Category talk:Nontheism

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what is the point of this category? It seems to make about as much sense as a Category:Non-zoology to include all articles that do not treat a zoological topic. We do have Category:Atheism to include articles that are about the issue of not having gods. Why should articles that simply do not concern the notion of a deity at all be grouped more than articles that do not treat the notion of "battle tank", "bycicle", "deconsructivism" or "dwarf planet"? dab (ᛏ) 13:35, 23 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

So using your logic it is not worth having the Nontheism page either. Secularism is not a system of belief or non-belief. A Nontheism category is exactly the same as having a Christianity category, that groups all philosophy, religion or spirituality that is Christian related. The group is not about articles that do not concern the notion of theism, it is about articles discuss specifically philosophy, religion or spirituality that is nottheistic. Such an idea should grouped as there are a number of articles that do deal directly with such this issue, where there are no articles that disucss non-bycicleism, or non-pantetism.

yes, well, the question is, do we need this category, and how do we delineate its scope wrt "atheism" and "secularism". There will also be no end to the debate, should Buddhism be in it, etc. Having an article about a concept is not sufficient evidence that the concept is useful for the categorisation of articles. dab (ᛏ) 11:29, 24 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with dab. This category is too vague, and nontheism is too much of a neologism for us to rely on over atheism at this point. It's perfectly fine to have an article for nontheism, as long as it's well-referenced, but having a category is a very, very different case, because the term nontheism has vastly less noteworthiness than the term Christianity. Moreover, there's too much overlap between this category and Category:Atheism for this to be a very useful categorization scheme: it would cause fights over which of the two categories (or both) a certain article goes into, due to the variable definitions of each term. Overall, it simply benefits our readers more to have a simpler categorization, which means "nontheism" is superfluous here, at least for now. -Silence 11:47, 24 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I fail to soo how there is too much overlap between this category and Category:Atheism. Atheism, among ther things is nontheistic, but not all things that are atheistic are nontheistic, hence Atheism being a sub category of nontheism. Why should there not' be an article that groups those things that are directly nontheistic. The category of Atheism only groups those articles that are related to atheism and the existance of this category does not detract from that. Categorisation that is heirachial is encouraged by wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Categorization) and this is simply what this category does. It is acting as a larger parent-group for other groups such as Atheism, Agnosticism, Buddhism etc, as well as other articles that do not relate soley to one of its sub categories, such as Logical positivism. It is not looking to take articles from Atheism or any other category. I also fail to see how this category would not be useful. One researching branches of philosophy may find a category that directs them to all child-categries or articles that are nontheistic in their nature very helpful. Jarryd Moore 13:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

yes, yes, I am not absolutely opposed to this category, I am just wary of creating categories on a whim that will remain underpopulated and overlap with other categories. If we're going to keep this, we need to integrate it clearly in existing category hierarchy. If you have followed discussion on Talk:Atheism at all, you will realize that it is far from obvious that "not all things that are [non]theistic are [a]theistic". It is dubitable if "nontheism" is even a meaningful term, barbarically linking the Latin prefix to the Greek noun as it does. "non" is simply Latin for Greek "an". There is no obvious difference between nontheism and atheism, and categories are not the place to solve disputes such as this one. Discuss the finer difference between "nontheism" and atheism, as expressed by notable authors at nontheism, but don't build a categorization scheme on it. dab (ᛏ) 14:07, 24 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]