The God of Kierkegaard (Moved to AvT)
I'm a little concerned about the language used in this freethinkers' forum. It says, "All theist posts will be destroyed". That's rather un-freethinking, isn't it?
The reason I'm a bit concerned, is that it can be too easy to leap to conclusions about what someone means, just because of the language they use. Censoring people because of the words they use sounds to me like totalitarianism - which is just what religions are good at.
A case in point is Soren Kierkegaard. Would he be classified as a theist, given that he wrote so extensively and profoundly on ---- "God".... ?
But wait - what did he mean by God?
He wrote extensively about God, religion, being a Christian, and faith. Yet none of the meanings for these words he used, had anything to do with the established Christianity of his time. He actually wrote "An Attack on Christendom". He referred to God as the Infinite. He referred to religion as one's striving to live truthfully in relation to the Infinite.
Soren Kierkegaard is often mistaken as a Christian who believes in a personal God, because he wrote with extraordinary depth on one's personal relationship to God. The thing is, by God, Kierkegaard wasn't referring to a personal God, or to any finite type of God, or to a supernatural God, but to the Infinite. God, for Kierkegaard, meant literally that which is everything.
He's a good example of how religious misunderstanding goes wrong. To modern Christians, Kierkegaard is a Christian, and yet in his own day, he rejected just about everybody who called themselves a Christian - and he lived in a Christian state. Those 'Christians' rejected his views, and called him an eccentric. To modern atheists, Kierkegaard is also a Christian,and yet if anyone was an atheist, it was him.
I won't go on about Kierkegaard, because he's just an example of how some people get very fixed ideas about what words ought to mean, as if everything is determined by the majority, or common usage.
....But perhaps the warning really means, "If you prefer to let other people decide for you, please don't post here." ?