Whenever someone says that they do not believe in God, or are perhaps irreligious, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that they might be an atheist. There are, in fact, at least three different labels which they may identify with.
For one thing, you can be a deist: one who believes that some sort of God or system of gods exists but does not conform to a religion. Christopher Hitchens often quipped that you cannot get from deism to religion without making a series of assumptions which are generous to yourself. Indeed, people usually become deists having previously been religious, rather than the other way around.
But let’s say you hath no God in thy life. Are you an agnostic, an atheist or even an ‘anti-theist’, a term coined by Hitchens before his death in December 2011? Let’s start with the latter term and leave the question of agnostic vs atheist to one side for a moment. Continue reading
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