No Religion? 7 Types of Non-Believers

[daaron]

17. Self-identification suffers from lack of verifiability.

Making the study of ideas a particularly tricky corner of social psych. There be where poli-sci majors in tailored shirts dwell.

The article itself is inoffensive in that it merely attempts to delineate some of the self-identification making the rounds with non-believers of various stripes. I think the attempt to coin 'positive' and 'negative' atheism was over-zealous labeling, however. Atheists self-identify as 'strong' and 'weak' atheists, not in polar, dualistic terms like + VS -. If one is allowing self-identification to comprise an underlying model for classification, as the author attempts to do, one ought to grant the same allowance to each self-identified group. I for one have never heard atheists debate positive or negative atheism. Atheism VS anti-theism, yes. Strong VS weak approaches to public expression of atheism, yes. Atheism VS agnosticism as a false dichotomy, yes. But positive VS negative? Nope.

That said, there is a subtle point in there. The author notes I think correctly that some atheists make the positive assertion that there are no gods, while other atheists make no assertion, but eschew belief, altogether, along with anything that requires an underlying belief (the Tinkerbell Effect, if you will). The latter's not a negative assertion. Here, "positive" means "there exists an assertion". It's a verbal flourish, not a description of the state of a logical proposition - at least, not if we're talking about the usual Boolean logic. So it's a mistake to extend this flourish to the proposition which it decorates; it turns the resulting +/- model into an erroneous mess. 'Strong' and 'weak' are more descriptive, and already in wide use. I suggest we stick with them. If 'weak' is offensive to some atheists, they should say so. Perhaps 'Positive' and 'Neutral', but 'Negative'? No way.

ETA: Proudly a 'weak atheist' since about a week ago.