[bill_mon]

Treading carefully is probably our best bet, but it's very difficult and error prone.

There are no militant atheists, in any reasonable sense of the word. If mentioning facts about the world is seen as criticism of religious people, that's a big problem. We know vaccines work, because our best research shows that. It's not controversial and we should be free to mention it. Huge parts of many religious text are factually incorrect, we know that from enormous amounts of research -- this is also not controversial and we should be free to talk about it.

> Isn't that just a really wide-spanning opinion though? Maybe we're using the word differently and mean the same?

In that case everything is opinion and we have no real knowledge of anything.

Thanks!

[sshumaker]

Virtually no one is an atheist, if you take the Sapiens definition of religion: “a system of human laws and values, which is founded on a belief in a super human order." (Super human orders are not the product of human whim or human agreements, unlike e.g. the laws of soccer) https://sites.google.com/site/taborsapiens/home/10-the-law-o...

If you read the book it’s clear communism, fascism, democracy and capitalism are really religions too. They require belief in a super human order - a set of laws that exist without backing in science or human agreement. E.g. “All men are created equal”

[ric2b]

> If you read the book it’s clear communism, fascism, democracy and capitalism are really religions too. They require belief in a super human order - a set of laws that exist without backing in science or human agreement. E.g. “All men are created equal”

I don't agree with that interpretation, someone who champions democracy just has a set of moral values they want to apply, they don't think the universe is inherently democratic or anything like that.

Likewise for your other examples. They're ideologies, not religions.

[bill_mon]

Atheism is the lack of belief in any gods. You can be religious without any gods. An atheist can be religious.