From: "curtisdeltabl...@yahoo.com" <curtisdeltabl...@yahoo.com>
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, May 4, 2014 4:47 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: To Curtis - Sam Harris C: One of the problems I learned from our Feser discussions is that atheists don't care about obscure ontological arguments about a god since it is the epistemological jumps that cause all the problems. As I pointed out, it is rare to find someone who does not include Aquinas in their classical version of god and this brings in the aspect of agency and interaction of god with the world and particularity with specific communications with mankind through certain books. That is the issue that concerns atheists. And once that jump has been made, the epistemological difference between an abstract spirit god who can still guide the hand of the writers (and translators) of the Bible and a fully decked out white bearded dude are insignificant. I know religious people make a big fuss about these distinctions and it rankles them to see what they think of as a more sophisticated version lumped in with versions they feel above intellectually. But once communication with a being with a personal agenda and ability to communicate that agenda to mankind specifically is claimed, these cherished distinctions are all a moot point. The bone of contention for atheists revolves around how we could be confident that this human claim is true or not. What is the claim based on. Not the imagined details of the being itself or himself or herself. The burden of proof is all on the man making the claim. Those other detail are all distractions to the epistemological issues. None of them improve or even hurt those knowledge issues. They are simply irrelevant to the real problem. Bingo. One of the things that I don't think a number of theists or quasi-theists or theists-in-denial-that-they're-theists don't "get" on this forum is that what they call atheists barging into an otherwise pleasant conversation about God is that this "barging in" often comes after a few rounds of them hurling the word "atheist" around as if they were saying "Nigger!" or "Spawn of Satan" or "rakshasa." They actually don't *get* that they look down on atheists as much as they do, and that this fact pervades their speech/writing. IMO, giving them a little "taste of their own medicine" at that point is well-deserved. :-)
