RE: christian looking to understand athiests
August 21, 2015 at 3:27 am
(This post was last modified: August 21, 2015 at 4:11 am by Excited Penguin.)
I'm an atheist because I met another atheist as a teenager, who upon my arrogantly bugging her about her 'stupid' atheism was kind enough to invite me to a civil debate about it. I wrote to her and while making one of my arguments I noticed that the idea of god is not so much a matter of epistemology as it is a classic example of the elusiveness of language.
We evolved this ability(i.e. language) so we could better express concepts and ideas to ourselves and to each others-- the availability and feasibility of linguistic constructs is crucial to describing differing takes on reality. A lot of the things described though are not phenomena of the outer world so much as of the brain. Just so "God" is more often that not a description of an array of certain mental processes, picked and ordered in a personalized manner, that we prize enough to nurture at all costs-- just so we can reenact them at will.
God is real and you are not mad for believing in him. I also believe you when you say you are born again. But the problem with others is, you're not able to better relay what you mean by those things when talking to different types of people, therefore disillusioned skeptics, for example, will tend to think you talk rubbish and maybe jokingly imply you must run a fever[or something to that effect] whenever you start conveying what you mean to say in that limited way of yours.
We evolved this ability(i.e. language) so we could better express concepts and ideas to ourselves and to each others-- the availability and feasibility of linguistic constructs is crucial to describing differing takes on reality. A lot of the things described though are not phenomena of the outer world so much as of the brain. Just so "God" is more often that not a description of an array of certain mental processes, picked and ordered in a personalized manner, that we prize enough to nurture at all costs-- just so we can reenact them at will.
God is real and you are not mad for believing in him. I also believe you when you say you are born again. But the problem with others is, you're not able to better relay what you mean by those things when talking to different types of people, therefore disillusioned skeptics, for example, will tend to think you talk rubbish and maybe jokingly imply you must run a fever[or something to that effect] whenever you start conveying what you mean to say in that limited way of yours.
