RE: Why I am a Gnostic Atheist
May 14, 2013 at 6:51 pm
(This post was last modified: May 14, 2013 at 6:58 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Well, not quite, since you've reached agnosticism as the intellectually honest position and I'm comfortable claiming knowledge.
For example, if someone says
Christian god - I say bullshit/You say bullshit (if I understand correctly)
Deist god - I say bullshit/You say I don't know
Nebulous god - I say bullshit/you ask for a definition.
I suppose what I was trying to get at, is how would defining Dracula, for example, lend any more credibility to the idea of vampires than before you defined him? I just don't see the point in asking for definitions - as whatever the person just told you about their god - however small that may be, is a workable definition. To be honest, I think that if someone was going to come up with some novel idea of a god that hadn't been foisted before-something so difficult to decipher that you required them to explain themselves before a conversation could be had....we would have seen it by now. It's a pretty thoroughly mined IP. The very moment someone invokes a god - you've got a pretty damned good idea of what they're talking about. You might quibble over the color of it's hair or what cut of jeans it wears...but since I don;t think that the color of it;s hair or its preferred crotchline is what makes a god such trash then these things hardly matter-to me.
That small conscession, that if they could define their deity - or that they may even be able to define a god, is the supply that's required for fundies and apologists to even operate, for example. Notice how pissy they get when you insist on step 1? A concession that the notion is even credible enough to warrant wonder or respect (the type of thing that is extended when we imagine that we can't know about gods - but we can know about elves)-this is a requirement before one can even tease a word out, and any observation to the contrary is a deal breaker for them. I don't care how they decide to describe their god, so long as within that description it's a god-that's what I want to see, not some definition hobbled up on the spot. That's not something that's going to invest the notion with any added gravitas for me.
For example, if someone says
Christian god - I say bullshit/You say bullshit (if I understand correctly)
Deist god - I say bullshit/You say I don't know
Nebulous god - I say bullshit/you ask for a definition.
I suppose what I was trying to get at, is how would defining Dracula, for example, lend any more credibility to the idea of vampires than before you defined him? I just don't see the point in asking for definitions - as whatever the person just told you about their god - however small that may be, is a workable definition. To be honest, I think that if someone was going to come up with some novel idea of a god that hadn't been foisted before-something so difficult to decipher that you required them to explain themselves before a conversation could be had....we would have seen it by now. It's a pretty thoroughly mined IP. The very moment someone invokes a god - you've got a pretty damned good idea of what they're talking about. You might quibble over the color of it's hair or what cut of jeans it wears...but since I don;t think that the color of it;s hair or its preferred crotchline is what makes a god such trash then these things hardly matter-to me.
That small conscession, that if they could define their deity - or that they may even be able to define a god, is the supply that's required for fundies and apologists to even operate, for example. Notice how pissy they get when you insist on step 1? A concession that the notion is even credible enough to warrant wonder or respect (the type of thing that is extended when we imagine that we can't know about gods - but we can know about elves)-this is a requirement before one can even tease a word out, and any observation to the contrary is a deal breaker for them. I don't care how they decide to describe their god, so long as within that description it's a god-that's what I want to see, not some definition hobbled up on the spot. That's not something that's going to invest the notion with any added gravitas for me.
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