Anti-theistic strawmen?

Do you value these figures for their psychological insight or for their theology?Do you think Krishna really spoke to Arjuna? Or does that not matter to you?For myself, I get a great deal from the Bhagavad Gita, from Buddhism and from Eliot, but however sophisticated they may be, that doesn't mean any of their supernatural claims are true.And that's the rub really. That's why critics say Dawkins is being naive in his argument, because he's treating such supernatural claims literally, as though it were simply a matter of true or not true. For a sophisticated theologian, those supernatural claims are symbolic, not literal, so attacking them as not being literally true is naive.If it were as simple as that, though, we wouldn't be having this argument, would we? I don't have any problems with the symbolic truths of religion - they've been very important in my life, despite my atheism. And as long as you don't argue that Krishna is a real supernatural entity, or that we get reincarnated when we die, then there's really no difference between you and Richard Dawkins. Or is there?

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

One Man's Real... You: Krishna is real
Me: Krishna is not real
Devout Hindu: Krishna is realIf one looked only at the words here, one might think that you and the devout Hindu agree. But I think the devout Hindu might consider your 'Krishna is real' to be closer to my 'Krisha is not real' then to his own 'Krishna is real'.Now I know that ambiguity is sometimes useful for getting across complex ideas, but don't you think this is rather confusing?Competing explanations of the world The analogy with art doesn't really help. Art and science aren't at odds because art doesn't make claims about the physical world, whereas religion does. And as if to prove the point, look what happened last month in India when engineers proposed to build a canal through the geological formation known as Lord Ram's bridge:BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Hindu groups oppose canal projectEdited by JavaMan, : Typo

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Let's take the example of the Ram Setu (Rama's bridge). There's a bunch of rocks there in the sea. That's an observed reality.According to geological models the bunch of rocks is a natural formation that once linked Sri Lanka to the mainland. According to Hindu activists, the bunch of rocks is the remains of the causeway that Rama built to rescue Sita.There is a conflict here between the scientific interpretation of reality, and a literalist interpretation of the Ramayana, and the resolution of the conflict will determine whether a canal gets built in the straits between Southern India and Sri Lanka.Now don't you thing it's very odd that this kind of thing happens so regularly with religious stories? If they're intended to be symbolic, why do people so often mistake them as literal historical accounts? I mean, nobody objects to construction work in Nuneaton on the grounds that Dorothea Brooke once built a cottage there. People understand that a novel like Middlemarch is a made-up story, however symbolically meaningful. Why don't they understand religious stories in the same way?It couldn't be that religious communities have an interest in insisting on the literal interpretation, could it? Nor mine, nor Richard Dawkins. This is a strawman. (Heh, we're back on topic ). The problem comes when religion claims to be part of calculator-world, by making potentially verifiable claims about the natural world, as though Chagall were to come to us and say, 'I'm not really interested in your symbolic understanding of my painting. I want to insist that brides really can fly.' In The God Delusion (somewhere - I'm useless at finding quotations ), Dawkins says something to the effect that if, by the word 'religious', people mean the feeling they get from looking out across a mountain landscape or listening to a sublime piece of music, then he's a religious man. Is that what you mean?

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang