E,
". . .vast historical literature. . .I mean from the agnostic tendency in Greek thought . . to our own times. Hundreds of thousands of books and documents."
In the post to which your's responded, I was specifically referring to the canon of atheist literature. Agnosticism (philosophy's nolo contendre) doesn't count because agnostics leave the the door ajar, while atheists have it firmly shut. My contention was, and is, that the bulk of atheist thought is contained in the declaration "I don't believe in god." The atheist mantra which responds to challenges of this credo is "You can't prove a negative (that God doesn't exist.)" It appears atheists are then left only to theocriticism, and criticism of another school does not constitute an original school of thought--at least in my mind.
This morning I did a multi-engine search on "atheism"--there were many many hits, and a cursory reading of them produced only one theme: the foolishness of religion. Pure atheism is born in the negation of an affirmation. My problem with it intellectually, is this is also where it dies. Because there is no philisophical creativity in it, it cannot grow beyond a black seed.
"It is hardly necessary to snorkel though the thousands of reiterations of the notion that there is a God. . ."
Yet all of your criticism is based on Christian dogma, and there are as many deistic conceptions as there are varieties of music. It is as though you have heard only Muzak and taken a stance against music, or eaten only at McDonalds and are against food, or were in an abusive relationship at an early age and then swore off men for the rest of your life. Taoism, for example, takes a decidedly anti-anthropomorphic approach to diesm -- one which finds evidence of a creator in natural observation, yet I wonder if you have allowed yourself to even consider it. Other schools of thought offer even more conceptions.
I believe one should know what one one disagrees with, else one's position is tenuously founded. Knowledge of deism consists of more than visceral reactions to the observed behavior of some Christians. In fact, I would be willing to drop "Christianity" from this discussion altogether and focus only on the existence of a Creator. Else you may say (in ironically Christian fashion) "You can tell a tree by its fruit", and Christianity (the atheist whipping boy for religion) has produced wars, intellectual oppression . . ." and I'll respond with counter examples of peace, intellectual encouragement (the first printing press produced a bible) artistic inspiration (imagine the course the arts would have taken were they atheistically rather than (primarily) religiously inspired up until the 20th century.) and in the end we'll have ended up discussing the religion of Christianity rather than theism.
To expand a little more . . . art without a God concept? That's a scary scary notion! Imagine the Egyptians without their pyramids, the Japanese without their pagodas, Europe without her glorious cathedrals. Imagine music without the religiously inspired and funded works of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert . . .sculpture without Michelangelo's David, painting without the inspirational, technical groundwork laid by painters of deistic subject matter . . . it is scary to conceive of the dark path art probably would have taken had not the early masters had inspiration as their primary theme.
I know I will never change your or any atheist's mind, but I try nonetheless because I feel its fundamentally negative nature is unhealthy to the psyche. The human mind loves "yes". The world loves "yes": love, smiles, babies, flowers . . .beauty.
Rick |
