- Glossary of Terms -

Logos Title

AESTHETICS - The branch of philosophy that deals with beauty--what is beauty, how do humans perceive it, et cetera.

AGENCY - The subject of social change, ie. who makes history.

AGONOSTICISM - Denying the possibility of knowing the nature or existence of God.

APATHETIC ATHEISM - or apatheism. Essentially not caring whether or not gods exist, and effectively acting as though they don't.

ARGUMENT - The method of verifying or falsifying the proposed relationships between objects.

ATHEISM - The lack of theism, or in other words, the lack of the belief that one or more gods exist.

BCE - Before Common Era. Dating system used by scholars and archaeologists without any biased religious connotations.

DEDUCTION - When an argument attempts to derive a concrete conclusion from abstract premises.

DOGMATISM - Denies the relativity of knowledge and the connection of knowledge to historically changing practice and social relations.

EPISTEMOLOGY - The branch that of philosophy that with what we know, what we can know, and how we know it.

ETHICS - The branch of philosophy that deals with ideal behaviour.

FAITH - Belief and trust in a being or object independent of scientific method of proof. Arguments that religious followers can adduce to support their belief in god relies on ambiguous, fallacious, or subjective premises and not reproducible, without "burden of proof".

FIDEISM - The epistemological and theological position that belief in God should only be based on faith.

FUNDAMENTALISM - Unquestioning submission to an absolute authority and intolerance of alternative view points, belief systems, and even in some cases of people who do not follow the teaching of the group. Politically fundamentalists have nominally occupied the right-wing conservative side of politics.

FUNDIE - An abbreviation for Fundamentalist. It is used to describe fundamentalists, zealots, and generally obnoxious rabid adherents to a particular religion, especially Muslims and Christians.

INDUCTION - When an argument attempts to extrapolate abstract principles from concrete data sets.

LOGIC - The philosophical discipline of evaluating propositions for truth.

METAPHYSICS - The branch of philosophy that deals with the fundamental nature of the Universe; how it acts, what is in it, why it acts the way it does, and why those things are in it.

MYTH CYCLES - A collection of myths which forms an inter-related body of fiction particular to any society.

NEOPLATONIST - Philosophies developed from Platonism which adapts certain religious beliefs into Western thinking. It emphasises emanationist as opposed to creationist principles.

NONCOHERENTISM - The position that one cannot make meaningful statements about gods, including whether they exist, because so far there have been no sufficiently coherent definitions of "god" advanced.

ONTOLOGY - A subset of metaphysics that deals with the nature of existence--what is real, what is not, and why things are or are not real.

PHILOSOPHY - "Love of wisdom".

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE - A subset of logic that deals with inductive logic within the experimental sciences.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY - A subset of ethics which deals with ideal government.

RELATIVISM - The philosophical trend which put extreme emphasis on the relativity of knowledge, to the point of rejecting any objective basis for knowledge or any sense in which one statement could be any ‘more true' than another.

SEMANTICS - The meaning of a statement. Semantics provides a method for determining what referrants are referred to by the syntactical expression and what the relationships between them mean.

SKEPTICISM - The philosophical current which emphasises doubt and the relativity of human knowledge.

STRONG ATHEISM - also known as hard or positive atheism. A postive belief that no gods exist. This is usually based on a perceived logical disproof, absurdity, or meaninglessness of god concepts. It should be noted that, although atheism in and of itself is often confused with strong atheism, strong atheists are generally in the minority of the atheist community.

SYNCRETISM - The process of merging various religious or philosophical beliefs into a single school of thought to reconcile possible differing or conflicting viewpoints. From the Greek sugkretizo.

SYNTAX - The expression of a statement. Syntax provides a method for expressing references to objects and the relationships between them.

TELEOLOGY - The branch of philosophy that deals with design and purpose--what underlying purpose and design to objects, or even the Universe as a whole, if any.

WEAK ATHEISM - also known as soft or skeptical atheism, is a skeptical disbelief in deities. This is based on the principle of onus probandi, or burden of proof. Weak atheists put gods in the same class as invisible pink unicorns: although not impossible, unsubstantiated and thus not believed in.

XIAN - An abbreviation for Christian. This comes from the Greek name for Christ, Xristos, and is the same notation as in Xmas. Another variation on this is Xtian. It should be noted that this is not inherently any more insulting or denigrating than the word Christian itself.