Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, & Culture - Carnival of the Godless - #39 - Blogs & Books

Theists like Gellman seem to have a great deal of trouble understanding that atheists are not a monolithic block of like-minded co-religionists who share the same values, dogma, and philosophy. Atheism, the lack of god-belief, is the single thread that connects two or more atheists together. Everything else is up for grabs. There are liberal atheists, conservative atheists, pro-life atheists, pro-choice atheists, Christian atheists (yes you read that right), satanic atheists, libertarian atheists, Jewish atheists, Muslim atheists, existentialist atheists, etc., ad infinitum.

Sometimes you find assassins where you least expect them and sometimes you find those you least expect among the assassins. Atheists have come to expect character assassination by the religious right. We're used to those who would malign and demonize us simply because we do not share the same non-evidenced beliefs as the majority of society. The stain of religious bigotry applied indiscriminately with a broad brush by the Falwells and Robertsons is one we know all too well. That is why it is all the more painful when it comes from our own liberal and progressive brothers and sisters, such as was the case with Melinda Barton's recent opinion piece at Raw Story.

When it is trodden on a worm will curl up. That is prudent. It thereby reduces the chance of being trodden on again. In the language of morals: humility.

According to Pat Robertson's book The New World Order, Freemasons, along with the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, homosexuals and international bankers, are conspiring with the devil to set up a World Government. Robertson claims that their sinister plan is all laid out in John Lennon's song "Imagine." Apparently, Freemasons were also behind the Kennedy Assassination and the murder of John Paul I, both of whom did nothing to deserve being assassinated, unlike Venezuela President Hugo Chavez.

Is it that fictional texts come to the aid of our metaphysical narrowmindedness? We live in the great labyrinth of the actual world, which is bigger and more complex than the world of Little Red Riding Hood. It a world whose paths we have not entirely mapped out and whose total structure we are unable to describe. In the hope that rules of the game exist, humanity throughout the centuries has speculated about whether this labyrinth has an author, or perhaps more than one. And it has thought of God, or the gods, as if they were empirical authors, narrators, or model authors. People have wondered what an empirical divinity might be like: whether it has a beard, whether it's a He, a She, or an IT, whether it was born or has always existed, and even (in our times) whether it's dead. God as Narrator has always been sought -- in the intestines of animals, in the flittings of birds, in the burning bush, in the first sentence of the Ten Commandments. But some (including philosophers, of course, but also adherents of many religions) have searched for God as Model Author -- that is, God as the Rule of the Game, as the Law that makes or someday will make the labyrinth, of the world understandable. The Divinity in this case is something we must discover at the same time we discover why we are in the labyrinth, and what path we are being asked to walk within it.