The optimal situation is that both sides have strong arguments, but atheism’s arguments are stronger.
Why is that the “optimal” situation ? Optimal according to what metric ?
who had arrived at atheism through two-sided discourse.
I personally never was religious, but AFAIK I’m an outlier. Most atheists arrived at atheism exactly in the way that you describe; others got there by reading the Bible. I don’t have hard data to support this claim, though, so I could be wrong.
I think the holy books are kind of hampering mainstream religions, to be honest. We live in a world where pictures of distant galaxies are considered so mundane that they hardly ever make the news, and where the average person carries a supercomputer in his pocket, which connects him to a global communication network that speaks via invisible light. The average person typically wields this unimaginable power in order to inform his friends about quotidian matters such as “look at what I had for lunch today”.
Against the backdrop of this much knowledge and power, the holy books look… well… kind of drab. They tell us that the world is a tiny disc, covered by a crystalline dome, and that the space outside this dome is inhabited by vaguely humanoid super-powered beings who, despite having the power to create worlds and cover them with crystalline domes, actually do care about what we had for lunch today. Hopefully it wasn’t ham. Gods hate ham.
I understand that most theists don’t take their holy books quite that literally, and that it’s all supposed to be a big allegory for something or other, but still, it’s hard to get excited about a text that didn’t even get the shape of the Earth right.
To be fair, the crystal sphere thing doesn’t appear in any Abrahamic holy books (that I know of); it’s a feature of Aristotelian cosmology that the Church picked up during the period when it was essentially the only scholarly authority running in what used to be called Christendom and therefore needed an opinion on natural philosophy. I believe the bit in Genesis about erecting a firmament in the primordial water does ultimately refer to a traditional belief along similar lines, but it’s pretty ambiguous.
Flat-earth cosmology was known to be false by Aristotle’s time, although some monks in the early Middle Ages seem to have missed the memo—again without explicit Biblical support, though. Science in the Islamic world always used a round-earth model as far as I know, and I don’t remember reading anything in the Koran that contradicts that, although it’s been several years.
To be fair, the crystal sphere thing doesn’t appear in any Abrahamic holy books (that I know of)
Ok, I may have overreached with the “crystal” thing, but there are definitely several passages that refer to a solid dome separating two sections of the world. This dome is typically referred to as the “firmament”, and is referred to in passages outside of Genesis on occasion.
As for the flat Earth, I admit that the claims there are weaker. The Bible manages “four corners of the Earth”, but that could be a metaphor. The Devil also transports Jesus to the top of a tall mountain to show him “all the kingdoms of the Earth”, but that could’ve been an illusion.
Why is that the “optimal” situation ? Optimal according to what metric ?
I personally never was religious, but AFAIK I’m an outlier. Most atheists arrived at atheism exactly in the way that you describe; others got there by reading the Bible. I don’t have hard data to support this claim, though, so I could be wrong.
I think the holy books are kind of hampering mainstream religions, to be honest. We live in a world where pictures of distant galaxies are considered so mundane that they hardly ever make the news, and where the average person carries a supercomputer in his pocket, which connects him to a global communication network that speaks via invisible light. The average person typically wields this unimaginable power in order to inform his friends about quotidian matters such as “look at what I had for lunch today”.
Against the backdrop of this much knowledge and power, the holy books look… well… kind of drab. They tell us that the world is a tiny disc, covered by a crystalline dome, and that the space outside this dome is inhabited by vaguely humanoid super-powered beings who, despite having the power to create worlds and cover them with crystalline domes, actually do care about what we had for lunch today. Hopefully it wasn’t ham. Gods hate ham.
I understand that most theists don’t take their holy books quite that literally, and that it’s all supposed to be a big allegory for something or other, but still, it’s hard to get excited about a text that didn’t even get the shape of the Earth right.
That’s my own personal perspective, at least.
To be fair, the crystal sphere thing doesn’t appear in any Abrahamic holy books (that I know of); it’s a feature of Aristotelian cosmology that the Church picked up during the period when it was essentially the only scholarly authority running in what used to be called Christendom and therefore needed an opinion on natural philosophy. I believe the bit in Genesis about erecting a firmament in the primordial water does ultimately refer to a traditional belief along similar lines, but it’s pretty ambiguous.
Flat-earth cosmology was known to be false by Aristotle’s time, although some monks in the early Middle Ages seem to have missed the memo—again without explicit Biblical support, though. Science in the Islamic world always used a round-earth model as far as I know, and I don’t remember reading anything in the Koran that contradicts that, although it’s been several years.
Ok, I may have overreached with the “crystal” thing, but there are definitely several passages that refer to a solid dome separating two sections of the world. This dome is typically referred to as the “firmament”, and is referred to in passages outside of Genesis on occasion.
As for the flat Earth, I admit that the claims there are weaker. The Bible manages “four corners of the Earth”, but that could be a metaphor. The Devil also transports Jesus to the top of a tall mountain to show him “all the kingdoms of the Earth”, but that could’ve been an illusion.