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11/20/2015 6:07 pm  #1


Any Ex-Atheist

Are there any ex-atheist here? If so what made you leave your atheism for classical theism instead?

 

11/22/2015 5:05 am  #2


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

I am. When I was a teen I was mainly convinced by a personal debunking kind of skepticism and a mild form of scientism that God, which I mainly understood in terms of my bad, Southern US, fundamentalist, protestant education, did not exist.

I came to something like classical theism through Plato and Heidegger. 10 years thinking about the history of thought softened me greatly to my intellectual hardness against religious thought. It was actually ironically Nietzsche who spoiled easygoing atheism for me. I remember the first quote that really stuck with me:

"Christianity — a mistake? A two thousand year mistake?"

I think I basically came to think the ontological argument at least plausible, and thought that many of the other traditional proofs were convincing, with my main final reservation being "That may *indeed* be a good argument, but I do not understand how, from just the argument, you provided something that should be called God." Feser pushed me along, and now I consider myself some kind of theist.

I'm still not particularly friendly to revelation *as a source of rational theism*. I don't know why, for instance, Aquinas needs it *except* that he's reasoning within ecclesiastical bounds, and historical arguments do not seem particularly compelling to me re all the things that are claimed of either scripture or Church tradition. I know many people from my background who would not be willing to consider the things we're talking about here to be God or else that what we're talking about is anemic and unimportant to faith. I mean, it suffices to me to say that, as far as I can tell, Proclus, Maimonides, Al-Farabi, and Aquinas all are talking more or less about the same thing by virtue of their common philosophical core. Why then qua theist, do I need to move past Proclus?

Last edited by iwpoe (11/22/2015 5:16 am)


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

11/22/2015 5:28 am  #3


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

So you would consider yourself a non-religious theist? Interesting. I'm Muslim, but sometimes I do consider this position. At this point even if I were to stop being Muslim, I would just go to this position rather than atheism. I could never be one. 

     Thread Starter
 

11/22/2015 5:47 am  #4


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

AKG wrote:

So you would consider yourself a non-religious theist? Interesting. I'm Muslim, but sometimes I do consider this position. At this point even if I were to stop being Muslim, I would just go to this position rather than atheism. I could never be one.

I think that the big religious traditions are, however you might want to cash this claim out, practically "valid". That is, I think there are various what I'm willing to call spiritual traditions which are for the most part both useful and qua *ways of being* frame lives and orient people both cognitively and practically in sufficiently broad ways that I am unwilling to dismiss them outright. However, with respect to their claim to unique theoretical authority vis-a-vis especially their revealed doctrinal content, I am entirely unconvinced.

I, for instance, see no reason to consider the assertion that the ground of being is triune true, never mind any of the claims of Christology.

That said, I do think that the major religious traditions of the world are far better than secularist frameworks in orienting the lives of those people imbedded in them. The best secular frameworks can do with, for instance, the transcendent feelings that are part of every person's life are to either ignore them, medicalize them into pathologies, or try to channel them into clearly inadequate activities like career and family life, which are themselves robbed of all the ultimate significance that Protestantism especially once tried to give them. It is no wonder that the largest outlet for the transcendent in the last 100 years is music and drugs, since there is literally nothing organized or systematic a secular background can ultimately say about this part of experience.

Last edited by iwpoe (11/22/2015 5:58 am)


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

11/22/2015 6:20 am  #5


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

Your right about the secular aspect part as we can see it everywhere. Do you have any particular views on the afterlife or the souls immortality?

     Thread Starter
 

11/22/2015 6:42 am  #6


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

AKG wrote:

Your right about the secular aspect part as we can see it everywhere. Do you have any particular views on the afterlife or the souls immortality?

I'm willing to hold the soul both immaterial and immortal, though it's hard for me to think non-temporal experience would *be* like anything in any way analogous to lived experience.


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

11/22/2015 3:57 pm  #7


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

@iwpoe Do you follow an Aristotelian Eudaimonia?

 

11/22/2015 6:54 pm  #8


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

Mysterious Brony wrote:

@iwpoe Do you follow an Aristotelian Eudaimonia?

In a sense. I understand eudaimonia polemically as in opposition to the modern moral order and more Romantically (as in Romanticism) than do most Aristotelians. The point of immanent life is the fullest and most harmonious immanent actualization of the individual's faculties (both reason and sentiments) in the world.

A problem with many Aristotelians is that they are either far too modern, almost repentant utilitarians, who want virtue to be a kind of mathematics where you just get right some kind of abstract list of character traits (virtues) that reside in you and all men equally, by avoiding their semi-quantitative deficiencies (vices). This isn't outright wrong, but it is an attempt to generate mere theory, not ethical life. I remember in reading that people would complain that they didn't think there was a good politics of virtue ethics, and that this was somehow a problem. That one would think this is an appropriate end for talk about eudaimonia shows that one misses the point. You cannot have such a politics because a polis operates on a qualitatively different level than the men who comprise it. They are related spheres, but not reducible to one another. A good polis needn't generate flourishing men and flourishing men might not be able to make a good polis.

Or else they are too mired in the ancient conception of virtue, which is discipline and control of primarily excess passions, which is not a useless lesson in this age, but is not the only lesson to be learned. We are in an age where not only is it possible to have passionate excesses, but also to forget even how to feel or how to feel appropriately or the target of passion. These are difficulties the Greeks hardly ever wrote of, but one can hardly read 10 pages of D.H. Lawrence or half a hundred  of someone like Coleridge or Goethe before running into the problem over and over again.

Last edited by iwpoe (11/22/2015 7:35 pm)


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

11/23/2015 11:09 am  #9


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

I am actually pretty close to iwpoe's position. Although I am deeply dedicated to Mosaic law and the subsequent legal structure built upon it, I find that my dedication stems a lot more from my conviction that some legal system and ritual is necessary, and that the Talmud offers the best in that respect, than from a dedication to an account of explicit revelation. Of course, I still believe in a degree of revelation due to a historical indication of a unique destiny for the Jewish people, but that's hardly the backbone Of my commitment.


Noli turbare circulos meos.
 

11/26/2015 6:27 pm  #10


Re: Any Ex-Atheist

Etz, how does Judaism mediate the gap between good law and the good life? I think the Platonic tradition has open the possibility that a polis with right laws may fail to have flourishing citizens. Does Judaism admit that a man might follow the law- Job, for instance -but fail with respect to eudaimonia?

My Romantic intrests push me to ask what' the relationship between outer observance of the law and the inner life? Jesus takes this theme up over and over in the gospels, but it's intellectually thematized in the romantics. The question amounts to whether you can follow the law but still suffer an inner disorder.


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

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