George,

“Thanks for the clear position as to who should proselytize. I would have guessed it having followed your recent debate with David (of AFoA).”

The generally accepted definition of proselytise is along the lines of that in Word Web: - Convert to another faith or religion –

The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary deems a proselyte as a person converted from an opinion, creed or party.

Its interesting how this word comes up in discussions about no religion or atheism. It’s totally irrelevant of course. But some do use it in the pejorative as debating ploy to win over the audience. It does seem to influence those not quite up to standard with the English language and have a less than adequate understanding of atheism.

Even stretching a definition into a form not meant using the Oxford version, what is the ‘opinion’ of an atheist? It can only be that waiting for evidence for a god is an opinion. That’s ridiculous of course.

Atheism is not a ‘creed’, so that one doesn’t work either. What about atheism being a ‘party’. Nope, that’s no good either.

So the lesson is that those who use this word in relation to atheism are probably having trouble formulating their own case to be coherent and so they go down the path of attempting to denigrate the opposition using obfuscation.

And don’t think for a moment that it is only religious people who do this. Heavens no, atheists are well capable of such shenanigans also.

David

It isn't that I don't "like" it, George.

>>OK, so you do not like the adjective “atheist” to refer to personal beliefs (though I do not see how a belief could be impersonal), systematized or not, held by an atheist<<

It is because it doesn't.

Atheism is not a belief, it is a non-belief. It is a non-belief in deities. So while a belief system such as Christianity requires that it informs your thinking and your actions, such a situation cannot arise with atheism. That is the major difference between the religious and the atheist - a religious person is defined by their religion, but an atheist is not - cannot be - defined by their atheism.

This is not "nit-picking about proper terminology". It is fundamental to the understanding of the difference between theism and atheism.

>>And Russell should have called his book not “What I believe” but “What is my personal philosophy”<<

This demonstrates quite precisely the difference in our views. Of course Russell should call his book “What I believe” - I actually have a copy with me as I write - because that is precisely what he writes about: his beliefs. His chapter headings are informative: "Nature and Man", "The Good Life", "Moral Rules", "Salvation" and "Science and Happiness". In these chapters, he discusses his beliefs.

His atheism is the result of those beliefs, not the cause of it.

This is an absolutely fundamental difference.

George,

There was nothing ambiguous about any of my post and yet most of your reply was in response to something entirely different to anything I had said. Are you alright?

<<I cannot understand your point. david f made two statements that I could agree with, so i concatenated them into one quote to tell him that.>>

No, if you look again, you'll actually find you separated them into two quotes, which is fine (that’s not even what I complained about), but they were dealt with back-to-front (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=5580#153499), which in turn took the wind out of what I think was david f's point. I doubt he was just randomly being agreeable and pointlessly repeating what he has already told you many times before - as your broken response implied. There was a point there, and one that you could skirt around by quoting the two paragraphs back-to-front, thus ignoring the operative word "however".

I’m suspicious of this because it is usually instinctive, logical and easier to quote statements in their correct order. To go out of your way to quote, and respond to, the two paragraphs in the wrong order actually requires forethought and effort.

<<I did not see a need to analyze why he could have made those statements...>>

I didn’t say anything about his motives and nor did I suggest that you analysing anything. I was talking about his point - that he too, as an atheist, can appreciate the wisdom in holy books (which in turn weakens the significance of the Bible to Christianity if that is the only way in which you are going to speak of it, or the only regard in which you hold it in re Christianity.

Regarding what you've said about "proper" interpretations, would I be right in presuming, then, that you weren't necessarily saying that there was any one objectively right and wrong way of interpreting scripture?

As for the interpretations of the binding of Isaac, I didn't find anything new at the Wiki page you linked to.

Continued…

…Continued

There was a bit of the usual scratching around trying to reconcile such an abhorrent and immoral request from a supposedly omnibenevolent god, but broadly speaking, it was the same as my own and I don't see why they would only be comprehensible to those within Judaism and Christianity.

Your reluctance to go into any interpretations, based on the non-believer’s ability to understand the story, hinted at some deep mystical message that you were deliberately holding back from us and I can only guess as to where that reluctance would come from or why you might want to hint at some mysterious meaning. Perhaps you are uncomfortable with the irreconcilability of the story with an omnibenevolent God? I would be too.

<<I have nothing to add to that since, as mentioned a couple of times, I am not an expert on these matters.>>

You shouldn’t need to be. What kind of a god communicates the most important message for mankind through a book that requires experts to interpret?

Either way, when it comes to what message the original authors of those passages were wanting to convey, or what story they wanted to tell, then expertise in the various languages and culture of the time would help (heck, it is only because of these experts that we now know the "virgin" Mary was actually just the "young" Mary). However, no expertise is required to interpret what God’s point was in that story, or what he was thinking at the time, as the supernatural is entirely speculative - there is no such thing as an expert in it.

<<Metaphors, like jokes, are not something you explain: you either get them or you don’t get them and you kill them if you try to explain them.>>

I wasn’t asking you to explain how they were metaphors; the very fact that I took one of your metaphors and ran with it (in order to ask you what it is that others like david f and I are not understanding) suggested that I most certainly understood the point they were trying to get across.

David David (of AFoA),

It was not I who suggested atheists should “proselytize”, it was Susan Jacoby, the atheist author of the article I linked to in my original entry here. So you should address your explanations to her. I was only asking that IF THEY DO proselytize - whatever she understood by that word - whether theists should be allowed to do the same.

Pericles,

>>Atheism is not a belief<<
I never said it was. The same about some other statements you seem to attribute to me.

I can only promise to you that I’ll be more careful when assigning the adjective “atheist” (not to a belief - I never did that - but) to THE SET of beliefs of somebody who calls himself an atheist like e.g. Russell. I really do not know what else you want from me.

[I certainly would not object if you called Christian my set of beliefs that underlie my world-view. This set overlaps with Russell’s, but is obviously not identical with it, among other things also because it contains a subset referred to as the tenets (or beliefs) of Christianity.]

I also acknowledge that after all Russell was OK when he called his book what he called it.

AJ Philips,

Had I reacted inappropriately to david f’s post, he would have told me, and I’d probably have apologized TO HIM.

>> would I be right in presuming, then, that you weren't necessarily saying that there was any one objectively right and wrong way of interpreting scripture? <<

I really don’t know what it means an “objectively right and wrong way of interpreting” a text. As I said, I am not a specialist in philosophical hermeneutics.: I tried to read Gadamer’s “Truth and Method”, perhaps the “bible” on hermeneutics, but could not understand much of it. Biblical hermeneutics, exegesis is, I suspect, not much simpler.

Anyhow, there are a number of ways to interpret ancient texts, and as far as the Bible is concerned, you choose yours, I choose mine (self-made or accepted ready-made by those whose expertise I trust).

You seem to know what I think or what motivates me to think the way I think and compose my world-view. I don’t pretend to know your motivations, only respect them. I certainly do not wish to convert you. If there are reasons for your "conversion" - one direction or the other - you have to find them for yourself. This, I remember, we have been through here already some time ago.

The following is not a metaphor but an Oriental wisdom (Chuang Tzu, translation by Thomas Merton):

If you persist in trying
To attain what is never attained
(It is Tao’s gift!)
If you persist in making effort
To obtain what effort cannot get;
If you persist in reasoning
About what cannot be understood,
You will be destroyed
By the very thing you seek.

To know when to stop
To know when you can get no further
By your own action
This is the right beginning.