lookout, you got my half of it 99.1% right. I have nothing against philosophy per se. Or at least I see nothing wrong with mental self-pleasuring. The failure of humanist philosophy as I see it is that it discounts an entire swath of the human condition - spirituality - without so much as a second glance, yet its followers still want to be seen as pure students of that condition. And they're not. They're bringing the same bias to the table as anyone else, but it's cloaked in this scholarly, nose-in-the-air demeanor that defies anyone to call it out.
All of the philosophers mentioned were highly intelligent and certainly were very influential. My opinion is that in dismissing the concept of God from square one, they set themselves on a path that ended in a skewed vision of humanity. And whereas there are fundamentalist Christians who do the same thing, there are many intelligent, well-read, logic-minded Christian people who arrived at their conclusions by examining ALL sides of the issue. They weren't born Christian, in fact many were devout atheists throughout their professional lives. When they allowed themselves the scandalous luxury of examining God from a purely unbiased standpoint, however, many of them understood the truth.
Or what I "believe" to be the truth.
