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1:28

(In »Everything is religion«)

However, what really exists without a doubt, according to Dennett, is the idea of God. What could be more obvious? One can believe in that idea and fill it with any number of different values without actually believing that only the Christian God (or Baal or the Gold Calf) actually exists. Dennett calls this belief in belief. You can believe that a religious faith supplies various commodities, and thus you can, which many do, believe in this faith without thereby necessarily believing in what the faith community for this religion believes in. You can also observe how the content of the idea of God has gradually changed almost beyond recognition from the old days of the folk religions up until the present day. This was brought to light as early as towards the end the 18th century by David Hume in The Natural History of Religion, where he calls the polytheists “superstitious atheists”, since they do not recognise any phenomenon that is in accordance with “our idea of a deity”.







Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58