Actually there is a conflict in Christian theology where they haven’t quite fully purged all the old testament competing Gods stuff, so you get a weird conflict where modern Christianity says God is the source of everything and therefore of course there are no other gods and no sources of magic power, but then you go back to the historical old testament stuff and every town has their own god and they all fight it out
Yeah, even the first commandment kind of implies that there are other gods, but disallows to follow them.
The stereotype of the athiest who adheres to physicalism, rationalism, and scientific skepticism is just that: a stereotype. It would be like questioning whether someone eating rice with a fork is really Chinese. Not necessarily wrong or unreasonable, but not necessarily right.
~Max
I gotta say, I thought your analogy was pretty damn good. How long did it take you to come up with it?
And to materialism. Materialism isn’t about believing in things according to reason and evidence (although materialism is what reason and evidence appear to support) it’s about believing that everything is wholly physical in nature (thus the alternative term of “physicalism”). One can theoretically believe in all sorts of crazy things and still be a materialist, so long as all of those things are entirely material.
The topic was fresh on my mind. Last week, at a family dim sum, my cousin’s kid used a fork to eat rice off a flat plate.
~Max