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I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but sometimes there’s no help. Where has Susan Neiman been all my life? Alonzo Fyfe of Atheist Ethicist describes and links to this video (Session 6) of the Princeton-based author of Evil in Modern Thought speaking at last year’s “Beyond Belief” conference.
The important division in the world today, Neiman argues, is not between believers and nonbelievers. The division is between those who follow the heroic Abraham of the Sodom and Gomorrah episode, who knows when God is about to do wrong and tells him so in fear and trembling, and those who follow the obedient Abraham of the second story, who does whatever he’s told whether it makes sense or not. To put it another way, one kind of belief in God requires you to make sense of the world; the other kind requires you to give up on sense itself.
