Peter

I cannot speak in the same theological language, only in simple terms - so bear with me.

Atheism is very much about the non-belief in a supernatural being. If one does not believe in the deity then the teachings that purport to come from that deity cannot be positively communicated.

Many atheists acknowledge the spirituality of human beings (some finding it via formal religion) as important.

Even an atheist knows we are more than a bag of bones and more than just a gene carrying factory. Our cognitive abilities and higher order thinking (incl. 'spirituality') is part of the advantage humans have for survival. It is in our collective interest to care for one another.

As far as human as person relations go, cannot the dignity of humans and other living things be part of nature. How often do we look at a sunset or a wilderness and be exilarated by its beauty and grandeur - it's dignity. It does not take a belief in God to admire natural beauty and to instil feelings of stewardship of the environment including the wellbeing of humans.

Stories such as The Road and Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm that look at the worst in human nature also reveal the best. The natural parting of the good people and the bad people in these works of fiction is just a literary reflection of the variations in human nature.

Human beings, according to religious folk, were created by God in his image.

There is no one homogenous global religion that could hope to bring about that human person relation, it has to come from within, religion can sometimes stifle that goodwill towards one's enemy.

Any moral framework would still be man-made. The religion is just the background story.

Peter, with respect, I suggest you stick to speaking for yourself, and let others speak for themselves. And beware of setting up straw men. I don't know what "atheism in its present form" or "the new atheism" might be. I think you're referring to some particular individuals. You should address them and their arguments specifically, without imagining THEY speak for all "atheists".

My attitude is that love and relationship are the core of my life. But I don't believe in your God, Christian or otherwise.

Furthermore, I see my attitude as arising out of nature. A relatively new view of nature is not that it is just "red in tooth and claw", but that cooperation is pervasive - along with competition. (There is always a tension between sharing and selfishness, it is a condition of life, from families to nations to baboon troupes.) Mammals live in social groups, we are mammals, we have our particular form of social group and social behaviours - and part of our particular form of social behaviours is that we are capable of deep bonds of love. It may be that humans are most distinctive not just because of our intelligence, but also because of our strong emotional attachments.

And please don't patronise me by saying if I believe in love and relationship then I really have a religion. If my valuing of love and relationship sounds like your interpretation of your God, that doesn't mean I ought to take on all the accreted custom, myth, imaginings and writings that comprise the major religions. Perhaps it means you can drop a lot of the superstructure and get more directly to the core wisdom.

The subtitle of this nonsense contained references to the power and competition, plus pleasure and death, being all that the atheist world view has to offer.

Perhaps so, but how does Sells explain this image from a thoroughly vile film which was at the time lauded as a great missionary tool for the christian "faith". Bucket loads of pain and suffering leading to a brutalized death

http://hollywoodjesus.com/movie/passion2/05.jpeg

This is supposedly an integral part of the christian message which christians are celebrating next weekend as "good news".

Remember too that it recently became public that the recent pope used to engage various "smacking of the flesh" exercises so as to strengthen his "faith", and resist the temptations of the "flesh".

There is just a matter of degree between such private masochistic practices and the horrific sado-masochistic pornography of Gibsons snuff/splatter film.

And yet steps are being taken to have this pleasureless pervert declared a "saint".

Only men and women of inherent pleasure are capable of knowing and being the Truth, and thus of being good company to all beings.

Plus my usual references re the truth about applied christian his-story 101

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel13.html

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/cruelty.html

This is becoming a somewhat familiar theme of yours, Mr Selleck.

>>This is basically why atheism in its present form is irrelevant to Christian faith because it can only think of God in terms of the analogy of “being”<<

(Let's ignore for a moment the idea that atheism, in any form, might ever have relevance to the Christian faith. Pure red herring.)

The problem of course is that throughout its history, thinking of God as a "being" is a recurring theme in your religion, as you yourself point out.

"The next step in this argument is to take the statement that man was created in the image of God seriously"

But to do so, you resort to a form of third line forcing...

"If God can only be understood by language that is based on an analogy of relation and if man was created in his image then our ontology is also based on that analogy. Since relationship can only exist between persons, that means that the proper ontology of man is that of the person."

This form of "if... then... then" argument relies entirely on the intrinsic strength of the "thens". On this occasion, it simply disappears into nothingness when you look carefully at the second "then", the ontology that is the "person".

Looking back at the path you took to reach the "person"...

"They concluded that the three Persons of the Trinity could only be understood in terms of the relations of persons... This was an ontology of being which did not rely on “being” understood in terms of the things of the world, their nature, but of existence in relation."

In relation to what, Mr Selleck?

In relation to non-existence?

I believe I understand what you are trying to do, which is to paper over the cracks that appear whenever religion - not just your own, or even your own version of Christianity - is examined too closely. But it is instructive that you are only able to do so in your own private language.

Using logical constructs that sag, rather alarmingly, in the middle.

What leapt off the page for me in this rambling mishmash was the comment on marital relations: "Do we regard our spouse as a means of sexual gratification, as an incubator for children, as unpaid labour or as prestige possession? Or do we regard them as “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh”?"

