Calanen wrote on May 30
th, 2009 at 8:08pm:
Quote:The thing atheists and Muslims share is a rationalism (as opposed to reasonableness) that is totally oblivious to its own limitations.
There is nothing comparable between atheism and muslims. Atheists just do not believe in God. Muslims are nut jobs who believe their god says they have to headbutt the carpet five days a day, blow people up and take over the world.
Why should anyone believe in God? Is it a safety in numbers thing? I don't care what you believe as long as your wacky beliefs about imaginary deities stay out of the classrooms, courts and government.
Two 'religions' concern me -Islam and Scientology. Luckily there are not many scientologists for it to be a problem. Islam is a big problem as a political religion, which is really a large supremacist political party organised under religious lines and enforced with extreme violence.
So what if Tolkein convinced CS Lewis or vice versa to be religious. I'm not religious, and I don't care if you are. If you want to debate the facts and evidence supporting a supreme being, its not a debate you can ever win. If you just want to believe in something without any facts or evidence to support it - go for your life. Could care less.
The debate is not with me. You don't have to beleve anything. Religion is not a numbers thing.
Reason has recognisded its limits since the late 18th century. 'God' is the ideas one has when the mind, the self, the conscious being, extends beyond those limits. Nothing positive (posited) can be said about god. That does not mean that there is nothing beyond the recognised boundaries of reasoning that the living, conscious self cannot go to.
On a practical level, the hopes, hates, fears and loves of all who went before us cannot be dismissed as delusions, lest our own hopes and hates and the rest are also dismissed. Life is an uncertain and therefore anxious business. We recognise that anxiety in one another. God is in the shock of recognition in a poem or a wordless piece of music. God is where it all falls away and you are, for a moment, stunned by the fact that you exist - and that you are, in that moment, comprehending your very own stunned being.
Is that then a bearded old fellow? Of course not. Does that moment signal to you a singular binding to all the living and all who ever lived? Of course. Is that God?
Well, I can't say it isn't. But who can?
You can be agnostic about all this. To be an atheist is to assert a certitude you have no power to assert. Only a fool would declare the limits of his wits to be the limits of the world.
As to muslms and atheists, they share a stubborn equation of the limits of their wits with the limts of the world. That is what I mean by their unreasonable ratonalism.
Be a secularist, be an agnostic and I will say you are reasonable. Be an atheist and I will say that you have let the cart run away with you, you have succumbed to boastfulness.i