Atheist FAQ

Joseph Leatch asks several questions in Butterflies and Wheels:
All scriptures describe a God or several lesser gods who speak, act, and wield an impact on the material world. All have a will, all interfere with our lives, and all may change things as they see fit. It is possible that Karen Armstrong is correct, and all of this is intended allegorically. But why, we may ask, would religious people write allegories in order to express the opposite of what they say? If they were trying to convince people that God does not exist in an explicit sense, why would they write allegories in which He does? Finally, why would prayer, sacrifice, and the belief that God can fulfill one’s wishes be such a deeply ingrained aspect of all religious traditions if those traditions did not believe that God could wield an impact on the real world?

In order:

1. Because human beings best grasp complex, even paradoxical concepts through allegory. Do most people learn about love through the scientist ("love is a series of chemical reactions...") or the poet ("love is a rose...")? More to the point, who is the better lover?

2. Because the great religious and philosophical texts were written with multiple audiences in mind. The scholar reads differently than the mystic who reads differently than the layman - and not everyone is capable of being a scholar or a mystic.

3. Because even if God cannot wield an impact on the real world, people who believe in God can. "God" may be nothing more than shorthand for the power of belief in God, but "God sustained the Jewish people" is a statement of fact in either case.

Comments

  1. DudeOctober 29, 2009 at 1:56 PM

    Good answers, but a waste of breath. The problem with atheists isn't so much that they don't believe in God, but that they want to be congratulated for not believing. But as they won't get that, they want to convince others that not believing is not only a sign of superior intelligence, but also of superior morality.

    And God sustained other peoples besides the Jewish, of course.

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  2. ¡Benjaminista!October 29, 2009 at 2:10 PM

    Of course. I find Jewish history to be the best example of the power of God-belief influencing human affairs, but all in all probably nothing would've happened historically without belief in something "irrational." The glory days of all peoples were times of strong belief, and you don't have to believe in what they believed in to believe that. Fundamentally, however, atheists don't believe in peoples: they believe in autonomous individuals, a belief they owe to secularized Christianity. But autonomous individuals would be wiped out if something didn't unite them, and smug satisfaction is a pretty lame substitute for divine mandate.

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