As a believer and someone who attends church regularly, this is sad but not unexpected. From my own personal experience - if the church cannot answer questions clearly, their members will look for answers somewhere else. A lot of churches unfortunately are so elementary in their teaching or turn to "feel good preaching" (see Elevation Church). The longterm effect is that a person ends up being tired of getting the same "baby food" and they look to other places. The churches where theology is solid (and clear) tend to be stronger in number and in regular attendance.
The American evangelical movement is particularly rabid, and subscribes overwhelmingly to Christian nationalism. It is entirely too mixed into politics, and is trying to create a theocratic state where “everyone must live like Christians (for my definition of Christian).”
One of the high points for me regarding religion in the past couple years was finding The Holy Post podcast. One host is Phil Vischer, AKA Bob the Tomato, the creator of Veggie Tales. I have some fundamental (heh) disagreements with their perspective at this point, but they remind me of what I thought the church was while growing up within it, and they still largely reflect what I think it should be. They acknowledge that there’s lots of room for disagreement, they don’t think they have all the answers, and they strike me as genuinely loving people.
If I had heard more people talking like them 20 years ago, I might not have left the church. It’s not a question of “baby food” so much as “cultural identity,” and the cultural identity of the American church is largely flag-waving rah-rah nationalism. Not sure what stats you’re referencing, because megachurches are still quite popular here and quite clear on their “theology.”
If you the parent poster are not located in America, please disregard this post entirely.
Hah, never thought I'd see the Holy Post show up in an HN comment. Fun podcast. I think what they're doing is important - exposing hypocrisy and nationalism in the American Evangelical church while pointing to a more charitable form of Christianity.
I grew up attending church, and on the whole have nothing but good things to say about the whole experience. It gave me both spiritual and moral support when I needed it the most and some of the best people I have ever known, I got to know through church. In fact in ways I mourn the loss of both my faith and my 'church'.
However once I realized that, on a very fundamental level, the core of what they where claiming as true wasn't in fact true, I felt I had no choice to walk away.
I was "in touch" with religion for 12 years (my parents sent me to a very catholic school even though both are atheists)
My experience was seeing huge amounts of falsehood and hypocrisy as religious people followed and repeated all the rituals of the mass but in the day to day life they just did not care about others and pretty much ignored what their religion taught them.
Thank God after those 12 years I saw everything I needed from religion to get as far away from it as I can.
This practice is very common among immigrant/non-Western communities. Oftentimes an educational institution with a religious background offers the highest quality and most prestigious education. In addition, while they might not have the same religious views as the institution, these parents often value the conservative social values that these institutions espouse.
Where I'm from the catholic churches offer the most prestigious high school educations because their cost is similar to college. They in no way offer a better education, it's just a paywall to keep your kids surrounded by like-minded society.
All you have to do to determine whether a school is there for the purposes of educating young people or acting as a buffer against desegregation is to compare the racial composition of the school's football and basketball teams versus the racial composition of the school's general population.
Once you get outside of religion classes and church services, Catholic schools tend to be pretty strong on the fundamentals. (Especially Jesuit schools)
When I went for HS, literally the only elective was Art, and for any student in honors courses, it wasn't an elective: you didn't take art because all of your time was in academic courses except for gym once a week. Don't get me wrong, I think electives are valuable and wish I'd had the opportunity: I'm just describing the educational priorities of that type of school. However they also need revenue, so the ones that remain these days are generally a little more friendly in allowing for an individual's interests.
Or they want a good education I recall my mum saying that if we had stayed where I was born, they would have tried to use my Grandfathers (ex headmaster in another school ) to get me into King Edwards.
That is THE King Edwards Tolkien's Alma mater and is normaly first or second ranked in the UK.
Haha it could very well have been that! In reality what happened is that we lived in a small town (in Mexico, called Campeche. Late 80s and 90s) and the only quality schooling at that place and time was catholic schools.
A carton would be challenging.
As a dumb smoking teenager I competed to smoke a whole pack and even then it made me quite nauseous. Took about 5 or 6 cigarettes back to back.
It depends on the religion. Some are just better at applying religious teachings to lifestyle than others.
In my opinion, Catholicism (for all it's good qualities) is too theoretical and abstract. It's easy to walk out of church without any real takaways that you might apply to your ordinary life.
Catholicism is so mired in needless hierarchy and ceremony that it severely inhibits any genuine value it might provide.
It hit home as a teenager during Easter Sunday mass. A priest enters the church, wearing his extra religious garb, a crucifix is carried behind him. The procession take several steps, the worshippers then kneel down and immediately stand back up. Several more steps, then kneeling and standing. Then several more steps, then kneeling and standing.
The third time I stood up I felt like it was outside my body looking at myself. Following the crowd with absolutely no idea why or the meaning behind it. To me, I looked like an idiot. My father was religious his entire life, so afterwards I asked him what the ceremony represented, he had no idea. I went to church less and less after that.
Unfortunately this is an example of exactly what CederMills said above about failing to properly teach the faith. There is an incredible amount of meaning imbued into every moment of a Catholic mass, and the more of it you understand the more engaging it is to attend and participate.
Earlier this year I attended a 90 minute "walkthrough" of the mass where my priest explained the structure and meaning of a normal everyday mass. At the end of it he had still only scratched the surface, but it was probably more explanation than most (ex-)Catholics ever receive on the topic.
Yet such information is incredibly lacking and hard to find. You would think the Vatican and similar would have all this information ready to be digested by people interested in learning, yet it's incredibly hard to find if it's available.
Unfortunately we Catholics often try to 'dumb' down our theology and liturgical training to make us seem more approachable like protestant churches. This acheives the opposite of the desired effect: the 'motions" begin to feel pointless. Ritual is important in human life, and symbols are important. But without good education, the symbols and rites are empty. Which it seems like what previous commenter was experiencing at Easter Mass. Granted, it's entirely possible even after learning the meanings that they would all still seem unattractive to commenter. But at least he wouldn't be missing a key element.
I think religion is primarily cultural and based on traditions. A lot of people do not go for their faith, only cause they are used to it. I wonder how many people stopped going because of the pandemic, then realized they didn't miss it.
I feel and felt the same. As many other commenters mentioned, a church must be a few elements in order to be sustainable: a community, a set of beliefs, an organization... and each one of these can be more or less important for the individual, and each on of these can go awry in its own way, often without affecting in the same way the other individuals or the other elements. Thus the discussion becomes even more difficult, when individuals have different experiences on each one of those dimensions. I think calling the debate "comparing apples with oranges" is a massive understatement.
Yea. In some ways I feel slightly uncomfortable speaking up for or defending the church in any general way. For as positive as all my experience have been and all the good I have seen churches do, I have also seen churches (even churches within the same general denomination as the church I attended) completely destroy the lives of people.
I was in the exact same place as you about 10 years ago.
A key thing for me (I'm still not religious, though I'm religion-adjacent in some ways) was seeing that religion - despite what some would tell you - is at its best when it's not made to be about material truths at all. Its truths, really, are truths about the human condition and how best to live it out.
