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Javier E

Ronald Dworkin's 'Religious Atheism' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ald-dworkins-religious-atheism

faith atheism deism value fact religious

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Dworkin, too, believes there is no contradiction in the term “religious atheism,” and offers no less towering examples than Shelley, Einstein and William James to show that it’s possible to adopt what he calls a “religious attitude,” a worldview which “accepts the full, independent reality of value,” as distinct from scientific fact, and which holds that both individuals and the natural world they inhabit have intrinsic, transcendental value, without believing in a personal God
  • Dworkin’s goal is to emphasize “the importance of what is shared” by subscribers of both “godly and godless religion.” That, in a word, he thinks, is faith. And while believers may think their faith in God differs substantially from the “faith” of an atheist, Dworkin’s rather startling conclusion is that the faith of theists is necessarily identical to that of religious atheists.
Javier E

Did Zeus Exist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...did-zeus-exist

deism Greece gods agnosticism atheism ancient

shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • This set me thinking about why we are so certain that Zeus never existed. Of course, we are in no position to say that he did.  But are we really in a position to say that he didn’t?
  • as this civilization developed the critical tools of historiography and philosophy, Zeus’s reality remained widely unquestioned. 
  • Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks? 
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • what the Greeks saw as experiences of divine actions in their lives. ”The greatest evidence for the existence of gods is that piety works . . . the converse is that impiety leads to disaster,
  • There were also rituals, associated with the many cults of specific gods, that for some worshippers “created a sense of contact with the divine. One knows that the gods exist because one feels their presence during the drama of the mysteries or the elation of the choral dance.
  • there were “epiphanies” that could “indicate not merely a visible or audible epiphany (whether in the light of day or through a dream . . .) but also any clear expression of a god’s favor such as weather conditions hampering an enemy, a miraculous escape, or a cure;
  • how can we be so sure that the Greeks lived in the same sort of world as we do?  What decisive reason do we have for thinking that for them divinity was not a widely and deeply experienced fact of life?
  • shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?
  • We may well think that our world contains little or no evidence of the supernatural.  But that is no reason to think the same was true of the Greek world.
  • I’m inclined to say that an atheistic denial of Zeus is ungrounded.  There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks.  We have no reason to make this assumption.
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