What kind of atheist are you?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

> including Buddhism as a "nonteistic philosophy"

I can't wait to see Nathan rip this apart.

The fact that the phrase the quiz uses is 'non-believer' is actually way worse than just classifying Theravada as a not-necessarily-theistic belief system would have been.  Confucianism is arguable--the Catholic Church, for instance, finally decided, in 1939, largely for realpolitik reasons, that it didn't count as a religion, and academic East Asianists are pretty evenly split on whether or not we agree with this--and I guess Tao might be arguable too based on what I know about it, but describing Theravada Buddhism as a 'nontheistic philosophy' makes about as much sense as describing Mormonism as an 'American political ideology'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

> including Buddhism as a "nonteistic philosophy"

I can't wait to see Nathan rip this apart.

The fact that the phrase the quiz uses is 'non-believer' is actually way worse than just classifying Theravada as a not-necessarily-theistic belief system would have been.  Confucianism is arguable--the Catholic Church, for instance, finally decided, in 1939, largely for realpolitik reasons, that it didn't count as a religion, and academic East Asianists are pretty evenly split on whether or not we agree with this--and I guess Tao might be arguable too based on what I know about it, but describing Theravada Buddhism as a 'nontheistic philosophy' makes about as much sense as describing Mormonism as an 'American political ideology'.

I would say that we don't actually know what exactly what Buddha taught, because like Jesus and Socrates we don't have any of his writings, only the writings of his followers and the various schools of Buddhism don't agree, anyway (just like Christians). To describe Theravada as a "not-necessarily-theistic belief system" is fine by me. The point is that not all Buddhists believe in God. Obviously some do.

Nobody serious uses the fact that we don't have any writings from Jesus as an argument that actually-existing Christianity isn't a religion or doesn't have the characteristics as a religion that it's generally recognized to have.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If your definition of religion includes a belief in "God",

But why would it?

The problem with the inclusion of Buddhism in this quiz (along with Confucianism, Tao, and, frankly, Unitarian Universalism) is that it's being lumped in with all these abstract philosophical conceptualizations. Theravada Buddhism and 'weak agnosticism' are simply not part of the same conceptual category at all.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I just feel like if the test is going to include things like Objectivism then it would make a lot more sense for it to include, say, dialectical materialism, rather than East Asian religions that happen not to be conventionally theistic.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

   1.   Thomas Aquinas (100%)
   2.   St. Augustine (86%)
   3.   William of Ockham (73%)
   4.   Aristotle (72%)
   5.   Benedictus Spinoza (63%)
   6.    Plato (59%)
   7.    Stoics (52%)
   8.   Jeremy Bentham (45%)
   9.   Nel Noddings (43%)
   10.    Immanuel Kant (36%)
   11.    Cynics (33%)
   12.    John Stuart Mill (33%)
   13.    Epicureans (32%)
   14.    Jean-Paul Sartre (27%)
   15.   William James (25%)          
   16.   David Hume (25%)
   17.   Ayn Rand (20%)
   18.   Prescriptivism (20%)
   19.   Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (19%)
   20.   Thomas Hobbes (0%)
   21.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau (0%)

Kant, James, and Nietzsche's general frameworks are a lot more central to my philosophical and theological project than this suggests, but I suppose it makes sense that I don't tend to come to the same conclusions as them (especially with Nietzsche).

Where's Philippa Foot? Isn't the trolley problem mostly associated with her?

lmao this site also has 'Would Locke become romantically involved with you?'

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

   1.   Jeremy Bentham (100%)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

   1.   Jeremy Bentham (100%)

?

Not a fan of Benthamite utilitarianism, although the man did a lot of really good work in other areas. Philosophically more sympathetic to Mill if I had to choose.