Hell: An Excessive Punishment

[shantonu]

I understand what you are saying. I would hate to see anyone simply end up swapping one religious fundamentalism for another. But a couple things to bear in mind is that literalism is a product of our culture and that voices that speak in absolutes appeals to individuals conditioned to think that way. Christianity was seen as absolutely true; then when it is found lacking, it's seen as absolutely false. The *real* danger with this, is that to position a non-theistic philosophy as representing Reality, as I've hear held forth so often as showing why religious is wrong, is that it make that word a religious belief!

 

We don't know reality, nor can we ever lay claim to say "This far, and no further". We have ideas of reality, and that's all. And those ideas are ever shifting and changing with new information, sometimes overthrowing older ideas, but never estabilishing once and for all "The Truth" That notion that we can lay claim to absolute truth is a driving force behind seeking answers both through religion and science. For me personally, the answer is the question; the truth is in the discovery.

 

Here's the hope. The heart. You are right about the process. To be sure, many, myself included, throw up walls around us by crying "bullshit" to what is trying to be sold to us as The Answer from the religious camps. I've tended to pendulum swing in the past, but found that right there in the middle of this "me" and that "me", was the true me. All the while what was driving it was a heart that wanted peace and fulfillment through love and hope. And the mistake was in thinking it was in finding answers to what is "right and wrong".

 

There is truth in religion because there is truth in humans, and humans create religion to express that. This is undeniable. Humans also create and pursue knowledge through the disciplines of science. And there is likewise great value in that, because it is meaningful to humans. You are completely correct that it is unfortunate to dismiss what you currently don't see value in as "bullshit". The Christian who sees no value in science calls it bullshit. I know this because I was amongst them. But you know what saved me from them? My heart. My recognizing that the vast majority of humans are sincere. That these things are not bullshit, but have value. HOW they have value, is a matter of my willingness to move beyond my particular "groups" doctrines to see something larger; to see a picture that is vaster, more inclusive than exclusive, one that views it all as portraits of something internal to us that we see beyond us.

 

So the problem really is mythology. It's the mythologies we create as products of our culture, whether it's religious or rationalistic, that sees Truth as either here or there, as opposed to in everything and through everything.

 

 

BTW, everything I've read from this point following to the end of the next page from both you and kcdad, I agree with. I appreciate what you're offering here.

 

While I agree with everything you say, what you say presumes that people will be tolerant and charitable. At least that's what I think you mean by the heart. But I haven't noticed much in the way of charity here. Perhaps people are just angry. As I think you mentioned once before, there's a process of deconversion that starts with anger and leads to some sort of acceptance and reconciliation with the individual's former belief.

 

But I don't see encouraging signs. What I see instead is a new doctrine of certaintly. Reality is a fixed thing in the view of some atheist. There seems no possibility of revision--there is simply the ideology: religion is all false. What makes atheism liberating is that atheism rejects the security blanket of certainty and opens up new realms to explore. It seems to have had the exact opposite effect. After all, if you say, "I think religion itself is valuable and interesting," you're treated like an apostate or a heretic.

[shantonu]

Religion is not just a bunch of bullshit. No serious atheist thinks this.

 

This one does.

 

All you are saying with this statement is that you don't take seriously those who disagree with your assessment of the great value of religion.

 

You're right. It's subjective. I don't take your atheism seriously because I find it to be reflexive and reactionary.

 

Maybe this is a stage, but your present views share little in common with the considered atheism of Marx, Freud, and Bertrand Russell. And this disturbs me greatly because I've had several intelligent converstations with you--and I've learned from you. Why you wish to associate yourself with the thugs, I do not know.

[Ouroboros]

Maybe this is a stage, but your present views share little in common with the considered atheism of Marx, Freud, and Bertrand Russell. And this disturbs me greatly because I've had several intelligent converstations with you--and I've learned from you. Why you wish to associate yourself with the thugs, I do not know.

Maybe it's rather you who associate thugs with who we are.

 

Just like there are 32,000 different kinds of denominations of Christians, there are plenty of different angles to atheism. If it's wrong to paint with a broad brush over religiosity, then it might be wrong to use the same broad brush for atheism.

 

(And now I have to leave, because I have to meet my quota of beating up old ladies with a baseball bat. Being an atheist thug is a hard life. )

[florduh]

While I agree with everything you say, what you say presumes that people will be tolerant and charitable. At least that's what I think you mean by the heart. But I haven't noticed much in the way of charity here. Perhaps people are just angry. As I think you mentioned once before, there's a process of deconversion that starts with anger and leads to some sort of acceptance and reconciliation with the individual's former belief.

