Covenant wrote:But no, there's no term. Someone can be an atheist and any other combination of things. In the aforementioned fight there was a lot of slinging back and forth between liberal and conservative skeptics, which is odd, since that's a political/ideological divide I didn't expect to see.
(snip stuff)
Even if someone did slap a label on it all it would do is allow me to feel less guilty for having some ideological association with people I find offensive. But that's life--you can't just cut yourself off from people you don't like. And you don't need to "defend" your tribe. Ideas are a marketplace and we're all part of a bigger group than any label or single ideology can ever express. People who wanna sling molotovs don't get it.
I think it's less that we're ditching one Dogma for the next, but that we're ditching an organized Dogma for the anarchy of mob rule in thought police form. These kinds of people that we're talking about aren't FOR anything, they're just AGAINST other people. That's a militia mindset.
A lot of the confusion is that the same word is used to describe two entirely different things. On the one hand, atheist is nothing more than a word used to describe someone who is not within the set containing all people who believe in one or more deities. In this context, it is only used to signify that the person it describes lacks that belief. On the other hand, atheist is also used to describe an identity, one predicated on its opposition to people who believe in one or more deities. This touches upon your last point, because in that context atheism is not a lack of belief but a
rejection of belief.
Trying to use different labels to describe those different kinda of atheism is not necessarily bad (though using intentionally demeaning terms to do it is, I admit, counterproductive), since it would, at the very least, reduce confusion. It's not so much about "defending" a tribe, as much as differentiating people who are members of a tribe from people who are not.