In this sense, even as someone who doesn't believe in metaphysical spirits, the heart of what they're claiming (if you really dig down deep past many of the surface-level particulars) contains a lot of truth.
The problem is that their teachings also contain a lot of falsehoods. For example, the majority of churches in the US teach that gay sex will cause a person to be tortured for eternity in hell.
That teaching is probably wrong and causes so much damage to so many people.
Religions house many people fearful of what is happening in their lives, the lives of their loved ones. They want explanations for why their expectations and needs are not met. Is it surprising that the powerful would leverage that fear?
Funny how the Hebrew and Greek words for fear have so many other meanings, and yet the church has taught but one for so long when considering the "fear of God".
Seems to contradict "perfect love casts out all fear". Perhaps we would all be better off if we understood "wisdom begins with the awe of God" as the preferred intention.
I admit that I have only participated in a minority of all the churches in the US, but I have never attended any church where your statement would be consistent with doctrine on hell, sin, or homosexuality.
Viewing pornography is equally as likely to be grave sin (I say equally likely because the act is a necessary but not sufficient condition for meeting the definition of mortal sin). I don't mean to downplay that pornography is a negative influence, but you misunderstand mortal sin [1]. Paragraphs 1854 -1864 are particularly relevant.
Mortal/grave sins must be confessed per catholic doctrine, but to say that the mere acts were final is to misunderstand the whole concept of the new covenant.
> Mortal/grave sins must be confessed per catholic doctrine
Can you truly perform confession for a sin that you are unrepentant about? Like if someone is continuously having gay sex with no regrets or desire to change can they really "confess" about that? Don't you need to at least "admit" that you have sinned in order to confess?
I agree with you that a couple of instances of gay sex doesn't send a person to hell, but a lifestyle where you accept gay sex as a fundamental part of yourself that you don't even try to change does send you hell if I understand the doctrine correctly.
I agree that that wouldn't do as a confession. I believe that would be considered an invalid confession, just like withholding grave sins that you didn't want to talk about.
My disagreement is in the idea of permanently accepting a lifestyle oriented around gay sex while also trying to remain a Christian. That lifestyle is clearly contrary to the church teachings, so maintaining such a stance over a lifetime requires spiritual stagnation such that you don't have to face the dissonance involved. That assumes a foundation of belief; without belief, church is like any other social function; with it, the idea of rejecting teachings shouldn't seem like a viable path. There are plenty of churches where such dissonance is the norm and a welcome contributor to doctrine, but if you aren't taking the teachings as foundational, then you're sort of just using Jesus as a figurehead of a pretty nice guy, which the Catholic church reliably objects to.
Having said all that, there are plenty of problems with implementation. I don't think you'd have to look far to find a Catholic church where many or most people agree to quietly disagree about contraception.They shouldn't be allowed to do so,but it's a much easier thing to hide. And you could argue that it's a much less visible, and thus less subversive, transgression (not clear that that's true.)
In both of those cases, though, the last thing the church should be doing is casting believers out. If they do that, they're abdicating their very clear responsibility to help those people. Whether you agree with those changes being "help", from the perspective of doctrinally sound preachers/congregants/parishes, directing others to lives ordered toward church teachings is the most important and morally obligatory thing.
So it seems like we agree on the original premise? The catholic church does teach that gay sex (over a lifetime) sends a person to hell?
I guess you would say that the action that sends a person to hell is the refusal to follow church doctrine, but when the church doctrine is "don't have gay sex" ...
So, we'll first put aside one thing, which is that the Catholic church provides very few guarantees for making it to hell,from, far as I can tell. There's some humility of saying that our lot is not to have full understanding of how God works (this also sidesteps some issues of unbaptized infants and people who were never exposed to Christianity.) You can get a system of salvation from God, but He gets to override that whenever he wants for worthy causes.
However, even with that out of the way, it's not that gay sex accumulates some overwhelming terrible immoral inertia in a person that eventually cannot be stopped. But it drives a person away from God continually. To really understate the idea by a weak analogy, it's like how eating a diet of constant sugar will not necessarily kill you, but is likely to lead to diabetes and metabolic disorders that people rarely come back from, even though we recognize that coming back from these is entirely possible. And not just that, but watching this from the sideline, you can't comprehend how the people suffering from these problems would sooner die than just curb sugar intake. How people walk into the general surgery practices day after day, not even acting surprised when you tell them you'll be cutting their right foot off because the loss of circulation from diabetes has caused it to become gangrenous.
Now apply that to something more important than your foot or your mortal life. The church's perspective is that unrepentant gay sex is to living a life ordered toward God, as excessive sugar intake is to proper metabolic functioning.
The particular urgency in this sin is that I am likely able to drink too much and disrespect my wife and watch porn, but then repent. All those things will weaken my relationship with God, but my acceptance that they're wrong allows me to be guided rightly. Living a committed homosexual life is inconsistent with living a life of God; being committed to both means that sooner or later, the incoherence will cause one or the other link to break completely. "If your left eye causes you to sin, better to cut it out..."
I'll agree with you that I find their reasoning faulty (I did), but what I dislike about my atheism is that I get lumped in with people who'll tell theists that "they're wrong"
To my mind, most of the planet's population have got to the 'right place' (show love and compassion to those you meet) - and how we all got to this same place is immaterial.
I'm without a doubt an atheist to my core - but doesn't stop me admiring those with faith who use it to lead a good life.
As a teenager I was that guy you don’t like. Vocal about my right to not believe, not participate, and not be coerced into religious stuff. Quick to anger by what I saw as violations of church/state separation in my public school. Quick to tell folks how wrong and stupid they were stupid for believing it.
Now it makes me cringe. Like you, still Atheist to the core. But I can really appreciate many of my childhood church’s teachings: God is love, God forgives us, God accepts all of us. I can listen in awe at the sermons of Dr. King Jr. And while I cannot imagine ever believing the supernatural aspects of it all, I will always deeply appreciate and agree with the concern and caring for The Least of These, and our shared responsibility to one another.
In the reformed community they have a term for this called being a "cage-stage calvinist." I think it's a useful concept in general. New converts to anything whether it's religion, non-religion, programing paradigms, even superhero fandoms, etc tend to be like that. Especially when those new converts are also young people.
I was like this, while getting my PhD@MIT went to RCIA@Harvard and changed. One thing that helped was realizing that I believe in free will, which is supernatural (and why many leading atheists reject it). Since belief in free will is an act of faith, it opened my eyes and the world gained color.
That’s interesting. Why is free will an act of faith?
(I’m not saying it isn’t. I think all belief in science requires an act of faith, e.g., the universe obeys laws of physics. I just haven’t heard this argued before.)
If we are only made of the dust around us, then, like a computer, we don’t truly have any control. It’s all just an illusion.
