![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingWe are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
---Richard Dawkins
I resent some man who doesn't know me from Adam coming down from on high and telling me what my religious beliefs are, as if he knows them better than I do!
I am not atheistic about any god. I am agnostic about all of them. In fact, I have been known to swear thusly: "By all the gods that anyone ever held holy..." which tells you something about my attitude toward all views of the divine.
This is not to say that I believe in such gods in the way Dawkins means (and may I say he has a horrifically reductive view of religion? he's as bad as fundamentalists, just in the other direction!), but I am open to the possibility that they might exist -- it is, after all, impossible to prove a negative -- and I do believe that they were real to their adherents, in the same way that I believe all currently worshipped deities are real to their adherents.
(We can debate subjective vs. objective reality some other day.)
Anyway, I do try to respect everyone's religion or lack thereof, but holy fuck, sometimes people get my back up!
*spits in Dawkins's general direction*
---Richard Dawkins
I resent some man who doesn't know me from Adam coming down from on high and telling me what my religious beliefs are, as if he knows them better than I do!
I am not atheistic about any god. I am agnostic about all of them. In fact, I have been known to swear thusly: "By all the gods that anyone ever held holy..." which tells you something about my attitude toward all views of the divine.
This is not to say that I believe in such gods in the way Dawkins means (and may I say he has a horrifically reductive view of religion? he's as bad as fundamentalists, just in the other direction!), but I am open to the possibility that they might exist -- it is, after all, impossible to prove a negative -- and I do believe that they were real to their adherents, in the same way that I believe all currently worshipped deities are real to their adherents.
(We can debate subjective vs. objective reality some other day.)
Anyway, I do try to respect everyone's religion or lack thereof, but holy fuck, sometimes people get my back up!
*spits in Dawkins's general direction*
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-29 02:27 pm (UTC)Yeah, this. For me, too. :)
Although, I would add that you seem to be saying in this comment sequence that spiritual = religious, which I don't consider the case. I would say that religion is an organized form of spirituality, and that it's possible to be spiritual/have spiritual feelings without being religious.
But that's a whole 'nother discussion . . . ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-30 02:06 am (UTC)Whereas I would say that spirituality is a catch-all term for various disorganized or non-standardly organized expressions of religion. *grin* Same idea, but I can see how the choice of terminology could get very confusing.