(Very often, amazingly, Christians point proudly to these two fellas. Obviously, Lewis and Chesterton aren't the very brightest of all the billions of Christians there have been. But maybe they're the best of the Christian equivalent of New Atheists: Christians who've made a career of defending their side. Well, enough of their supposed brilliance! Watch as I decimate their "arguments" with ease! [Plus one each by Aquinas and William Lane Craig while I'm here.])
“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning." -- CS Lewis "Rejecting the meaning you assign to the universe, CS, doesn't mean it has no meaning. To some degree our lives mean what we are able to make them mean. This means you're weren't listening to Jean-Paul Sartre, even if that sounds mean." -- The Wrong Monkey
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” -- CS Lewis "A young Christian who wishes to remain so -- Christian, that is. Young is more difficult -- does not need to be careful about how much Lewis or Chesterton he or she reads. One page of Nietzsche or Twain or Russell or Sartre or The Wrong Monkey or Schopenhauer or Marx or the Bible or Augustine or Aquinas or Kierkegaard or Carlin or Napoleon or any of thousands of other authors, on the other hand, could instantly and irrevocably mess that plan up. But only if this young Christian really wants to learn, which most of them don't, which is why they end up old and stupid and unbearable like you!" -- The Wrong Monkey
“To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” ― Thomas Aquinas "That must be why you spent so much time and effort writing those proofs of God's existence. Have I told you I'm a big fan, Thomas? Well I'm not, and anyone who's told you otherwise is a stinking liar! I find your writing unbearable at best! On the question of the existence of God, arguments for are easily ripped to shreds by an average atheist who is not yet full grown, and arguments against are generally ignored by the best of you, when they're not they're distorted into strawmen. Debating with Christians is a waste of an atheist's time, time much better spent warning others about people like you." -- The Wrong Monkey
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.” ― C.S. Lewis "See what I wrote above about meaning. Other than that -- wow, what can I say, except: You really can talk some mess! And maybe you should've checked out some other people's arguments against the existence of God, instead of just assuming that yours was state-of-the-art, and that when you thought you'd found a hole in it you were done." -- The Wrong Monkey
“"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.” ― William Lane Craig "You had a couple of deep thoughts and scared yourself, and instead of continuing to think, which often, perhaps more often than not brings some consolation with no sacrifice of intelligence, you retreated to the standard conservative-Christian fall-back position and dedicated your life to interfering with those of us who are trying to continue to think." -- The Wrong Monkey
“For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.” ― G.K. Chesterton "Speak for yourself, Fatso!" -- The Wrong Monkey
“The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if he realized this, he could not go on being indignant. The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still." ― C.S. Lewis "Atheists aren't mad at the cosmos, CS. We don't arraign heaven. In order to be able to do so we would first have to believe that heaven exists. We are impatient with morons like you, and we are angry that you still have power so grotesquely unproportionate to your intelligence and skills. As powerful as you Christians still are, and as fat as Chesterton was, very few non-Christians ever confuse or conflate you with the entire universe" -- The Wrong Monkey
“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” ― G.K. Chesterton "If there were no diseases, there would be no physicians. If there had been no Chesterton, there would have been much more cheese for everyone else. (He was very fat.)" -- The Wrong Monkey
“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.” ― G.K. Chesterton "You must have had some very powerful connections, the way you prattled on endlessly about it. Unless what you really meant, and I think it was, is that you wished you lived in a Medieval world where no-one was allowed to breathe an un-Christian word in your presence." -- The Wrong Monkey
“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.” ― G.K. Chesterton "I've never met anyone like that. This is the very first time I've ever even heard of someone like that, and I'm 52 years old and astonishingly well-read. It's clear why being a Christian interferes with someone's ability to be a good novelist much less than it interferes with other things: both activities require that one constantly make stuff up. Of course, Christianity also requires that one insist that the made-up stuff is true, while the novelist admits that it is fictional." -- The Wrong Monkey
Showing posts with label aquinas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aquinas. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Friday, September 13, 2013
Just In Case Some Of You Haven't Noticed Yet: Theologians Don't Play Fair
Here are just a few of a countless number of instances:
I think maybe every single one of my comments on Nathan Schneider's non-mind-blowing essay 10 Proofs That Will Change How You Think About God on Huffington Post Religion may have been removed, because of "violations of our guidelines," ie because some holy roller has achieved Community Moderator status. A time-honored Christian approach to inconvenient criticism is to pretend it never existed.
From Aristotle's prime mover to the "endgueltigem Beweis Gottes" Schneider says Hegel was working on at the time of his death -- perhaps it's very good for Hegel's rep that he died when he did -- Schneider's 10-point stroll through thousands of years of Western philosophy resembles a walk through a minefield which the perambulator survives, in that not one of the many bombs of skepticism in Western philosophy was set off by the merest hint of a mention. If one's only source of info about Western philosophy has been Huffington Post Religion -- and I fear that it is some people's only source, and that many have only seen Western philosophy through similarly-filtered lenses -- then one definitely could get the impression that philosophy and theology are synonymous to a great extent.
