Hello dear blog readers! It is I once again! It's Christmas break right after Christmas, so this is the part of the story where I'm still at my parent's house, but everyone else has work and friends and such, so I'm stuck at home by myself. But that's okay! Although I really wish I had brought more books with me... I just have The Kingdom of the Cults, Wizards First Rule, and In Defense of Atheism. I finished the first two, and have restarted reading the third.
So some of you may be wondering what the heck I'm doing reading a book about Atheist and it's best arguments. Well, it's not actually my book, it's my best friend Rayne's, but the simple reason is because you can't take a fair view if you don't know both sides. So I've always done my best to read lots of books and articles and such that are against Christianity, so that I can make fair judgement. Anyhoo, today's topic is about what I've found in this book, In Defense of Atheism.
So first off, it's not exclusively against Christianity, it's arguing against the big monotheistic religions, so Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I'm not nearly as well versed in the last two, so I've mostly been ignoring what he's said about them, especially seeing as how completely wrong he's been getting his ideas about Christianity. Although I'm assuming that he's talking about Catholicism when he speaks of Christianity, so he may be actually right about it. Again, I'm not very well versed in Catholicism. My main religious interests have always been Atheism and Jehovah's Witnesses. Anyways, I'm a few pages away from halfway through, so I feel I can say with due confidence that he has no intention of actually arguing anything. I mean arguing in the logical sense of putting forth premises to support an eventual conclusion. It seems that his only mode of attack is ridicule. He has a very sarcastic tone that kind of gets on my nerves, and all he seems to be doing is listing off everything that he could find that could potentially look dumb, and then makes fun of it. For those of you not knowledgeable in logic, this is not a legitimate strategy, and yet it's often used because it's so effective. But I can say, "Oh, Atheists think life just suddenly appeared out of nowhere, that's so stupid!". While I may be correct, I have no evidence to support my claim, so anyone reading or hearing it has absolutely no reason to think that it's correct, and in fact, in my opinion, should not think it correct.
But that's enough of that! One thing I should mention is that the author (Michel Onfray) is obviously pretty well researched, as evidenced by his mounds of events and ideas he ridicules. But of the things he talks about that I do actually know about, he seems to either have the details wrong or is talking about something that is really not Christianity. For example, he mentions that "the church" is incredibly biased against any scientific discoveries, and that when the human geonome was discovered and mapped out, the church was against it. "Avoid pain and suffering? Seek a human medicine? Absolutely not!" as he put it. But I know for a fact that the project to map the human geonome was run and indeed started by a Christian man. So either he's talking about the Catholic church, which he very well may be, or he is incredibly mistaken. There was a few more things that he had wrong, but I can't remember them at the moment. But the thing that has frustrated me the most was his insistence that all monotheistic religions cry out against anyone thinking and reasoning. I can prove him wrong right now simply by the fact that I am reading his book and trying to extrapolate and evaluate his logical points, and that this has always been encouraged in every church I know. We even have a name for it, apologetics. It's a point that he raises again and again and it just frustrates me. It almost seems like he has never actually been to a church and heard any of the things that he's so adamantly against. He seems to only know all the different stereotypes and myths about Christianity that are so common nowadays. So, I will finish the book, but I'm very afraid that the misinformation that he believes is becoming more and more commonly held that it won't be long until people don't even pretend that they're listening to anything a Christian would have to say. And the book is an international bestseller, so I'm not sure I'm wrong. I guess we'll just have to prove him wrong by being actual Christians, ie. the exact opposite of what he has portrayed us as. Oh boy...
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