Tooth Fairy Bullshit

[Esquilax]

Those who compare God to the tooth fairy are douchebags. I’m sorry but that is truly how I feel. Without even an ounce of shame they ridicule some of the best and brightest thinkers who take up a problem serious and came to serious conclusion. Kierkegaard, Hegel, Kant, Buber, Kripke, Plantinga, Newton, Leibnitz, Putman, and Godel are/were theists. That list doesn’t even include theologians, like David Bentley Hart, or physicists, like, Francis Collins or Max Planck. All brilliant.

Okay? Brilliant people can still be wrong on trivial matters. Appeals to authority aren't rational just because you feel strongly about them.

I guess the real question is, would it be possible to produce the same effects you describe here- the inspiration and so on- with a modified tooth fairy story? In essence, is this "great thinkers spent reams of paper and ink justifying belief in X, and being inspired by X," exclusive to the christian god? It'd be hard to argue for that, given all the other religions purporting the same effects to gods you consider imaginary. There are people out there who are being spurred to precisely the same actions and beliefs, based in a character you'd consider equivalent to the tooth fairy... just because you place a- let's be serious about this for a moment- rather chauvinistic and unwarranted importance on the Western thinkers you happen to like, doesn't make their beliefs some untouchable edifice.

There's actually an interesting question at the heart of this. Too bad you're too busy being self-righteous as always to even consider it.

Maybe you don’t realize this but it is possible to be an atheist without acting like an infantile little snark. It’s astonishing to me how such ass-wipes will disrespect the legacies of truly great men and women like Dr. King, Bonhoeffer, and Catherine Booth (founder of the Salvation Army) by pretending that their religious convictions did nothing to motivate and inspire them to change the world.

And yet you'd disrespect the living by wildly simplifying our views in order to have something to get mad about. See, this cuts both ways.