--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19140641/site/newsweek/ > > This topic interests me. It is a dilemma for non believers. > The challenge of staying in rapport while being true to your > own position, which is by definition, a negation of someone > else's POV. Right now there are a few books out that aren't > pulling any punches and some come off as pretty caustic to > believers. I keep reading criticisms of these books that > focus on their disrespectful tone and a claim that the > authors are unfairly lumping together fundamentalists > believers with people the reviewers consider more thoughtful, > (themselves). Sometimes the reviewers come off as just as > rudely dismissive of fundamentalist believers as the atheists. > I don't see anyone spelling out what exactly their God belief > includes in any detail. Just a lot of dodge ball, "That isn't > my version, not that either, nope you aren't talking about > mine". Andrew Sullivan was the master of this game in his > debate with Sam Harris, reducing his God belief into certain > uncontroversial human emotions, (We all like puppies right? > Then my God is puppies).
Your parenthetical above, just for the record, is exactly the sort of thing the reviewers are complaining about, and with good reason. As Terry Eagleton says in his review of Dawkins's book: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. "This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster." http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html Eagleton also gives a rather specific definition of God, although I doubt it would be specific enough to satisfy Curtis. Here's a comment from another review of Hitchens's book: "As for straw-man argument, a single example suffices to reveal Hitchens's petulant mediocrity in philosophy. The notion of a creator, he observes, raises 'the unanswerable question of who...created the creator'-- an objection that theologians 'have consistently failed to overcome.' "Really? Any decent freshman survey could have informed Hitchens that, as Aquinas and many others have patiently explained, God is not an entity and thus is not ensnared in any serial account of causality. Not a thing himself, God is rather the condition of there being anything at all. "Thus, 'creation' is not a gargantuan act of handicraft but rather the condition of there being something rather than nothing. Creation didn't happen long ago; it's right now, and forever. (This is why 'creationism' is bad science--because it's bad theology.)" http://tinyurl.com/2ezkws (from "Commonweal" magazine) Atheists tend to be exceedingly unsophisticated metaphysically, so when a believer doesn't define God in similarly unsophisticated terms, in the kind of concrete detail that is the only approach the atheists know how to deal with, the atheists think the believer must be playing "dodgeball."