In any case, the assumption that they are in harmony seems to be very widespread among both theists and atheists. The former love to trot out their favorite quotes from Augustine and Aquinas, they often assume that Spinoza and Einstein were on their side. The atheists generally dispute the subject of Einstein's religious view much too much -- his religious views are unclear, that's about all there is to say about it -- and the case of Spinoza not nearly enough. If they have looked at all at the actual words of Spinoza, they immediately notice all the theological-looking phrases, up to and including the 2nd word in the title of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
and often they discard Spinoza long before they have begun to suspect that what looked at first glance like theology could have been camouflage for atheist arguments in the 17th century when plain spoken atheism was not allowed. (The same may also have been true for Descartes, whom Spinoza regarded as the greatest of his immediate predecessors in philosophy, although to assume atheism in Descartes' case is a bit more of a stretch. But even a century after Spinoza, even the plainly-atheist Hume never actually said in so many plain words that he doubted the existence of God.) Just as I myself discarded Spinoza after my first contact with him, and only returned because Nietzsche praises him so often and so highly.
But of course the theists (especially those tedious 21st-century pantheists) cite Spinoza as if he had been perfectly free to say plainly and literally whatever it was that he really thought about the idea of God.
Among other absurdities which theists present with maddening smug stupidity as fact, such as that Biblical literalism was invented in 19th-century America, that fundies have much more in common with atheists than with them, the religious moderates, the truly enlightened, and that the "conflict thesis" has been thoroughly refuted and discredited among historians (How many people who have not read much more theology than is good for anyone have ever even heard of the "conflict thesis"?) is this version of the Western philosophy absent its religious skepticism. Democritus, Lucretius, Seneca (Seneca was an idiot but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then), Boethius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Even worse than behaving as if all of these people had never existed, the theists, the theologians often go one disgusting shameless step further and cherry-pick them for quotations to take out of context and make these thinkers seem quite different than the critics of religion (/spirituality, po-TAY-to/po-TAH-to) which they were, just as they cherry-pick Augustine and Aquinas to make them look tolerant and urbane and not like the bloodthirsty Bible-thumpers they were. If you want to learn about the integrity and reliability of a philosopher or theologian, read an entire book by someone they've quoted, and compare the impression you've gotten from that entire book with the impression you got from the citation.
I think maybe every single one of my comments on Nathan Schneider's non-mind-blowing essay 10 Proofs That Will Change How You Think About God on Huffington Post Religion may have been removed, because of "violations of our guidelines," ie because some holy roller has achieved Community Moderator status. A time-honored Christian approach to inconvenient criticism is to pretend it never existed.
From Aristotle's prime mover to the "endgueltigem Beweis Gottes" Schneider says Hegel was working on at the time of his death -- perhaps it's very good for Hegel's rep that he died when he did -- Schneider's 10-point stroll through thousands of years of Western philosophy resembles a walk through a minefield which the perambulator survives, in that not one of the many bombs of skepticism in Western philosophy was set off by the merest hint of a mention. If one's only source of info about Western philosophy has been Huffington Post Religion -- and I fear that it is some people's only source, and that many have only seen Western philosophy through similarly-filtered lenses -- then one definitely could get the impression that philosophy and theology are synonymous to a great extent.
In any case, the assumption that they are in harmony seems to be very widespread among both theists and atheists. The former love to trot out their favorite quotes from Augustine and Aquinas, they often assume that Spinoza and Einstein were on their side. The atheists generally dispute the subject of Einstein's religious view much too much -- his religious views are unclear, that's about all there is to say about it -- and the case of Spinoza not nearly enough. If they have looked at all at the actual words of Spinoza, they immediately notice all the theological-looking phrases, up to and including the 2nd word in the title of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
and often they discard Spinoza long before they have begun to suspect that what looked at first glance like theology could have been camouflage for atheist arguments in the 17th century when plain spoken atheism was not allowed. (The same may also have been true for Descartes, whom Spinoza regarded as the greatest of his immediate predecessors in philosophy, although to assume atheism in Descartes' case is a bit more of a stretch. But even a century after Spinoza, even the plainly-atheist Hume never actually said in so many plain words that he doubted the existence of God.) Just as I myself discarded Spinoza after my first contact with him, and only returned because Nietzsche praises him so often and so highly.
But of course the theists (especially those tedious 21st-century pantheists) cite Spinoza as if he had been perfectly free to say plainly and literally whatever it was that he really thought about the idea of God.
Among other absurdities which theists present with maddening smug stupidity as fact, such as that Biblical literalism was invented in 19th-century America, that fundies have much more in common with atheists than with them, the religious moderates, the truly enlightened, and that the "conflict thesis" has been thoroughly refuted and discredited among historians (How many people who have not read much more theology than is good for anyone have ever even heard of the "conflict thesis"?) is this version of the Western philosophy absent its religious skepticism. Democritus, Lucretius, Seneca (Seneca was an idiot but even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then), Boethius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Even worse than behaving as if all of these people had never existed, the theists, the theologians often go one disgusting shameless step further and cherry-pick them for quotations to take out of context and make these thinkers seem quite different than the critics of religion (/spirituality, po-TAY-to/po-TAH-to) which they were, just as they cherry-pick Augustine and Aquinas to make them look tolerant and urbane and not like the bloodthirsty Bible-thumpers they were. If you want to learn about the integrity and reliability of a philosopher or theologian, read an entire book by someone they've quoted, and compare the impression you've gotten from that entire book with the impression you got from the citation.
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