So in addition to the above pertinent reader comments I would like to add that when spoken by the chest-thumping male of the species, the phrasing that "his" woman is "bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh" sounds just about as warped as the idea that Eve was just a spare rib. In the face of this, a plain old contract between a man and woman to be helpmates to each other in practical terms is a good deal less threatening.

Historically, the Puritans in the US seem to have had nicely passionate marriages, but the overall track record of Christian marriage isn't so positive. There are numerous cultures around the world that have norms governing sexual relations and child-rearing that are superior to ours, and that without reference to the God of the Bible (old or new testaments).

'The new atheists would have us return to a time in which the only realities are power, competition, pleasure and death.'

That sounds fine by me. If the religious want more, they are free to enjoy those lofty tales so tried and true. Why does it have to be either/or, and why does atheists enjoying anything have to do with the religious?

Realities? Realities are subjective.

'The natural parting of the good people and the bad people in these works of fiction is just a literary reflection of the variations in human nature.

Human beings, according to religious folk, were created by God in his image. '

True pelican.

God would be nothing without the Devil. How would he distinguish himself? Everything in it's place. No good without bad or bad without good. It's the inescapable beauty of all things. And as I said, it's all personal and unique to each person's psyche. Heaven, Hell, God, Devil, they're all inside me and part of me and everyone else. Individually. And they all have different hairdos.

But if you're really needing of comfort y'all, The Shins is da word...

'Of course I was raised to gather courage from those
Lofty tales so tried and true and
If you're able I'd suggest it 'cause this
Modern thought can get the best of you.

This rather simple epitaph can save your hide your falling mind
Fate isn't what we're up against there's no design no flaws to find
There's no design your flaws are fine.

But I learned fast how to keep my head up 'cause I
Know I got this side of me that
Wants to grab the yoke from the pilot and just
Fly the whole mess into the sea.'

This is difficult to read and almost impossible to understand.
I think this is faith masquerading as thesis as it disappears up its own unattainable ambitions.

The atheist seem to be forming more non denominational faiths than the Christian church. There seems to be very little consensus. It is amusing to watch the increase in the numbers attending faith based schools as the atheist amoral philosophies produce the rotten fruit their doctrines are founded on. Facing the obvious is never something the atheist has been good at doing. Instead they use pseudo science to justify their godliness.

Peter Sellick

Here is my promise to you.

Provide me with some real hard evidence that the deity Christians profess to believe in actually exists and you can witness my baptism.

I can find no evidence that such a deity exists.

The whole thrust of your piece seems to be:

It would be dreadful if the Christian deity did not exist. Therefore the Christian deity MUST exist.

As an example of wishful thinking this is magnificent. Its probative value is zero.

PLEASE Peter Sellick, rescue this infidel from his unbelief. Provide some EVIDENCE.

Peter,
Let get this clear. An Atheist is simply somebody who does not hold a belief about a supernatural being. Nothing else. Atheism, if it is indeed a movement, does not have any agreed position on any other thing that you mention here. You may speculate as you wish on what the ramifications of this state of non-belief might be but they are only opinion and nothing more. The onus still remains on you to demonstrate to all of us that your extraordinary claims about your beliefs are logical, rational and can be shown to be fact using some clear and concise reproducible test that is not related to an ancient book.
So far you have been unable to do this.
In the meantime could you please stop assigning attitudes about various subjects to people you have never met.
Thank you for your musings though, they are extremely entertaining.

The difference between an Athiest & a Thiest is only one thing.

Athiest: Power, Competition, Pleasure, Death.
Theist: Power, Competition, Death.

Notice that Pleasure is missing. For we all know that "Pleasure" is a sin.

First of all my apologies, Peter Sellick, for misspelling your name in my previous post, that was impolite. It isn't as if we've only just met.

I am aware that you gave up talking to non-theologians a long time ago. And it's quite fun to see people still waiting for you to say "look here guys, here's proof!"

The real enjoyment of your offerings, though, is the ever-decreasing circles with which you are describing your faith.

This could simply be a case of over-intellectualizing, in which case you may have many more years of such earnest wordsmithing ahead of you.

But it may also be that you are actually well along the path of a journey towards... atheism.

Yeah, I know. But hear me out.

Over the years you have developed increasingly abstract notions that deny your God any form of "being", this article being typical.

It probably started as a means for you to rationalize the absurdity of an actual "father". But this will eventually, inexorably, lead to defining him as a series of neurotransmitters, migrating to a presynaptic membrane.

In this article, you have almost completely rationalized the Trinity into electrical impulses.

"Thus the name of God as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” is not the name of existent beings or subjects but of relations that have the attributes of the Pauline blessing: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” This is not a blessing that proclaims the presence to the believer of a supernatural being but the presence of the grace, love and fellowship of God."

I suspect that nineteenth-century missionaries would have had a really tough time selling this particular construct to the natives of Africa, what?

It's either a sophisticated form of bait-and-switch, where you sell the product on the promise of a "father-in-the-sky" type of being, then admit that hey, it's only a "presence".

