Sunday, December 18, 2011

The Stupid! It Burns! (not even wrong edition)

the stupid! it burns! Usually, I feature egregiously stupid, obviously hypocritical or completely mendacious posts about atheists and atheism, usually by Christians. This post isn't in any of those categories. But I wanted to feature it simply because it's just so vacuous, empty of content. It's difficult to show a lack of substantive content with a quotation or excerpt, so I'll just point you to the original article:

Thank God for atheists

I will highlight this quotation:
Every atheist I have ever read or met does not reject the God I believe in and worship and serve. The ones I know are rejecting an idol (and, of course, replacing it with one of their own making)–e.g., the God of the gaps, the deus ex machina of bare theism or the all determining reality of Calvinism.
That may be correct; who knows? What God does Olson believe in? In one sense, because there simply isn't any way to come to rational agreement about what God actually is (or even whether God is something that can even "be") every believer has a different idea about God is. There's no reason to believe that Olson's idea is any less idiosyncratic.

I suspect that Olson is on the other horn of the theist's dilemma. If they do not define God to be something definite, something about which we can talk meaningfully about truth and falsity, can it be said that they actually believe anything at all? Or are they simply repeating a vacuous slogan, or to use Seinfeld's metaphor, rooting for the shirts? If you construct your belief so that it's logically impossible to prove it wrong, you do not actually have a belief: you have defined your belief out of existence and into emptiness and vacuity.

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