Originally posted by FreakyKBH
I would concede your point, DeepThought, if the threads didn't continually follow the same boring path.
Atheists (or, as I affectionately call them, the God-haters) are not on here to explore other paths of spirituality; they are here to shout down Christianity.
Take, for instance, twhitehead.
A very knowledgeable fellow, with a pretty impres ...[text shortened]... utcome... all the while accusing the theist of intransigence.
Heads, he wins.
Tails, you lose.
Freaky: “Atheists (or, as I affectionately call them, the God-haters) are not on here to explore other paths of spirituality; they are here to shout down Christianity.”
That is a lie.
You have engaged with enough atheists on here to know that it is a lie - including Buddhists and Taoists and Vedantists, and some whose spiritual path, so far as I know remains undefined, but who have contributed to spiritual discussions that had nothing to do with atheism/theism at all. Bbarr (Vedantist), Taoman, blackbeetle, BosseDeNage, myself - for a few. LemonJello has both initiated and contributed to discussions of Zen Buddhism and - especially - Sufism. Even rwingett has contributed well-studied and well-presented material on pantheism, such as with the ancient Stoics.
And those examples are all of particular
religious contexts; and
spirituality is not confined to any particular
religious context. Many nondualists (such as myself and a few of the aforementioned) accurately refer to themselves as nontheists or atheists vis-a-vis the notion of some kind of personal, supernatural god-entity. To most self-identified theists on here - and conventionally, in the Christian West anyway - that is the only (revisionist) use of the term
theos that is acceptable. I suppose that, to you, such a deeply, deeply spiritual Christian thinker as Meister Eckhart is a “God-hater”.
The divide here is not between theists and atheists. It is between idolatrous (in the precise sense of the Jewish tradition - which includes the idolatry of fixed god-concepts) - idolatrous dogmatism, and any deconstructive threat to that dogmatism from any corner. Some of those dogmatists claim the mantle “Christian”; others (like Dasa) claim other religious mantles. And I have seen the dogmatists - including those claiming the mantle “Christian” - descend into snarky insults, fear-mongering and shrieking personal abuse on here more than I have seen it among atheists (though it happens on both sides - and intramurally within each camp).
And that is one reason why I no longer hang around here much.
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Dogmatism - under any mantle - I see as really the enemy of spirituality. And there have been, and are, theists on here who preach their particular religion without demonstrating a shred of spirit in the process - as they denounce any deconstructive threat to their cherished theological dogma, and anyone who challenges that dogma. (You have not been one of them: RJHinds has been; Dasa has been; Darfius was - note the intentional use of past tenses there .)
Some of us struggle. We have to work at our particular spiritual path(s). We fail. My failures on here - when I have lashed out at others - is another reason that I have removed myself from the RHP community for extended periods. But I have been spiritually informed by many on here with whom I have disagreed (and do disagree) - both theists and atheists, both religionists and non-religionists, both Christians and non-Christians.
Here is a - quite accurate, if poetic - rendering of a favorite New Testament verse, that I once used as the basis for an entry into one of the old sermon contests on here, from a strictly Christic point of view:*
Spirit where it wishes blows.
You hear the sound of it but do not know
whence it comes nor where it goes.
All who are born of spirit wayfare so.
--As you know, this verse capitalizes on the meaning-play of the word
pneuma, which can mean wind or spirit or breath. This is quite a metaphorical verse.
The dogmatist attempts to stifle the free range of spirit - and to silence spiritual wayfarers - often with layers of complex theology and mummy-wrappings of scriptural exegesis, all to keep spirit within defined doctrinal bounds. Various religions have various responses to this: The early Syrian Christians, for example, insisted that theology be expressed only in poetry; rabbinical Jews rely on the radical semantic openness of Biblical Hebrew, which disallows (as rabbi and scholar Marc-Alain Ouaknin put it) any “idolatry of the one right meaning”; Zen Buddhists use
koans; Sufis also use poetry and story (parable); etc. etc. All of those responses to dogmatism are responses to the danger of idolizing the respective scriptures as well: Bible, Torah, Sutras and Qur’an.
Some theists - such as Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook (orthodox), to name just one famous example - have recognized the value of atheism as a necessary response to the aforementioned idolatries; and have affirmed the arguments of atheists in that necessary deconstruction - rather than shallowly condemning atheists as “god-haters”. I doubt that the atheists I know on here would accept that as their purpose, or limit their atheism to that. But the point is well-made: it appears that “religionism” always faces the danger of internalizing its own idols, so that they are no longer recognized as such, but are vigorously defended as “right doctrine”.
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My wife just sent me the following, posted outside a Methodist church in New York:
“You can safely assume
that you’ve created God in your own image
when it turns out that God
hates all the same people you do.”
--Anne Lamott (http://i.imgur.com/N4G8XmJ.jpg)
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There is likely nothing that I have written above that you have not seen presented on here before. That is partly what makes your descent into the gross lie so disappointing.
I like Suzianne. Her profile indicates that her departure is as much due to her own emotional reactions (including, perhaps, that expressed in the OP) as well as whatever she was reacting to. And so I will say no more about that.
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* I say “Christic”, rather than “Christian”, because I could give a fig about who are or are not “True Christians™” according to other, self-proclaimed “True Christians™”.