RT Article
T1 Protagoras's Assertion Revisited: American Atheism and its Accompanying Obscurities
JF Implicit religion
VO 14
IS 3
SP 257
OP 294
A1 Baggett, Jerome P. 1963-
LA English
YR 2011
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1690394013
AB How scholars (and others) culturally frame what we mean by atheism matters when it comes to our analysis of it. Because we tend to frame it as something quite simple and certain—as afirm conviction that God does not exist, in other words—we seldom examine our presumptions in doing so or truly appreciate atheism's connection to the oft-underestimated degree of religious uncertainty among Americans. We also tend to overlook the fact that the variety of atheism with which Americans are mostfamiliar is actually one among conceivable others, a reality that this article examines with respect to its "official" iterations and then more fully in terms of what I call "non-official" or "lived" atheism. For this latter category, I explore two strands of atheist literature—atheist conversion accounts and atheist spirituality books—to argue that, at this popular level, atheists' cultural frames are surprisingly similar to those deployed by other Americans, including religious ones, when thinking about their own lives.
K1 Atheism
K1 American Atheism
K1 GREEK gods
K1 History of religion
K1 Protagoras
K1 Skepticism
K1 Sophists (Greek philosophy)
K1 United States
K1 Conversion
K1 cultural frame
K1 Culture
K1 Spirituality
DO 10.1558/imre.v14i3.257