(Religious) belief and atheism from a semiotic viewpoint

Abstract. Th e article attempts to give a semiotic defi nition of the intellectual attri-butes of belief (in its broader sense), religious belief and atheism, treating all three of them as sign systems – cultural languages. To defi ne the formal structure of the phenomenon of religion, fi ve aspects of the corresponding communicative act should be considered – the orientational, the sign-creating, the cognitive, the teleological and the energetic ones. Belief as an orientational act cannot be treated without including autocommunication: the I-you relation is accompanied by the I-I relation in the form of vertical and horizontal to-pological imaginations. Th e sign-creating aspect of belief is expressed, on the one hand, in the performative characteristics of utterances (utterance = act) and, on the other hand, in symbolic mnemonic programming. As a cognitive act, communica-tion typical of belief is mythological, expressing identifi cation with the addressee and the subjective eternity of the relation. Teleologically, belief is connected with the existential projection; energetically we treat belief as energeia – the creative force of man. Relying on the Scriptures and theological literature (mainly the works of Paul Tillich), the article analyses the appearance of all these communicative characteris-tics in religious sign-creating. Atheism as negation of God is formally an antithetic structure of thinking, which is characterized by the symmetry of the antithetic plus-side with the intellectual cha-racteristics of the minus-side. Based on the characteristics of belief, it is particularly interesting to observe how Marx (and his disciples) have “furnished ˮ the orienta-tional, teleological and energetic characteristics of atheism, and how the dedicative structure of thinking has also given birth to earthly gods