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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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This forum should be open grounds to challenge any view.

At the risk of getting modded for "waging the culture war", go ahead, challenge away. Show us what you've got.

That's not how it really works. The atheist view is typically a response to Christian arguments, not a pre-emptive strike declaring 100% certainty that no gods exist.

Well my, my, isn't that a convenient restatement of the position? "Oh yeah I totally could take you with one hand tied behind my back, but I have to go water my hydrangeas right now!"

Isn't that "fighting with oversensitive interpretations of the rules", Benny-ben?

Well my, my, isn't that a convenient restatement of the position? "Oh yeah I totally could take you with one hand tied behind my back, but I have to go water my hydrangeas right now!"

No, this is a blatant strawman of my position. I'm saying I'm not a gnostic atheist here.

Benny-ben?

Come now.

Aw, but you make me want to ruffle your hair and pinch your adorable chubby cheeks, little Ben with your "My dad can take your dad!" attitude!

Sorry. I'm being annoying. Apologies for that.

Benny-ben

Don't do that.

Fair point. But when someone comes in all pigeon-pouter chest about "my philosophy can wipe the floor with yours", then collapses back into "no, your philosophy has gotta start it first, else I'm not justified in throwing the first punch!", it eggs me on to be Condescending Auntie.

You seem to be confusing atheist with agnostic.

There's no such thing as a dictionary-definition Atheist. Nobody can prove god doesn't exist, when those who say He does can shift His definition to fit reality.

An Atheist is an agnostic who's 99% certain that the common conceptions of any God made by humans is not real.

An Atheist is an agnostic who's 99% certain that the common conceptions of any God made by humans is not real.

By that definition, atheists are perfectly orthodox religious believers, or have you really never heard of the way of negation/apophatic theology? Usually summed up as "We cannot say what God is, only what God is not".

Ironically, in view of the comment about angeology, our friend Pseudo-Dionysius was one of those:

Pseudo Dionysius describes the kataphatic or affirmative way to the divine as the "way of speech": that we can come to some understanding of the Transcendent by attributing all the perfections of the created order to God as its source. In this sense, we can say "God is Love", "God is Beauty", "God is Good". The apophatic or negative way stresses God's absolute transcendence and unknowability in such a way that we cannot say anything about the divine essence because God is so totally beyond being. The dual concept of the immanence and transcendence of God can help us to understand the simultaneous truth of both "ways" to God: at the same time as God is immanent, God is also transcendent. At the same time as God is knowable, God is also unknowable. God cannot be thought of as one or the other only.

God's appearance to Moses in the burning bush was often elaborated on by the Early Church Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395), realizing the fundamental unknowability of God; an exegesis which continued in the medieval mystical tradition. Their response is that, although God is unknowable, Jesus as person can be followed, since "following Christ is the human way of seeing God."

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – c. 215) was an early proponent of apophatic theology. Clement holds that God is unknowable, although God's unknowability, concerns only his essence, not his energies, or powers. According to R.A. Baker, in Clement's writings the term theoria develops further from a mere intellectual "seeing" toward a spiritual form of contemplation. Clement's apophatic theology or philosophy is closely related to this kind of theoria and the "mystic vision of the soul." For Clement, God is transcendent and immanent. According to Baker, Clement's apophaticism is mainly driven not by Biblical texts, but by the Platonic tradition. His conception of an ineffable God is a synthesis of Plato and Philo, as seen from a Biblical perspective. According to Osborne, it is a synthesis in a Biblical framework; according to Baker, while the Platonic tradition accounts for the negative approach, the Biblical tradition accounts for the positive approach. Theoria and abstraction is the means to conceive of this ineffable God; it is preceded by dispassion.

According to most progressives there's no such thing as "wokism" or "the deep state" either but that doesn't mean you don't know exactly what im talking about.

The two words can be used interchangeably in some cases. Most atheists are agnostic by design, while most Christians are gnostic. It's usually Christians making the first claims.

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