Atheism in Five Minutes - Teemu Taira
2. What Is the Difference Between "Atheism", "Agnosticism", "Nonreligion" and "Secular"?
Atheism in Five Minutes - Teemu Taira
Christopher R. Cotter [+]
The Open University
Christopher Cotter is Staff Tutor (Lecturer) in Sociology & Religious Studies at The Open University. He is co-founder of The Religious Studies Project, co-editor of After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (Routledge, 2016) and author of The Critical Study of Non-Religion: Discourse, Identification, Locality (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Description
This chapter introduces three terms—“agnosticism,” “nonreligion,” and “secular”—which are entangled with the concept of “atheism” before mapping their similarities and differences in different contexts. The take-home message throughout should be that difference is in the eye of the beholder and depends on who is utilizing the terms and for what purpose.