Title:
ATHEISM IN BRITISH RELIGIOUS DEBATES: A CRITICAL SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY

Authors:
Ameer Ali Hussein and Ahmed Sahib Mubarak, Iraq

Abstract:
Atheism is a controversial concept that has been studied in the field of theology and anthropology. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge atheism has not been studied from a critical sociolinguistic view. This paper will tackle the concept critically. The data of the study consists of a British public religious debate that is A live interview with Annie Laurie during the Christmas holiday. Annie Lauri wants to reveal the ideology that there is no god and there is no need to celebrate the birthday of Jesus by posting an advertisement in Las Vegas as part of a campaign called “war on Christians”. The research tries to answer the following questions: (1) Which kind of atheism that is critically manipulated in the American and British religious public debates? (2) What are the dialectic and persuading strategies used by atheists to reinforce their ideologies? (3) What are the socio-cognitive techniques that are manipulated by the speakers to reveal the ideology of atheism? (4) What are the social variables that contribute to revealing atheism in the selected speeches? The main approach of the study is Fairclough’s approach, the study will focus on the meso and macro levels of the approach. After analyzing the excerpts from the interview, the researchers reach to the following: Annie Laurie adopt the explicit stance of atheism to reveal her ideology.