Again, why should I or anyone else care what atheism meant in 1965? Unless you believe that words should never change meaning, then the only thing that matters is how the word is used now.
The point is, again, who cares? If you have an issue with the way the word is used now, let’s have it.
Here's the problem as I see it. Christians have an epistemology that is partially dependent on outside forces (i.e. God, in this case) to orchestrate for the potential believer additional information and/or relevance that is not typically available to the average, mortal man or woman. This has always been the epistemic claim for Christianity, and it is clearly laid out in the Bible.
But hold on, here comes the Enlightenment, and not only does Humanity start measuring all things by itself and its own reasoning, Christians also begin to fall in line with this overall appeal to having to prove this belief, that belief and whatever faith they might exude has to be demonstrated by means of "pure reason," whatever "pure reason" really is. So, now we have Christians running around with Enlightenment notions built into their formerly revelation dependent epistemologies, smacking others over the head as to the 'obviousness' of the Christian faith. [...and believe me when I say that I just
Kant wrap my head around this kind of over assurance of belief
]
But hold the phone, now in the 2Oth-21st century, Skeptics and Atheists have made a move to further the overall epistemic quandry in which we all find ourselves, making it ultra difficult for those who might attempt to attain even a shred of religious faith, and they do this by not only defining "faith" as an epistemology (which it never was really before), BUT ALSO by further developing their self-promoted definitions of just what it is to be 'non-believing,' thus enabling themselves to epistemically bunker down and hole-up into an otherwise unreachable [and unbreachable] position. Because we ALL KNOW that the burden of proof ... is upon the Christian to demonstrate his or her faith (even though originally, faith was not an epistemology, and as I mentioned above, it used to be recognized that Christian belief requires an epistemic component IN ADDITION to whatever analyses we might apply to whatever evidence we do have available to us. Needlesss to say, all of this has had the effect of making the evidence become ....PRESTO!!! no evidence.)
So, forgive me if I seem to oscillate between having sympathy on one side of the epistemic equation where I understand that non-believers just don't feel they can believe, and then having irritation on the other side of the equation where I react against atheists when they attempt to apply the same epistemic constructs for the purpose of criticizing and even completely downing Christian faith.
And that's how I see it, Todd.
Oh, and one last thing. I think that when the smoke clears, and if I'm correct about the epistemic (evidentiary) misapplications made on both sides--by both modern atheists and a lot of modern Christians--then if we can recognize this, we can stop hemming and hawing at each other, stop pointing fingers at each other, stop implying that the other side is ALWAYS irrational, and otherwise stop trying to make the other side "cry uncle" on all social and political fronts.
2PhiloVoid