 

But I don't see encouraging signs. What I see instead is a new doctrine of certaintly. Reality is a fixed thing in the view of some atheist. There seems no possibility of revision--there is simply the ideology: religion is all false. What makes atheism liberating is that atheism rejects the security blanket of certainty and opens up new realms to explore. It seems to have had the exact opposite effect. After all, if you say, "I think religion itself is valuable and interesting," you're treated like an apostate or a heretic.

 

 

So sorry we're letting you down.

 

Mythology expressed in religion or elsewhere is a valid insight on the mind of Man. The religions that grow from the myths become destructive and present demonstrably false reality to their followers.

 

The anger you see comes from resistance to your superior attitude. Those who disagree with your learned assessment of things are dismissed as ignorant, inflexible and and angry. Certainty of position should be something you're familiar with. My (and perhaps others') certainty bothers you because it disagrees with yours.

 

Personally, my conclusions have been crafted over many years and much study, both formal and informal. My opinions, like yours, have not been arrived at by whimsy and emotion. Our study and thought processes have led to different conclusions, that's all.

 

Note to any who will listen - we are not your classroom, and you are not our professor. We're here for an exchange of ideas among equals.

[shantonu]

Maybe this is a stage, but your present views share little in common with the considered atheism of Marx, Freud, and Bertrand Russell. And this disturbs me greatly because I've had several intelligent converstations with you--and I've learned from you. Why you wish to associate yourself with the thugs, I do not know.

Maybe it's rather you who associate thugs with who we are.

 

Just like there are 32,000 different kinds of denominations of Christians, there are plenty of different angles to atheism. If it's wrong to paint with a broad brush over religiosity, then it might be wrong to use the same broad brush for atheism.

 

(And now I have to leave, because I have to meet my quota of beating up old ladies with a baseball bat. Being an atheist thug is a hard life. )

 

Are you saying it's okay to be a thug? Other than beating up old ladies (that is admirable), I can't see why anyone would want to be a thug. There are atheist thugs out there. Stalin was one. But I've spoken with Florduh, and he's a smart guy.

 

There are many sophisticated ways of being an atheist. Advantages: several, including wearing berets, drinking coffee, and pretending to read Sartre.

 

He seems to want to a thug. Why? It's a mystery.

[shantonu]

So sorry we're letting you down.

 

Mythology expressed in religion or elsewhere is a valid insight on the mind of Man. The religions that grow from the myths become destructive and present demonstrably false reality to their followers.

 

The anger you see comes from resistance to your superior attitude. Those who disagree with your learned assessment of things are dismissed as ignorant, inflexible and and angry. Certainty of position should be something you're familiar with. My (and perhaps others') certainty bothers you because it disagrees with yours.

 

Personally, my conclusions have been crafted over many years and much study, both formal and informal. My opinions, like yours, have not been arrived at by whimsy and emotion. Our study and thought processes have led to different conclusions, that's all.

 

Note to any who will listen - we are not your classroom, and you are not our professor. We're here for an exchange of ideas among equals.

 

Fine. But I still insist you are conflating facts with methods. As far as we can tell, it's a fact that God does not exist. The method of religion lead to a false belief. But that doesn't mean that the method is useless for all purposes. I'm going to take the liberty of posting an article about Freud in a moment. I have to cut it down to size. As soon as that is done, I'll post it.

 

And I don't mean to come off souding superior. I'm not superior, but I have read some great atheistic authors, and none of them say what you're saying. So, frankly I'm a bit confused.

[florduh]

What do you mean by the "method?" The mythology on which a religion is hung?

[Ouroboros]

Are you saying it's okay to be a thug? Other than beating up old ladies (that is admirable), I can't see why anyone would want to be a thug. There are atheist thugs out there. Stalin was one. But I've spoken with Florduh, and he's a smart guy.

 

There are many sophisticated ways of being an atheist. Advantages: several, including wearing berets, drinking coffee, and pretending to read Sartre.

 

He seems to want to a thug. Why? It's a mystery.

Mystery to you, but maybe not a mystery to him. Mystery to you only means you can't see it from his viewpoint. Is your external judgment on him right and he has to change according to your template, or is it just that you lack the tolerance for diversity?

[shantonu]

What do you mean by the "method?" The mythology on which a religion is hung?

 

Yes, sort of. The method of "philosophizing" that religious people do in their less f'ed up moments.

 

The best example of this is in the Book of Job. There's an excellent book called the Bitterness of Job by John Wilcox that I could recommend. Wilcox argues that "satan" wins the bet and Job actually does curse God.

