Comment by dgellow
4 hours ago
I don’t think you understand atheism? As an atheist I do not believe in any form of deity or divine authority. I do not reject a specific religion, I do not actually believe there is any form of divine order to our world. I can look at faiths as the social constructs they are, and find interest in concepts humans have been developing and created cults around but there won’t ever be a religion/deity I will look at and somehow start to believe. And religious doctrines do not come for free, they are fundamentally built on top of a belief in a divine truth. My moral values may overlap with some religious people at a given time but we are using incompatible models to analyze our world
Also atheist here. Reading old+new testament was informative like reading history: whatever is true or not in those passages, have had profound impact throughout history
Their point is that despite your subscription to reason, without exposure to other cultural norms, you may be blind to what Christian values you live by. Becoming aware of them can help self evaluation of your ethical framework
To clarify, I didn’t claim I subscribe to reason. I believe that I behave as if I would however I don’t think humans are too rational. There is just nothing divine into the world. The Old and new Testaments have very little I personally find insightful. Write their content in contemporary language and they are a collections of (extremely dry) folk stories. Which is fine, but I wouldn’t rely on it for anything other than a curiosity, the same way I wouldn’t rely on Grimm’s collection of fairy tales. IMHO the Quran is more interesting historically speaking given that we have a better understanding of the cultural context it was written in and its authorship. The church institutions are also themselves interesting for their cultural impact and political structures, but the religion and faith has no monopoly over moral values
Grimm's Fairy Tales also have had an important impact on your culture.
No one is asking you to believe in anything, but it's self-limiting to refuse to engage with works of historical/cultural importance.
1 reply →
Thank you. Yes, exactly.
For that matter, reading the Christian scriptures through a historical lens reveals a very different kind of thought than the modern version of Christianity and Judaism. It takes a huge amount of effort to read these documents in context; just reading them in the original languages is hard enough. But the past is a very foreign country and they see things very differently there.