Saturday Dec 04, 2010

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"Tell me, how does god choose, who's prayers he will refuse?"

Tom Waits
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shiz:

tareva said:
......that general era of history is replete with examples of what i think of as euphemistic atheists....pretty hard stepping all the way out of a closet when stake burning is fresh on the mind....anyone who doesn't cut them some slack isn't identifying all that well....



Cut them some slack? Sure. I'm not in the habit of bickering with non-dogmatic deists. But call them an atheist when they weren't? To me, that's offensive to their memory - as offensive as when Christians try to make them out to have been Christian (though there, at least, both Franklin and Jefferson did indeed name themselves that, even if their version of it clearly falls short of the usual definition). To imagine that any of them could have held a "secret atheism" and not been public about it, is to ignore the many controversial truths they had no fear in proclaiming, and indeed staking their lives upon (not to mention, to ignore the many decidedly deistic statements they made).
tareva:
"...as offensive as when Christians try to make them out to have been Christian..."

Precisely my point. That's what they do all the time....latch onto any microscopic hint of religiosity, then run with it. Suddenly, deism becomes christian forefathers.

In my gut I know that most of those deists, having a conversation, in private, at your home, after dinner, would be atheists at heart. It took 300 years of painful transition to get to where we are now, when it's finally somewhaat tolerable for atheists to speak freely.

Sorry, but I have to think that deism was atheism in disguise. And I'm going to resist any efforts to whitewash that into the faith camp.

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