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i am not sure i understand the meme "the new atheism" because it looks alot like the older types of atheism: same arguments, same procedures, same type of evidence.
within the judeo-christian tradition, god has always been a name.
nothing more.
how people believe, what they project about themselves as being outside themselves, what they attribute to these projections, how they interact with them, has alot to do with the effects of naming--the possibilities that assigning a name sets up--that the name would refer to some guy, some older white guy with a beard (like me) is just one possibility--that the name would refer to other names and say nothing about the attributes of a (potential) referent is another. that there should be no name because god designates dimensions that surpass finite understanding is yet another (nominalism seems to me the only coherent form of christian belief, btw)
what tends to reinforce one view over another is the social situations within which it functions.
what accounts for the selection of one view over another is certain types of social functionality--certain types of social power, certain types of social control, certain modes of deference to hierarchy, etc etc etc.
the problem generated by the notion of faith is simply that it pushes you into an immediate relationship with the context that shapes your beliefs, such that you do not think about context, only about the terms that your belief brings together for you.
so it would seem unreasonable for one who believes to think that they beliefs rest in significant measure on social effects.
the judeo-christian way of framing this god character is very strange.
generally speaking, i am more sympathetic to the catholic version than i am to the protestant one simply because in catholicism you have lots of saints running around and the saints let you indulge the magic-doing aspects of religion--you can invoke them and they will go to the big god-office and talk to the chief of the administrative branch that runs the sector of the lifeshow that concerns you and see if something can be done. i think that's nice. dont you?
this magic-doing seems far more universal an aspect of spirituality than does the single abstract dude and the three phases of being attributed to him. religion seems to me mostly about magic, the desire to be able to do magic, to influence events by invoking a higher power, to have things go more or less your way, to counter impotence and isolation with spiritual artillery.
in this the gnostics seem to have been much more intereting than what later became catholicism, even though catholicism comes out of gnosticism, was a version of it prior to the conversion of constantine and the assimilation of christianity into the bureacratic structure of the roman state. with gnosticism, divine inspiration was everywhere and anyone could tap into it if they performed the correct rituals. the various gnostic groups seems much more horizontally organized, not at all about social control (which is what freaked augustine out about them) and deeply committed to magic---that is not to an abstract notion of faith, instead to kinds of practice.
anyone could be a prophet.
anyone could write gospels.
that sounds kinda cool.
but i digress.
atheism is just the inversion of christianity--both are predicated on this curious belief that human activity yields certainty--they simply disagree on what constitutes certainty. the idea of certainty seems to me wholly retrograde. you dont need it practically, and you cant ground it conceptually.
not knowing makes more sense to me.
because we dont.
we know some of how this phenomena we call reality is organized, we know some cause-effect relationships, we like to think we know alot more than we do becaue we take causal relations that obtain on one register and map them onto all others--whence the illusion that mechanics can function as a way of thinking about causation in general. but if you think about it, there are all kinds of problems with this--for example, even human beings as systems of systems operates on a number of scales at once, and causation within one scale/system does not follow the rules of other scales/systems--and the assumption that there is a single causation has been shown repeatedly to be a real obstacle to understanding--an epistemological limitation that follows from the frames of reference investigators drag from one level to another, the inability to suspend what they take for granted, what they think is "natural"...
i digress again.
stopping now.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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