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non-atheism

From:Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 17, 2002, 17:36
I sent a message last week about the possible need for a word "non-atheist"
to cover people who are not atheists but neither necessarily theists (they
may believe in jinns, angels or similar creatures), which seems to've
disappeared in the aether.

I basically said that according to my experience, "atheist" is used of
people who don't believe in gods, regardless of whether they hold any
religious beliefs, and thus an atheist may perfectly well believe in the
existence of, say, jinns. I also noted that I don't seem to know any word
for somebody who disbelieve in supernatural creatures of any kind or power,
but yet believe in the existence of something more than the material (they
may f'rinstance believe there are objective ethical rules with an
accompanying duty of material creatures to follow them, or in a
mind-and-matter dichotomy that's non-supernatural since the mental part of
the universe follows laws of nature just like the material).

Somehow I said that in rather fewer words than this post contains. I must've
forgotten my eloquence somewhere.

                                                 Andreas

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Replies

Padraic Brown <elemtilas@...>
Padraic Brown <elemtilas@...>Numinism was Re: non-atheism
Pavel Adamek <pavel.adamek@...>Taxonomy of supernatural beings