Antitheism

Opposition to theism

Antitheism has been adopted as a label by those who regard theism as dangerous, destructive, or encouraging of harmful behavior. Christopher Hitchens (2001) wrote:

I'm not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.

Opposition to the properties of any deity

Other definitions of antitheism include that of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1953), for whom it is "an active struggle against everything that reminds us of God".

Christopher New (1993) proposed an altered definition of the word antitheism as part of a thought experiment. He imagines what arguments for the existence of an evil god would look like, and writes:

Antitheists, like theists, would have believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal creator; but whereas theists in fact believe that the supreme being is also perfectly good, antitheists would have believed that he was perfectly evil.

New's changed definition has reappeared in the work of W.A. Murphree.

The misotheistic sense of the term's purported exclusion of atheists and agnostics disputed by Patheos in 2011.

Examples of belief systems founded on the principle of opposition to the properties of any deity include some forms of Atheistic Satanism and maltheism.

Opposition to the existence and the properties of any deity

The definition of Robert Flint (1877), Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh was similar. Flint's 1877 Baird Lecture was titled Anti-Theistic Theories. He used "antitheism" as a very general umbrella term for all opposition to his own form of theism, which he defined as:

the "belief that the heavens and the earth and all that they contain owe their existence and continuance to the wisdom and will of a supreme, self-existent, omnipotent, omniscient, righteous, and benevolent Being, who is distinct from, and independent of, what He has created."

However, Flint also acknowledged that antitheism is typically understood differently from how he defines it. In particular, he notes that it has been used as a subdivision of atheism, descriptive of the view that theism has been disproven, rather than as the more general term that Flint preferred. He rejected the alternative non-theistic: not merely because of its hybrid origin and character, but also because it is far too comprehensive. The theories of physical and mental science are non-theistic, even when in no degree, directly or indirectly, antagonistic to theism.