 

Job is about the suffering of an innocent person. Why does he suffer? Why does God allow him to suffer? Where is there justice?

 

The normal religious answer to this question is something like "God allows Job to suffer to test him. And Job passes the test and gets rewarded in the end. Glory be to God."

 

That is bullshit. The real answer according to Wilcox is that . . . there is no answer. Bad things happen to good people. The world is not just. Job fails the test. He curses God. But then again God does give an "answer," and that Answer is Job 40, where God asks Job "where were you,when I created the lion?" etc. But yet again this is no answer at all. The implication is that the world is awful, in the old sense of the word awful, meaning "dangerous and solemnly impressive; inspiring awe."

 

Job asks for simple, human justice. God responds with something like, "look at the awful, dangerous, beautiful world that I've created." This is the sort of religious understanding that I'm talking about.

 

Imagine that a terrible tragedy has befallen a friend, say that she has lost a child. What comfort is there in that she participates in an awful, beautiful world? I'm not sure. But I think that Job 40 is very similar to the consolation of atheism, which is to say "you are human, you have arrived here unbidden and powerless, you are a noble thing, part of a noble world that carries much beauty and much risk, how wonderful and awful you are, in your helpless humanity, to take such risks as these."

[shantonu]

Are you saying it's okay to be a thug? Other than beating up old ladies (that is admirable), I can't see why anyone would want to be a thug. There are atheist thugs out there. Stalin was one. But I've spoken with Florduh, and he's a smart guy.

 

There are many sophisticated ways of being an atheist. Advantages: several, including wearing berets, drinking coffee, and pretending to read Sartre.

 

He seems to want to a thug. Why? It's a mystery.

Mystery to you, but maybe not a mystery to him. Mystery to you only means you can't see it from his viewpoint. Is your external judgment on him right and he has to change according to your template, or is it just that you lack the tolerance for diversity?

 

Am I intolerant if I don't tolerate intolerance? Arrrggg. Head hurt now.

[shantonu]

Here's that article:

 

September 9, 2007

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

Defender of the Faith?

By MARK EDMUNDSON

 

Late in life — he was in his 80s, in fact — Sigmund Freud got religion. No, Freud didn’t begin showing up at temple every Saturday, wrapping himself in a prayer shawl and reading from the Torah. To the end of his life, he maintained his stance as an uncompromising atheist, the stance he is best known for down to the present. In “The Future of an Illusion,” he described belief in God as a collective neurosis: he called it “longing for a father.” But in his last completed book, “Moses and Monotheism,” something new emerges. There Freud, without abandoning his atheism, begins to see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present. Close to his own death, Freud starts to recognize the poetry and promise in religion.

A good deal of the antireligious polemic that has recently been abroad in our culture proceeds in the spirit of Freud’s earlier work. In his defense of atheism, “God Is Not Great,” Christopher Hitchens cites Freud as an ally who, he believes, exposed the weak-minded childishness of religion. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins come out of the same Enlightenment spirit of hostile skepticism to faith that infuses “The Future of an Illusion.” All three contemporary writers want to get rid of religion immediately and with no remainder.

But there’s more to Freud’s take on religion than that. In his last book, written when he was old and ill, suffering badly from cancer of the jaw, Freud offers another perspective on faith. He argues that Judaism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate empirical world, opening up fresh possibilities for human thought and action. He also suggests that faith in God facilitated a turn toward the life within, helping to make a rich life of introspection possible.

“Moses and Monotheism” was not an easy book for Freud to write or to publish. He began it in the 1930s while he was living in Vienna, and he was well aware that when and if he brought the book out he could expect trouble from the Austrian Catholic Church. The book, after all, insisted on some strange and disturbing things. Most startling, it argued that Moses himself was not a Jew. [ . . .] Freud also said that monotheism was not a Jewish but an Egyptian invention, descending from the cult of the Egyptian sun god Aton.

In London, where Freud arrived in June 1938, he encountered another sort of resistance to finishing and publishing the Moses book. The first person who came to see him at his house on Elsworthy Road was his neighbor, a Jewish scholar named Abraham Yahuda. Yahuda had gotten wind of the contents of the volume and had come to beseech Freud not to publish. [. . .]

What did Freud do? He published of course — and not just in German but, as quickly and conspicuously as possible, in English. The reviews were terrible. The private response was often bitter. And Freud was delighted. He reveled in the strong sales figures, shrugged off the nasty reviews and sang his own praises. “Quite a worthy exit,” he called the Moses book.