That points to why belief in free will is an act of faith. It is, by definition, not possible to know (because you could always argue your conclusions were not made by your will). It also lies outside the usual ‘god of the gaps’ straw-man debate, because it is more like an endless chasm. :)
> but what I dislike about my atheism is that I get lumped in with people who'll tell theists that "they're wrong"
But every Christian that doesn’t reject the first Commandment implicitly believes the same thing. Some of them picket and scream terrible things at their outgroupers. Most are reasonably neutral and nice.
Giving too much oxygen or mind share to the few vocal outliers only lowers your quality of life. Also, there are enough atheists/agnostics/nones that it’s basically useless to talk about them as a monolithic group.
I am far more concerned about the asymmetry of media/discussion about the obnoxious few with bad ideas over the quiet plurality of pleasant people who don’t force their toxic ideas on others.
I’ve encountered this claim more often than I’ve encountered actual fundamentalist churches I think are making any sort of strong claim about the world.
So I’m curious to hear what people think is wrong.
I mentioned in a parallel comment that I had similar experiences, so I'll jump in until the other commenter does. And to keep spirits cooler, I'll mention my experiences in martial arts. I gained my black belt in Aikido in a wonderful dojo, wonderful teachers, doing many activities together otherwise. I found a few lifetime friends there and love as well, so it was definitely more than "training", it was a real community. Yet I'm not going there anymore for a dozen years already. The entire teaching is based on life energies and ki flows which... just weren't there for me. I was able to progress nicely also without them - faking them to be more honest, I could have been continued growing in the technique, but what was the point continuing something I don't believe in? What was the point in rebelling and showing them how simple sportmanship gets the same peace of mind, does the same precision, builds the same attitude towards "martial" and life in general? People are good if they choose the good, and not everybody needs the supernatural element in order to stay good. And I don't mean a fear of supernatural punishment, but in my Aikido case, a belief in supernatural and benevolent support.
I read a book by Eckhart Tolle that gave me two takeaways. The first was that the book was full of nonsense. The second was that it was clear why this nonsense was so effective for people.
What are the downsides to suspending scientific accuracy for the purposes of doing Aikido?
I did it for years for myself but at some point when you're supposed to tell your pupil to bend more forward to not obstruct the ki flow, you just can't bring yourself to do it anymore... you can't bear the dissonance anymore.
The same as with every other sport: injury. You don't want to risk injury by extrapolating a faulty training method from magical thinking. In my experience, the arts and systems geared more towards full-contact spars have way, way less Ki/Qi in them.
Hmm I definitely cannot say the training is faulty. You cultivate (in Aikido) exactly the harmony of movements which also without spiritual dimension can be understood and practiced in a very physical, efficient and safe way (as safe as martial arts go, duh). Whereas with krav maga for example there's nothing of this, not because ki is missing (it is) but because it seeks efficiency instead of beauty. Or maybe it's only me not able to find the right balanced system...
> The entire teaching is based on life energies and ki flows which... just weren't there for me. I was able to progress nicely also without them - faking them to be more honest, I could have been continued growing in the technique, but what was the point continuing something I don't believe in?
I had a similar experience — in Kung fu and Buddhism.
Beliefs are a model of the world: just because a model isn’t phrased in terms of my core beliefs doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach me.
In the case of Kung fu and Buddhism, I don’t believe I would understand things as well as I do (physics, physiology, neurology) without having taken the time to understand what those other models were trying to express about the world.
To use an analogy: just because I have an irresolvable dependency conflict with a new piece of software doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach me about software and programming.
If my message came across as dismissing the ki let me reiterate: I used the model as a tool, it's based on generations of experimenting and I know it works for the practical goals. My issue is that it comes with an esoteric luggage in which I don't believe, yet I'm expected to pass further on. The tool wanted to be also the goal. I assume you can't teach kung fu without some buddhism (I suppose, I'm not a kung fu practitioner) so what is the way forward? Practice krav maga? Practice by yourself on a mountaintop? Neither of those help you much advancing in what you loved... but I'm diverting already too much from the OP. My point was, community is great, but if the spiritual dimension doesn't resonate I can't remain as true member.
My solution to encountering outdated beliefs with great utility was to try and update them — to retell Kung fu (and Buddhism) in that new world view. Buddhism has a maxim to keep what’s useful and discard the rest.
What does “ki” mean in physics?
I think it’s more than esoteric luggage, but a class of physics equations which are nasty to write down because they’re complex differential equations — and the numerics don’t matter to the practice, just the behavior of the system.
So you give a name to that behavior and model it experimentally, describe it euphemistically, etc.
I get spending the time to learn multiple models and translate between them isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, though. Those people reasonably make different choices than I did.
not OP, but I would presume "the claim" is that (a) there is a God, (b) the church knows which one, and (c) they know what he wants.
For comparison, I (atheist) normally state my position as "There is insufficient evidence to conclude there is a God," so any statement about there being any god, or about what influence they should/do have on our lives I treat as a "claim," which requires supporting evidence.
At the risk of being pedantic, I believe that’s more Agnostic than Atheist. Your statement allows for a God to exist, and even infers that you’re willing to believe in them given sufficient evidence.
While the whole atheist-agnostic thing is more of a continuum than not, I think the line is whether you believe there is no God or whether you don’t believe there is one. It might seem pedantic but I do think it’s an important distinction.
I used to identify as agnostic for a while--the definition I quoted is one adapted from The Atheist Experience podcast. I'd personally describe someone who actively believes there is no god, i.e. possesses enough evidence to claim "There cannot be any god" an "anti-theist", in my personal lexicon.
Generally this is why I bother to give the specific definition by claim--too often I've encountered religious folk who take "atheist" to mean "one who hates god", or "one who actively has evidence against a god", or similar--which may be true for other folk who use the label atheist, but doesn't match my personal definition.
As you said, "the whole atheist-agnostic thing is more of a continuum than not," so I like to give the definition to clear up any mis-assumptions people may make about me for using said label :)
I also agree that the difference does matter--I also think it's more intellectually honest of me to allow for the possibility that I am wrong, however unlikely--even then, there is an important distinction between acknowledging the existence of a god, and choosing to worship said god if they even existed (which is usually the follow-on question from religious folk I talk to.
So I’m curious to hear what people think is wrong.
We know there is a God AND the Bible is some sort of authoritative (most would claim the most authoritative) description of who/how God is and how he wants us to behave towards him.
Often there is also a third correlating claim that our interpretation of the Bible is the most correct interpretation.
Tell that to all the practitioners of all the other religions... "um sorry folks, you are wrong, we are right"
I have issues with
1) "God told me to tell you" (any human claiming to represent God to their fellow humans. They surely would be devoid of ulterior motives, right?)
2) This collection of hitherto uncompiled writings (including a wholesale incorporation of Judaism) that were uncontestedly written by humans, some of which we know the names of, has now become a singular "book" and it's the world of God, shut up or else, etc.
I smell humans, not divinity.
Oh, and YES you nailed it on the last point.
Witness the smug way some Evangelicals dismissively tell a Catholic "but I am CHRISTIAN"...
