In the linked wikipedia article on Russell's teapot, there's some suggestion that Russell himself may also have thought similarly. I think my difficulty is that I really don't want to be lumped in with Dawkins and his ilk - Dawkins in particular strikes me as arrogant, patronising, and guilty of exactly the same sort of fuzzy thinking he looks down upon the religious for.
Definitions are, of course, tricky, and I don't think I had previously come across the wider sense of atheist you mention here (my cosmic apathy means I've not really engaged in this debate to any great degree). There are, of course, terms like "skeptic", which in some sense I feel kinship to, but again, the very word carries (to me at least) a connotation of negativity as the the default state that I feel uncomfortable with. I don't assume that ghosts don't exist because no-one has produced convincing evidence, I start from the position that ghosts exist in the sense that people report experiencing them, and the balance of evidence suggests this is an artifact of human psychology rather than an independent phenomenon. But I have no horse in this race. I'm fine either way.
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Date: 2013-05-21 10:16 am (UTC)Definitions are, of course, tricky, and I don't think I had previously come across the wider sense of atheist you mention here (my cosmic apathy means I've not really engaged in this debate to any great degree). There are, of course, terms like "skeptic", which in some sense I feel kinship to, but again, the very word carries (to me at least) a connotation of negativity as the the default state that I feel uncomfortable with. I don't assume that ghosts don't exist because no-one has produced convincing evidence, I start from the position that ghosts exist in the sense that people report experiencing them, and the balance of evidence suggests this is an artifact of human psychology rather than an independent phenomenon. But I have no horse in this race. I'm fine either way.