12.05.09
Jollimore on Armstrong
Troy Jollimore on Karen Armstrong’s ‘The Case for God’
“We are talking far too much about God these days,” writes Karen Armstrong, author of “The Battle for God,” “Visions of God,” “The Changing Face of God” and “A History of God,” at the outset of her new book, “The Case for God.” Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.
I don’t care for Armstrong’s confused/confusing ‘theism’, but she is right about one thing: the new atheists tend to provoke our response to negate what they are saying. That happened here on this blog. You know there is something wrong when atheists refuse to associate with ‘New Atheists’. The problem for me was the ignorance of the history of religion by the New Atheists.
So the issue is not really the ‘case for god’ as much as the dialectical reversal that produces verbiage from one angle then verbiage from another.
The theistic and atheistic perspectives in this debate are both unacceptable.
One solution is to apply a dialectic to one’s own thought: try, quietly being a theist, then an atheist in successive dialectical chords. Perhaps the word game will stand out as undecidable, if not meaningless.
James said,
December 5, 2009 at 3:22 pm
…or you could do something like Schopenhauer and come up with something that transcends both.