All of a sudden, I am getting feedback that "unbeliever" is a bad synonym for "atheist." Do you feel that there is a difference in the following labels?

unbeliever
nonbeliever
disbeliever

I asked the same thing here, without much response.

http://answerpool.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&s=669605981&f=573602022&m=339100535

I expect that I am the culprit. If I have offended anyone by using an inappropiate word, I appologize, put I don't promise not to make the same mistake in the future. It is hard to keep words straight (and sometimes I don't even feel like looking up the difference between prophecy and prophesy).

DD

No need for any mea culpas, DD. As I said in my post, the terms have been bandied about by many since Jeeves.

juanruiz: I am sorry that I either missed or forgot your question. I asked it, in part because I saw you use the word "disbeliever" in a thread, a term which I rarely see.

I get a feel that "disbeliever" sounds more like an agnostic to me, has some morsel of belief there. "Nonbeliever" sounds to me as though someone may never have heard of the one in whom others do believe, while "unbeliever" sounds to me as though someone is to whatever degree choosing to abstain from believing. I go with "unbeliever," but this word sounds so strong to one unbeliever that I got some feedback that it is a personal indictment of the unbeliever. I suppose that the person was just fed up with being singled out for religious orientation/nonorientation; after all, there are other things concerning which we can relate to one another.

Perhaps we should bypass labelling and cut to the issues: yap now and ask personal questions later. Perhaps individuals have histories as to how they came to match a particular label, and it is their histories concerning which they are sensitive.

A relatively recent label for people with a naturalistic world view -- no supernatural beliefs -- including atheism, is "brights," also described by Daniel Dennett in a NY Times Op-Ed piece here. Among brights, there is dissention in the ranks over the choice of this label because it smacks of elitism.

In any case "bright" (the noun, not the adjective) is not strictly a synonym for "athesist," but I thought it was worth mentioning here.

I have tended to use the terms interchangeably over the years, tsaeb, usually depending on what term is found in a given thread.

If you didn't follow ice-hockey, would you bother about what kind of "non-fan / un-fan" you were categorised as? It would be a non-issue, as I suspect this is.

Those (if there are any) who worry about their particular atheist label are possibly not atheists at all, but people going through a Lewisian 'angry-with-God' phase; like a die-hard hockey fan who has sworn off hockey for ever over a defeat for his (or her) team, the strike, or some such thing.

Having said that, I don't like the 'brights' idea. It sounds silly, for a start. It's also depressingly reminiscent of a problem with the Humanist Association; being about 'joining' - manifestos and commmittees, subscribing, defining, signing up to statements you didn't think up yourself, appointing officers... a herd mentality that's a mirror of religious hierarchies and dogmas.

Atheism should be an ill-defined and individual idea; people thinking for themselves and linked by no more than the perception (or suspicion) that the religious emperor has no clothes.