Feb 29, 2012
Why is Heidegger so obscure?
What Heidegger does by writing as he does is to remind us that the things of which he writes are not simple and so his writing points us to them and triggers our thinking about them. We then ask if his ambiguous utterances are the best we can do but we know they are far better than naive thinking that obscures the obscurity of Being.
Feb 24, 2012
The varieties of non-religious belief - Alain de Botton and Richard Rorty
Despite the New Atheists' denials that they are any sort of believers at all, atheist beliefs about God and religion seem to come in many varieties. I'm thinking of three: the mad, the glad and the sad.
The mad atheist (think Richard Dawkins' brand of New Atheism) is cranky as hell at religion; the glad atheist (think Alain de Botton and Richard Rorty--more below) floats through the godless life with nary a care for the issues at stake, and the sad atheist knows that the stakes are high but cannot believe in the One who might offer the ground of all being to quell our anxieties.
Currently I'm wrestling with two non-believers of the glad variety--Richard Rorty and Alain de Botton--similar in their conclusions although while de Botton takes a short cut, Rorty takes the long road via a lifetime of serious thinking.
I'm in the process of writing a review of de Botton's Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion. (Published February 2012 by Hamish Hamilton.) RFA's first line is a shot over the bows of Dawkins and Co. as well as the seriously religious: "The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true."
For de Botton, the tragedy of atheism is to have thrown out some of the wonderful trappings of religion with the dirty bathwater that consists of arguments about religious truth claims. "Of course no religions are true in any god-given sense," says de Botton in the second sentence of the book and then proceeds cheerily to ignore the question that serious thinkers, atheist and religious (and yes, fundamentalists on both sides too) think that matters.
More soon...
The mad atheist (think Richard Dawkins' brand of New Atheism) is cranky as hell at religion; the glad atheist (think Alain de Botton and Richard Rorty--more below) floats through the godless life with nary a care for the issues at stake, and the sad atheist knows that the stakes are high but cannot believe in the One who might offer the ground of all being to quell our anxieties.
Currently I'm wrestling with two non-believers of the glad variety--Richard Rorty and Alain de Botton--similar in their conclusions although while de Botton takes a short cut, Rorty takes the long road via a lifetime of serious thinking.
I'm in the process of writing a review of de Botton's Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion. (Published February 2012 by Hamish Hamilton.) RFA's first line is a shot over the bows of Dawkins and Co. as well as the seriously religious: "The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true."
For de Botton, the tragedy of atheism is to have thrown out some of the wonderful trappings of religion with the dirty bathwater that consists of arguments about religious truth claims. "Of course no religions are true in any god-given sense," says de Botton in the second sentence of the book and then proceeds cheerily to ignore the question that serious thinkers, atheist and religious (and yes, fundamentalists on both sides too) think that matters.
More soon...
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