this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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[โ€“] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's that muddy middle that has many atheists describing atheism as "hard" and "soft". If the answer to the question "do you believe in a god or gods" is anything other than yes, you're an atheist.

[โ€“] saltesc@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Atheism is an ism attached to the idea of atheos.

All isms are idealogies attached to their leading premise. Atheism is no exception to any other word in this regard.

It is the people's poor understanding of language but allure to social labels that has caused the word, which is otherwise very clear, to now be seen on a spectrum. Like how people now refer to LLMs as AI, for lack of understanding the fundamentals of the terminology first.

There are those that misunderstand it to mean a-theism instead of atheos-ism. Which is madd

If the answer to the question "do you believe in a god or gods" is anything other than yes, you're an atheist.

No. We have preexisting terms for this and atheism is, at best, a distant association for its crossover similarities of that statement. You are simply describing the state of being nontheistic, no isms necessarily attached.

There are many isms that fit into your statement by being nontheistic positions. Atheism is just one of many. However a person can be nontheistic and not adhere to any of them, since every individual is capable of rejecting any ideology. Those that don't even know about the idea of deities aren't even capable of aligning to theism or atheism, for example.