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(In »Everything is religion«)
There are, according to Dennett, no good reasons to believe that this God exists, and there are an almost infinite number of good reasons to believe that he does not exist. This prompts Dennett to view himself as an atheist. But he also claims, with an argument borrowed from Dawkins, that all of us, even the most devout and literal believers among theists in our cultural sphere, are in fact radical atheists when it comes to all those other gods that the rest of humanity believe in or have believed in once upon a time: Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Amun-Ra, and so on. Theists around the world thus don’t just believe in one god or the other, but also in their fantastic luck that the god they believe in within their particular congregation, and that they have been raised to believe in – as long as they do not happen to be converts – just happens to be the only god that actually exists, as opposed to all the other false gods, who thus do not exist.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58