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MeisterEckhart
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Frank wrote on Oct 4 th, 2023 at 4:47pm: MeisterEckhart wrote on Oct 4 th, 2023 at 4:32pm: Frank wrote on Oct 4 th, 2023 at 4:24pm: MeisterEckhart wrote on Oct 4 th, 2023 at 4:10pm: 31 pages of it, with everyone talking at cross-purposes.
Define what you mean by 'god' instead of assuming each poster is referring to the same phenomenon.
Unnecessary. It is the meaning of Greek root word theos in the word atheism. Define 'absence of theos' without reference to theos. We are not discussing the nature of theism. Everyone know there are as many gods as there are cultures that imagine them. Are there as many atheisms? No. By your own terms, we must be discussing the nature of theism, if atheism, in the same terms, is its antithesis. No one here is speaking of 'theos' or 'atheos' in terms the ancient Greeks would understand. Socrates was executed partly because he spoke against the gods, even if his last words were 'Crito, we owe a cock to Asklepios - Pay it and do not neglect it'. Atheists use the word atheist to describe themselves. They must know what they mean. My point is that atheism, as the word suggests, is a reaction to and a negation of something, the denial of something. Without that something, atheism cannot conceive and define itself. It needs theism, however THAT is conceived, to remove it from its own conception of the world, to absent it. Dialectically it is a negation, the elenchus, a refutation, not an proposition. The Socrates that Plato imagined did speak against the gods - as his Athenian contemporaries understood theism, but by putting those final words into Socrates' mouth, Plato paid deference to theism as a cultural phenomenon even if his dialogues spoke to reality being above and beyond the Greek 'gods'. In other words, 'theism' is multi-definitional as is, by that, 'atheism'. There are exactly as many atheisms as there are theisms so, define your terms.
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Does Atheism really exist? (Read 36131 times)
