Taking Sides: Atheism vs. Christianity

That's just wrong.

I suppose the word Religion can be a bit loaded in some peoples minds. I'd say that as a social entity it clearly does need other people, but as a spiritual one, it clearly doesn't.

If they had hunted Christians down to one guy hiding in the woods, praying daily and subsiding on roots and berries, would it still be religion? I'd say yes. Maybe not A Religion (checkbox in the census form), though.

http://www.lawrence.edu/fac/boardmaw/god_in_quad_berkeley.html

Prayer would seem to me to be something you can do by yourself, apart from god(s), and is fairly crucial to the whole endeavour. But that's a Catholic perspective. Are there other religions where you can't do something holy by yourself, by scripture rather than practice?

This depends on the strength of the agnosticism. "I don't know if God exists" is just a statement, as undeniable as "The sun is shining". Which is not as undeniable as 2+2=4, but that's another ballgame.

But "there is no way of knowing whether god exists" is like "The sun will come up tomorrow, because science says" or "The sun will come up tomorrow, thanks to Ra". You can build consistent world views around it, but it is clearly just a belief. It's a positive statement, and can't be proved right, just wrong.

Hrm. Guess who just read a book on Wittgenstein vs Popper, and thinks he knows the secrets of the ages?

hurhurhur.

Oh, I picked Atheism vs. Christianity because a few previous threads were discussing it, and Christianity has more cultural significants around here. Also, I was interested in others view of Christianity specifically.
And I totally agree that public schools should have a world religion class. I would have loved to have anything other than American history in high school (I hardly had any social studies in school other than American history, it sucked.)

and as for Tom's explination of his atheism,

"I'm with J. Religion shifts the argument into a non-rational sphere with the introduction of the concept of 'faith' and I'm happy to enter that sphere. I have no faith, indeed I have a felt absence of faith, therefore I am an atheist."

I think that is a great explination. For me, who believes in predestination of man, Tom would be an example of someone who is seemingly not predestined.

All very Judy Blume book, I know, but I drew the inevitable conclusion with half the bizarro Christian sects that if parents had followed any, I'd probably not be alive and writing this.

Good things about religion include great literature produced (where do we get the classic narrative structure of genesis, action, climax denoument anyway, from Greeks or subconscious parallel with How Sex Goes?) and that is why I am able to treat most of it like other, older myths and legends, there to provide object lessons to people who need them and to provide apocryphal plotlines to us what don't.

Maria's question is interesting. First awareness I had of the whole God thing was when I got to primary school and people told me they went to Sunday School, that's how agnostic my folks are. Also when my elder grandfather died, when I was seven, by coincidence there were all these weird Life After Death programmes doing the rounds of the cheapo TV stations and I just sat there watching all these weird talkshow people talking about out of body experiences whilst meeting their pal, The Light, getting told 'it's not your time' by a Marcus Welby type voice and getting sucked back down to the hospital bed. Very 'ooh, freaky, better not tell anyone I'm watching this, they'll freak out because of Grandpa but this is *fascinating*' vibe.

When I'm in joke arguments with my Jewish girlfriend (we're both atheists, though I was baptised a catholic - the arguments are more about the coolness of the respective literary traditions), and she's nagging me about the unoriginality of the Jesus myths, how they're all derivitive, if not rip-offs of Torah stories (yeah, yeah, there's midrash and all that crap, but still you can take it too far...) I love to point out the extent of borrowing in Genesis from other sources. But even then I know I'm wrong, cos while the details are stolen, the simplicity of narrative and overall point is (was) blatantly revolutionary. Once upon a time, the idea of monotheism must have been a big deal.

The Gospels contain the greatest alienation in world history, when Jesus is on the cross: 'Eli, Eli, la'ma sabach-tha'ni?' that is, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'"

Excuse the cut and paste but Chesterton is often OTM...

"But if [Jesus'] divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. . . He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

I sympathise strongly with that Kiwi. But maybe faith in anything but the most amorphous of gods is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I remember getting in trouble at school for being cheeky when the chaplain told me Jesus died for our sins and I said, yes, but he came back three days later. I was being cheeky but I was also being proto-serious - the happy-ending part of the central story of Christianity diminishes it (and has I think vast and often negative repercussions for Western culture ever since but that's a different thread), which is why I've always had sympathy with radical clergy who've tried to turn the Resurrection into a metaphor rather than literal truth.

Pah, call that radical? Turning it into a roller disco - now that's radical.

