What you call an idol is what billions of religious believers around the world worship. If this is not God, then they are presumably all atheists, and only a few non-believers like me are true theists! It seems that for you belief in God can mean no more than a commitment to fairly impersonal values such as truth and decency. I don't think these are very useful definitions of theism or of atheism. By atheism I mean the conscious disbelief in a personal god, such as is worshipped by billions of believers around the world, and this is a perfectly reasonable and familiar definition of atheism; and I am an atheist on this definition. The deity is conceived in the major theistic traditions as possessed of personal characteristics; for example, he is loving and merciful, as well as almighty. I hold that such a personal god is inconsistent with the universe as it presents itself to humans; that ultimate reality is not spiritual, but material. The universe displays no care for humans whatever, it displays no teleology, it is governed by law throughout, and operates mechanistically; and no deity and no rituals or prayers can influence its course. If there were a supernatural being, he is perfectly useless to us. All the points you've raised so far dance around this central point without addressing it. As for abstractions such as being itself, I find the notion perfectly unintelligible and perfectly useless. A few intellectuals like David Bentley Hart may kick up a dust with words, and, seduced by their own rhetoric, mistakenly believe that these words have significance. I know what it is for something to exist or be a fact; I haven't the slightest notion what Being itself is supposed to denote. ![]() |