Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - The "New Atheism," the vocal minority making the rest of us look bad, or more?

KnifeMissile · 11-01-2006, 12:07 PM

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Originally Posted by pigglet

Really no reason to be condescending about your beliefs. You have your reasons, which I fully understand and probably largely support. I also am guessing there are entire sections of questions which your approach can't answer. You will say those questions are invalid or foolish questions, but that doesn't answer the questions.

Who's being condescending? How are they being condescending? Are you sure it isn't just your defensive interpretation? To what are you referring when you say "approach?" Is it your contention that all questions must be answered? ...even if it means deluding one's self to satisfy this need?

Quote:

As far as the gnosticism thing goes, I actually pulled those definitions from an atheist website a long time ago. I can't find the link right now, which is the reason I haven't posted it. However, I find the notion that an agnostic is
a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience. , to be strange if gnosticism is defined in the specific and limited way you gave earlier. It does seem that its the most prevalent definition out there, but I think its odd that analyzing the word roots: the rejection of something very limited is defined as something so general. If I can find the particular atheist references that made the distinctions, I'll try to post them.

When I read this, it sounds like you think there are two teams and all the players are cooperating with each other to compete with the other team...

You can't take the roots of a word too seriously when considering its current meaning. For instance, why are awful things not as desirable than awesome things? I mean, surely it's better to be full of awe than it is to only have some of it, right? Mind you, we can still find vestiges of awful's original meaning when we say that something is awfully big. The technical meaning of words (and phrases) change as real people use them. I've seen many intelligent people use the term "begs the question" to mean "raises the question..."

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

I learned a lot about this throughout the process of planning our wedding... I thought ktspktsp wanted an atheist wedding, but really he wanted a secular one. An atheist wedding would have been rather militant/activist... reading literature/taking vows, etc that promoted the idea of NO GOD. Ktspktsp, though, wanted to simply remove the idea and mention of any God or religiously-associated texts, which we did (other than a slip on my mother's part, but that was my fault for not modifying the text at 4am). He was fine with having the literature and vows be spiritual/humanist, as long as it wasn't religious.

Why do you think an atheist wedding would have been too militant? It's not as if atheist vows spend any time maligning religion...