With many people discussing atheism at the moment, it seems to me that atheism as a singular is the wrong way to think about the concept. Atheisms would be more accurate as the word is polysemous.
Atheism in its 'pure' sense is a negative position, although even what it is a negative of is not necessarily as clear cut as many people think. Words rarely exist in this 'pure' sense outside of a dictionary though.
The meaning of 'theism', like almost all words, has nothing to do with any of the letters in the word, the meaning draws from convention and contextual usage only. Adding a prefix doesn't change this, the word undead doesn't mean alive, for example. Unless a word is onomatopoeic, trying to determine its meaning from its letters is not viable.
Meaning doesn't come from a dictionary, it comes from usage in context. The letters have no intrinsic meaning, just convention. This convention is not, and never has been, uniform as regards atheism though, even in the most general sense, and certainly not in contextual usage. It is a word which developed in the context of Western religion and philosophy, and this 'baggage' doesn't disappear just because the world is now more globalised.
There seem to be multiple atheisms, not a singular atheism.
Also meaning is not purely denotative, and what is signified by a word is not necessarily only it's 'standard' meaning. To say a word can be stripped of the context in which it is used when identifying its meaning is somewhat pointless.
The word atheism may (not does) carry various connotations, implicit assumptions and signified meanings that are collected from the context, both grammatical and situational, in which it is used.
"Mauthner admired Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth-century Christian mystic who died in obscure circumstances after being subjected to trial by the Inquisition, as a true atheist, since Eckhart insisted that nothing could be said of God – not even that God existed." The silence of animals, John Gray
"It is furthermore imperative to put the propaganda of atheism on solid ground. You won't achieve much with the weapons of Marx and materialism, as we have seen. Materialism and religion are two different planes and they don't coincide. If a fool speaks from the heavens and the sage from a factory--they won't understand one another. The sage needs to hit the fool with his stick, with his weapon." Letter from Gorky to Stalin
The atheism of Mauthner and the atheism of Gorky are not the same thing. Gorky's is a doctrine that must be propagated, it forms part of a larger worldview in which Marxism, materialism and atheism all form fundamental tenets. Mauthner's atheism also forms part of a larger worldview, but his is the idea that language cannot capture anything that is unreal, therefore his atheism is founded on a rejection of the concepts of theism, rather than a disbelief or lack of belief.
Gorky sees atheism as a fundamental political stance to be advocated, Mauthner sees it as a subsidiary point within a broader critique of language:
"Mauthner remarked that history of atheism in the West gradually achieves the aim, which is liberating human minds from the power of the word “God”, unknown in the tradition of the East. Every word is entangled in its own history; it is subject to various transformations of its meaning, until it discovers that behind the curtains there are no contents that can be referred to the real outer reality. " Fritz Mauthner's critique of Locke's idea of God. - H. Jakuszko
When someone talks about 'the atheism of Richard Dawkins', it doesn't simply mean what the dictionary says atheism means. When someone says new atheism, it conveys specific meaning, even though new atheism is neither a new or purely atheist ideology. Dawkins' atheism can be evangelical, but other atheisms could not be collocated with 'evangelical' while maintaining conceptual sense.
Dawkins' atheism is forcefully expressed and incorporates anti-theism and a scientific outlook, none of which are intrinsic to atheism, but are communicated from a knowledge of context for those familiar with his ideas, simply through the word atheism.
As such, there exist multiple atheisms, all gaining their meanings from a broader context. This is not from a misuse of language with 'true meaning' being perverted, just the standard use of language in how it transmits meaning.
Atheisms may be of the general kind, the 'dictionary' atheism, or they can be of a specific contextual kind, in which the meaning conveyed by 'atheism/atheist' is not generalisable to the totality of atheism/atheists. Whenever atheism is professed, its meaning can only be interpreted from its usage, not from a normative abstraction.
Is it more useful to think of multiple atheisms that derive meaning from context then, rather than a singular, denotative, atheism that 'just means....'?