Anyway yes. To clarify what I was saying, the 'you gotta take it on faith thing' is a nonsense to me. Why not take any old story on faith? If your parents brought you up as devil worshippers and told you to take that on faith, what's the difference?

And then they might say 'He has answered my prayers'. And so you ask 'What about kids who die of Leukemia despite people praying for them?'.

And they might reply 'Well God works in mysterious ways'.

And then you give up.

No really, what if you came upon any "larger" being/presence -- how would you know if it was god or not? A sort of variation on Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology" maxim.

Tom I dont agree with your views on the different "risks" on the Trinity as I think that is misinterpreting the concept from the limited understanding I have of it but I will have to discuss later

In what way is the concept of faith (or any ‘concept’) non-rational? Raw experiences, emotions, etc are non-rational (in the sense that they aren’t dependant on our rationalising about them – hit your thumb with a hammer and it hurts like hell, no matter how you may interpret the experience) but as soon as you make a knowledge-claim about an experience, such as ‘I knew I was feeling the presence of the Lord’ then you’re putting forward a rational argument about the world: ‘I intuited the existence of God.’ Such an assertion (similar to those of ‘direct realism’ but with the object supposedly apprehended non-inferentially being a benign superbeing rather than, say, a table) is open to a challenge for justification, as all assertions are: What credibility is there, for instance, in claimed intuitions of divine entities when those entities are noticeably defined in terms which correspond to the context of cultural belief in which the ‘intuitions’ occur?

Faith (insofar as it implies dogmatic conviction, as opposed to mere unprovable belief) in no way transcends rationality by claiming immediate knowledge. Furthermore, in offering no support to its claims of knowledge other than ‘I just know,’ it confines itself to the least credible class of all rational assertions, those which rest on dogmatic assumption.

>That's just wrong. <

Apart from an abscence of God based faith, what then is the "belief system" of atheists?

(hint: there isn't one)

-Alan

Atheism is not the belief that there are no gods. It is the lack of belief in a god. It can be part of a religion or belief system (see: Buddhism), but it is not a system of belief onto its own, because it is A) not a belief and B) not a system of anything (as it is a single property).

Theism also has this problem. It, in and of itself, is not a belief system. Its simply states that one has belief in a god or gods. What they are can range from trees to Jehovah to Ganesh to spacemen.

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Alan

Alan, if you wouldn't mind not talking smack on this matter, then maybe there's a point of discussion. My mom is an atheist and flat out does not believe in God (or gods), period. That is her BELIEF, not a lack of belief in something else. Do not put words into her mouth or into the mouths of others who think the same way.

Alt, websters vs. philosophers

The point of contention here is whether "belief system" and "religion" are equivalent terms or not. All religions are belief systems, but not all belief systems are religions. I think "belief system" describes something much more general, concepts more on the track of theism and atheism, general topics that deal with the concept of morality rather than specific implementations of it. Alan (it seems) disagrees, which begs the question of what he calls things like theism and atheism.

First, I wasn't "talking smack". I was simply bringing up what atheism means. And, literally, it means "lack of belief in god/gods". Secondly, your mother does not believe in a god, no? Then she lacks belief in them, clearly. She falls under my statement.

"Weak Atheism", as strict observance to the definition of Atheism is called, is the default position. If there were no evidence in either direction for or against the existance of god/gods, it would be the only rational position to take. Your mother is a "strong" atheist; she has moved beyond merely claiming that there is no evidence for a god, but that there is evidence against one or ones existing. This evidence therefore supports her claim that no gods exist.

And, as you've inadvertently proven, my previous statement that atheism is not a system of beliefs is correct. People who are atheists disagree with your mother on this position. =)

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Alan

http://www.lava.net/~hcssc/atheism.html:

"Theism, which derives in part from the word theology, is defined as belief in the existence of a god or gods. Inclusion of the prefix "a" with any noun indicates without, not, or opposite. Thus the word atheist describes an individual who is without theism, theology, or religion."

http://atheismawareness.home.att.net/questions/what_atheist.htm:

"Atheism is often defined incorrectly as a belief system. Atheism is not a disbelief in gods; it is a lack of belief in gods. Older dictionaries define atheism as "a belief that there is no god". Newer and more accurate dictionaries define atheism correctly as "having no belief in god(s)". Atheism is not a belief system nor is it a religion. Atheism may be a part of an individuals religious beliefs, but the atheism, of and by itself, is not a belief or religion."

-now that we've gotten the definition of atheism out of the way...- Alan

-my kingdom for an "edit" function!"-
Alan

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Alan