Literary Discussions

Cheap clarity! I like that. It resembles Bonhoeffer's cheap grace; grace without discipleship.  One of the people in my Atheist thread is one of my "top 10" and at a certain point said the level of abstraction was over her head. If she really meant that then I achieved something today.  Each of us can fall into habits of understanding, even people high in academia. One generalization I was trying to make is that an Atheism which is defined merely by an etymology of the word A-Theist (no-gods) and has no positive content but is simply a negation has the same problem as Nihilism, no positive content... and perhaps the problem of the Tea-Baggers who define themselves as a negation of the Democratic opposition but once the enemy disappears then where is the positive content or platform which recommends the ideology. I pointed out that Australian Aborigines have practiced "Dream Time" religion for 50,000 years and one would be hard pressed to find the "evil" in Dream Time. I feel certain that Neanderthal who lived 400,000 years with a polity of anarchism had some kind of religion which did more good than harm. Now postmodern humanity has useless vestigial functions like horripulation, goosebumps when we are cold to fluff up the furry coat which we no longer possess or a metabolism which was great for hunter/gathers times of feast and famine but now produces diabetic couch-potato.  Religion did more good than harm for thousands of years but now perhaps does more harm than good.