(April 1, 2009 at 6:52 am)Kyuuketsuki Wrote: Atheists believe there is no god: No, atheism is about disbelief in current claims to deity not actually insisting we know there is (indeed cannot be) a god or gods.I believe it is agnosticism that Kyuuketsuki is describing above.
Dawkins is quite right when he says: “I’d be surprised to meet many people in category 7”.
There are very few of us (…me…) who managed to reach milestone 7 and I am now obliged to clarify that I’m a category 7 atheist as the term atheist alone is not the proper one.
Kyuuketsulki writes that “atheism is about disbelief in current claims to deity.” What about ancient claims to deity? The idea of the deity is not ours. How far back into the past should we look for the origins of the idea, and why is our idea of God different or better than theirs?
The One and Only God of Jews, Chistians and Muslims was born out of the union of the Egyptian gods Amun and Ra.
W.Budge quotes, in the preface to his book “The Egyptian Book of the Dead,” some striking passages, as he says, that the German Egyptologist Brugsch had collected from the Egyptian texts.
A sample of these passages is following.
God is one and alone, and none other existeth with Him.
God is the One, the One who hath made all things.
God is the eternal One, he is eternal and infinite and endureth for ever and aye.
God is truth and He liveth by truth and He feedeth thereon.
God is life and through Him only man liveth.
God hath made the Universe, and He hath created all that therein is.
He is the Creator of what is in this world, and of what was, of what is, and of what
shall be.
God is merciful unto those who reverence Him, and He heareth him that calleth
upon Him.
God knoweth him that acknowledged Him, He rewarded him that serveth Him, and He protected him that followeth Him. (xcii)
The contemporary German Egyptologist, Jan Assmann, writes in his book “The Search for God in Ancient Egypt” the following regarding the birth of Monotheism:
The Theban theology of these decades can be interpreted as an attempt to fill the hyphenated formulation Amun-Re with theological content, that is, to develop a divine concept sufficiently comprehensive to include all the traditions concerning Amun and all those of Re as well.
The pure Amun aspect of the city god and the pure Re aspect of the sun god are connected by the concept of the supreme being who had already emerged in the theological fragments of the Middle Kingdom in his aspects of primeval god, creator god, and god of life.
I call this process “additive” for I have the impression that this new concept of a supreme being was arrived at primarily by accumulation and juxtaposition. All aspects of divine unity –preexistence, creator, sustainer- were combined and connected with one another by means of simple but well-ordered juxtapositions of sequences of predicates of Amun and Re.
Jews, Christians and Muslims continue to invoke the name of Amun (Amen) in their prayers. So, how current are our current ideas of God?
If one presents evidence of how the One and Only God was created, this God will be discredited but, of course, the general idea of the deity remains unmolested. Yet, we only have to penetrate enough into out past to acquire the means to discredit the idea of the deity entirely.
We do not have to prove that God does not exist. It suffices to prove that he who first informed humanity of the existence of immaterial gods was either joking or lying.