And it was, but not chiefly because of the strange speculations about Moses’ identity that worried Yahuda and scandalized the book’s first readers. There is a more subtle and original dimension to the book, and perhaps it was that dimension that made Freud so determined to complete and publish it, despite all the resistance. For in “Moses and Monotheism” Freud has something truly fresh to say about religion.

About two-thirds of the way into the volume, he makes a point that is simple and rather profound — the sort of point that Freud at his best excels in making. Judaism’s distinction as a faith, he says, comes from its commitment to belief in an invisible God, and from this commitment, many consequential things follow. Freud argues that taking God into the mind enriches the individual immeasurably. The ability to believe in an internal, invisible God vastly improves people’s capacity for abstraction. “The prohibition against making an image of God — the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see,” he says, meant that in Judaism “a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea — a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.”

If people can worship what is not there, they can also reflect on what is not there, or on what is presented to them in symbolic and not immediate terms. So the mental labor of monotheism prepared the Jews — as it would eventually prepare others in the West — to achieve distinction in law, in mathematics, in science and in literary art. It gave them an advantage in all activities that involved making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life. Freud calls this internalizing process an “advance in intellectuality,” and he credits it directly to religion.

[ . . ]

Freud’s argument suggests that belief in an unseen God may prepare the ground not only for science and literature and law but also for intense introspection. Someone who can contemplate an invisible God, Freud implies, is in a strong position to take seriously the invisible, but perhaps determining, dynamics of inner life. He is in a better position to know himself. To live well, the modern individual must learn to understand himself in all his singularity. He must be able to pause and consider his own character, his desires, his inhibitions and values, his inner contradictions. And Judaism, with its commitment to one unseen God, opens the way for doing so. It gives us the gift of inwardness.

Freud was aware that there were many modes of introspection abroad in the world, but he of course thought psychoanalysis was by far the best. He said that the poets were there before him as discoverers of the inner life but that they had never been able to make their knowledge about it systematic and accessible. [ . . .]

Though Freud hoped that mankind would pass beyond religion, he surely took inspiration from the story of Moses, a figure with whom he had been fascinated for many years. (He published his first essay on the prophet in 1914.) Freud wanted to lead people, and he wanted to make conceptual innovations that had staying power and strength: for this there could be no higher exemplar than the prophet.

“Moses and Monotheism” indicates that Freud, irreligious as he was, could still find inspiration in a religious figure.[ . . ]

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud were all at times able to recognize religion as being what Harold Bloom has wisely called it: not the opium of the people but the poetry of the people. They read Scripture as though it were poetry, and they learned from it accordingly. They saw that even if someone does not believe in a transcendent God, religion can still be a source of inspiration and of practical wisdom about how to live in the world. To be sure, it often takes hard intellectual work to find that wisdom. (As the proverb has it, “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.”) Yet Freud’s late-life turn shows us that there is too much of enduring value in religion — even for nonbelievers — ever to think of abandoning it cold.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine...ture&st=cse

[Kuroikaze]

Am I intolerant if I don't tolerate intolerance? Arrrggg. Head hurt now.

 

And perhaps he feels he is just being intolerant of intolerance. So would that mean you are intolerant of an intolerance of intolerance?

[Antlerman]

I understand what you are saying. I would hate to see anyone simply end up swapping one religious fundamentalism for another. But a couple things to bear in mind is that literalism is a product of our culture and that voices that speak in absolutes appeals to individuals conditioned to think that way. Christianity was seen as absolutely true; then when it is found lacking, it's seen as absolutely false. The *real* danger with this, is that to position a non-theistic philosophy as representing Reality™, as I've hear held forth so often as showing why religious is wrong, is that it make that word a religious belief!

 

We don't know reality, nor can we ever lay claim to say "This far, and no further". We have ideas of reality, and that's all. And those ideas are ever shifting and changing with new information, sometimes overthrowing older ideas, but never estabilishing once and for all "The Truth™" That notion that we can lay claim to absolute truth is a driving force behind seeking answers both through religion and science. For me personally, the answer is the question; the truth is in the discovery.

 

Here's the hope. The heart. You are right about the process. To be sure, many, myself included, throw up walls around us by crying "bullshit" to what is trying to be sold to us as The Answer from the religious camps. I've tended to pendulum swing in the past, but found that right there in the middle of this "me" and that "me", was the true me. All the while what was driving it was a heart that wanted peace and fulfillment through love and hope. And the mistake was in thinking it was in finding answers to what is "right and wrong".

