The Atheist Christmas Carol

[nameandnature]

it's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
and holding fast with sharp realization
it's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
you are safe here you know now
...
it's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart
of feeling the full weight of our burdens
it's the season of bowing our heads in the wind
and knowing we are not alone in fear
not alone in the dark

The song is by Vienna Teng, and has almost replaced I believe in Father Christmas as my favourite Christmas song. It's captured how I feel about this time of year.

Comments

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Would you consider yourself to be an atheist?

Recently I had a discussion with mboes, who said that he thought that agnosticism was the smartest position in that to be an atheist you would need to rule God's existence out which is (for various possible reasons) impossible to do. I thought that atheism sounded more like the smart place to begin, and then go from there and listen to the arguments for theism, and then decide what to do. At the start I thought my position was quite good, but by the end I thought he may well be right - what are your thoughts?

[nameandnature]

Hmm... it depends on what you mean by the words. I think an agnostic was originally someone who claimed that it was impossible to know whether God exists, rather than someone who just said they didn't know. I don't think it is impossible to know, but I don't see any strong evidence. I admit that it's possible that some sort of God exists, although I don't see how it can be the Christian one. That probably makes me a weak atheist or an agnostic depending on how those words are defined.

Of course, as the evangelicals would point out, what matters is not whether you consider God exists in an abstract sense but whether you live your live as if he does, which I'd say I don't.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

How do you think one might know?

Are your arguments for there not being a Christian one essentially based upon the questionable morality of the Christian God, and possibly that that appears to conflict with the stuff they say about Yahweh being this nice guy?

[nameandnature]

I take bluap's view that any entity powerful enough to convince me that it is God is effectively God enough for me. So far, no such entity has troubled itself to do that, but then, if I were one, I'm not sure I'd notice the puny humans for long enough to bother.

My feeling is that the Christian God is supposed to be very interventionist (in the Bible, anyway) and yet you just don't get the same quality of intervention that you got in the good old days. The posting about the two sorts of God, which I've mentioned before, describes this quite well. I don't think the Christian God is there because as described, he should be very obvious, and he's not. Whether or not I think he's moral has no impact on whether he exists, although it obviously does impact whether I'd worship him.