It’s a funadmental(ist) flaw…
As we talked about in the last podcast Australian students in religious education classes are going to be given some education about Humanism and it will be pointed out that “there is no evidence for god. Of course Ken Ham has a bit of a reading comprehension problem, and this explains a lot about Mr. Ham, in his recent blog post he claims that Australian Students are to be taught “there is no god”.
Allow me to be the first to point out that “there is no evidence for” and “there is no” are two distinctly different statements. It is further into Mr. Ham’s inanity that I take a certain level of umbrage, he claims that “religious education” is the place for this discussion because “atheism is a religion”.
This old one again, and frankly one I’m a bit sick of. Atheism, is specifically the absence of religion, in the way that “darkness” is not in itself a “thing” but merely the absence of light, so is atheism an absence of religion. Humanism could be thought of as a religion in some ways, however a more proper definition would be that Humanism is a philosophy as most religions deal with supernatural claims and are most marked by some form of worship, and philosophies are not.
Of course where atheism and religion cross is when secularists point out that freedom of religion, in order to be truly a “freedom” must include freedom from religion. If I told you that your “freedom of being punched” meant you got to choose wether I punched you in the face or in the gut, I do not believe you’d think very highly of such a “freedom”.
Actually, atheism isn’t the absence of religion. It’s the absence of a belief in gods. There are atheists, such as Buddhists, Scientologists and Raelians who follow religions that don’t have any gods as a part of them.
You are, of course, correct, and I’ve mentioned them in the past. I constantly make this mistake because of personal definitions. I think of any religion without a belief in gods to be a philosiphy. But this is not entirely accurate as well as Buddhists, Raelians and Scientologists all believe in supernatural BS.