What is an Atheist?

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Dan Beecher (0:52)

I feel like what we've done is make everything worse for everybody. This whole episode is just about making everything worse.

Dan McClellan (1:01)

I will frequently say, if I just come in and muddy the water and then run away, I've done my job. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:13)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:15)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. And today, we're going to be focusing on the latter end of that mission statement a little bit, aren't we?

Dan Beecher (1:31)

Yeah, man, I'm looking forward to this conversation. We are, we're barely, I mean, are we even going to talk about the Bible? We might not.

Dan McClellan (1:41)

To the, we might brush up against it. Yeah, maybe one or two passages, but that's it.

Dan Beecher (1:47)

Yeah, we so we're doing two. What is that segments? We're going to we're going to ask some pretty big questions. And they're they're questions that are sort of increasingly important in today's kind of cultural landscape, I feel like. So we're going to start with the question of. And this is a big one. What is religion? Because we all think we have a handle on that word, but I think we need to kind of define our terms on that.

Dan McClellan (2:18)

Yeah.

Dan Beecher (2:18)

And and then the one that I actually feel like I might actually have something to say is we're going to we're going to ask, what's an atheist? So a lot of interesting stuff coming up. Let's just dive right in.

Dan McClellan (2:33)

Let's do it.

Dan Beecher (2:34)

What is that? And our first, what is that is religion. So yeah, like I said earlier, it almost feels like intuitively, intuitively, we all seem feel like we have an understanding of that word.

Dan McClellan (2:52)

Yeah.

Dan Beecher (2:53)

Until you start to break it down. So so why are we asking this question?

Dan McClellan (2:58)

I think we're asking this question because where the boundaries of the concept of religion are, are increasingly contested and are becoming increasingly important. Not just in on social media and in general social discourse, but even in the law and in the way that our governments function. And in a lot of different ways, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to determine what is and is not a religion. And different countries have have different degrees of of clarity regarding that. Like there are some countries that where there are certain groups that are considered religious groups by the state, the government here, but in other countries, like, nope, not religious groups, sorry. And so this has far reaching implications. But you mentioned it seems kind of intuitive that we know what a religion is. And this is common for most words that we see used frequently.

If we have a backlog of experiences, hearing words being used in reference to certain concepts or items or entities, we just intuitively kind of generate a concept of what that thing is. And so a lot of people, when they try to think about what a religion is, what they're going to do is just retreat into their mind and just come up, try to imagine the imagery, the conceptual field that is evoked by that word, and then try to describe or define that. And people think, okay, that's religion. The problem is, as we've talked about before, I think we've talked about prototype theory and cognitive linguistics a little bit before, the problem is that that's entirely relative. It's gonna be different for every person because we all have different experiences. And so if we try to retreat to, this is the conceptual package that is evoked in my mind when I hear that word, great, that doesn't really have any authority outside of your mind.