As someone who was raised in a religious home who no longer attends any church I think it's less to do with not answering questions and more to do with a hostile rejection of religion generally. It wasn't until I had children of my own that I realized I needed to distance myself from religion. I know there is a large variety of what is taught from religion to religion and sect to sect but I'd like to steer clear from any organization that takes a negative view on basic things like homosexuality. I cannot fathom exposing my (or any) kids to that kind of worldview.
I think it heavily depends on the church and community. One of the reasons we are staying in our current church is because we're open to a wide community (multi-ethnic) with the same core values. Our kids grow up in this community but at the end of the day, it will be their decision if they decide to no longer attend.
I also grew up in a Christian house and am now atheist--I never understood how people could reconcile "church shopping" for a community that aligns with their views (e.g. not homophobic) with the notion that the core religious concepts are supposed to be infallible. If you disagree with various churches on some doctrinal/sociological point, how do you know that your current church is correct on God existing, or knowing what he wants?
Part of my de-conversion was driven by what looked to me like people willfully deceiving themselves that it was possible to "choose" a church who fit their worldview, without treating the cosmology claims the church inherently makes with the same skepticism.
I get what you're saying, but there's plenty of disagreement on what those concepts even are.
td;dr: Denominations vary wildly, and it's almost impossible to separate one's personal biases from choosing a congregation.
For example, Catholicism is very heirarchical, stating that one cannot receive salvation except through the Catholic Church. Methodism states that good acts + belief are the gateway to heaven. Lutheranism promises salvation to all that believe in Christ.
Or take the infallibility of the Bible. The Roman Catholic faith places a lot of emphasis on church doctrine, which is based on the Bible to be sure, but also a lot of church constructs. Baptists believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible. Mainline protestants emphasize historical context and nuance. ELCA does not even claim the Bible is the literal word of God.
Plus, individual congregations within a denomination might have differences in emphasis, sociopolitical leanings, etc. It's important to know that "The Church" is in many cases, and especially for Protestant denominations, made up of congregations from the bottom up, and reflects the aggregate of its membership.
I talk about this more in another reply [1], but I'll restate here:
If it's possible for all these varied denominations to come to wildly different conclusions about god, the world, and his desires for us, all based off the same source materials and epistemological tools (e.g., faith)--differences that're important enough to have fought wars and divided nations over--why then do people believe these source materials and tools are still a reliable way to determine how one should live their life?
The fact that these huge disagreements exist is evidence to me that the bible specifically and religious texts generally aren't reliable systems to learn about the world.
What frustrates me is people who "church shop" seem to be aware of this, because they're seeking a church that is similar enough to their existing beliefs yet the indicators of that are difficult to find because even within the same denomination a specific population can hold different beliefs, yet they don't extrapolate to the wider issue of the base beliefs being the issue.
Have you ever watched a press conference after a sports game and the losing coach is convinced that all the calls went against his team? And then the other coach gets up and starts talking about the calls that went against his team? One could conclude that there is not a reliable way to determine when fouls should be called. And in some sports for some rules that comes into play. But a much larger factor is just self-interest. A man with a great desire to win will be blind to objective reality, all the while fully convinced that he is utterly in the right.
There are very different views on what the United States Constitution means and requires. Arguments about it are had on the internet daily, in congress frequently, in the court system constantly, and there was once even a war over it. One could conclude that the Constitution is such a badly written document that you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean, but I see here the work of self-interest. When the stakes are sufficiently high, men are geniuses at convincing themselves that what they want to be true, is true.
For churches claiming that they believe the bible to be the divinely inspired word of God, the stakes are very, very high. In consequence, the incentives to convince yourself that the bible says what you want it to say are also extremely high. Self-deception thrives under those conditions.
I'm not completely certain what you're stating, so I apologize if I assume the wrong meaning. Please do correct me if that's the case.
> One could conclude that there is not a reliable way to determine when fouls should be called.
One certainly could conclude that, but it seems strange to me to give equal weight to the opinions of those who're most invested in the outcome. I would instead turn to a more objective measure--either the calls of the officials, or even a close reading of the rules and reviewing all the available observations of the event.
> One could conclude that the Constitution is such a badly written document that you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean...
I would certainly agree that there are many points on which the Constitution is unclear or poorly written :) The caveat of the constitution is that we don't have to exist alongside its poor meanings for eternity with no recourse--We the People are imbued with the ability to clarify and update the constitution, a power we've used many times to correct its shortcomings.
If I am to take your use of the Constitution as an analogy to the Christian bible, the opposite is true of that bible: we're unable to clarify and update it where flaws are discovered, and must continue to exist with it as the supposed-word-of-God in its current form. Just as with the Constitution, it is possible that new interpretations of the text can develop, but it's impossible to decide if they are truly "correct" with regard to authorial intent--something much more important of the bible than the constitution.
> Self-deception thrives under those conditions.
I absolutely agree. Part of what frustrates me about conversations around religious accuracy is that the stakes are (typically) set so, so much higher for the religious party: the threat of damnation, eternal torment, and not being able to see one's deceased loved ones make a powerful incentive to overlook otherwise obvious shortcomings in one's reasoning.
Because on the main point, they're all pretty much aligned: Salvation is achieved through Jesus's death on the cross. And fundamentally, it's the only thing that really matters in Christianity.
In that respect, shopping for churches is mostly irrelevant. What you see as fundamental differences are really more social than theological, in which case the shopping around makes a lot of sense.
"the bible specifically and religious texts generally aren't reliable systems to learn about the world."
I think most mainline Christians would reject the notion that the Old Testament is a factual historical record. (Less so for Evangelical and Pentecostal, however). Religion teaches us "why", not "what".
This is not an attack, just something I have wondered and your comment "Salvation is achieved through Jesus's death on the cross." reminded me of it. Jesus dying essentially allowed God to forgive humanity and allow for salvation. Why worship a God that was willing to destroy humanity and required a blood sacrifice of his own son instead of just saying, you know what, I forgive you. Why is an entity like that worthy of worship for any reason other than fear? Please note, not trying to attack your faith here, just wondering on your opinion.
Edit: Thought about it a little more and I guess fear is a pretty legitimate reason to do so. If one truly believes that if one does not worship then an eternity in hell is on the plate then worshipping does make sense but it cant be anything except a Stockholm syndrome style of worship.
This is one of the most widely asked questions about Christianity, so I have some skepticism that you are asking in good faith, but I will assume so nonetheless.
The arguments generally revolve around the tension between justice and forgiveness.
Jumping to forgiveness elides the question of sins and crimes and injustices that demand punishment, atonement, reparation, consequences.
How can God welcome everyone into Paradise, oppressor alongside oppressed, murderer alongside murderer, rapist alongside their victims, and every other kind of perpetrator of evil and those they have trespassed against?
The Cross is meant as a way of reconciling this tension, and a great many sermons have been devoted to trying to explain the mystery of it.
> This is one of the most widely asked questions about Christianity...
Perhaps because existing answers are unconvincing to those asking :)
To that end:
> How can God welcome everyone into Paradise, oppressor alongside oppressed ... ?