 

There is truth in religion because there is truth in humans, and humans create religion to express that. This is undeniable. Humans also create and pursue knowledge through the disciplines of science. And there is likewise great value in that, because it is meaningful to humans. You are completely correct that it is unfortunate to dismiss what you currently don't see value in as "bullshit". The Christian who sees no value in science calls it bullshit. I know this because I was amongst them. But you know what saved me from them? My heart. My recognizing that the vast majority of humans are sincere. That these things are not bullshit, but have value. HOW they have value, is a matter of my willingness to move beyond my particular "groups" doctrines to see something larger; to see a picture that is vaster, more inclusive than exclusive, one that views it all as portraits of something internal to us that we see beyond us.

 

So the problem really is mythology. It's the mythologies we create as products of our culture, whether it's religious or rationalistic, that sees Truth as either here or there, as opposed to in everything and through everything.

 

 

BTW, everything I've read from this point following to the end of the next page from both you and kcdad, I agree with. I appreciate what you're offering here.

 

While I agree with everything you say, what you say presumes that people will be tolerant and charitable. At least that's what I think you mean by the heart. But I haven't noticed much in the way of charity here. Perhaps people are just angry. As I think you mentioned once before, there's a process of deconversion that starts with anger and leads to some sort of acceptance and reconciliation with the individual's former belief.

I think I failed to be clear. I don't believe necessarily that in the end the heart will win. It's my hope, my ideal that our humanity, our ideals will win. Some may never see clear of what the culture fosters, and it is a hope that for the sake of peace, both for the individual and the society, that we can truly think independently and not merely call ourselves enlightened by virtue of switching camps. The heart is that ideal of the self in the face world that makes a choice to be free; a choice of the will, as opposed to aligning themselves with whatever group.

 

But our culture is a powerful molder of what we perceive as the real, as "reality". This is why I focus so much on mythology. Whether that mythology is religious or scientific. It operates the same way. It defines "reality". In both cases we call it "truth". In both cases it operates as truth. In both cases it is truth. Note, there is a difference between truth and fact, as I see it. Truth can and does exist in the idea of a reality; and that can be, and is without doubt, more powerful than fact. That then becomes truth, and becomes it's own reality.

 

I say we create God in our own image. And this is how I mean it. Not just merely to make it look like us, but a projection of ourselves onto our perceptions of existence. Put another way, if we look long and hard enough deep into the mysteries of God, we will see our own faces staring back at us. And it's that, which terrifies us! It's that realization around which we create all sorts of masks to conceal the true identity of God with all manner of mythical qualities. He is a lot like us, just far more, and we say it the other way around that we were created in "his" image. People don't want to look at God, because if we see our own face out there, it leaves us with all the responsibility. It leaves us having to deal with being alone; of having only ourselves to hold accountable for everything we have the power to do so.

 

As far as charity here, as you put it, I believe there is. I see that the value is in, in fact trying to promote real "free thinking", that explores possibilities; pushing the envelope for the sake of keeping ideas fresh and vital, as opposed to sinking into the rhetoric of religious camps; exchanging one set of doctrines for another. Freethinking, in no way shape or form, is about being one thing. Hardly. Unless that one thing is about freedom of thought, freedom to explore the possible; whether that includes or excludes religion; or includes or excludes science; or something else altogether; or includes both; etc.

 

Personally, I think most people are genuinely interested in growth. And that what I see where most people here are at. Afterall, why would we have left something which promised so much? Perhaps because it fell short? For me in my path I saw the shortcomings elsewhere too, and that was the case because of my heart, which was what started the whole process.

 

But I don't see encouraging signs. What I see instead is a new doctrine of certaintly. Reality is a fixed thing in the view of some atheist. There seems no possibility of revision--there is simply the ideology: religion is all false. What makes atheism liberating is that atheism rejects the security blanket of certainty and opens up new realms to explore. It seems to have had the exact opposite effect. After all, if you say, "I think religion itself is valuable and interesting," you're treated like an apostate or a heretic.

There's always hope. All one needs to do is look at the result which is division and hold hope that that is not what anyone truly wants in their heart, on either side. The trick is to let go of ones worship of their ideologies to see that life is not black and white/true or false, but a process of discovery and the creation of reality through our humanity. I hate to see anyone assuming an exclusivist attitude. I would hope that the heart has more sway than the rationalizations of the mind in response to the fear of the heart. It's my ideal that we in fact do care more for life than our worship of our ideas.

[shantonu]

I say we create God in our own image. And this is how I mean it. Not just merely to make it look like us, but a projection of ourselves onto our perceptions of existence. Put another way, if we look long and hard enough deep into the mysteries of God, we will see our own faces staring back at us. And it's that, which terrifies us! It's that realization around which we create all sorts of masks to conceal the true identity of God with all manner of mythical qualities. He is a lot like us, just far more, and we say it the other way around that we were created in "his" image. People don't want to look at God, because if we see our own face out there, it leaves us with all the responsibility. It leaves us having to deal with being alone; of having only ourselves to hold accountable for everything we have the power to do so.

