There's simply no difference between, say, Wendell Berry and Pat Robertson, C.S. Lewis and Jerry Falwell, Dostoevsky and Fred Phelps.
Is this sarcasm? Maybe it's too late for me... Robertson, Falwell, and Phelps will be rightfully lost in the tides of history but C.S. Lewis and Dostoevsky had important things to say and conveyed them quite well. (I don't know Berry.)
It's just flat strange and saddening to me, to know that there are those who truly think that the Santa Clause analogy would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien. That the existence of reflective intellectual Christians like Annie Dilliard, Flannery O' Connor or Walker Percy so long after Darwin is merely an anomaly to be ignored.
I am a non believer, not quite interested enough to be an "atheist", but I never paid much attention to the arguments atheists made. They seemed contrived and unnecessary. When I attended college and started meeting people from many different backgrounds, I couldn't help noticing that there are hundreds of different faiths. Which one any given person belongs to depends more on their friends, family, and geographic location than anything else. This is pretty arbitrary for something ostensibly so important and serious. So it seemed to follow that all religions must have been made up over the years.
As the years have worn on since college I've discovered that the reason I fell out of faith so easily probably had to do with how my mind worked. Like Dawkins in this respect, I had a hard time taking theology seriously. I just though it was an offshoot of history and literature but it seems people believe there is actually some philosophical credibility to it. I can actually read texts from the history of modern religion/science (like Aquinas and Lucretius) and find them interesting but modern theology I cannot digest for some reason. So it is particularly difficult for me to engage with serious theists.
That being said, I also don't read atheist texts. Seems like a waste of time. And I don't need an encyclopedia of arguments for something that seems plainly true to me.
Sorry, I wasn't saying "there's no difference", I was lamenting that there are those who think "there's no difference."
I don't disagree with pretty much anything you've said. There's a huge geographic and societal component to religion, and that seems...undemocratic? I guess it would seem more 'fair' that every individual would arrive at their worldview purely from a 'rational' standpoint devoid of influence.
But of course it doesn't work that way for any worldview religious or otherwise. It never could work that way. Even those of us who fancy we have an 'examined life' and are attempting to be intellectually honest come at these questions with an existing interpretive framework inherited from family and society. And I don't think this is any less true of atheism or agnosticism than religion.
Nevertheless we try, right? Try to be objective, try to engage questions with honesty and courage and be as reflective as we can. Both negative and positive experiences with religion influence this. What's strange is I've met a number of Chinese over the last few years who grew up under communist, atheist rule and are now disenchanted with it, and deeply curious about religion and Christianity in particular.
What does it mean? Not sure. What to do? Not sure there either. I seem to have faith, you don't. I don't know what that means. I see the world a certain way, I can't help it. I like exploring and articulating that worldview, I want to have as much integrity within it as I can, I know that there are certain points of view that I disagree with, but ultimately, to quote David Byrne -- how did I get here? That remains mysterious and pretty humbling to me.
He was trying to say, leading from the preceding sentence:
"[For dogmatic people] there's no distinction between [acclaimed artist/thinker] and [Bible-thumper/wanker]. [but there is for me]"
You might have the causation exactly backwards for friends. I've heard of cases where the causation is backwards for geography too (Mormons move to Utah, evangelicals move to Colorado, Muslims move to Dearborn).
In general, sure, faiths are correlated with original geography and race and class and what have you. That isn't, however, a well-formed argument against their ultimate truth or untruth. It might be a well-formed argument about how they spread.
Is this sarcasm? Maybe it's too late for me... Robertson, Falwell, and Phelps will be rightfully lost in the tides of history but C.S. Lewis and Dostoevsky had important things to say and conveyed them quite well. (I don't know Berry.)
It's just flat strange and saddening to me, to know that there are those who truly think that the Santa Clause analogy would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien. That the existence of reflective intellectual Christians like Annie Dilliard, Flannery O' Connor or Walker Percy so long after Darwin is merely an anomaly to be ignored.
I am a non believer, not quite interested enough to be an "atheist", but I never paid much attention to the arguments atheists made. They seemed contrived and unnecessary. When I attended college and started meeting people from many different backgrounds, I couldn't help noticing that there are hundreds of different faiths. Which one any given person belongs to depends more on their friends, family, and geographic location than anything else. This is pretty arbitrary for something ostensibly so important and serious. So it seemed to follow that all religions must have been made up over the years.
As the years have worn on since college I've discovered that the reason I fell out of faith so easily probably had to do with how my mind worked. Like Dawkins in this respect, I had a hard time taking theology seriously. I just though it was an offshoot of history and literature but it seems people believe there is actually some philosophical credibility to it. I can actually read texts from the history of modern religion/science (like Aquinas and Lucretius) and find them interesting but modern theology I cannot digest for some reason. So it is particularly difficult for me to engage with serious theists.
That being said, I also don't read atheist texts. Seems like a waste of time. And I don't need an encyclopedia of arguments for something that seems plainly true to me.