From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Oct 24 2004 - 03:05:59 BST
A teenaged Palestinian girl is standing in front of a full length mirror at
the mall when, worried, she turns to her friend and asks, "Does this bomb
make me look fat?"
David Morey said:
Generally, I find that anti-god talk folk have experienced low-quality
thinking on these subjects, whilst the pro-god-talk camp are either more
familiar with high-quality god talk or are in the low-quality god talk
camp and are pretty ignorant.
dmb says:
Um, this sentence makes me wonder if its author knows anything about
high-quality. You've simply asserted that you're a deep thinker and those
who disagree are ignorant, bad thinkers. Its not an argument or a case so
much as a self-congratulatory assertion, a naked assertion without any
apparent basis.
MOrey said:
My own path has been from a pure atheist back ground, obsession with science
and philosophy, discovery of the problems and low-quality aspects of atheist
and secular thinking, to discovery of high-quality god talk that actually
engages with issues that secular and atheist thinking dogmatically refuse to
address.
dmb says:
Like what? Are you saying faith is better than nihilism? As I understand the
MOQ, neither of these are options. In any case, without something specific I
can only guess what you're talking about.
Morey said:
Most secular thinking fails to get as deep as Pirsig does, and let's face it
when he gets deep he starts to open his thinking up to what is still
religion, but of the eastern variety.
dmb says:
Not just Eastern religion, but Native American mysticism too. Its a less
cluttered and more familiar form of mysticism. One of the reasons LILA opens
with the teepee scene and all that. I realize you're only sharing your path
with us so we know where you're coming from, but I have to say that the MOQ
does not present shallow secular thinking nor theistic religion as options
and more or less rejects them both. Can we please agree on that, at least?
Morey said:
I guess my position is pro-deep thinking, and my suggestion is that unless
you avoid deep thinking, you are going to have to start talking about stuff
that often provoke the use of the god-word. Do you really imagine that we
would talk about god for thousands of years only to find that god is a
fiction. How strange would that make us.
dmb says:
Not at all. There was a point where we stopped worshipping animal spirits,
why not God too? Its called evolution, man. Get with the program. Today the
serious (deep) questions are not about the reality of God, but the meaning
and purpose of myth. We can look at religion with different eyes now, and
there really is no going back even if we wanted to. When we talk about God
in the anthropomorphic sense, we're talking about a conception that is
entirely inappropriate within modern consciousness, one that is entirely
intellectually indefensible. (This is where faith comes galloping to the
rescue.)
Thanks.
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