 

As far as charity here, as you put it, I believe there is. I see that the value is in, in fact trying to promote real "free thinking", that explores possibilities; pushing the envelope for the sake of keeping ideas fresh and vital, as opposed to sinking into the rhetoric of religious camps; exchanging one set of doctrines for another. Freethinking, in no way shape or form, is about being one thing. Hardly. Unless that one thing is about freedom of thought, freedom to explore the possible; whether that includes or excludes religion; or includes or excludes science; or something else altogether; or includes both; etc.

 

Personally, I think most people are genuinely interested in growth. And that what I see where most people here are at. Afterall, why would we have left something which promised so much? Perhaps because it fell short? For me in my path I saw the shortcomings elsewhere too, and that was the case because of my heart, which was what started the whole process.

 

Yeah. I alternate between hope and despair.

 

I strongly agree that we create God in our own image. This is what makes us responsible for what gods we create in the existential sense. Marx and Freud make this point exactly but don't emphasize the responsibility aspect which is all important. This is the existential crisis of responsibility that, as you say, "leaves us having to deal with being alone; of having only ourselves to hold accountable for everything we have the power to do so." Sartre has a really nice way of putting this: we are condemned to be free.

 

The burden is on us. If we create a hateful Christianity, we are responsible for that. If we create a loving Christianity, we are responsible for that. But the same is true of atheism. A tolerant atheism will be a credit to atheists. An intolerant hard-edged atheism will be a discredit to atheists. I have a foot in both camps, as I guess you do as well. So I feel doubly compelled to get this right.

 

Have you thought of how the notion of idolarty plays upon the notion that "we create God in our own image"? The orthodox Christian essentially creates an idol--only it's a mental idol. If we create God in our own image, we must be careful not to create an idol. But what is an idol? An idol is something that you ask something of, that you have to supplicate, that you bow toward.

 

But theism is mental idolatry. Atheism frees the Christian from idolatry so that finally Jesus can be viewed clearly.

[nightflight]

Atheism frees the Christian from idolatry so that finally Jesus can be viewed clearly.

 

So what do you think of Jesus? I honestly think he's overrated.

[Deva]

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud were all at times able to recognize religion as being what Harold Bloom has wisely called it: not the opium of the people but the poetry of the people. They read Scripture as though it were poetry, and they learned from it accordingly. They saw that even if someone does not believe in a transcendent God, religion can still be a source of inspiration and of practical wisdom about how to live in the world. To be sure, it often takes hard intellectual work to find that wisdom. (As the proverb has it, “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.”) Yet Freud’s late-life turn shows us that there is too much of enduring value in religion — even for nonbelievers — ever to think of abandoning it cold.

 

I have read Schopenhauer and Nietzche. I agree that religion is more aligned with art. It is a source of inspiration. Being raised in a black and white, fundamentalist, literalist type of Christianity, it has been the task of my entire life to come to terms with it and find some value in it. It was only after many years of not being able to find inspiration in it that I turned elsewhere to a different religion. Shantonu, you do us a disservice when you use the word "thug" in reference to atheists on this site. You seem sad and rather superior. I am well aware that there are fundamentalist types of thinking in every type of religion, and also in atheism. But you seem to lump everyone together as thoughtless "thugs", I think this itself is a bit thoughtless on your part.

 

I would honestly be curious as to what value you see in the work of John Calvin. I say it is BS, but that is my opinion from having read the "Institutes of the Christian Religion". This is the type of work that gets people burned at the stake. I don't actually have strong enough words to condemn an ideology that results in this type of behavior. What is the value in the notion that God created people predestined to hell for eternity? I personally fail to find any inspiration in that. Do you?

 

St. Augustine with is idea of original sin, not so great or inspirational to me either. I don't agree with Chairman Mao, who said "religion is poison". Nevertheless, I think some forms if it come close to poison, as proven by experience in my own life.

[MathGeek]

What do you mean by the "method?" The mythology on which a religion is hung?

 

Yes, sort of. The method of "philosophizing" that religious people do in their less f'ed up moments.

 

The best example of this is in the Book of Job. There's an excellent book called the Bitterness of Job by John Wilcox that I could recommend. Wilcox argues that "satan" wins the bet and Job actually does curse God.

 

Job is about the suffering of an innocent person. Why does he suffer? Why does God allow him to suffer? Where is there justice?

