GavrielKay wrote...
Your first group is mostly made up of some very vocal people who feel there must be some voice out there speaking against the political pressure exerted by extreme religious factions. In their day to day lives, I can tell you from personal experience, a firm belief in the nonexistance of a supernatural being is not what most atheists dwell on. It would be akin to spending lots of time thinking about how unicorns and the monster under the bed don't exist.
I see this whole "atheism as a belief system" being used by the religious in some weird attempt to make it seem like everyone believes in something they can't prove. Like another poster said, atheism is a belief like off is a TV channel. If I don't buy from the traveling salesman, I haven't "purchased nothing."
You seem to have misread my post.
Strong Atheism doesn't attempt to challenge those who believe in a deity. Their personal belief affects every aspect of their lives like one does when practicing a religion, and they accept that people are free to believe what they wish, deities or no.
Weak Atheists go about and challenge others who believe, usually stating "righteous" crusades of being oppressed when others' beliefs in deities should not (and most of the time, does not) necessarily affect them -- words are words, sticks and stones. Weak Atheists also commonly make the claim that one cannot make an assertion that they believe something does not exist. They often make the claim that rejecting all assertions is the same as not doing something and implies nothing. These are the cliché arguments that I mentioned. By the standards that Weak Atheists apply against a belief in deities, science doesn't exist, either, but they often make exceptions to the rules so that they accept science "evidence" without contesting the evidence in the same manner. This is hypocrisy.
Let's take on the TV off situation (that I'm sure they heard someone else say and they thought was witty). It is incongruent to compare a TV's singular off state to a range a TV's on state. One should only draw an anology on the states themselves and not inequal states contained within them. A correct analogy would be the TV tuned to a frequency receiving a signal versus tuned to a frequency that has no signal. It's still tuned but to something different.
The purchase situation is also inapplicable (also likely something that someone else said that they thought was witty). It's a situation of refusing to accept something that actually exists.
In my experience with Atheists, weak Atheists often cite a situation where they feel they were slighted by some deity in a situation where they feel such a deity would have done something. This is not always the case, but it has been the most common.
If the idea that there is no deity guides your decisions and you live and let live instead of going out of your way to confront those who claim otherwise and you have willingly drawn a solid conclusion for yourself without the need for 100% irrefutable proof, you are a Strong Atheist and you equal those that follow other religions.
If you try to prove yourself better than others by making logical claims in one instance and not in another instance as it suits you, if you accost those who simply spout words that should not mean anything to you, if you have nothing to offer from yourself other than saying "no" to whatever you hear by forcing others to provide all the evidence in the universe, if you are angry at a deity that didn't do something that you expected and, usually, if you spout some dribble you heard someone else say, you might be a Weak Atheist.
Morrigan seems like a Strong Atheist. Anders in the second Dragon Age is definitely a Weak Atheist. Morrigan answers her belief with what she accepts as evidence only when directly provoked. Anders openly seeks to provoke and offers nothing but the claim that the Maker would have done something about a situation if the Maker existed.
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