Your god supposedly made this universe, and dictated the laws that govern it--metaphysical and otherwise. I have a difficult time making excuses for oddities in those laws alongside that.
From the outside, it all looks like a bit of a cup game [1]: We have sinned against god, and have been stained eternally by that. God demands punitive justice for our transgressions, yet we cannot redeem ourselves independently, by god's laws. The only way to wash the sin from ourselves is for god to send himself (which is also his son?) to die for our transgressions, satisfying this punishment (though he'll be raised 3 days later), such that we can then pass into his kingdom.
(1) Apologies for irreverence, this just sounds like when a bunch of 3 year olds are playing war in the yard:
"I shoot you with my laser!"
"Well my atomic armor blocks your laser!"
"But my laser is hooked up to my fusion backpack, and cuts through your atomic armor!"
etc.
(2) I don't understand how in any way this reforms us sinners that we may pass into heaven and exist alongside each other--we haven't undergone any transformation on our own such that we understand the terrible crimes we're supposedly guilty of; we're certainly (in the church's view) not any less likely to commit sin if we know about these crimes we've committed and the supposed significance that god himself had to die (but only kind of?) for them.
In either reformative or punitive justice, it makes no sense: we're no less likely to commit these sins by threat of punishment, because we can be forgiven simply by believing in Jesus. We also aren't any less likely to commit sin by being reformed because... we haven't reformed at all, we simply believe in this story.
I'd kindly request you to consider looking at this from a secular view, as if someone were proposing this as a system of justice in a secular context: Does this seem a reasonable way to structure a society, where those who break the laws of the society can send someone in their stead for reformation or punishment? I strongly doubt the efficacy of such a system, and I find it so strange that folks accept it in a religious context.
> The Cross is meant as a way of reconciling this tension, and a great many sermons have been devoted to trying to explain the mystery of it.
Perhaps god could have explained it more clearly and saved us all a lot of confusion :)
As it stands, I see no reason to believe this tension exists in the first place. In order for this explanation to make sense I first must subscribe to your premises--that god exists, that we're guilty of eternal sin which we're unable to address ourselves, etc--which I see no reason to do.
Until parent poster chimes in . . . :-)
The reason God is not "just saying, you know what, I forgive you", has to do with His system of justice and righteousness.
As the final Judge and Creator of the law, sin must be judged.
You are either committing a sin or you are not. Jesus dying on the cross for our sins does not change the fact we will be judged. But Jesus that had no sin, took our sin upon Him and paid the price of death that we really were to pay. By believing in Jesus Christ we take part in His death and resurrection, and as a result: An everlasting life with God.
About 800 years before the birth of Christ the prophet Isaiah wrote the following prophecy (Isaiah 53:5-6):
"But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all."
I encourage you to read the the whole chapter of Isaiah 53 here:
My experience in life with self-identified Christians has largely been in the context of those people disagreeing, on moral grounds, with actions I take or people I support--almost always citing religion in their reasoning. It's possible the people I've dealt with just aren't components of this "mainline christianity" you're familiar with, but they use the same tools to believe these things. To me, those tools are egregiously flawed, and I have a vested interest in making sure those tools don't get used to believe false things that bring harm to myself or my neighbors.
> Because on the main point, they're all pretty much aligned...
Historically, wars have been fought over these disagreements--both within only Christianity, and in the wider religious space.
I think it's worth considering other religions personally because it's what led to my de-conversion: I couldn't answer the question of why, other than being raised in it, I should believe Christianity over, say, Buddhism or Islam. As I regarded other religions with skepticism, when I was a Christian, I should also regard Christianity.
While the specific point I've made previously deals with selecting a denomination and a church within that denomination it's also true that people choose religions for similar (flawed?) reasoning.
Further:
> What you see as fundamental differences are really more social than theological...
I'm not sure I'm convinced on this. Take gay marriage, for example: I vividly recall being 12 in our church, sitting in on a conversation between my (single) mother and our pastor, on how to deal with people who chose to sin in our lives, specifically referring to my father who was openly gay at the time. The church we went to was firmly against homosexuality, but was of the love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin cloth. On the upshot, they were relatively kind to those of the LGBT community, but they did still make it clear they did not support their "choices" and largely ostracized them--with reasoning that, in their view, was ensconced in theology.
While LGBT rights have certainly been a social issue throughout the world, I think dismissing this "difference" between my church and the one on my college campus who made a point of welcoming LGBT members is to minimize these actual theological differences. There's part of me that wonders if this is a bad-faith maneuvering (not on your part, but organized religion as a whole) to downplay socially repulsive beliefs without having to sacrifice their supposed moral authority.
> I think most mainline Christians would reject the notion that the Old testament is a factual historical record.
This certainly hasn't been true across history, and even now I harbor doubt. Perhaps I've only dealt with more fundamentalist types than you, but the opposite has been true in my experience, and is definitely not true of the more loudmouthed Creationist/Ken Ham style evangelicals. While they may not be representative of the majority, *they are affecting policy* in many regions of the country. My mother, an elementary teacher, frequently voices her frustrations that she's not allowed to pose creationism as an "alternative" to evolution in her classes science units--something that is allowed in several other states[1, though from 2014].
You see similar flaws in other arenas, too: my grandparents view climate change as an issue outside of human concern, squarely in God's hands, in part because they believe in life-after-death and the eventual rapture, so while they should do reasonably well to steward the planet, they don't think we're going to be here forever so it doesn't matter if Earth becomes an unlivable rock; while some may suffer the effects of an adverse climate, it won't matter when everyone's in heaven.
I also wonder about what motivates these changes in how doctrine is viewed. Supposing your right, what drove the digression that the Old Testament is not factual? I doubt it was the Church deciding on its own, outside of societal pressure. I'm sure it's because of pressure from those who found fault in the Old Testament teachings--those who were condemned by it, or ostracized by the churches of their time, and the Churches granted this concession without wholly usurping their power. But what about the next issue? Maybe folks are believing less in Noah's Ark, but how will they contend with folks who're trans, or polyamourus, or take issue with abstract (i.e., not historical) teachings of the bible like not rebelling against kings, for they have been ordained by God [2]?
> stating that one cannot receive salvation except through the Catholic Church
The contemporary position of the Catholic Church is that non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians can be saved. What you've said there will be read by many readers as saying that only Catholics will be saved, which is not the Catholic position at all, in fact it is the condemned heresy of Feeneyism.
Now, the Catholic Church also teaches that when non-Catholics and non-Christians are saved, they are saved through the Catholic Church – but in a mystical rather than visible way – so what you've said is literally true, but is prone to misinterpretation.
The differences are way over rated, especially between the denominations themselves.
If you look at the core statements of beliefs from various Christian denominations, you will find far more similarities than differences, especially around the core tenets of the faith.
This is unreasonable to me when both possible worldviews make such wide-reaching claims about reality, and require me to subscribe to particular rules and philosophies--especially when you consider these beliefs are in direct opposition to one another.