 

The normal religious answer to this question is something like "God allows Job to suffer to test him. And Job passes the test and gets rewarded in the end. Glory be to God."

 

That is bullshit. The real answer according to Wilcox is that . . . there is no answer. Bad things happen to good people. The world is not just. Job fails the test. He curses God. But then again God does give an "answer," and that Answer is Job 40, where God asks Job "where were you,when I created the lion?" etc. But yet again this is no answer at all. The implication is that the world is awful, in the old sense of the word awful, meaning "dangerous and solemnly impressive; inspiring awe."

 

Job asks for simple, human justice. God responds with something like, "look at the awful, dangerous, beautiful world that I've created." This is the sort of religious understanding that I'm talking about.

 

Imagine that a terrible tragedy has befallen a friend, say that she has lost a child. What comfort is there in that she participates in an awful, beautiful world? I'm not sure. But I think that Job 40 is very similar to the consolation of atheism, which is to say "you are human, you have arrived here unbidden and powerless, you are a noble thing, part of a noble world that carries much beauty and much risk, how wonderful and awful you are, in your helpless humanity, to take such risks as these."

 

My interpretation of Job is that God favors whoever He wants, whenever He wants. If anything, Job demonstrates the hypothesis that we may be living in some kind of computer simulation where God is the game designer. I sometimes wonder if we are in gigantic SIMS game, and that God, the user, is negligent because he doesn't satisfy our wants because he's busy with somebody else at the moment. Basically speaking, this is a creative attempt at trying to answer the problem of omniscience versus omnipotence. Personally, if God had to create a SIMS-style game and he let us wander around to sort our own devices until it was too late, the level of his omniscience is directly correlated with his omnipotence. Without knowing all, you can't be all-powerful.

[Guest kcdad]

Yes and no. It depends what exposures you had as a Christian, what organization, what theology you were a part of. I can't speak for all ExCs here, but it would not surprise me if a huge percentage of us came out of your more American Evangelical flavor. Trust me, they do not talk about other views except in a light that puts them down in order to make themselves look good. I had never even heard of Pelagius until many years after leaving behind those views in my religious past. To me it's not a surprise that there's a steep learning curve to be had when one has lived life having information withheld from you.

 

For those who don't know who Pelagius is, this is worth your read: http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/chri...st_pelagius.htm

 

I know that Catholicism has adopted a more "semi-Pelagian" theology, that man is born fallen, but once he's saved then his nature has been changed to a good one. Leave it to the Catholics to try to appease both camps.

 

You're right. We've touched on this subject before, but I find the ex-Evangelicals simply do not give enough credit the diversity of Christian experience. It's frustrating because I understand their anger, but I fear they will wind up with an atheism that is as intolerant and ignorant as the fundamentalism they rejected.

 

So we hear such dismissive statements as "God is Santa Claus for adults," etc. My reaction is something like . . . really? Is that really it? Thomas More, Erasmus, and the other 2000 years of culture and achievement just flushed down the toilet like that?

I understand what you are saying. I would hate to see anyone simply end up swapping one religious fundamentalism for another. But a couple things to bear in mind is that literalism is a product of our culture and that voices that speak in absolutes appeals to individuals conditioned to think that way. Christianity was seen as absolutely true; then when it is found lacking, it's seen as absolutely false. The *real* danger with this, is that to position a non-theistic philosophy as representing Reality, as I've hear held forth so often as showing why religious is wrong, is that it make that word a religious belief!

 

We don't know reality, nor can we ever lay claim to say "This far, and no further". We have ideas of reality, and that's all. And those ideas are ever shifting and changing with new information, sometimes overthrowing older ideas, but never estabilishing once and for all "The Truth" That notion that we can lay claim to absolute truth is a driving force behind seeking answers both through religion and science. For me personally, the answer is the question; the truth is in the discovery.

 

Here's the hope. The heart. You are right about the process. To be sure, many, myself included, throw up walls around us by crying "bullshit" to what is trying to be sold to us as The Answer from the religious camps. I've tended to pendulum swing in the past, but found that right there in the middle of this "me" and that "me", was the true me. All the while what was driving it was a heart that wanted peace and fulfillment through love and hope. And the mistake was in thinking it was in finding answers to what is "right and wrong".

 

There is truth in religion because there is truth in humans, and humans create religion to express that. This is undeniable. Humans also create and pursue knowledge through the disciplines of science. And there is likewise great value in that, because it is meaningful to humans. You are completely correct that it is unfortunate to dismiss what you currently don't see value in as "bullshit". The Christian who sees no value in science calls it bullshit. I know this because I was amongst them. But you know what saved me from them? My heart. My recognizing that the vast majority of humans are sincere. That these things are not bullshit, but have value. HOW they have value, is a matter of my willingness to move beyond my particular "groups" doctrines to see something larger; to see a picture that is vaster, more inclusive than exclusive, one that views it all as portraits of something internal to us that we see beyond us.

