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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

I think concepts like Spinoza's or Deism or people who declare themselves "not religious but spiritual" are just having trouble parting with the comfort of religion even though they know there's nothing there.

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Spinoza was writing at a time when it was easy to become exiled or dead for publishing material that doesn’t align with the mainstream religious position. So some degree of the religious comfort aspect of his work can arguably be more of a practical necessity to get his ideas published in the first place.

I don't think I would conflate things like Deism with spiritualism. You can apathetically believe there is a God of sorts and not be in the least spiritual.

I don't mean that they're equivalent, I mean that they're ways to avoid labelling yourself as an atheist when you're irreligious. They're like diet atheism. Something you can say to not feel completely alienated from religious culture.

I've often said that being "agnostic" isn't a position on whether or not one believes in God. You can be agnostic theist, or agnostic atheist. But I no longer think that's accurate.

One reason people opt for it, which I find understandable, is owing to the popular connotations that atheism carries, not unlike theism. You can avoid having to explain "I'm not saying I know that God doesn't exist". But the qualifier is explicit. One needn't necessarily be certain whether they believe in a God or not and I don't think that's well represented by the term "atheist". By the same token I don't think Deism is anywhere near atheism-lite. It is explicit belief in a God with the caveat that it's irreligious.

I like the term "apatheism" because it also captures the way I feel about the question of whether God exists.

Nothing where?

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