As the Christian god demands "You shall have no other gods before me" how can I freely consider participating in other religions alongside Christianity? Surely one of them must be closest to reality with its claims--unless I am to regard the demands these religions make of me merely as suggestions, or allegorical teachings? While that's certainly possible (and, I'm told, the case of the Greek and Roman gods), that's not how I often encounter religion in my life.
Typically it's being cited as edicts or prohibitions that must be followed, lest terrible things happen, and being used to motivate people's decisions around policy and behavior, policy and behavior which I've watched cause harm to myself and those I care about.
I find it a ridiculous proposition that a person could make a decision that would have such effects by seeing which of these contradictory things "resonates" with them, somehow.
> I also grew up in a Christian house and am now atheist--I never understood how people could reconcile "church shopping" for a community that aligns with their views (e.g. not homophobic) with the notion that the core religious concepts are supposed to be infallible. If you disagree with various churches on some doctrinal/sociological point, how do you know that your current church is correct on God existing, or knowing what he wants?
That doesn't actually seem like a problem specific to religion, but a problem with truth, generally. If anyone believes their beliefs are true, they have to reconcile that with the fact that people disagree, which usually proceeds by believing those people are in error or that the differences aren't significant. I don't think Christians actually believe that the truth is something easy to access, given the emphasis on faith and belief that everyone is flawed, etc.
> given the emphasis on faith and belief that everyone is flawed
Forgive my possibly abrasive tone, but "given the emphasis on faith and belief that everyone is flawed" falls apart when the focal point of the church and the religion it purports, the god, is held to be infallible.
The notion that all these disparate groups can cite the same 'source of truth' as their guiding principles, yet come to such significantly different conclusions as to fight wars over them shows those principles aren't as useful or reliable as members of any church make them out to be.
That's where my frustrations come in: churchgoers seem inherently aware of these intense differences, yet don't seem to question the reliability of their text (or view, or belief, or...) despite all these alternative conclusions from the same tools and evidence.
(In Street Epistemology the "Outsider Faith Test" is used to demonstrate this; broadly phrased, "If it is possible for a person of Hinduism to use faith to justify their belief in their god(s), and it's possible for a Christian person to use faith to justify their belief in their god, yet those beliefs are in opposition to one another, is faith a reliable tool to determine what is true?")
> Forgive my possibly abrasive tone, but "given the emphasis on faith and belief that everyone is flawed" falls apart when the focal point of the church and the religion it purports, the god, is held to be infallible.
Not really. That only falls apart under particular assumptions (e.g. an assumption that a perfect thing will only create other perfect things, or that perfection will be the particular kind you imagined it must be).
> (In Street Epistemology the "Outsider Faith Test" is used to demonstrate this; broadly phrased, "If it is possible for a person of Hinduism to use faith to justify their belief in their god(s), and it's possible for a Christian person to use faith to justify their belief in their god, yet those beliefs are in opposition to one another, is faith a reliable tool to determine what is true?")
I've got a pretty clear sense that there are regions of truth that our "reliable tools" cannot access. Faith is basically the hope that some of those regions can be accessed in other ways.
> there are regions of truth that our "reliable tools" cannot access
This is a contradiction in terms. If you have a set of tools such that some tools reliably determine truth and some don't, inherently that latter set can't be used to "access" other "regions of truth." Put differently, when I examine the universe with my reliable truth-tools (roughly, the scientific method), I see no reason to believe that these other regions of truth that my tools cannot detect exist. If I use tools that are demonstrably flawed, like faith, I can conclude those things are true, but why would I use known-bad tools to reason with?
It almost feels like a weird inverted understanding of object permanence; I can't see into the other room, so I cannot reliably determine what is inside it. It's possible since I left it that a ninja suck in and left a million dollars in my couch cushions, then retrieved it later--I would have no way to detect that from here, so my 'tools' can't determine that. Why would I choose to believe in the ninja?
It is possible that you could come to believe something that is true by faith (as in, "I have faith we live in a heliocentric solar system, although I cannot prove or determine this with my current set of tools"), you cannot use faith to prove that what you believe is true. A practitioner of Street Epistemology, Anthony Magnabosco, has a very good conversation [1] with someone on that very topic.
> This is a contradiction in terms. If you have a set of tools such that some tools reliably determine truth and some don't, inherently that latter set can't be used to "access" other "regions of truth." Put differently, when I examine the universe with my reliable truth-tools (roughly, the scientific method)...
You'll notice I put "reliable tools" in quotes. I do not think they are as reliable as you do. For instance, to give a secular example, they're unlikely to be able to give an answer to the simulation hypothesis. Say physics ultimately derives from a certain configuration in Conway's Game of Life, and that configuration is in-fact running on some kid's Hyperpentium 4 PC. Science may be able to access the truth of the configuration and game rules, but it's totally blocked from probing the region of truth beyond that. However, that block is one way, and the kid's totally capable of editing the configuration to add a message "LOL U DOODS R IN MY PC." Now (with or without the message) you may decide to have utter faith in your tools, and deny or dismiss as meaningless what they can't perceive, but that's just denial or averting your eyes. There is truth there, it's just outside the grasp of your tools.
I'm perfectly content to leave things such as the simulation hypothesis as "I don't know."
This is another tool in the Street Epistemology toolbox, one normally done at the start of the conversation: you display a container of tic tacs and ask if there's an even or odd number in there--your conversation partner shouldn't be allowed to closely examine the tic tacs. There is a 'true' answer, but it's impossible to determine from their vantage point: as such, what use is either stance? The only "correct" answer is to acknowledge while there may be a true answer, they're unable to determine it from there and as such they don't know.
My tools are perfectly reliable in the sense that they are reliable indicators of truth where they can be applied, e.g. to things that can be observed. You're completely correct in that if we are in a simulation they can only probe the bounds of the problem, and offer no answer as to if we are indeed in a solution (beyond if an observable event occurs that would indicate such)--but I don't feel compelled to choose a "side" on that issue, and I remain skeptical of people who choose to do so in the absence of evidence--the same skepticism I regard folks who believe in a god with an absence of evidence. They may be correct, depending on the claims they make about that god and it's ability to influence the universe, but I see no reason to allow that possibility to influence my life and decision making, just as I don't allow the simulation hypothesis to influence my decision making: having seen no evidence, why would I affect change in my life for this thing?
It seems as though we've disagreed on the meaning of "reliable tools"--I don't mean omniscient, I simply mean they're the best way I've found to believe things that are true with regard to reality; put differently, they don't yield false positives. (Though it's wholly possible for me to reach false conclusions, I am only human.)
> This is another tool in the Street Epistemology toolbox, one normally done at the start of the conversation: you display a container of tic tacs and ask if there's an even or odd number in there--your conversation partner shouldn't be allowed to closely examine the tic tacs. There is a 'true' answer, but it's impossible to determine from their vantage point: as such, what use is either stance? The only "correct" answer is to acknowledge while there may be a true answer, they're unable to determine it from there and as such they don't know.
