On 08 Jul 2013, at 23:18, meekerdb wrote:
On 7/8/2013 12:26 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 12:53 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 7/8/2013 1:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 08 Jul 2013, at 02:45, meekerdb wrote:
On 7/7/2013 6:56 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 07 Jul 2013, at 07:28, meekerdb wrote:
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/06/god_is_not_great_christopher_hitchens_is_not_a_liar/
I love Christopher Hitchens. I agree with many points. He is more
an anticlerical than an atheist to me ...
Everybody called him an atheist. He called himself an atheist. I
think you just don't like the term.
"atheism" is different in America and in Europa, although I have
realized now that some atheists in America might be similar, but
not Hitchens. Many people confuse agnosticism and atheism. Some
atheists maintains the confusion to hide that they
are believers (in "matter" and in the non
existence of God).
I don't know any atheists who are shy about their belief that
matter exists and God doesn't.
Many people, and dictionaries, confuse agnosticism="that whether or
not God exists is unknown" with agnosticism="that whether or not
God exists is impossible to know". I agree with Sam Harris that
"atheist" is not a very useful appellation because it only
describes someone in contrast to "theist". It just means they fail
to believe in a God who is a person and whose approval one should
seek. As Harris points out we don't invent words like awarmist to
describe one who fails to believe there is global warming or
anummerist to describe someone who's not sure about the existence
of numbers.
There is the term "Bright", which perhaps better describes someone
who seeks to include only naturalistic explanations in their world-
view:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brights_movement
But what would happen if naturalistic explanations lend credence to
the existence of God or gods?
Then people would have a greater degree of belief in gods; but they
wouldn't have "faith", i.e. unquestioning belief, in them. In fact
that's the way it was at one time. The belief in storm gods,
volcano gods, deer spirits, rain gods, plague's as punishment for
impiety,...were all 'naturalistic' explanations at the time. It was
just assumed that important, unpredictable events must be the work
of a powerful being. It wasn't forbidden to doubt these models
and their effectiveness as predictors was not supposed to depend
on how pious or faithful you were. There was no distinction between
natural and supernatural. Those were later developments as religion
was split from science and subsumed into an instrument of social
control.
Exactly.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
