While I agree with the author there is a mistake. The following is wrong: "it is official Roman Catholic doctrine that there is no salvation outside the church" The Catholics do not believe that anymore. After Vatican II that changed. I can't handle bad scholarship, it makes those of us who try and agrue our point look bad.

The first secularists were medieval churchmen.

Um, this smells, firstly i actually think his definition of secularism excludes half its meaning; that part being of religious skepticism. And secondly wouldn't the first secularists be someone like from way back when in ancient Greece? Perhaps Strato? ... according to this guy: http://www.edwardjayne.com/secular/preface.html

Cheers

quote: so a simple lesson in semantics might help to clear the air for them on the meanings of "secular", "humanist" and "atheist". endquote

ok, i'll admit it. i have never quite understood what 'humanist' is, exactly. by the dictionary definition..i am a humanist. and an atheist and secularist.

quote: by the dictionary definition..i am a humanist. and an atheist and secularist.

Why do people always have to think in terms of THIS or THAT? I am a humanist, secularist atheist. There is no contradiction in that! The world would be a better place for more inclusion!

The Catholics do not believe that anymore

This type of statement demonstrates that religious people just believe what they want to believe, and yet at the same time they claim that their beliefs are based upon some universal truth dictated from an all-powerful God.

I do love that at times this site resembles websites of conservatives and other ideologues in that any argument which appears in the media, which supports your opinion is passed along as gospel. Grayling's essay is at best a bastardization of ideas. Eye-rolling could easily occur as he tries to tell us that atheism is a name forced upon those who believe in no god (rather than a name embraced or at least utilized by them). Or his pompous remarks about there being a contradiction when speaking of intelligent conversation and those with faith. He also misses the long tradition of religious humanism wherein there is no real contradiction between faith and humanism. For the most part essays like these that are passed on by bloggers and the popular press are outside any major intellectual debate and avoid the real issue. (He spends half of his time playing with the semantics of being a-theist, a-goblin, a-etc, which is honestly on the level of distraction and digression that one might expect from a college student who is high). That said, the argument that people of faith are a-intellectual because they believe in something they cannot prove is boring. Everyone has beliefs in things that they cannot prove. The belief that with science and rational thinking we can progress progress progress until all things are known is at best naive. Intellectual people of faith have come to the understanding that we can observe much of the world around us and let faith act as a dialectic between mystery and observation. Believing that dinosaurs lived a couple thousand years ago is silly, yes, but that is hardly the contention of major theological belief and thought these days. Sorry to preach. I usually just come for the Daily Show clips.

Disclaimer: I am a pantheist. I have no need of faith since my God is always physically present with me.

Every atheist I've ever met has had a definition of deity that is entirely based on irrational, non-scientific bias. The real God falls outside their definitions - he's not an old bearded man in the sky, for example- so they either try to redefine the word "Religion" to mean "revelation-based anthropomorphic faith" or they try to redefine my own theology (I teach Sunday school, incidentally, at the local Unitarian church) as being "really" atheism!!

I haven't met a single atheist open open to argument about the nature of their non-existent God. They take the definition of God as a faith item, usually drawn from the Bible or other judeo-christian context. Often they think that pantheists believe in a pantheon - and not because they understand the core beliefs of Hinduism, either! They can't see the critical differences between Hasidic Panentheism and Einstein's Pantheism, because this does not fit their faith-based dogma of "what religion is".

In my admittedly limited experience, which only encompasses a few hundred atheists, that is. Please feel free to show me something different!

Baruch, While I can respect your sophisticated variation on the definition of deity, I must counter that there are many many different definitions/descriptions of deity out there - and that yours is no more verifiable to be "the real" one (as you wrote) than anybody else's. I'd guess from the tone of your comment that you'd probably go along with this. In my experience (and dictionaries tend to back me up) the supernatural, anthropomorphic definition of deity that your atheist acquaintances use is actually quite a popular definition among theists as well. After all, it is very close to the one described in the Christian/Jewish/Muslim scriptures, and believed in by a great many religious people in this culture.

Having a more vague definition of deity, as you do, is very useful in that it allows one to make it fit into the gaps of current evidence and science, wherever they happen to be at the time. This indicates to me the basic desire we all have for holding a worldview that feels consistent with experience. However, for the atheist, this just ignores the root problem - that people use "faith" to protect certain beliefs that they know would not hold up under their normal level of insistence on evidence and sound reason, then use those beliefs to base "moral" judgments on others.

If you want to define "deity" as something other than the popular, traditional definitions used by the society of theists at large, that's fine for you, but that's just not what it means to most people. Indeed, the more vague and un-pin-downable of a definition you come up with, the closer you get to a definition that most atheists could believe in with little difficulty.

Baruch, So why don't you define what you mean by "pantheist" and "deity"? For the record, I am an Atheist. By that I mean that I don't believe in anything supernatural.