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Why religious people always misunderstand atheism
One cannot help but feel a little sorry for Richard Dawkins. He has spent much of his life attempting to elucidate some of the principles of rational atheism, and this has led him to spend many fruitless hours conversing with religious people — always with the same outcome. There is something intrinsic in such conversations that leads perpetually to incomprehension on the part of the religious person. As this same phenomenon repeats itself wherever and whenever a thoughtful rational person attempts to converse with a religious person, it is worth exploring why the impasse exists and is hardly ever circumvented.
For the thoughtful person it is immediately obvious that the thousands (or perhaps millions) of gods, ghouls, and goblins we humans have invented over the years are all fundamentally the same and all fundamentally the results of an imaginative projection of our own characteristics. There has never been a god, ghoul, or goblin that is not fundamentally human and it’s a cliché to note that we always invent gods in our own image. That’s why religious beliefs are always banal, predictable, and most often squalid. Yet religious people are cut off from this basic observation. For them, their particular god, ghoul, or goblin is the only possible one and despite perhaps knowing abstractly that (a) their…
