Quote of the Day (plus an argument against said quote, because Richard Dawkins is an ASS)

[edenfalling]

We 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*

Comments

[edenfalling]

And what is wrong with finding holiness in a lump of coal? I think if anything can be holy, everything can be holy -- everything is, after all, connected -- and a lump of coal is no less part of the universe than a cockroach, a supernova, or a human.

Also, please note the extreme Western Christian-centric POV of that quote: God is 'him,' God is singular, God is, above all, specific. Those are assumptions that not everyone shares! And if you are defining religion on the basis of those assumptions, you are naturally going to annoy and offend people whose beliefs, practices, ideas, values, etcetera, you are lumping in with that modern Western Christian-centric outlook.

[vehrec.livejournal.com]

But if everything is holy then functionally nothing is. Existence seems a pretty poor criterion for wonder and awe, let alone worship. And if it's the only criterion for holiness, then why worship anything? If everything is holy, that's functionally almost the same as saying that holiness does not exist. When you make a decision in such a system, the holiness seems to cancel out and you're left with the non-holy components to base your judgments upon.

And a non specific god is less ridiculous? "What is god?" 'I dunno, I worship a non specific deity that cannot be specifically described or defined.' Certainly, it doesn't fit every definition of everything that has ever been worshiped, but that doesn't make it an invalid argument for why we shouldn't be careful with our definitions.