I attended an meeting hosted by the Atheist Community of Northwest Indiana (ACNI) several months ago, in order to conduct research for a paper I was writing at the time on the Atheist Community as a diverse population.
-Lets digress for a moment
The class I was taking at the time was titled Diversity, and it was a Social Work class. The first assignment was to find a marginalized population and write the name of that group on a slip of paper to be approved by the teacher. The next week I was handed back my slip of paper and it stated the topic could not be approved. I was overcome with an emotion that I don't remember feeling before. Something heavy in the gut, enraged. I less then calmly told the Professor that I disagreed with her, and she suggested that I speak to the department head. Our department head rocks, she was of the option that based upon the assigned that my topic probably should not have been revoked in the first place. And I my topic was approved.
-Digression ends.
Anyway, I had attended ACNI several times before before I struck out on the project of creating a local atheist group so I didn't have to drive the 45 minutes into Indiana to hang out with cool people, so there were some familiar faces, and others that were new to me.
One of the members I didn't remember meeting asked me, "are you an atheist?" I responded, "Sometimes, but the rest of the time I am a philosopher." I consider atheism to be a temporary and situational stance localized in those specific moments where I have to describe to others my stances towards deities and communities centered around transcendence. Between one moment where I'm stating that I am an atheist, and the next moment I repeat the claim, I am with a religious import. The trick of the words atheist/atheism/non-theist (and so on) is that they are not self-referential, but are codependent to the reference that comes after the negation ("a" or "non"). Negation is a tricky subject in and of itself, and trying to education others on the difference is tricky because the language in which to discuss the subject is near completely framed in religiously embedded language. How do we escape from this? Nietzsche argued that you can't get rid god till you get rid of grammar (or what we know as grammar). In other words, language needs a revolution to create a new system in order to more acurately describe the world the world and the people who live in it. Nietzsche pushed for smashing everything with his philosophical hammer. But deconstruction isn't the only way out. We could, and this is a bit of a stretch because the atheist community self defines itself in such a way where it could be compared to psychotic kittens (arguably psychosis is a kitten's natural state) could establish new ways in which to describe themselves.
