There is a certain stripe of atheist that tries to hold on to all the trappings of religious belief without the one held most central to most religions- God. But the word "God" means many things to many people. Some think of God very abstractly, as a force or as the universe itself. Others think of God in terms of personality or even as a concrete person. For instance, Christians think Jesus Christ is God. Most theologians make distinctions among different types of god-believers: theists (both poly- and mono-), pantheists, panentheists, monists, and so on. A theist, strictly speaking, is someone who believes in a God that has something like a personality: thoughts, beliefs, hopes, desires, intentions, plans, etc. There are people who believe in God but who do not believe that this God has a personality. That is broadly called pantheism.
There is a confusion, I think in that there are two ways in which the term 'theism' is used. There is a BROADER concept of theism, which is the rejection of atheism. And there is the more specific term, dealing with that particular subset of theisms that deals with a personal God. To avoid confusion, perhaps we should distinguish between the two words with a symbol. Theism is belief in a personal God. -theism is the belief in God simpliciter. Notice the hyphen to represent all the different forms of belief in God (PAN-theism, PANEN-theism, etc).
So given all the definitions and conceptions of God, how should we use the term? What should our definition be? Broadly speaking, we want a definition that doesn't assume one conception or another, but finds some linguistic middle ground upon which all can operate evenly. It seems to me that the best way to understand the word 'god' is simply to take it to mean 'that which is worthy of worship.' Worthiness of worship means, simply, that something is actually WORTH worshiping, it is morally allowable to worship this particular object or morally obligatory to worship it (interesting side-thought: is worthiness of worship about moral permissibility or moral obligation....ooooh good stuff for a later post). It is important to note that worshiping something doesn't make it God. The question is not whether something IS worshiped... it is whether the particular thing worship is RIGHTLY worshiped. Are we justified in our worship? That is the question. Atheism, then, is simply the proposition that there is nothing that is worthy of worship. All forms of worship are morally repugnant, for no object can be actually worth worshiping. Atheism is the rejection not of theism but of -theism. It is the rejection of belief in God of any type.
Now, then, a question that follows from this is what constitutes worship. Worship takes so many vast and varied forms. I'm not inclined to wade into debates about all the various activities that may or may not be labelled worship. But of all the definitions I've heard, and there have been a great many, this is the best I know: worship is the ordering of one's entire existence around a particular object. This does not need to happen all the time. If there is any point at which you are centering your entire existence around a particular object, then you are worshiping it. The question then becomes whether it is appropriate to worship that object. Worshiping what you should not worship is idolatry (atheists, then, tacitly accuse all -theists of idolatry).
Now a person who believes in a transcendent moral order, is to my mind not an atheist by a pantheist. They do not reject -theism, but theism. For certainly, if there is some kind of platonic moral order beyond oneself, then it follows by one's very belief in such an order that one believes that one should center one's existence around it. For to seek to conform to such an order is just what it means to BE a good person. One cannot suggest that one should act ethically, and then attribute ethics to some transcendent moral order, without essentially suggesting a particular type of worship. It may not be RELIGIOUS worship, but it is worship just the same. Awe and wonder simply ARE the spontaneous ordering of one's being around an object. If such an ordering is JUSTIFIED, then there is a god...for that object is an appropriate object of worship. Atheists who seek to maintain a sense of awe and wonder, and seek to maintain a sense of some transcendent moral authority, are not, strictly speaking, atheists. They are pantheists. Atheism and secularism are not the same time. One can be irreligious and be a theist or a -theist or an atheist.
This also feeds into the argument atheists make about 'just going one god further'. Having a particular religious affiliation is not what makes one a -theist. What makes one a believer in God is believing that there is some appropriate object of worship. What religious people argue about is not which 'god' to be atheist about, what they argue about is what it is appropriate TO worship. One can agree on the base assumption that there is an appropriate object of worship, without agreeing on what that object IS. The atheist disagrees with all -theists by disagreeing that anything exists that is an appropriate object of worship. Any atheist that doesn't disagree with this, is not strictly speaking, an atheist at all.
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