Ok, slightly silly thread title, but it'll do.
I joined this site a while ago, but haven't joined in yet as I've not found much in this section that isn't four pages or so long that I can be bothered to go through in detail; so I thought I'd start one here and see where that takes me.
I'm an atheist who is fascinated by religion, and I am also very keen to empathise with religious views, and regard them with much value. Someone like Dawkins attacks faith at a literalist base value, and it come across, to me, that he has no imagination and doesn't actually know what he's talking about regarding the complexities of religious belief.
To understand many people's religious ideas it is vital to at least see things from their perspective, in order to understand the idea; almost like 'extreme philosophy' whereby you have to get your head totally around something that makes no sense to you.
All religion has an intrinsic value; by this I don't mean the herd mentallity of simple dogmatic religion, but that religion itself is a necessary part of our nature. Simply put it cannot be separated from our species, when regarded from any perspective, be that anthropological, historical, social, psychological, archaeological, etc.
So, as the title says, I love religion, and think that many (maybe most) atheists don't know what they are talking about when criticising the ideas.
I joined this site a while ago, but haven't joined in yet as I've not found much in this section that isn't four pages or so long that I can be bothered to go through in detail; so I thought I'd start one here and see where that takes me.
I'm an atheist who is fascinated by religion, and I am also very keen to empathise with religious views, and regard them with much value. Someone like Dawkins attacks faith at a literalist base value, and it come across, to me, that he has no imagination and doesn't actually know what he's talking about regarding the complexities of religious belief.
To understand many people's religious ideas it is vital to at least see things from their perspective, in order to understand the idea; almost like 'extreme philosophy' whereby you have to get your head totally around something that makes no sense to you.
All religion has an intrinsic value; by this I don't mean the herd mentallity of simple dogmatic religion, but that religion itself is a necessary part of our nature. Simply put it cannot be separated from our species, when regarded from any perspective, be that anthropological, historical, social, psychological, archaeological, etc.
So, as the title says, I love religion, and think that many (maybe most) atheists don't know what they are talking about when criticising the ideas.
