(September 21, 2012 at 4:48 am)Tobie Wrote:(September 21, 2012 at 4:23 am)greneknight Wrote: What about you? Do you claim to be an atheist, a Hindu or a Taoist or a combination of these? You're a fine one to talk about cognitive dissonance. Perhaps, you do see yourself doing all that in a belltower? You're scary. You speak like you've been through it or might very well go through it.
Seeming as Hinduism and Taoism can be atheist religions, there is nothing stopping her being all 3. Christianity, however, has no atheist option.
And why would Hinduism be atheistic? What happened to Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu? What about the Taoist gods and goddesses? How does one read these gods and goddesses? Would apophenia step into a Hindu temple and tell the priests there that the Hindu gods and goddesses didn't exist?
Obviously, you can be atheistic about Hinduism by looking at the gods and goddesses as mere representation of something else - maybe goodness or truth. You look at Hinduism through a metaphorical lens. If you can do that to Hinduism, why can't you do that to Christianity? The church disallows that? But so do Hindu temples, I'm sure. Which church disallows that? That depends on the church, surely?