Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

> my experience, many atheists also seem to proselytize with a religious fervor as well

That is a total non-sequitur since lots of religions does not proselytize. So clearly this is not a defining quality of religion but rather a characteristic shared between some religions and some non-religious movements and ideologies.

i think its a fair condensation. the discussion of google is pretty incidental and given the lack of any actual official connection to GOOG, i think we should be shrewd in our assessment; it's in the title to sell more books.

Exactly. It's "reasoned", and it's easy to think that reason is everything worth thinking about. That is, after all, reasonable.

But a huge swath of human activity isn't reasoned. A lot of human activity is spent just sitting around wondering what it all means, trying to live a "good" life, and wondering for that matter what "good" even means. Those are unscientific questions (or at least, we lack anything close to a science for discussing them), but it doesn't make them unimportant.

Those are the questions the "continentals" are usually working on. In my opinion, they're at their worst when they're trying to sound analytical about it. The more rigorous they get, the more they make it clear that they're actually pretty bad at rigor. Derrida is the most obvious example, and honestly I have only the word of his defenders that he's somehow trying to undercut rationality rather than simply being a charlatan.

In the end I treat the continentals the way I treat fans of soccer: I'm glad you're having a good time and finding meaning in what you're doing. That's worth it. But I'm gonna get irritated if you insist that I must find meaning in it as well. Maybe I will, maybe I won't, but the harder you insist the less interested I get.

The flavor and style of respect is what makes it Christian.

Most who claim "respect for universal human rights" as their motto actually have a belief system that's heavily influenced by specifically Western sources. When the rubber meets the road, their biases, blind spots and points of emphasis will reveal this.

Someone from a different cultural tradition will have a different set of biases while still believing in "universal human rights". Up to and including which rights are more important when they come into conflict.

But you wrote:

"The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian.""

Where you effectively claim that "Christian religion" can be one where somebody is even one who doesn't believe in supernatural. Because... some other values count too?

Can really somebody who doesn't believe that Jesus is a "Christ" (the anointed one, a "Messiah", it's not a surname but the specific role in the universe of believers) be a Christian? And somebody who doesn't believe in any supernatural deity at all?

I for example admit I grew up in the area where traditionally most of the inhabitants were real Christian believers, but I surely am not a Christian. The Church would surely not accept that claim.

Edit: user keiferski answers below that to him "it's unclear what "supernatural" means in this context." Let me write that even more clearly: I don't believe in the existence of any supernatural deity, i.e. one which can influence the events on Earth that occur among humans or one which can "change the rules" how the universe functions, as established by the scientific experiments and research. I also define the belief in life after death as a belief in supernatural, and I assert that I don't have that belief. Also, the area I grew up was never inhabited by majority of "protestants." I was also never in life an object of any religious ceremony (and I consider myself lucky for growing up in such an environment, learning how most of people in the U.S. live). Most of the people I know who were baptized as children later officially renounced the Church, and the Church wiped them out of its records. All of them never went to any religious school, just state schools (some of them had a subject where they explicitly learned about religion though). People I knew who already died don't have any religious sign on their graves, and didn't believe they will "live" after their death. People who live together with their partners and even have children didn't even officially register in the state institutions, and they even less had any ceremony in any church. It's not "complicated" at all. And I'm not even some special exception -- exactly because not every area in the western world functions like an average "contemporary American" would expect. What is that that those people in my environment and I "do" which you believe could make us "Christians" then? (I also admit I know a few people in the circle of people around me, a very small minority, who do say they believe in Jesus Christ and that they have Christian morale, and attempt to behave according to that, while also not being consistent though their life. But they are a minority, and like I've said, even they don't "do" consistently what "the religion" would "expect" from them).