Atheism is essentially not a belief but a denial of a
belief. In its pure form it’s a negation that has its origins in a strong
scepticism akin to that envisioned by David Hume in his defence of Empiricism.
From a logical standpoint such a position makes sense although I personally
find it to be no better than the Deist argument. Militant Atheist is a term
that has arisen in the recent milieu of political discourse to describe the
sub-group of atheists who have combined the traditional atheist position with
an active anti-theism. The position arose out of an understandable opposition
to the extremes of fundamentalism in the theist camp.
Since politics abhors a belief vacuum (and atheism is not a
belief in and of itself as mentioned) atheists often gravitate to political
positions that replace the God hypothesis with that of the ‘Other’. This
‘Other’ can take the form of a secular humanism, anarcho-capitalism or indeed
some facsimile of dialectic materialism for example. Depending on the
authoritarian nature of the personality plus their drive for utopianism many
atheists moved historically embraced those philosophies on the left
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