In addition, state atheism emerged during this period in Eastern Europe and Asia, particularly in the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin,[224] and in Communist China under Mao Zedong. Smart even argues that “sometimes a person who is truly atheist can call himself, even passionately, agnostic because he has an unreasonable generalized philosophical skepticism that would prevent us from saying that we know anything other than perhaps the truths of mathematics and formal logic.” [61] Therefore, some atheist authors, such as Richard Dawkins, prefer to distinguish theistic, agnostic, and atheist positions according to a theistic probability spectrum – the probability that everyone attributes to the statement “God exists.” [62] Some atheists argue that the various ideas of the gods, such as the personal God of Christianity, are attributed logically contradictory qualities. Such atheists present deductive arguments against the existence of God that assert the incompatibility between certain characteristics such as perfection, creator status, immutability, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, omnipotence, all-goodness, all-goodness, transcendence, personality (a personal being), non-physicality, justice and mercy. [19] Even more people say that their definition of “God” is simply a unifying force among all peoples. Or that they are not sure what they believe. If you do not have an active belief in the gods, you are an atheist. Definitions of atheism also vary in the degree of attention a person must devote to the idea of gods to be considered an atheist. Atheism is generally defined as the simple absence of believing that deities exist. This broad definition would include newborns and others who have not been exposed to theistic ideas. As early as 1772, Baron d`Holbach said: “All children are born atheists; they have no idea of God.
[49] Similarly, George H. Smith suggested, “The man who is not familiar with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a God. This category would also include the child who has the conceptual ability to grasp the problems associated with him or her, but who is still not aware of these problems. The fact that this child does not believe in God calls him an atheist. [50] Implicit atheism is “the absence of theistic faith without conscious rejection of it” and explicit atheism is the conscious rejection of faith. For the purposes of his work on “philosophical atheism,” Ernest Nagel denied including the mere absence of theistic faith as a kind of atheism. [51] Graham Oppy classifies those who have never thought about the issue as innocent because they do not understand what a God is. According to Oppy, these could be one-month-old babies, people with severe traumatic brain injury, or patients with advanced dementia. [52] Older dictionaries define atheism as “a belief that there is no God.” Obviously, theistic influence contaminates these definitions. The fact that dictionaries define atheism as “there is no God” betrays the (mono)theistic influence. Without the (mono)theistic influence, the definition would at least be: “There are no gods”. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described himself as the representative of an “atheistic existentialism”[117], which was less concerned with denying the existence of God than with asserting that “man […] to find himself and understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.
[118] Sartre said that a logical consequence of his atheism was: “If God does not exist, there is at least one being in which existence precedes essence, a being who exists before it can be defined by any concept, and. He found that in the poorest and least developed countries (especially in Africa and South America) there are far fewer concentrations of atheism and secularism than in richer industrialized democracies. [121] [122] His findings, which related specifically to atheism in the United States, were that “atheists and secularists” are less nationalistic, biased, anti-Semitic, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, narrow-minded, and authoritarian than religious people in the United States, and in the U.S. states with the highest percentages of atheists, the murder rate is below average.