religion is positive, atheism is negative

I don’t think the church’s monopoly on literacy was because they discouraged it in anybody else, who like you said, were not particularly interested in it. But if you happened to be a scholarly type there was nowhere to go but the church. Literacy doesn’t do you any good if there is nobody else around to be literate with. Besides copying the bible and religious writings over and over the church also needed literacy to run their empire.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of atheists. There are the guys who think about it and reason things out, and come to the conclusion that there is no god, and then there are the natural born skeptics who pretty much don’t believe anything anybody tells them. Back then I think that anybody that was of a learned bent was a member of the clergy, and if he came to the conclusion that there was no god, he knew enough to keep it to himself to keep his job, and the natural born skeptic was likely a peasant and didn’t know how to read or write.

Atheism used to be a term thrown around to mean anybody who didn’t follow your religion. The Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists all called each other atheists. Guys like Spinoza, whose philosophy was abstract were called atheists, even though they didn’t deny god, they just made him a cosmic marshmallow. Maybe the turn of the century was when people first started openly calling themselves atheists. There was a kind of god is dead furor in the early sixties, but that had nothing to do with the hippies. The hippies were basically new agers or maybe pagan, but they were certainly not atheists. There is no organized atheism. There may be organizations composed of atheists, but they hardly include all atheists. Atheism is not, contrary to what many claim, like a religion. A religion is positive, and atheism is negative.

There were no pagans who claimed Abraham. These pagans you speak of were likely sects of the Abrahamic religions who were declared pagans by the more orthodox believers.

How do you know what the story of Abraham means? It was written thousands of years ago, by some stranger who lived in times much different than ours? Oh I’m sorry, I see you said, that you think it means so and so. Sometimes I don’t read what you write closely enough, my bad. Anyway that is one of the things I like about the bible, the stories that can be used for examples to make some point.

Authority and rebellion are in everything. Everyone is a rebel when they want to overthrow the king, and when they become the king they they become the authority. It’s not the authority of the church that makes it closed minded, it is the fact that it claims to know pretty much everything that is knowable, and any new thing can only be explained in its own terms, like Marxism, Freudism, many other isms.

Oh you deists, you are as bad as the agnostics, no I take that back, nobody is as bad as the agnostics. But you deists, and correct me if I’m wrong, believe that god doesn’t take much of a hand in the affairs of the world, and doesn’t talk to you, but then you claim to know what he wants. How do you know if he doesn’t talk to you. And then if you figure it out by talking among yourselves, what do you need god for?