Of Atheists and Anti-theists

There has been a lot of discussion lately of a "schism" amongst the atheist movement that I find to be quite disturbing. This so-called schism is between atheists who share the idea that god does not exist and the atheists who are against anything to do with god.

Now of course these are pretty broad descriptions so of course I invite discussion on this topic. But here is the thing, this isn't a schism of atheism or some new group called "The New Atheists". This other group are simply anti-theists. Because I am an atheists who believes in reason I will break the words down to show that this is exactly what this other group is.

Obviously both words share the base word theism, which means the belief in at least one deity. Now atheism has the prefix "a-" which means to be without or the absence of. So atheism truly means to be with the belief in any god. On the other hand the prefix "anti-" means to be against. So anti-theism is to be against the belief in any god. Looking at this analysis it appears that atheism is far more passive where one is just simply without the belief as if it is just absent from the person. Whereas anti-theism is far more active where someone is pushing against the belief.

Now you look at the two movements that are discussed in many articles about this schism (including the article at NPR.org ) and you will find that the group that ridicules religion and has much contempt for religion is more of an anti-theist than someone who simply has the belief in god absent from their lives. Activities like Blasphemy Day is more anti-theist (and quite immature). The more passive group tends to try to get the word out about the existence of non-believers. They want to show that we are just as good of people as anyone else.

Now, I don't write all of this to say that the anti-theists are bad people or doing anything wrong. However, they are making a bad name for atheists. Who cares if we're accommodating to the theists about certain issues? We're not harming anyone by doing so. We still fight for the theists to rationalize their views reasonably in public discourse by making sure that using the "god" crutch for an argument is no allowed. But we do recognize their right to exist as theists and that there is nothing wrong to believe in things unproven, its just that we choose not to believe that ourselves. If we can't admit these types of ideas that what are we even doing with the movement?