Negative And Positive Atheism
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Positive atheism (also called strong atheism and hard atheism) is the form of atheism that asserts that no deities exist. Negative atheism (also called weak atheism and soft atheism) is any other type of atheism, wherein a person does not believe in the existence of any deities, but does not explicitly assert there to be none.
The terms negative atheism and positive atheism were used by Antony Flew in 1976, and appeared again in Michael Martin's writings in 1990. However, usage of the strong/weak terminology has grown since the mid-1990s on the Internet, particularly due to the newsgroup alt.atheism.
Read more about Negative And Positive Atheism: Scope of Application, Alternate Meanings
Famous quotes containing the words negative, positive and/or atheism:
“The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short- cut answer.”
—Margaret Mead (19011978)
“It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evilfar more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind, and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word human disappears from the race.”
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“He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianitya state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.”
—Norman Douglas (18681952)