It was delightful to read “God Talk” (I and II) by Professor Stanley Fish, writing in his syndicated column in the NYT. It was also a pleasure to read “The Atheist’s Dilemma” written by Professor Paul Campos. Though I have not explored these ideas in detail in my blog posts, a few of them reflect what I have written over time.
Why I am not a Christian yet? (October 2008)
One is does belong to a faith or religion by heritage. One does not belong to a faith by upbringing. Last but definitely not the least, one does not belong to a faith by tradition or by following customs sincerely. According to me, there is one and only one criteria and that criteria is a faith experience.
The thief on the cross had his faith experience during the brief conversation before his death. “And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss” (Luke 23:41) Paul, the man responsible for Christianity spreading to Rome and eventually to the rest of the world had his conversion experience on the road to Damascus. “And he trembling and astonished and said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” (Acts 9:6) Paul, known as Saul before his conversion had quite a dramatic faith experience. The martyrs of Rome, the converts in India and the rest of the world, Augustine, Jerome, Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, Moody, Hudson, Luther King, Graham… each and every one of them had an intense faith experience. Be it any religion, Hindu, Islam, Buddhist or atheism there can never be faith without a faith experience.
Yet Another Belief System (June 26, 2008)
All these factors have led me to believe that atheism is no different from theism – it is just another belief system. It uses the same tactics that any other belief system uses. And both recruit adherents by cultural, environmental and personal influence.
Wake up folks! Open your eyes and see that your supposed ideological enemies engage in the same tactics as you do. Live with the fact that you will never wake up to a morning to find a world full of theists or atheists. There is a lot more that one can do than engage in this mindless and distasteful bickering!
No Sides. Only Questions. (Feb 19, 2008)
Every opposing argument in a debate can be further deduced to two conflicting premises. These two conflicting premises can be further reduced to other conflicting premises. The problem here is that only one of of these premises can be right or wrong. And the premises used to deduce whether something is right or wrong is again based on other premises. The entire thing is a painful paradox. Human thought is flawed since the parameters used to judge whether something is wrong or right are decided by humans themselves.
For a long time, I have been planning to type out a post titled “Ideas Are, Not People, which would have probably served as an update to the one above. As I wrote about it to a friend recently:
My upcoming post “Ideas Are. Not People” would probably do a better job in explaining the idea which I am attempting to explain here. A couple of weeks back, I did some free writing for about four pages. Those four pages are still lying on my table and the post has not taken shape of any form. The basic concept is that given an evaluation system, it is possible to compare one idea to another idea and positively claim that one is better or worse than the other. The outcome of the comparison purely depends on the evaluation system and the evaluation system itself is subject to change.
The best quote from the article was “Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith”. This kind of reflects my frustration of people who have the scant understanding of how science works, when I wrote to my friends:
I somehow feel that only the low life masturbators* who pout off some high level fundaes from some high level book that they read are unclear about the assumptions and premises and the masters at the field are very much clear about the constraints that they are working under.
Sometimes I cannot help but wonder whether science itself might take a beating from such an attitude. Sitting at church this week, I was reflecting upon these issues and as a result of it, the following ended up on my FB stream:
Every Saturday, I go to church in the morning and hang out with a bunch of atheist friends in the evening. I am reminded every week that not all people who believe in a god are stupid and not all need one, to be kind and helpful to their fellow human beings.
*the intellectual kind
