Lots of strawmen, red herrings, and leaps of logic in your reply.
From the dictionary: the word “sheep” can connote “a meek, unimaginative, or easily led person.” So we’re not talking about the animal itself.
Your second paragraph is a red herring. I’m not a positivist, and I’ve argued at length against scientism and positivism in my writings. I’ve even rejected new atheism because of its scientistic presumptions. So no, I don’t subscribe to the falsifiability criterion of meaning. You just made that up out of whole cloth instead of reading what I’ve written. Of course, you’re not obliged to read anything, but in that case, you should avoid commenting out of ignorance. Dealing with your misrepresentations is just a waste of my time.
Your third paragraph is another misrepresentation. Who cares what you think the sentence means when you haven’t even read the context? I explain its meaning in the paragraph and in the article. It means that the distinction between “artificial” and “natural” isn’t the same as the metaphysical one between supernature and nature. The artificial can arise from the natural (from the wilderness), regardless of whether there are miracles in the metaphysical sense. So that’s the ambiguity. Mystery solved.
Your fourth paragraph is quite the strawman. Nope, I’m not a nihilist. Nope, I don’t argue that nothing matters, as the two articles linked below demonstrate.
Your fifth is ad hominem.
Your sixth seems to be directed towards a figment of your imagination. Where did I say that all religions are false because they contradict each other? I’ve written various criticisms in specific articles on different religions. Some are on Buddhism, some on Judaism and Islam, some on Hinduism and Daoism, some on New Age consumerism, and many are on Christianity (and on different Christian sects). The multiplicity of religions does pose a well-known problem for exclusive theists, but there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to problems with exoteric religions. I don’t put all my eggs in one basket.
Your seventh is more conjecture about what I think about religions. Instead of trying to read the tea leaves, you could have read more before commenting or you could have asked me direct questions in the comments. The third and fourth articles linked below touch on what religions have in common (the Axial Age and the shamanic, entheogenic background).
Your eighth is another strawman or red herring. I emphasize existentialism and thus the nonrational basis of our worldviews. But I reject postmodern relativism. Not all emotions or leaps of faith are equally valid. We should do our best even when reason fails us. Ethical and aesthetic standards can be brought to bear.
You say heretics and pagans were persecuted because they seemed untrustworthy. I’m pretty sure a lot worse can be said about the Church’s motives. Paranoia, tribal demonizations, gullibility, materialistic greed, groupthink mania, institutional arrogance, racism, and patriarchal sexism all likely had a hand too.
Your tenth paragraph continues the earlier misrepresentation. My goal isn’t to demonstrate that all life is absurd. On the contrary, I said a fully enlightened, transhuman perspective would be required to perceive life’s complete absurdity. That would amount to the atheistic equivalent of a theophany. My goal is to encourage us to pursue tragically heroic acts in defiance of life’s absurdity and of the natural world’s monstrousness. That’s roughly just humanistic existentialism.
Your eleventh paragraph is based on another misrepresentation. Where do I say that pure reason is the apex of human activity? I emphasize creativity more than reason. Indeed, I deflate objective reason as Faustian instrumentalism (see the fifth link). Some beliefs in God are quite lame, though, for the reasons I set out in my articles, as opposed to the strawman nonsense you invent out of whole cloth.
I talk about the problems with happiness in yet more articles, but I won’t bother adding them to the list of links.
Your second-last paragraph is amusing. Trust a Christian with a rifle in a warzone? Such compromised, post-Jesus Christianity can spiral off into all kinds of zany directions if “Christians” can get past Jesus’s obvious pacifism. But making it up as you go along is fine because it showcases the aesthetic basis of our core beliefs and actions. It’s just more honourable to recognize that we’re being artistic when we’re shaping our religion to suit our sensibilities and the current zeitgeist, as opposed to being dogmatic and to pretending we’re still in debt to what might have happened in Judea long ago.
That paragraph also perpetuates the stereotype that humanistic atheists are less reliable than theists, whereas the opposite is easily demonstrated. Precisely because atheists think there’s likely no afterlife, they’d be less willing to waste this life if they could help it, such as by not committing crimes and potentially going to prison. Theistic believers can ignore this earthly life if they think they’re on God’s side, because they have an infinite afterlife ahead of them. Indeed, Jesus said his followers should renounce happiness in this life and sacrifice themselves, for just that reason.
Humanistic atheists might also recognize our common humanity and existential predicament, as opposed to exacerbating tribal differences with crude, exploitative, theistic reifications. Also, utopian theism supplies believers with the excuse to commit all manner of grotesque crimes as means justified by supposedly absolute ends. See, for example, the suicide bombers.
