Conversion Fascination
I have to admit that I am still fascinated by the recent conversion of former atheist blogger, Leah Libresco. Unlike the re-conversion of Patrick Greene, Libresco was a blogger and so I assume that she knew the standard arguments and was presumably knowledgeable about the plot holes, ridiculousness, and just factually incorrect aspects of Christianity.
Like I said before, I wasn’t a reader of her blog so I don’t know how much she really know anything about her positions. But I really have to assume she was knowledgeable. Her conversion is different than say Kirk Cameron’s conversion in that he wasn’t someone in the greater community of reason and he didn’t know the arguments against religion.
Libresco claims that her conversion was over Platonic Forms, but I am starting to wonder about that. It seems to me that Platonic Forms have been an outdated idea for some time now and that they are interesting for Introductory Philosophy students as a way of showing the history of thought. But aside from being a conversation starter, no modern moral philosopher would hold to such an idea as a moral theory. So my thought is that there was some emotional component involved as well.
It is possible that Libresco isn’t even aware of this emotional component, but I really do have a hard time believing that her conversion to Catholicism (and all the wackiness that entails) was a result of a belief in Platonic Forms.
I mean, Libresco has to have heard of Sam Harris, right? If she is into Plato’s Forms, she probably read Aristotle too. I think his view of morality is far better than Plato’s and even that is outdated. There is a huge history of moral thought that it seems Libresco has surprisingly ignored. This seems unbelievable to me given that she appears to be a fan of philosophy and someone who is interested in the field of morality. So how did some religious person get her with the old C.S. Lewis “Moral Law Giver” argument?
We have to be missing something here. Perhaps I can get a dialog started with her to try to reason this out.
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Filed under: Catholics, conversation, ignorance, morality, People of Reason, Religious Manipulation
