For the newbies, this is my thing. I’ve been working on it for almost 3 years. I’m a few weeks from completing the website, but it will require maintenance, and now the fun begins of analyzing what the hell I just did.
I’m still doing the copy editing, so sorry about typos or whatever. If something isn’t comprehensible, let me know. At this point, I’m mostly wondering if this introduction draws you in at all. Even if this idea of understanding the history of religion and why it’s still around isn’t your passion, are you at all intrigued to hear more?
The audience is more believer than atheist, so feel free to pass it along if you know of someone who is wondering what atheists think. One of the gaps I’m trying to fill is providing that perspective without telling them they are stupid and wrong.
Interesting but a bit overwhelming for me Lausten.
Guess for me the main hurdle is that its all about books and the words and opinions of other people who wrote their own books to counter or reinforce what others have written.
I come from an Earth Centrist position - my final authority for reality is what I (we) can find within the physical reality and processes of Earth. Years of a false awe and learning to look behind the curtain has taught me to put no faith whatsoever in learned people who live within books and rhetorical argumentation while being blind to physical human reality and its constraints.
Far more is possible within the human mindscape than is possible within our physical world. This is what needs recognizing and studying, imho.
Lausten, I just spent a bunch of time posting under Godbox, like a fool I hit ‘preview’ before doing a quick copy and the thing disappeared. Don’t suppose there’s anything at your end under moderation?
hate it when I do that and it’s too late, goin to bed, sorry.
It started with the question, Why does that scriptural stuff have such a hold on you? . . .
Sorry, nothing on my end. Great question though. At first, I just didn’t want my 17 years as a Christian to be a complete waste, so I wanted to write up what I’d learned. At the same time, I was trying to figure out why I’d been fooled by the hocus pocus in the first place, so I was listening to other deconversion stories and paths. Although many are the same, each is unique and each provides insight into the human condition. Also, like Dan Dennet, I am looking for what is appealing about church and how can we use those good things to inspire people to do things like clean up the planet.
All that has grown into Bible study which is something that is becoming increasingly popular by atheists. Take the book of Mark for instance. It is a pretty tightly woven tale incorporating history, the variety of religions from the time, political moves that were happening, and personal advice on how to survive such upheaval. If you only approach it as the thing it became to the Catholic Church, it’s just dumb. But even though it is that to most people, I think it is it’s the actual message that explains why it has survived. It is a timeless story of how progressives try to create a better world, but they are squashed by those who only care about power. The messiah shows up, but we don’t recognize it, we fight amongst ourselves and the powerful kill the movement.
In the 2nd entry, I show how this happened at the end of the Enlightenment era.
Thanks for not being offended. I’ll take a look at that link when I have the time to give it. I hear what your saying, but I wound up coming at all this from a completely different direction. That Narcissus, Goldmund thing, the one is content within the books and the other rails at their constriction and simply needs to escape into the cold cruel world to do the best we can. Sounds all poetic, … and it actually is.
This is not a competition. Some people will be interested in biology and biospheres and others will be interested in poetry. Both can agree that we should treat widows with the same respect that we treat business owners. We are finally getting to a world where widows can be business owners and it’s considered normal, not an exception. People like Sagan and Tyson have realized that the mistake made 60 years ago was to ignore the poetry in science, or maybe I should say to not express science poetically. No matter how amazing something is, it still needs marketing, if you want to be a little more crass about it.
If we just leave it up to some untrained voices to put these amazing cycles of life into something someone with little education can just pick up and find intriguing, you get Deepak Chopra. If you expect those voices to figure out science first, then write the poetry, you leave the divide unbridged.