RE: Book Recommendations
July 20, 2020 at 9:36 pm
(This post was last modified: July 20, 2020 at 9:40 pm by Belacqua.)
(July 20, 2020 at 8:05 pm)Grandizer Wrote: Honestly some of the books to read for a beginning atheist should also include books written by religious thinkers regardless of whether you agree with them or not. This is to help keep things in perspective and expose oneself to what people really think instead of reading critiques that may end up strawmanning them at times. Helps with improving critical thinking skills as well
I think so too!
No doubt there are a lot of people who stop being Christians for good reasons -- maybe they were raised in a dumb church, or all they know of Christianity is the TV evangelist version. I'm sure it's hard to get past all that. They haven't been exposed to the intelligent people.
The trouble is that on both sides, the most available sources are the media figures and sophists. And people of that type benefit from the illusion that the issue is simple.
The great religious figures whom we all benefit from reading are difficult. It takes time to get what Dante or William Blake are saying. And this is not something that people in sound-bite culture can manage.
I remember mentioning Nicholas of Cusa to someone on an Internet forum. (Cusanus was a cardinal and important mathematician, who suggested a non-geocentric universe 70 years before Galileo.) The person I was talking with did a quick skim of Wikipedia and came back to announce that all of Nicholas' thought was crap. The time stamp on the posts indicated that he had devoted about 4 minutes to his study. When people graduate from Four-Minutes of Wikipedia University with that much confidence, you know that things are not operating at an intelligent level.
