Anyway, I love them so much, I think I'm gonna share an article every week (or try to anyway).
"Faithful Apostasy" by Daniel Silliman hit the nail on so many things that have been in my head recently. It's a criticism of a study done by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola of "Preachers Who Are Not Believers." I'm tempted to just copy and paste the whole article because I think it's so great, but I don't think that would be very Golden Rule-ish of me, so please head on over to KtB for the full article. It's worth your time.
In a nutshell, Silliman chastises Dennett and LaScola for dismissing the nuance in the way the participants in their study believe, and instead, just claiming that they just don't actually believe at all. He calls out the narrowness of the study's spectrum of what it's possible to believe about God and the arrogance of claiming to know what another person believes better than the person him/herself. A few excerpts:
--------[They] quote Karen Armstrong’s statement that, “God is not a being at all.” But instead of understanding that to mean God is more than a being among beings, or that God is Being itself, they take it as a veiled declaration of atheism. They react as if Armstrong is trying to disguise her true unbelief behind tricky language.
--------Dennett and LaScola are mono(a)theists: they claim to know exactly what God is and they call it hooey. For them God is ridiculous, and they insist on their simple definitions even if that means dismissing the accounts of more reasonable beliefs offered by those who hold them.
Even if all the theists are really mugs playing a mad game of absurdism and obscurantism, rationally engaging with them requires responding to the most sophisticated among them. Rejecting a mischaracterized God that isn’t worth taking seriously isn’t much of a feat.
I grew up with a very narrow, and frankly absurd, definition of what God was. I've rejected that definition, but I've come across many more ideas of what God could be, and I'm not done exploring that.
