Recently the Patheos blog site renamed it’s “Atheist channel” to “Nonreligious channel”. The resulted in some comments and blog posts about the change. For me, it didn’t matter much. Since I gave up on religion, I have always preferred to call myself “non-religious” rather than “atheist”.
Here, I mainly want to respond to:
which argues for anti-theism.
In that post, Dan Arel argues:
Religion is dangerous and hurts real people. I strongly believe that when the world is reasoned out of religious faith, the world will be a much better place.
Some people see atheism as dangerous and as hurting real people. But that’s not my main concern here. I just don’t see that it would make the world a better place if religion were to disappear.
We already have non-religious people who are in the anti-vax movement. We already have non-religious people who are climate change deniers.
The things that Dan objects to in religion are human foibles. Yes, religion manages to concentrate those into a movement. But there are plenty of other ways that these human foibles can be concentrated into group-think.
So I just do not see that anti-theism provides some kind of solution for problems that arise out of being human.
For myself, I accept that people can have weird beliefs. And maybe some folk think that I have weird beliefs. But we should be able to get along in spite of individual wierdness.
The Heretical Philosopher 