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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I had the same problem as you until I read the question that the comment was responding to. It reads:

I've seen the idea of "shoe atheism" brought up a lot: the idea that "shoes are atheist because they don't believe in god". I understand why this analogy is generally unhelpful, but I don't see what's wrong with it. It appears to be vacuously true: rocks are atheists because they don't believe in god, they don't believe in god because they are incapable of belief, and they are incapable of belief because they are non-conscious actors.

I've seen the term ridiculed quite a bit, and while I've never personally used this analogy, is there anything actually wrong with it? Why does something need to have the capacity for belief in order to lack belief on subject X?

The comments generally argue that atheism isn't merely the lack of belief in God but the active disbelief in God. Atheist apologetics often likes to deny the fact that atheism is a distinct belief system like any other by insisting that it is a sort of default position. Hence, the term is defined negatively, not by belief but by lack thereof, and therefore, since inanimate objects are incapable of belief, inanimate objects are atheists. The commenter here argues that this argument is disingenuous since virtually everyone making it actively believes God doesn't exist, and isn't merely staking a default position based on ignorance.

As Torquemada would put it: Those heretics pretend to be pagans!