No, no I grasp what he did.
In my experience, atheists love defining terms in discussions.....except the term "atheism". Sam takes it a step further and thinks it shouldn't exist.
I agree and also don't care if it exists or not.....it changes absolutely nothing.
Well it does change things. Sam argues by attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn't really a thing at all. And atheism, he argues, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as “non-racism” is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such.
He argues by consenting to be labelled an atheist, we are consenting to be viewed as a marginal interest group that lacks credibility. It also has been used to keep our criticism of religion at arm’s length, and has allowed people to dismiss our arguments without meeting the burden of actually answering them.
Rather than declare ourselves “atheists” in opposition to all religion, Sam suggests we should do nothing more than advocate reason and intellectual honesty—and where this advocacy causes us to collide with religion, as it inevitably will, we should observe that the points of impact are always with specific religious beliefs—not with religion in general.
