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Chula Vista · 02-11-2017, 12:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DwnWthVwls

How so? I'm not sure I follow. What is the scale?

Just for clarity, how I distinguish the 4 categories:

-Gnostic Atheist - Rejects the theistic belief in god, claims there is no god (has burden of proof)
-Agnostic Atheist - Rejects the theistic belief in god, does not make truth claims

-Gnostic Theist - Believes in a theistic god, claims god exists (has burden of proof)
-Agnostic Theist - Believes in a theistic god, does not make truth claims

Great post DWV. You really need to read this book. Caution: It's the most mentally and soul searching book I've ever read. Many of my friends have not been able to simply deal with it.

There were dozens of sections that I had to read a second time to fully absorb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong

Simpy put, she puts belief, and non belief in the perfect context. I stopped being an atheist after reading this. Now I have no title.

https://www.amazon.com/Case-God-Kare...aren+armstrong

Quote:

A nuanced exploration of the part that religion plays in human life, drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age.

Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?

Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”