Or it is another step on the travolator to reality.

Feel free to ignore this, by the way, if it upsets you.

Now who's being mischievous pericles.

Hats off.

Unmitigated nonsense

Cue Sellick, sniffing about how hard it is to have a good theological discussion at OLO.

What Houlebecq said. In spades.

Pericles is right.
If I were an organized person (which i am not) I would have collected all of Peter's missives and gathered them together as evidence of a developing and evolving theology. I will actually try this tonight.
Personally, I find Peter an absolutely fascinating person who is on a spiritual journey. It has been said by those wiser than I that a spiritual journey, properly conducted, will always result in atheism.

We have to admit, believer and skeptic alike, that our lives would be duller if it weren't for Peter.

Peter, How does one get an interview with you and when is your book coming out?

Sells,
having just read the introduction to Alan Sokal's new book, "Beyond the Hoax", I'm afraid your article appears to rather neatly fit the profile of interdisciplinarian dilettantism. I mean, can you please define these "new atheists" you speak of? And your dual ontologies put rather too fine a point on matters, don't they? Clearly you've been reading Hobbes's "leviathan" (or someone on Hobbes): "In the state of nature, every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body", for instance, and life in a state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (apart from that it's bliss!). Your ontologies are rather binary, aren't they? What I don't get is where Christianity fits into all this; do you meant to say that it offers an equitable social contract?
And I can't help but reiterate Pericles; your faith in God seems to be getting more and more attenuated, almost like homeopathy?
Speaking as a "humble atheist", all I profess is my ignorance; I reject theism on the grounds that is is patently self-serving nonsense, but I still have an ontology, and it's not scientism. Have I fallen through the cracks?
I should add that I shall be subjecting myself (and Sokal) too to sokal's intellectual rigour--such as it proves itself to be.
We have auto-ethnographies, why not auto-ontologies?

Christians/Muslims/Jews or anyone belonging to a religious group or sect do not have the exclusivity on morality and all it encompasses.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html
I think well worth a watch.

Sorry, Peter -- you've been rumbled. You might as well go the whole hog and start talking about the 'apophatic' nature of God:

"Apophatic theology--also known as Negative theology or Via Negativa (Latin for "Negative Way")-—is a theology that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God." -- Wikipedia

I like to think of it as the 'Sergeant Schultz' school of theology -- "I zee naathing!". But it really is beyond parody. Just read what you yourself wrote:

'In other words, talk of God does not rely on an analogy of “being”, of an analogy to things in the world but to an analogy of relationship.'

Clear as mud.

'It is obvious from Defoe’s novel that Robinson Crusoe is ontologically unstable.'

Ditto. Read over these in one of your more rational moments and ask yourself, with Macbeth: "Is this a nonsense that I see before me?"

Harris himself seems totally blind to his arrogant and sinful nature. He is deliberately or deceitful enough to ignore the fact that as corporal punishment has dropped off rape, violence, rebellion has increased dramatically while disregard for one's fellow human being has dropped dramatically. No doubt along with Dawkins his little sniggers of arrogance are certainly spiritually inspired.

...And the neo medievalists would have us return to a time when the unquestioned foremost geniuses of any time might be deprived of collegiate sinecure *just* for not being trinitarian. Despite being otherwise fully conditioned to the religion of the day.

Sells,

If you could leave out the three quarters devoted to "the trinity", you might have had a point. As it is, you undermine your own position by clinging to doctrine. "The trinity" is only important if "god" (a)exists *and* (b) is not deist.

Please rewrite the whole article.

Rusty

Runner, Thank you first of all for enlightening me as to the source of your scientific knowledge - fascinating.

Has it occurred to the religious people on OLO that all our animal attributes such as love, kindness, nurturing, and as Pelican has so cogently put it, our more human attributes, "our cognitive abilities and higher order thinking" might just be part of our process of evolution, without which man may not have survived. I doubt that a belief in a particular deity would have been a prerequisite for survival. One might wonder what attributes those civilizations who have disappeared have failed to possess. Indeed, we should be cautious that we too do not lose our desireable attributes and go the same way, whilst pursuing some quaint religious philosophy.

David

30 March 2010

Mr. Peter Sellick,

You say;-“our future looks bleak indeed”.

Our future is bleak indeed. Churches make it so.

To add to their list, here comes the church of the Atheists.

If only we were left alone. If Priests, sellers of packaged constructs called religions, left us alone, free to wonder about the essence and meaning of our existence, we would have a more peaceful life.

As is, Constituted religions, like multinational corporations, are plundering our existence for profit.

You obviously haven't been in the position of going hungry for a few days.
Let me tell you anyone who has is not a good guy or a bad guy - just hungry and will take strong action if anyone stops him from eating.
The jews fought tooth and nail not to enter the gas chambers because life is a potent force. The same applies to hungry people.
As for god- if he created everything then he is 100% responsible for us and we are without sin. which is nonsense because he doesn't exist.
Religions are private clubs, you don't have to be a member.