Misused Terms: Introduction
I’m going to start off this blog by introducing the first of a series of posts about some of the problems that I see as common, although perhaps accidental, misusage of several terms regarding the “Atheist community” – that term in itself seems a bit off, but I’ll get to that in a later post. First and foremost I want to point out that I currently consider myself, or have in the past have considered myself, each of the terms I will talk about in this series. For more on my own self-labeling, check out my very first post on otherwhirled.com. Not one of these words should be considered degrading, negative, or shied away from due to shame or stigma, a stigma – especially with regard to “atheist” – which we must work hard to combat. However we must be careful to replace old prejudices with new ones.
I further want to make clear that I am far from a grammer-nazi nor am I a fan of turning philosophical arguments into semantic debates. Unfortunately I tend to use these words in the same ways that I might be criticizing and correcting in this series. Part of the motivation for me to write this, apart from the aforementioned effect on atypical atheists, is that often debates turn semantic due to simple but common misunderstandings about what words mean, and I despise it – and thus tend to stick to common usages. So I guess this is more about how people (including myself) should be using these words.
