``I think it would be interesting for non-believing list-members to share their stories of how they came to outright reject, or, as is the case with me, simply (without sturm und drang and snarky, anti-belief super irony) find no place for, religious belief...'' .d.
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Saturday morning. Putting off cleaning the apartment. Last night I wrote something on the opposite side because I had read Estabrook's annoyed response to Dawkins. I sort of agree. Dawkins doesn't understand what he is talking about.
``Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it's just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it...'' (CGE). In other words they are both completely clueless.
The real problem here is that if you have wondered through art history, anthropology, philosophy, math, some of the hard sciences to some mediocre depth---in other words have sought out to grasp as much of human creativity and knowledge about the world as you can follow---from such a perspective, the stories about Jesus just don't cut it. These are children's stories, nice for children. But we are not children. We demand the universe and nothing less. It is hardly surprising that Jewish scribes exiled from their ruined temple working on their scrolls in caves in ancient Palestine could not possibly imagine our needs or satisfy our demands.
That really isn't the issue is it? From the point of view of knowledge and understanding, rather, it's the other way around. In other words, I take it to be, it's my interest in knowledge and understanding that pursues them---the writers of ancient texts.
So on one level E.G. Estabrook is right. If you really want to address this issue with some sincerity, you have to have done your homework. I am pretty certain that neither Dawkins nor Pat Roberts has.
One of my favorite books on this subject is Andre Malraux's, The Metamorphosis of the Gods. He reaches back into time through art to unearth the gods. In effect he creates a meditation on our relationship to the cosmos and our own evolving sensibilities through our images of our gods. This is very poetic stuff. And why not?
In the current political climate our ideas of god are so limited by the absurdity of Christianity, that we fail to see that the gods once encompassed all that was unintelligible about the human mind and its existance, as it gazed at an even less comprehensible world or more importantly, at eternity.
Here is a quote:
``Nowhere, perhaps, is manifested more clearly the power that certain figures have of impregnating space with the divine than at Gizeh, where some of the oldest figures in the world challenge the immensity of the desert. We have only to look at them in the wrong direction for them to become incomprehensible; for the Sphinx to seem no more than an enormous knife-rest. Photography fails to bring out the accent of these figures, since it is almost impossible to photograph them at the hour when they reveal their full significance. But when, coming from the village, not from the road, we see the evening shadows lengthening behind them, while in the foreground the jagged outlines of the Private Temple stands up, already pitch-black, out of the surrounding chaos, the walls built by man grow indistinguishable from the ageless blocks of stone, across a dust-haze tinged by the fires of sunset. We can no longer see the hung paws of the Sphinx. Hung in air above the chasms of the Thebaid, the head looms up, without a body, its neck replaced by the rocky mass below; itself a rock on which some man of the earliest civilization, sublimely arrogant, has imposed his image. The features have been mutilated, almost to shapelessness, by the ravages of time, and this give them the accent of `devil's chimneys' and sacred mountains; like the wings on barbarian helmets, the great flaps of the headdress enclose the huge, worn face, blurred still more by the approach of night. Towering on high, the ruined head acquires the aspect of an hieroglyph, a trapezoidal sign hung in the still translucent sky. Mantling in darkness the great pyramid, twilight makes it seem like a projection of the somber face, and into its triangular shadow the last rays weaving back and forth dissolve a still larger Sphinx. In the distance the second pyramid closes the perspective vista and makes the colossal death-mask seem like the guardian of a dike set up against the tides of the desert and the encroaching dusk....'' (TMOTG, 6p)
Even so, I am an athetist of many orders of magnitude beyond anything that Dawkins could probably understand. In fact I would say, that my remotness from the gods is a religious experience all its own. One of the more interesting thoughts to me in this realm, is the idea that an entire cosmos without gods of any sort, turns out to be one of the more profound mysteries of human conception, and further, that alone recommends it. Or more simply, if you can convinvce yourself that there is only the world and its processes, and nothing more, all the world turns out to be a far more mysterious and interesting place, than if you postulated a divinity, not matter how elaborately conceived and magnificently arrayed.
I think in effect that is the primordial religious experience itself, but it is only accessible to me if I abolish all the gods in advance. It is much more mysterious that all human existance should arise from some half understood process of life, itself an engima, and then simply disappear one day---more mysterious than any other alternative.
The problem with the thought that the gods are a delusion, obscures understanding far more thoroughly than it illuminates it. In fact both ideas, god and the delusion are reciprocal to each other and leave most of human culture, the arts, and human experience completely inexplicable and alien.
If I can push the idea that there is the world and nothing else far enough, I realize that for all of their accomplishments, most of the sciences still remain tethered to some form of metaphysics, perhaps most subtly within their mathematical conceptions, without realizing it.
CG