Thursday, February 10, 2011

I was just looking for an interesting discussion...

I was perusing the internet last week and came across this slightly interesting article about the existence of Jesus. Since I didn't have much time, I whipped off a quick, but poignant, point.

My point being that the existence in a historical Jesus does not in fact mean that he was any sort of messiah. Apparently I was way out of line though.

So, of course, I had to go back later and poke the bloggy wasps nest with a stick..

I found a number of really interesting things out about some hyper-religious bloggers.
1. Some of them don't know that "X" for Christ isn't some sort of new age atheist insult.
and 2. they didn't seem to understand that people that don't believe in *their* gods aren't necessarily atheists (or of very low intelligence either)

The author of the article, Mark Shea, had this lovely bit of Xian love for me..

"Your problem is not that you make up you morality. Your problems is that you steal it from your Judeo-Christian heritage. Virtually all the shallow members of the New Atheist movement do this. They are like vandals raiding the Christian warehouse and grabbing bits of morality they live. Or more precisely, they are like children leaving home after ransacking the attic for stuff they didn’t create, oblivious to the fact that the morality they take to be “self-evident” is completely rooted in mystical principles they reject in their simple-mindededness.

They are also, as you demonstrate with every word you say, typically unable to stick to the point (in this case, that it’s stupid to deny Jesus’ existence) because they are in such a hurry to find some excuse for denying him. Some, like you, are able to see that certain arguments (like “Jesus never existed”) embarrass and endanger the project of denial by making atheists look so acutely stupid that the subject must be rapidly changed. But rather than look that stupidity in the eye and ask, “Is New Atheism really all *that* rooted in Reason and Intellect as worshippers of the intellect like Fred B parrot?” Or could it be that there are some basic flaws in the project as users of the intellect like YOS keep demonstrating, over your futile resistance?

Moral: contempt is a bad basis for understanding something. When you drip contempt for Christianity, you put yourself in the worst possible position for having the slightest idea what you are talking about."


So class, what did we learn from this endeavor? Well, apparently morality didn't exist before Judaism (I wonder how humanity survived before then?) And if you want to prove that you're right, you should insult the person you disagree with as much as possible.

Good job Mark Shea.

No comments:

Post a Comment