Jagat

My basic idea here is simply this: I don't think that after Marx, Nietzsche, Huxley, Spenser, Freud, Sartre, Camus, and the rest of the 19th and 20th century's giants of atheistic thought, that there will be much new to be said. I have read most of these authors and also responses to their thought by Christian authors like Borhnoeffer, Tillich and Niebuhr. Nevertheless, I think that there is value in the contribution all these thinkers made, and atheism had a strong influence on the development of Christianity in the post WWII period, both as a transformative in liberal mainline Protestantism as well as in the reactionary fundamentalisms. Of course, I find liberalism more attractive, and that is one of the reasons I appreciate the atheist critiques of fundamentalist thought. In India, the influence of Buddhism meant that the most basic arguments of atheism were given much more credence philosophically and theism could not credibly grow in India without the intermediate ste...

Literalist concepts of God were made to be mocked; they are for children. And even understood symbolically, many concepts of God are fraught with problems. In the present day world, crude literalist forms of Islam and fundamentalist Christianity are leading the charge to cause doubts in the minds of reasonable people about all forms of the religious life. And for good reason. The purpose of the "God idea" or "God symbol" is to elevate humanity both as individuals and as social beings. If it appears to do the opposite, then what can this mean? Some defenders of religion say that it has done more good than bad, but since there is no way to measure such things it is quite easy to point out that plenty of pretty horrible evils have been wrought in the name of God and religion. Even if such a jaundiced view were to be true, on its own, it hardly functions as a decisive proof that religion does not have a positive function or that God does not exist. Thinking of God ...