Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-226878-20150710200046/@comment-26018514-20150730013946

LiveandSound wrote: -Damn hypocrites...

-That's kinda the issue. People can easily identify as X, but unless you truly know all of them, how do you know they are truly X? And even if you know they aren't, do they know they aren't actually X?

In a group of 10 people, 8 say they are atheists. 5 are true atheists, 1 believes he's an atheist but actually isn't, and the other 2 are lying. But you don't know none of them. So how would you know which ones are the true atheists, and which ones aren't? It would screw up your calculations.

"In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which, in its most general form, is the belief that at least one deity exists."

This is not confusing at all... if you don't believe, you don't believe. You could argue belief in things like Karma or rebirth disqualifies you from being an atheist, but in general it does not.

The problem here Live is that you have attributed outright hatred as a dogma which absolutely does not exist, because atheists have no written dogma... they aren't an organized religion so much as a term attributed to those who do not believe. I agree with Shadow 100%, atheists in general only hate religion to the extent it applies what atheists view as a fictional rules-set upon their everyday lives, the reason Christianity and Islam are often targets of their rhetoric is because those 2 religions are full of high ranking politicians who enforce laws based on those religions... you don't even need to try to find such abuses of power, which atheists themselves were often targets of, this is the reason for any perceived "sensitivity".

However, the continued success of books with biblical allusions generally proves that most can tolerate it within fiction.