So, I should conclude that I don't know if LIGO has ever detected gravitational waves? I am unable to determine that from my vantage point.
You could ascribe reasonable certainty that folks using the scientific method have accurately modeled the universe, as determined by their documented and repeatable experiments.
I've previously seen people phrase that as "having faith in the beliefs of others," which usually boils down to semantics on what "faith" means: I believe it is likely those people have observed the things they say they have, because of the nature of the scientific community and how these experiments are structured.
I also think we're getting rather far off the specific, original issue: the existence of a god. In my experience this has been the kind of thing a single individual can experiment with and reason around--at least, in all the ways people tend to give evidence for their belief in god:
(1) hearing him communicate with them in some way
(2) seeing him influence the universe in ways they'd expect a god to
(3) believing a god must have been necessary to create the universe due to its complexity/beauty/etc.
You'd contended (please do correct me if I've misunderstood your argument) that the tools I suggested--the scientific method--were incapable of determining what lies behind the observational curtain, which I agree is certainly true: if you can't observe a thing or its effects in any way, you cannot determine its existence. The thing we seem to get hung up on is what we should believe about what lies behind that curtain.
My stance is to take the null hypothesis and assume nothing exists beyond the curtain; at the very least, not a god that interacts with our world and the people in it as the Christian faith claims. In short, "I have not seen sufficient evidence to conclude a god exists."
Your stance seems to be that it is acceptable to believe facts about things beyond this curtain; that we are not in a simulation, that there is a god, etc, framed as having faith in those facts being true, despite observational tools not functioning in this realm.
The tic-tac example wasn't supposed to be an indictment of extrapolative beliefs from experience ("these people have reliably observed the universe before / predicted things / modeled things for years, it seems reasonable to continue to trust their motivations and methods"), just a demonstration of when "I don't know" is a more correct answer over taking a stance when observational tools have reached their limit.
> I also think we're getting rather far off the specific, original issue: the existence of a god.
Huh? I picked up that you're kinda evangelical and were drifting there, but that's not where we started and it wasn't actually the conversation I was having.
> My stance is to take the null hypothesis and assume nothing exists beyond the curtain;
Isn't that a little unreasonable? You see a floor, so you assume nothing exists on the other side because it blocks your vision?
> Isn't that a little unreasonable? You see a floor, so you assume nothing exists on the other side because it blocks your vision?
You keep taking my statements to strange extremes; I'm going to try to avoid metaphors for clarity.
I use observation and experimentation to determine true things about the world. I extend my belief in these things to other humans in the world who I believe practice observation and experimentation effectively; scientists, mostly.
When we reach the limits of these observation and experimentation based tools, like with the simulation hypothesis, I stop and say "I don't know." By the fact these things and their effects cannot be experimented on or observed, they also cannot affect my life, so why bother making conclusions that I can't verify and won't affect me anyway?
In the case of a god who created the universe, has an interest in my life, has declared certain things to be "right" and certain things to be "wrong," and hypothetically takes action in my life (e.g., the common Christian understanding), this is well within what can be observed and experimented on. As such, I take the null hypothesis like a good scientist: I don't assume there is some god and begin running experiments to determine _which_ one is there, I assume there is _no_ god and begin looking for any evidence that shows there is _any_ god.
In my experience thus far in life, I have not encountered any evidence that makes me suspect there may be any god of any kind, and certainly not the one of the Christian description.
Your original statement was:
> I've got a pretty clear sense that there are regions of truth that our "reliable tools" cannot access. Faith is basically the hope that some of those regions can be accessed in other ways.
The implication I read here is that you believe in things that cannot be demonstrated through observation and experimentation, and that it is reasonable for people to use faith to support these beliefs.
My frustration is with people who make claims about things in those regions without any way of actually demonstrating them, and then making life- and policy-based decisions around those beliefs that affect me and others in the world.
I've tried to convey why this seems unreasonable to me, and you keep taking my points to strange extremes that seem disconnected from our original discussion.
To return to your floor metaphor (which may be a poor choice on my part): I see a floor, and I assume there is no dragon in the basement that I must not aggravate because I've never seen any sign of any dragon, why would I worry about that?
Hopefully my tone isn't misinterpreted because I genuinely appreciate the openness in your approach and thoughtfulness throughout this thread. I'm just curious to get your thoughts, admittedly some of these questions are rhetorical.
What experiments have you performed to prove the "null hypothesis"? How do you respond to those who claim they've experimented on their faith and found sufficient evidence to assert their belief?
Isn't "taking the null hypothesis" at some level still making a choice of belief? Doesn't that assumption introduce some amount of skepticism and bias into the measurement? What if the proof requires some amount of willful credulity? What if it's designed to be bestowed 'line upon line' and 'precept upon precept' after 'asking in faith' 'believing that' you will 'receive'.
I've found that starting this particular hypothesis under the premise that there is a God who has crafted a plan that requires the use of your agency to regain His spirit and influence in your life tends to yield better results.
No worries :) I love these kinds of conversations.
I'll give a personal anecdote before I start slingin' scientific/philosophical language: My de-conversion started when, as a teenager, I asked myself if I only believed in Christianity (instead of, say, Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism) because I was raised in the church--and that if I'd been raised in some other religion, I would instead believe that. (I'll use this example to better frame the null hypothesis question later, but it's useful to keep in mind as I explain.)
> What experiments have you performed to prove the "null hypothesis"?
This is a minor misunderstanding of what a "null hypothesis" is and how we interact with it. A null hypothesis is basically the assumed-default of the world, based on the fewest assumptions. Any theory you may be investigating may be an alternative hypothesis, but the way you go about collecting data is less about proving an alternative and more about disproving the null.
To be maximally pedantic, science is about constructing models that most accurately model the real world. If the data contradicts a model, then it clearly isn't reliable, and we make adjustments to the model--so we would never "prove" any hypothesis, null or otherwise, we would just find that the data more and more supports a specific hypothesis (over some others).
This philosophical block of text from Wikipedia explains why we frame the null in this way pretty well:
A negative claim is the opposite of an affirmative or positive claim.
It asserts the non-existence or exclusion of something.
The difference with a positive claim is that it takes only a single
example to demonstrate such a positive assertion ("there is a chair
in this room," requires pointing to a single chair), while the inability
to give examples demonstrates that the speaker has not yet found or
noticed examples rather than demonstrates that no examples exist
[from 1]
So when applied to our god claim, it looks something like this: I see people making saying things like
(a) god has had influence on our past (in dictating his laws to people, performing miracles, the resurrection etc)
(b) god has influence in the present (he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind or by influencing the world around us; enabling certain outcomes to occur, like getting a specific job or having a good surgery outcome)
While (a) is a little hard to test 'cuz I don't have a time machine and the historical record is opaque at best, (b) is a series of positive claims that can be observed and tested against the null of god not existing or not having any influence over our reality.
