Dean Esmay
Member
I find some of the assumptions here interesting, simply because a lot of what people used to all know has been forgotten. "God" as a concept, the THEOS in Greek, has been understood since Before Christ as not belonging to any one religion. Plato believed in the THEOS, the GOD, the ultimate source of everything. So did Socrates. So did Aristotle. Many Greeks, when they came across the Hebrew scriptured, immediately recognized the concept of God in there with the various names like YHWH and Elohim were the same idea. Early Christians like Justin Martyr and Polycarp argued that the Christian God was God. Most theologists think the Zoroastrian Aharu-Mazda and the Iwazu of the Bantu philosophers and the idea of the Brahman of deep Hinduism all are the same basic idea once universally known as "GOD"--the ultimate source of all reality, the thing that's making time and space go right now: GOD. That's what the word MEANS.
So it's interesting we now see an "atheist" quoting Plato and not knowing that Plato not only wrote extensively about God, which he believed in, but that he described why he thought God was a necessary condition for the universe to make sense at all, for physical OR moral OR ethical phenomena, or for even ideas themselves to exist. It is very strange we now all think that if you say "God" you're going to be offending someone's religion, when for thousands of years, this idea of God as the Ultimate Source That's Making Reality Go, has been bedrock knowledge. 800 years ago, in describing the Prime Mover and the source of all reality and motion, visible or invisible, physical or intangible, said, "This ALL PEOPLE call God."
You may think I'm crazy, but I think there's a genuine GOD-PHOBIA underlying a lot of "skeptic" behavior. And I say that as someone who is very much a recovered Atheist.
So it's interesting we now see an "atheist" quoting Plato and not knowing that Plato not only wrote extensively about God, which he believed in, but that he described why he thought God was a necessary condition for the universe to make sense at all, for physical OR moral OR ethical phenomena, or for even ideas themselves to exist. It is very strange we now all think that if you say "God" you're going to be offending someone's religion, when for thousands of years, this idea of God as the Ultimate Source That's Making Reality Go, has been bedrock knowledge. 800 years ago, in describing the Prime Mover and the source of all reality and motion, visible or invisible, physical or intangible, said, "This ALL PEOPLE call God."
You may think I'm crazy, but I think there's a genuine GOD-PHOBIA underlying a lot of "skeptic" behavior. And I say that as someone who is very much a recovered Atheist.