Notebook per
Meta-atheism
Citation (APA): riccardo-mariani@libero.it. (2017). Meta-atheism [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Georges Rey,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 3
Meta-atheism: Reasons to Think that Few People Actually Believe in God
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 7
I find it hard to believe that anyone really buys the "ontological argument," or any of Aquinas' "five ways." Existence may or may not be a predicate, and there may or may not be unmoved movers, uncaused causers, and undesigned teleological systems, but these arguments don't remotely establish their intended conclusion,
Nota - Posizione 9
x IRRILEVANZA DEGLI ARGOMENTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 11
I began to wonder whether the arguments were ever really intended seriously; and this led me to wonder whether anyone actually believed their conclusion.
Nota - Posizione 12
x IL DUBBIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 16
For starters, there are the formidable difficulties of expressing oneself clearly in language,
Nota - Posizione 16
x PRIMO BAS POSSIBILE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 17
there is the familiar phenomenon of adjusting what one says
Nota - Posizione 17
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 19
there's also the phenomenon of self-deception:
Nota - Posizione 19
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 25
meta-atheism:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 25
Despite appearances, not many people -particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived.
Nota - Posizione 26
x IPOTESI META ATEA
Nota - Posizione 26
X CI SI INGANNA SULLA PROPRIA CREDENZA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27
meta-atheism doesn't entail atheism: it's a view not about God and whether He exists, but about whether people actually believe that He does
Nota - Posizione 28
x META ATEISMO E ATEISMO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 32
I shall mean by ` God.'
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 34
God is a psychological being, i.e., a being capable of some or other mental state, such as knowing, caring, loving, disapproving.
Nota - Posizione 34
x DEF DIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 37
If you think of God as something other than a psychological being of this sort, or that talk of God is simply a metaphorical or "symbolic" way of talking about love, the possibility of goodness, or the Big Bang, then much of what I say may not apply.
Nota - Posizione 39
x CHI NN CREDE IN DIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 44
Now, of course, I don't think that most religious people are in fact schizophrenic. Nor do I think all religious people are being insincere. Rather, the meta-atheism I want to defend is the view that many people who sincerely claim to believe in God are self-deceived, which, as some of the other cases I've already mentioned show, can be entirely "normal," and even morally benign (nothing like a little self-deception to keep an otherwise querulous family together!)
Nota - Posizione 47
x SCHOZOFRENIA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 59
All that I really hope to do here is to put my hypothesis in the running, calling attention to a number of striking peculiarities of religious thinking
Nota - Posizione 60
9 INDIZI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 61
nine:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 61
(1) Tolerance of Otherwise Delusional Claims:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 62
were the claims about a supernatural entity who loves, commands, scolds, forgives, etc., to be encountered in a fashion removed from the rich, "respectable" aesthetic and cultural traditions in which they are standardly presented, they would be widely regarded as psychotic.
Nota - Posizione 64
x LE STESSE AFFERMAZIONI INCONTRATE FUORICONTESTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 68
think about what you would make of someone -again in any other context- who said they could really change wine into blood, or bread into flesh,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 82
(2) Reliance on Texts:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 82
Many of these otherwise outlandish religious claims derive an air of legitimacy, of course, from their reliance on a specific set of usually archaic texts, whose claims are presented dogmatically
Nota - Posizione 84
x IL DOGMA DEI TESTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 84
The texts standardly serves as the sole basis for various claims
Nota - Posizione 85
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 88
there are no such texts or creeds for common sense or science.
Nota - Posizione 88
x SCIENZA O SENSO COMUNE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 94
(3) Detail Resistence:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 101
absence of evidence, especially when you look for it, becomes evidence of absence, and most people know this, which is one good reason they have for not believing in fairies or little green men controlling us from Mars.
Nota - Posizione 103
x RUOLO DELL EVIDENZA MATERIALE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 103
religious claims are oddly detail-resistant. Perhaps the most dramatic cases are the claims about creation.
