Or Roman Rational Scientific Skeptic

Right on, Skep. RRSS is the only way to be! Those damn RSSers are just splitters.

That reminds me, Are you the Judean People’s Front?

Or Roman Rational Scientific Skeptic when HappyNat is around

Honestly labels are simply shortcuts for understanding and should never be used a definitions of people.

Skeptigator
“A Democrat from Indiana smells an awful lot like a Massachusetts Republican”

There aren’t very many misconceptions about the word skepticism, the most prevalent being that people think it means refusal to believe.

On that topic, there’s a discussion on Aardvarchaeology in which people are disputing the use of “skeptic” to describe the skeptical movement. It all strikes me as excessively curmudgeonly and wrongly prescriptivist.

I consider the most accurate label for myself to be “skeptic.”

Ahem, I think you mean “Roman skeptic” . . .

However on this site I identify myself as an atheist precisely because of all the misconceptions and negative stereotypes. I want to de-curse the word by not living up to the awful things that misinformed people assume about atheists. I also confess a little glee when the worst bigots feel confounded.

I understand the discomfort some have with the term atheism because it’s a word that has to define itself by referring to its opposite and it says nothing about what else there may be to the person, but I’ve resolved to accept that at this point in history atheism is like an island in a sea of theism. Islands are defined as such by the water that surrounds them more than by a quality about them themselves. If some day a thousand years from now belief in gods is the small island in a sea of freedom from belief in gods, probably by then we will have come up with a new term for our viewpoint.

You can probably tell that I’m growing to dislike the label of “atheist”. Defining a group for what they don’t believe in encompasses too many things. Secular humanist at least says that I uphold reason, ethics and justice as important ideals.

On the flip side, defining a group for what they do believe in encompasses too few things. I think that when in a large group like the one Hemant mentions, the larger, more general term should win out. Of course, by that logic, they should probably go with “freethinker” or just “non-religious”

I can’t say I ever remember finding “Roman Catholic” insulting. We used the label ourselves.

On the other hand, Secular Humanism has a set of beliefs

The Humanist Minimum Statement is all you really need, and I think few atheists would disagree with much of it: Or the American Humanist definition.

AHA – “Humanism is a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.”

IHEU minimum statement – “Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Humanist_Association

If you want a very in-depth analysis of what Atheism is (and more importantly what it is not) I would suggest George Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God.

If you want a brief synapsis it’s that Atheism simply says that “I do not believe in any god(s)”. It doesn’t say anything about what someone actually believes. For example, I could say the following and be absolutely correct, ” I do not believe that there are any gods and that all redheaded people should be imprisoned”. That would be a perfectly consistent statement for any atheist to state, because the first statement is a statement of atheism and the second is a positive statement of belief (that is not inconsistent with the first).

On the other hand, Secular Humanism has a set of beliefs (if you want to know what they are and this is certainly not comprehensive or authoritative, check out http://humaniststudies.org to start). To take one example, some humanists believe that we should do everything possible to end suffering, so to make the same statement above would be incompatible with humanism.

The problem isn’t that both make potentially conflicting positive statements of belief, one simply doesn’t necessarily inform the other. Someone like George Smith does a much better job than I can do.