Talking About Faith

4:01 pm - Wed, Oct 24, 2012: 2 notes

Talking About Faith

Leah Libresco, a formerly atheist and now Catholic blogger, uses Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition as a launchpad for a discussion on the different vocabularies of atheists, modern Christians, and traditional Christians. She writes:

I’m noodling over the idea that atheism and Modern Christianity are much closer to having a common frame of reference than either is to Catholicism or Orthodoxy…

[T]he Catholics and Orthodox I was talking to [at Yale] used some of the same words as the Modern Christians, but they meant radically different things. It’s basically like having an argument in French, except this dialect of French is composed almost entirely of false cognates, so it’s pretty easy to fail to notice that your opponent is speaking French instead of English.

It is sort of head-exploding to think that atheists and post-Reformation Christians might find it easier to speak to one another than, say, an evangelical and a Catholic. Even if their vocabularies are the same, Libresco seems to be claiming that they mask drastically different conceptual frameworks.

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