Why mocking belief IS an attack on the person

[el_bryanto]

26. There was a good article at Salon this last weekend about what religion provides

And how many Anti Theists refuse to grapple with it. Here's the article.

The problem is that the New Atheists think of God only in epistemological terms. Consequently, they have nothing to say to those who affirm God for existential reasons. New Atheist writers tend to approach religion from the perspective of science: They argue that a particular religion isn’t true or that the empirical claims of religious texts are false. That’s easy to do. The more interesting question is why religions endure in spite of being empirically untrue. There are, of course, millions of fundamentalists for whom God is a literal proposition. Their claims concerning God are empirical and should be treated as such. For many, though, God is an existential impulse, a transcendent idea with no referent in reality. This conception of God is untouched – and untouchable – by positivist science; asking if God is true in this sense is like asking how much the number 12 weighs – it’s nonsensical.

These sorts of questions pervade literature and philosophy. The existentialist authors, most of whom were atheists, took seriously the problem of meaning and truth. Dostoevsky, for instance, although a Christian, refused to defend Christianity on positivist grounds. He considered God a motive force, not an empirical claim about reality or history. For his part, God was a bridge to self-transcendence, a way of linking the individual to a tradition and a community. The truth of Christ was therefore less important than the living faith made possible by belief in Christ.

Richard Dawkins may find this distinction trivial, but I don’t think it is.

Bryant