WLC: "You can't prove the negative"

[Belacqua]

Well, I think you’re quite nice, intelligent, and very reasonable, but probably a bit misunderstood. Showing an interest in certain topics can get a person boxed, labeled, and summarily dismissed pretty quickly around here, and I’m guilty of it myself. It’s just the sheer amount of dishonest interlocutors that blow in and out of the forums on a regular basis starts to jade folks after a while, and you stop giving people the benefit of the doubt. 

At the end of the day,  some people enjoy digging into subjects like epistemic foundations, and others don’t. It really just boils down to personal preference and interest in the subject matter. Some atheists are more practically-minded; i.e. “no god seems to be impacting my life in a detectable way, therefore I’m not going to waste another second of my precious time considering it” (my husband), while others of us enjoy perseverating on metaphysical questions simply for the joy of it, (or because we can’t turn our brains off, as is the case for me), even if it doesn’t change the way we live our lives or lead to any definitive, tangible answers. But regardless of any personal inclinations, as you mentioned, intellectually honest discussions can’t happen if both parties aren’t willing to analyze their reasons for why they believe or don’t believe something. This gets crudely interpreted as, “you’re saying both participants share an equal burden of proof,” which isn’t necessarily correct depending on the nature of the discussion, but both sides certainly bear a responsibility to explain and justify their reasoning. Otherwise it’s not a productive discussion, or really a discussion at all.

It's a pleasure to hear something nice around here for a change. I'm glad we don't ALL have to attack each other!

I certainly understand your husband's feelings about the whole subject. It's not an urgent sort of subject, and it's not practical, and it's very much a niche sort of interest. To a lot of people it probably seems like collecting beer mats or trainspotting -- something for obsessed eccentrics. But I've got nothing against trainspotters.

Maybe there are two kinds of people in this world. Or on this forum, anyway. Those who are interested in the subject and enjoy pondering it. So we come here and discuss, not too seriously because we're not exactly aiming for academic publication, but with more than passing interest. And we're in contrast to those who come here because they despise the subject, and wish all religion and theology would go away, and think that somehow posting here will weaken the enemy and make the world better. (As if posting here has any influence on the world at all.) But to me this difference is between those gravitate to what they like, and those who choose every day to fondle their hate. Respectful disagreement in discussion is good, and I'm glad there are a handful of us here who enjoy that.

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I read Dante's Divine Comedy a long time ago and though I found it very interesting, provocative, and entralling, it was at the end of the day just very imaginative literature to me (I don't know if within Catholicism (which seems similar to your views, on account of Aquinas etc) it's meant to be taken as revelation, but it certainly wasn't within my Protestant upbringing). If that is your approach... ie more grounded in ideas and literature, than line by line analysis? 

You were talking to Neo here, but I'll chime in because when someone mentions Dante I can't help myself. He's my main guy. 

Dante's son said the Comedy was allegorical fiction, and this was the view for centuries. The Catholic church has never included it in canon at all. In about 1950, though, an Italian scholar suggested that Dante meant it as revelation, and he wrote an influential paper arguing that we should read it that way. His argument was that the son downplayed its seriousness because he was afraid the church would ban it, as they had done Dante's essay recommending a separation of church and state. 

This shook things up a bit. And of course it led to all kinds of talk, in the heady days of semiotics, about whether someone who thought he'd had a genuine religious revelation would still express it allegorically, or whether Dante really believed the world was hollow. Galileo once made a lot of money calculating how big Dante's hell would be if it were real -- with Satan at the center of the earth and Jerusalem on the surface directly above. 

Whatever Dante intended, though, I am adamant that it's one of the greatest of all works of art. 

Then I could at least understand where you're coming from a bit more, but at the same time could pretty much categorically say that that could never be me, and never was me when I was a Christian in the past (ie I grew up a literalist and a creationist), because, differences in beliefs aside, my mind just doesn't work like that; I am [over]analytical and reductionistic by nature, so I could never approach any of this based on vague ideas and impressions even if I wanted to.

Blake said that the Bible is the "Great Code of Art." And part of what he meant, I'm sure, is that we should read it as art. 

This will lessen its importance to most modern people, who see aesthetics as intrinsically more shallow than "serious" stuff, and art as entertainment. But (also as Blake saw) we live in a reduced age, when the quantifiable is overly valued against the wholly human.

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What I will also say is that my personal approach to bible study is more esoteric and heavily influnced by Swedenborg.

Watch out! Swedenborg is a gateway drug to Blake! And that's a real rabbit hole!