The Sauce wrote: The Vatican is planning a new initiative to reach out to atheists and agnostics in an attempt to improve the church's relationship with non-believers. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered officials to create a new foundation where atheists will be encouraged to meet and debate with some of the Catholic Church's top theologians.
The Vatican hopes to stage a series of debates in Paris next year. But militant non-believers hoping for a chance to set senior church figures straight about the existence of God are set to be disappointed: the church has warned that atheists with high public profiles such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will not be invited.
It will be interesting to see who they get. I'm glad they don't intend to invite Dawkins or Hitchens because I'm pretty tired of listening to the both of them. I found this comment to be of interest...
The Sauce wrote: ...Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, made it clear he would not be willing to give a platform to certain prominent atheists.
The foundation, he said, would only be interested in "noble atheism or agnosticism, not the polemical kind – so not those atheists such as [Piergiorgio] Odifreddi in Italy, [Michel] Onfray in France, [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins".
Such atheists, he added, only view the truth with "irony and sarcasm" and tend to "read religious texts like fundamentalists".
I wonder who would be considered part of the 'noble atheism.' Who would you guys like to see engage Catholic Theologians in France?
It depends on what the point and desired outcome of these debates are.
I wonder what the questions/topics will be.
~Those who benefit from the status quo always attribute inequities to the choices of the underdog.~Ann Crittenden ~The Goddess is not separate from the world-She is the world and all things in it.~
just me wrote:It depends on what the point and desired outcome of these debates are.
I wonder what the questions/topics will be.
They don't want polemics, so my guess is that they'll get rather boring academic types to sit in a chair and agree for hour n half with another thirty minutes spent agreeing to disagree over a ten minute argument.
I imagine the desired outcome is to get secular-types to stop looking at the Catholic Church in abject disgust and regain lost ground in public relations gained under the last Pope. I don't know how that will go over with crowds in France, but it would probably bore most Americans to sleep. We like bare knuckle polemics with the take no prisoner's approach, not the soft Oxford style high table talks.
A very interesting fellow who has only recently come to my attention is British philosopher Julian Baggini. Haven't read much of his writing yet, but so far consider what I've read superb, and look forward to reading a lot more.
How does it get atheism wrong? When I wrote my own book on the subject, I believed that atheism was widely misunderstood as being primarily a negative attack on religious belief, on which it is parasitic.
But this can’t be right. Imagine for one moment that atheism triumphs and belief in God is eradicated. On the view that atheism needs religion, then this victory would also be atheism’s extinction. This is absurd...A second feature of atheism is that it is committed to the appropriate use of reason and evidence. In order to occupy this intellectual high ground, it is important to recognise the limits of reason, and also to acknowledge that atheists have no monopoly on it. The new atheism, however, tends to claim reason as a decisive combatant on its side only. With its talk of “spells” and “delusions”, it gives the impression that only through stupidity or crass disregard for reason could anyone be anything other than an atheist. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence,” says Dawkins, once again implying that reason and evidence are strangers to religion. This is arrogant, and attributes to reason a power it does not have.
I've read two of Baggini's books and I really wouldn't reccomend them to anyone. The content was fine, he was just a dry writer for me. Someone like Baggini is probably what the Vatican has in mind, since the UK has a number of Philosophers who are 'public intellectuals' (A.C. Grayling, Brian Magee, Roger Scruton).
There is a scholar on yourside of the globe Ray, that I'd like to see get into a discussion with a RCC Theologian. Gregory Dawesof Otago University in NZ. He's a former Priest turned Atheist who still speaks pretty highly of the Catholic Church.