I’m watching Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0, and after Sam Harris’s talk there was a comment from the audience (at 48:20) that perhaps a good replacement for atheist would be reasonist, because the prefix a- is usually applied by those who are in the position of power within a given paradigm, to identify those who reject that paradigm. So we should turn the tables and call theists areasonists.
The comment somewhat misunderstands the etymology of atheist, which is not actually a derivation of theist, but in fact comes to us more or less intact from the ancient Greek atheos. Anyway that’s quibbling over a minor detail and is beside the point.
I love the idea. It’s really just a reworking of rationalism versus irrationalism, but the a- prefix has the added benefit of drawing a connection to atheism, with the hope (at least for me) that the point would not be lost on the recipient of the areasonist label.
July 17, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Interesting video, DD, I just began to watch it. Yes, it seems like a better way to define theist and atheist would be to turn it around, as you say, based on that audience comment, and call atheists reasonists and theist areasonists. Sort of puts the stress on reason!
Incidentally, just a short time ago I started a post on my blog on James P. Carse’s new book, The Religious Case Against Belief. A contradiction in terms? ha ha But it seems we each have switched away from politics and toward that other thing, i.e. “religion”, for the nonce! Great minds follow similar paths? ha ha ha
March 14, 2009 at 1:30 am
Hey,
I just watched Enlightenment 2.0 last night, and I, too, was a fan of the reasonist/areasonist idea. In fact, I discovered your blog by google searching the two terms. Sam Harris’s condemnation of “atheist” was so damning that perhaps “reasonist” something we should try to get people to adopt.