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Thursday, March 26, 2015

Finding oneself agreeing with Richard Dawkins

Meh. It happens.

Michael at 'Shadow to Light' Atheist Safe Spaces -- "While Dawkins is mocking the whole idea of safe spaces, and I happen to agree with him on this, he fails to realize that atheists have been the safe space pioneers. Someone said a prayer in school? There is a Christmas tree in school? There is a picture of the Ten Commandments in the school? MAKE IT STOP! The atheist students are being traumatised by the scary expressions of Christian belief. If you think about it, the Freedom From Religion Foundation should be renamed the Making Atheist Safe Spaces Foundation."

3 comments:

Nick said...

Atheism is nothing but a misguided religious belief. Richard Dawkins and his ilk pretend to use science to support their ideology, but atheism, at this point, doesn't square with the facts. -Nikk Jakson (now SRV)

Ilíon said...

That's true: atheism is a misguided religious belief -- i.e. a misguided metaphysical belief system that seeks (or purports) to explain the world in which we find ourselves, including explaining ourselves --that doesn't square with the facts.

If I may ask, how far out of your (apparently) former atheism have you ventured?

I still hoping to one day be able to call you 'Brother Nikk'.

Nick said...

Without God, or some creative intelligence or purposeful plan behind the universe, life is simply too bleak.

I suppose I started there (I plan to write more at my own blog). Death stares us in the face, and without God, there is no hope to overcome it.

I don't see any clear evidence (yet) that we survive death (though I do see evidence that there is something strange about existence that atheism can never explain). I wish it was otherwise, but as others have said, knowing for sure that "Heaven" is real might make us too anxious to get there.

G.K. Chesterton wrote: "The materialism of things is on the face of things; it does not require any science to find it out. A man who has lived and loved falls down dead and the worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like. That is Atheism if you like. If mankind has believed in spite of that, it can believe in spite of anything."

I choose to believe, or at least hope. More later, Ilion, on where I'm at (I'm certainly not a Christian, though I've thought, not too seriously, about returning to the family religion both my parents were brought up in, Roman Catholicism). My girlfriend was Catholic, became a Buddhist years ago, and has sort of returned to the Church.

The truth is my dad died a few weeks ago, and the grief has overwhelmed me. We were very close, and each day is a struggle for me to get through. Dad believed death was just a gateway to what he called "the other side" and he wrote in his will that he'd be waiting there for us.

I can say that I believe with near certainty that atheism is a false view of reality (I will write soon about why I think that, one reason being the failure of neo-darwinism to fully explain life, complexity and consciousness), but not much more so far.

All of this has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but my dad's passing has now brought it to the surface.