{"id":2080,"date":"2008-02-11T12:08:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-11T12:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=2080"},"modified":"2008-02-11T12:08:00","modified_gmt":"2008-02-11T12:08:00","slug":"reasonable-atheism-7-a-brief-comment-about-structure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=2080","title":{"rendered":"Reasonable atheism (7): a brief comment about structure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I thought it would be worthwhile to say a little something about &#8216;where am I going with this?&#8217; as it may not be clear. Just as my Virgin Birth tirade evolved from what I thought was going to be two posts into a great long series of over a dozen, so too this sequence I now expect to stretch over at least twenty posts. This is how I see the structure of it panning out:<br \/>&#8211; first some conceptual ground clearing, especially on the difference between atheisms (mostly now done);<br \/>&#8211; then I&#8217;m going to talk about how wisdom is taught, and how &#8216;wisdom language&#8217; and traditions function, not least in neurological terms;<br \/>&#8211; then I&#8217;m going to talk about the nature of theological language, when it&#8217;ll become clearer (I hope) why I&#8217;m talking about wisdom so much &#8211; I see theological language as a means of forming wise people;<br \/>&#8211; then I&#8217;m going to talk in more specific terms about what it means to be a Christian, not least in terms of the claim that Jesus is wisdom incarnate, and, therefore, what a Christian is actually committed to claiming over against the humourless atheist critique. This is where the &#8216;meat&#8217; of positive assertion will come; I&#8217;m holding it off until the end because I don&#8217;t believe it can be properly understood without the prior clarifications.<\/p>\n<p>Along the way I want to disinter some &#8216;theological mistakes&#8217; made by humourless atheists (and many Christians). This is my list at the moment:<br \/>1. Why God does not &#8216;exist&#8217; (this will explain the basic principle of idolatry).<br \/>2. The fallacy of &#8216;I only don&#8217;t believe in one more God than you&#8217;.<br \/>3. Christians don&#8217;t believe in &#8216;the supernatural&#8217;<br \/>4. The fallacy of &#8220;You&#8217;re just a liberal and you don&#8217;t believe anything, you&#8217;re not really a Christian&#8221;.<br \/>5. The nature of magic and superstition.<br \/>If there are any others that people can think of I&#8217;d be happy to add them in.<\/p>\n<p><span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I thought it would be worthwhile to say a little something about &#8216;where am I going with this?&#8217; as it may not be clear. Just as my Virgin Birth tirade evolved from what I thought was going to be two &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=2080\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-philosophy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-xy","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}