Rebranding Atheism

A recent essay by Benjamin Cain got me thinking about something that, to be honest, I don’t spend much time on. Cain’s essay is a convincing takedown of John Vervaeke’s nontheism as a real alternative to atheism.

Vervaeke claims that atheists and theist share a common conception of the sacred — a conception that he rejects. Cain pulls this quote:

“I’m a nontheist,” Vervaeke said, “which means I think the shared set of presuppositions between the theist and the atheist are actually what needs to be rejected.” Clarifying the difference between these three, he said theists and atheists both presuppose “that sacredness is to be understood in terms of a personal being that is in some sense the Supreme Being, and that the right relationship to that being is to have a correct set of beliefs.” And Vervaeke goes on to say, “I reject all of those claims.”

Sacredness, for Vervaeke, doesn’t come from a being (supernatural) but from participation in being, and Vervaeke thinks atheism, in rejecting a supreme being, is also rejecting any form of sacredness.

Cain isn’t buying it. He argues, first, that the desire of nontheists to avoid the atheist label is a tribal dispute:

“…some Western secularists found that they don’t approve of the politics of some prominent atheists, so they disassociate from the label “atheism.”