 

So the problem really is mythology. It's the mythologies we create as products of our culture, whether it's religious or rationalistic, that sees Truth as either here or there, as opposed to in everything and through everything.

 

 

BTW, everything I've read from this point following to the end of the next page from both you and kcdad, I agree with. I appreciate what you're offering here.

 

I wish I had written this post....

 

 

I would suggest that I don't think the problem is the creation of mythologies, so much as the inability to see those mythologies and human products. They are allegories and parable, not histories.

[Ouroboros]

Am I intolerant if I don't tolerate intolerance? Arrrggg. Head hurt now.

Eh... I think we need to figure out what you're really talking about first, because you're really taking it to the extreme.

 

My impression, and correct me if I'm wrong, was that you consider atheists to be thugs. As far as I've seen, you're accusing Florduh as a thug, not because of violent acts, but because of his opinions. So my impression here is that you consider atheism and opinionated speech to be thuggish. Am I correct so far?

[florduh]

Maybe I am a thug!

 

So the mental labor of monotheism prepared the Jews — as it would eventually prepare others in the West — to achieve distinction in law, in mathematics, in science and in literary art. It gave them an advantage in all activities that involved making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life. Freud calls this internalizing process an “advance in intellectuality,” and he credits it directly to religion.

 

I think the much older Eastern philosophies might negate that statement. Where is the evidence that the West is superior in the things mentioned, and why would religion be responsible for it?

 

The thug's point of view is that it is insane to worship or even acknowledge a god you know doesn't exist. Abstract thought exists without gods or religions. The great themes of humanity are addressed in the arts as fictional representations that have meaning - mythology. Attaching supposedly real gods and religions to creative, abstract, and introspective thought muddies the waters in my opinion.

 

Obviously, some people are able to use the language of religion to organize their thoughts. Those are a tiny minority. For most people, their religion is confining and destructive in many ways.

 

So sayeth the thug.

[nightflight]

I would suggest that I don't think the problem is the creation of mythologies, so much as the inability to see those mythologies and human products. They are allegories and parable, not histories.

 

Can we be sure that the writers intended them to be allegorical?

[Guest kcdad]

I would suggest that I don't think the problem is the creation of mythologies, so much as the inability to see those mythologies and human products. They are allegories and parable, not histories.

 

Can we be sure that the writers intended them to be allegorical?

 

Yes. Talking serpents and donkeys, people wrestling with spiritual beings... come on.

[nightflight]

I would suggest that I don't think the problem is the creation of mythologies, so much as the inability to see those mythologies and human products. They are allegories and parable, not histories.

 

Can we be sure that the writers intended them to be allegorical?

 

Yes. Talking serpents and donkeys, people wrestling with spiritual beings... come on.

 

Supernatural beings, resurrections, miracles, healings..........come on.

[Guest kcdad]

I would suggest that I don't think the problem is the creation of mythologies, so much as the inability to see those mythologies and human products. They are allegories and parable, not histories.

 

Can we be sure that the writers intended them to be allegorical?

 

Yes. Talking serpents and donkeys, people wrestling with spiritual beings... come on.

 

Supernatural beings, resurrections, miracles, healings..........come on.

 

 

Super natural... what do you mean? Outside or Above Nature?

 

Resurrection... what do you mean? Raised from the dead or remembered, dredged up again?

 

Miracles... ahhhh the things that make us wonder, that make you go AHHHHHH

 

Healings? You don't believe in healing? Geesh.

[nightflight]

Super natural... what do you mean? Outside or Above Nature?

 

Yes.

From Encarta: 1. not of natural world: relating to or attributed to phenomena that cannot be explained by natural laws

 

Resurrection... what do you mean? Raised from the dead or remembered, dredged up again?

 

The dead returning to life, as the Bible speaks of it.

 

Miracles... ahhhh the things that make us wonder, that make you go AHHHHHH

 

Supernatural acts that are beyond nature. You know, the things that don't happen.

 

Healings? You don't believe in healing? Geesh.

 

Not the supernatural variety. Geesh.

 

Do we really have to explain our terms like this? All the things I spoke of in my post were those things that are of Biblical Christianity, you know the religion that most of the people on this site left. I mean, come on. This is Ex-Christian dot net. The form of Christianity we escaped from is the conservative/evangelical type, which is dominant in our culture.