The Vegan Thread

The problem here is an equivocation of the word 'belief'.

In common parlance we would use 'belief system' to point towards religious belief.

So we might agree that atheism is a position on a single issue, but I would still not say atheism itself is bound up in a belief system of any kind, there may be some commonly associated ideas, but these are not necessary for atheism, and certainly not themselves a belief system in an meaning of the term other than simply a set of ideas.

To call atheism a belief system is to call being Lib Dem a belief system or a fan of ice hockey a belief system, it renders the word meaningless as it is universally applicable.

Well, of course I didn't call atheism a belief-system, and I'm sure sammyo wasn't trying to use the word with great precision.

I don't know about common parlance, but the philosophical usage of 'belief-system', which I'll be prone to, isn't limited to religious applications. To pull out a definition of 'belief' at random (from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy): 'Belief. A mental state, representational in character, taking a proposition (either true or false) as its content and involved, together with motivational factors, in the direction and control of voluntary behaviour. [...]'

As a result, 'belief-system' can in philosophy likewise refer to a belief-system more generally than merely religious.

sammyo sounds as if he may be coming from a somewhat philosophical background, hence perhaps his similar usage to mine.

The Wikipedia disambiguation page seems to have been created by someone who also recognises different usages:

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_system[/ame]

'Belief-system' (in the wider sense from now on) certainly is a fairly important word, but if applied strictly (which I recognise something like the Wikipedia page doesn't, and which common parlance wouldn't) it is by no means meaningless. For starters, it will refer to complexes of beliefs which are (perhaps justifiably) claimed to be (fully) systematic. This is different from, say, a number of beliefs merely held in close association with each other, which may be incoherent and/or involve no real claim to systematicity. It is also different from belief-sets which are predominantly systematic but involve some non-systematic features, which I would call non-strictly systematic.

So, the proportion of systematic belief-sets (whether strict or non-strict) is certainly going to be much less than the proportion of unsystematic belief-sets, whatever your account, and by no means universal or meaningless. (Note: Axiomatic belief-systems can exhibit perfect strict systematicity despite making initial assumptions to ground the system--something can be systematic even if it is not ultimately soundly-grounded, or if its foundation is uncertain should the axioms be questioned.)

I would go so far as not to describe the vast majority of religious belief-sets as strictly systematic, and some not as belief-systems at all, even in the non-strict sense--see some strands of Hinduism which actively resist systematisation. (There are of course also a number of religious belief-sets that lay (strong) claim to being systematic and can be shown to fail at the strength of this claim. Quite a lot of traditional Roman Catholic church doctrine springs to mind.)

As I say, I haven't audited common usage, so I may well be wrong about that.