Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
It would be an underwhelming performance. Teaching is fun because my audience is a captive bunch of suck ups.
I don't deny that in general, but do you really believe the solution is to propagate stereotypes of religion in your defence? As someone who is really interested in interfaith dialogue I don't see how such responses that attempt to "flatten" the issues are remotely productive.
You opened this point of discussion by introducing results from a Pew study which shows that the vast majority of Americans would be unhappy if a family member married an atheist. You trivialized the results by equating them to much less complex and benign social matters as political persuasion and gun ownership. Then you marshalled that data to suggest that the huge disparity is somehow indicative of a broad based "hatred" of atheism. Religion is an extremely sensitive issue that will certainly evoke strong feelings especially within family relationships, and I would argue that the results of the study you shared are primarily affected by that.
I had actually considered citing this verse in my last post! On the face of it it sure does appear to be a straightforward divine assertion about atheism. However, I tend to think that the writer—an Iron Age or Archaemenid Jerusalem priest who had likely never travelled more than 80 kms in any direction from his home—never even considered the possibility that gods did not exist. Why would he? Everything in his immediate experience and everyone he had ever met validated his primitive worldview. So, I rather tend to think that Ps 14:1 is not so much a criticism of "atheism" as we know it, but rather a criticism of those who ignored the abundantly obvious intervention of divine forces in the world.
|
As usual I think you short sell yourself TC. Everyone is a suck up at some level.
As to the propagation theory. Interfaith dialogue "to this point in time" does not appear to have shown any progression, at least as far as I can tell. Now you could suggest that it simply needs more time, perhaps education, to help push forward those changes; and my answer is, "it might be", but how much time? It has been a few millennia in the works and we still sit on a seesaw of whose God is better or whose God has all of the answers and those atheists don't have the right to try and answer for us. There is a significant part of the population, that is growing rapidly, that finds this discourse akin to traveling on a rudderless boat?