Nota - Posizione 104
x LA FEDE È SEMPRE LA STESSA NONOSTANTE LE EVIDENZE CAMBINO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 115
Of course, theologians do discuss details. As I mentioned, I'm not a scholar of theology, however, I'm willing to wager that few of the details they discuss are of the evidential sort that we ordinarily expect of ordinary claims about the world, i.e. claims that link the theological to crucial data
Nota - Posizione 116
x TEOLOGI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 123
Indeed, I find there are three standard reactions: either the claims are not to be understood literally (in which case, fine: they are not literally believed); or they appeal to "mystery" (to which I will return shortly); but more often they simply giggle or make some other indication that I can't possibly be asking these questions seriously. The questions are regarded as somehow inappropriate.
Nota - Posizione 126
x LE TRE REAZIONI PIÙ COMUNI A EVIDENZE SCOMODE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 130
(4) Similarity to Fiction
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 130
this resistence to detail is strikingly similar to the same resistence one encounters in dealing with fiction. It seems as silly to ask the kind of detailed questions about God as it does for someone to ask for details about fictional characters, e.g.: What did Hamlet have for breakfast?
Nota - Posizione 132
x SOSPETTE SOMIGLIANZE CON LA FINZIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 135
(5) Merely Symbolic Status of the Stories:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 136
Take for example the tremendously moving story of the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, and ask yourself whether, were we actually trying to achieve justice in the world, his "dying for our sins" would be even remotely appropriate.
Nota - Posizione 137
x ES RISCATTO DAL PECCATO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 138
supposing that this kind of proxy atonement did make sense, the question should certainly arise in the specific case of Jesus whether He the actually did suffer enough! I don't mean to say that His betrayal and crucifixion weren't pretty awful; but can they really "balance" all the horror of Ghenghis Kahn, WWII, the Gulag, or what death squads routinely do to their victims in Latin America? These are crucifixions multiplied tens of millions fold.
Nota - Posizione 141
c ERRORE!!
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 142
Mere symbols, after all, needn't share the magnitudes of what they symbolize.
Nota - Posizione 143
c
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 143
(6) Appeals to "Mystery":
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 143
Confronted with many of the above oddities, many theists claim God is a "mystery" --indeed, I once heard a famous convert, Malcolm Muggeridge, claim "mystery" as his reason for believing!
Nota - Posizione 144
x MISTERO OVUNQUE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 145
Imagine the police arresting you merely because it's a "mystery" how you could have murdered Smith! Just so:
Nota - Posizione 146
x NOI DI SOLITO NN CREDIAMO DOVE C È MISTERO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 163
(7) Betrayal by Reactions and Behavior:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 163
People's reactions and behavior --for example, grief, mourning at a friend's death-- do not seem seriously affected by the claimed prospects of a Hereafter.
Nota - Posizione 164
x TROPPO DOLORE E DISAPPUNTO X CHI CREDE NELL AL DI LÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 170
Or consider petitionary prayer: why aren't people who believe in it disposed to have the National Institute of Health do a controlled study (say, of the different sorts of prayer) as they would were they interested in the claim whether soy beans cure cancer (5) And, in any case, why do none of them expect prayer to cure wooden legs?
Nota - Posizione 173
x CONTROLLO SCIENTIFICO DELLE PREGHOERE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 174
(8) Patent Sophistry:
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 175
There is a small industry of efforts in certain philosophical circles to show that religious belief is no worse off than our beliefs about the existence of the external world or other minds.
Nota - Posizione 176
x PLANTINGA ELUDE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 181
Any defense of religious knowledge would need to present a theory that meets both of these demands, and, for some of the reasons I've sketched, it is difficult to see how it could do so, whether or not it's "foundational." In particular, the question is not whether there are or aren't "basic" or foundational beliefs, but why on earth anyone should think that belief in the existence of anything with the extravagant implications of God should figure among them;
Nota - Posizione 184
x CI VUOLE ALTRO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 188
(9) Appeals to "faith":
Nota - Posizione 188
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 188
Indeed, most religious people readily recognize the failure of evidence but then go on to claim that religious beliefs are matters of "faith,"
Nota - Posizione 189
X KIRKEGAARD E COMPAGNIA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 190
Tertullian or Kirkegaard,
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 195
issues of faith do arise precisely in those cases in which a person is asked to manifest their loyalty to a person or cause despite the evidence that might otherwise undermine it:
Nota - Posizione 196
x FEDE CONTRO L EVIDENZA
