Atheists Dumbfounded to Discover Richard Dawkins is a Closet Christian!

reply to post by Bigwhammy


I rather like his actual feelings about creation.

www.youtube.com...

A species that is elsewhere in the universe who seeded life on earth. Sounds like a god to me! Isn't that pretty much what God is? Another entity out there who placed life on earth. This of course removes all concepts of God's status of holiness and soforth, but does it not logically seem to be the same, when you break it all down?

Originally posted by Audevourahn
reply to post by Bigwhammy

 

I rather like his actual feelings about creation.

www.youtube.com...

A species that is elsewhere in the universe who seeded life on earth. Sounds like a god to me!

Which is exactly why I refuse to use the terminology God.

If you say/post anything - - - Believers thing they can grab onto and claim you just described God - - they jump up and down doing their "Hallelujah".

Humans do experiments all the time on lower form species. Are Humans God?

Geeze - - - this pisses me off.

For me the topic opens up a whole can of worms regarding post-structuralism and communication.

It's apparent that an iteration does not really convey a single meaning.

An author's meaning is never just what is written, or the graphic code (or physical symbols on the page or screen) would be the meaning itself.

It operates in a whole system of culturally associated meanings for both the author and the reader.

So we can say that there is no literal truth about atheist texts or religious Scriptures.

However, since a text (or this thread) about a text (Dawkins on religion) is already another iteration (and so is my comment) we already have several layers of meaning and debatable intents.

It sure could be chaotic, but one cannot convincingly go outside a common consensus of interpretation, or wider comparisons in a text itself, and be taken very seriously.

Clearly Dawkins is setting up what he argues against before deconstructing and dismissing it.
The Bible, mainly read as a set of commandments, does not operate like this very often.
Some argue it has an implied counter-point from the surrounding religions and cultures from which it differentiated itself, but except for some clear verses where it forbids idol worship or pagan gods, we mainly have to guess that historical context, and how it applies to us now.
(Or one could claim, similar to the New Agers, that some supernatural force seen by any Tom, Dick or Harry who claims it adds to the Bible with various extra-textual visions, prophesies and trances; but then one no longer has a Biblical religion as such.)

What is more interesting is whether Dawkins could have written such a popular book without the easy counter-point of religious extremism, or so-called "fundamentalism" (which is a selective fundamentalism that cherry-picks and recombines certain meanings over others).
Is atheism really natural, as some atheists claim, or does it first need religion to create it's own narrative as a response?

Anyway, an introduction to post-structuralism
Note how it has to set up the "communication model" to explain what post-structuralism actually argues against:


So the irony is that one can deconstruct the Biblical God as genocidal, or a warmonger and misogynist - but to claim God has a gay side is still seen as blasphemy (or a joke), because a queer reading of male-male relationships in the Bible is still outside the "consensus" discussions between believers and atheists.
So when I try threads on this queer reading, I get a lot of personal insults or laughs, but very little sound counter-argument.
Ultimately my meaning is also possibly right, it's just not a meaning that is familiar to other iterations.

But one cannot prove from Dawkins' book that he is a closet Christian (although that wouldn't surprise me, just as many religious figures are probably in it for the money and mind control).
That would rather try to mirror a fundamentalist approach to the Bible, which many skeptics do employ to remind the fundamentalists that their approach is untenable and hypocritical.
But Dawkins doesn't claim to write a lifestyle manual or commandments.
He writes academically, and there you set up a counter-thesis for your thesis.
That is normal for the genre, or type of text.

However, if you get your own meaning, then enjoy it.
It's not very convincing however.