Were I to invert the null, and assume that there is a god, it's possible I could construct my experiments poorly: suppose I pray that I'll get a raise at my job, and the next week my manager tells me I'm getting a raise. Is this evidence that god exists and is influencing my life? Perhaps my boss was just motivated out of my work performance over the past few months. If I'm assuming that god exists, I could easily count this as evidence without that being the case.
Suppose the opposite happens, and I don't get my raise: What does this have to say about our god question? It might be that my raise "doesn't fit god's plan", and he had his own reasons not to grant my request--the typical explanation I hear from believers. It could also be simply that I did not meet my boss's expectations for deserving a raise and it was unreasonable for me to expect one, godly influence or no.
If you loop this over a lifetime of experiences, it's very probable that you'll run into a series of events where god seems to be at work, i.e. you pray for things and they happen, or you have some fortunate luck occur, or whatnot, that you're happy to attribute as evidence to god existing--even if there's perfectly mundane explanations for each of these occurrences. You could be wrong that there is a god, yet merrily believing such because of this poor logic chain. Broadly this is "confirmation bias," [2] or "only counting the hits." You see this with things like when you buy a new car: suddenly you start seeing that car everywhere. In reality, nothing has changed in terms of the percentage-distribution of cars in your local area: you're just now more predisposed to notice the kind of car you have than you were before, so it "feels" like there are now more of them.
You may ask (and apologies if I'm straw-manning), "What if God's actions are simply indistinguishable from the mundane chance?" In science we would say that said effect would be "statistically insignificant"--if you cannot reasonable separate the effect of some thing from random chance, then it's unreasonable to conclude that the "some thing" has influence on what you're observing.
You see this in medical trials with what's called "the placebo effect" [3], where doctors will run a study where some group of people get actual (new) medicine and some group get sugar pills, and yet another group will get nothing; there are many, many cases where the sugar-pill group (the "placebo" group) display effects _different_ than the "control" group who got nothing. If the results of the group who got real medicine are similar in magnitude to those who got the sugar pills, then it'd be unreasonable to conclude that the medicine is having a real effect, since that effect can also be demonstrated by not-real-medicine.
To your questions:
> Doesn't that assumption introduce some amount of skepticism and bias into the measurement?
You're absolutely correct :) Some atheists also use the 'skeptic' label, as it more widely describes their approach to life beyond just their religious beliefs. Bias I would question--would a similar bias not be introduced by assuming there were a god? (I'd argue I've demonstrated quite a significant bias would be introduced.)
If you remember my anecdote from the beginning, I had the question of if I only believed Christianity because I was raised in it, vs these other religions. One way to frame the experiment would be to assume Christianity was correct, and begin collecting evidence: but this would leave me open to the "confirmation bias" of attributing events to a god who may not actually exist. Defaulting to the null hypothesis of there not being any god, and requiring myself to be convinced otherwise, allows me to be much more sure that *were* such an existence to be demonstrated, that it would indeed be true with regard to reality.
> How do you respond to those who claim they've experimented on their faith and found sufficient evidence to assert their belief?
Generally I ask them to walk me through their beliefs and their experiments, in the vein of Street Epistemology. I highly, highly, highly recommend watching a few of Anthony Magnabosco's videos [4] on the subject. He does an amazing job of taking a calm, reasoned, conversational approach and demonstrates many of the techniques and tools I've cited and talked about, with a variety of people on a variety of claims--though typically claims about God. In the interest of full disclosure, Anthony is an atheist, but these conversations are much more of a Socratic dialogue exploring beliefs than they are a debate.
Returning to your question, I have not yet had a conversation with a believer whose evidence I found convincing, typically due to flaws in their reasoning akin to the above. A few months ago I even read several books one such believer recommended to me ("Mere Christianity," "The Problem of Pain," and "Should We Fire God?") on the basis that those books were part of what helped build their faith, and I only came out the other side even more disillusioned about their ability to rationally engage with the subject.
> I've found that starting this particular hypothesis under the premise that there is a God who has crafted a plan that requires the use of your agency to regain His spirit...
This is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with regard to confirmation bias: If I begin looking for signs that there is the Christian god, and I allow myself to count what would otherwise be mere coincidences (or possibly very likely outcomes that I mistakenly though unlikely), I would merrily begin finding this evidence: not because it's good evidence, but because my premise is flawed. Suppose alternatively there is a god, but it's the god of Islam, or of Judaism? A lot of that evidence could support the Christian premise, but still not lead me to the correct conclusion if I'm starting from the Christian default.
I currently see no reason to believe that there is any god with such a plan requiring me to suspend my reasoning--and I would charge that any god that required me to suspend my reasoning in order to be led to believing in him (especially if that belief is demanded, lest I be punished eternally) is a god of poor moral standing.
> What if the proof requires some amount of willful credulity?
Thanks for laying all of this out. I'll say up front that I believe in God (member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) so you know where I'm coming from. You obviously understand this stuff at a high level, and I won't claim to. I had a question about experimenting with proving (personally, at least) God's existence based on what you've explained.
>(b) god has influence in the present (he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind or by influencing the world around us; enabling certain outcomes to occur, like getting a specific job or having a good surgery outcome)
Your example experiments after this point talk about proving God exists through outcomes. I agree that experiments in this realm based on outcomes are bad. As you said, outcomes can have many different, non-divine causes; and it is impossible to observe the actual source. But what about the first point "he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind..."? What if you designed an experiment that tested whether God exists by testing if He can communicate with you? What about something like Clayton Christensen's experiment[1]? His experiment is more about a religious text than God Himself, but could something like that provide a framework for disproving the null at least?
> You obviously understand this stuff at a high level, and I won't claim to.
I'm flattered, but I merely consider myself a talented amateur who perhaps enjoys this subject of discussion more than is reasonable, and thus have spend an inordinate amount of time on it.
> What about something like Clayton Christensen's experiment[1]?
A critically important point in science, especially dealing with psychological matters, is knowing that the human brain for all its power is an incredibly fallible tool: it's memory is subpar [1] and it's willingness to identify patterns dangerously strong [2]. To this end, we have to design our experiments knowing that our brains will see causality where there may be none, and mis-remember data according to both our hopes and our doubts.
A second point is that an effective experiment must be (a) convincing to those who see it (with regard to the proposed conclusions) and (b) repeatable, such that those who doubt can run the experiment themselves, observe the results, and test their alternative explanations. I've seen many a scientist simultaneously sad that their hoped-for explanation was not supported by an experiment, or that their results were shown to be incorrect by another in their field adapting their experiment, but that same scientist was intensely glad for the fact that their model of the world was now more accurate.
Broadly in Street Epistemology, a methodology that lead to belief in multiple contradictory beliefs across a population is not a useful methodology for determining truth: this is an extension of the "Outsider Faith Test" I discuss somewhere up this thread. But, generally, if person A can use a methodology to conclude god A exists, and person B can use the same methodology to confirm belief in god B, then the methodology is not useful to discern realities. With more concrete examples, I've seen people claim to be filled with some emotion or spirit during Pagan rituals, or followers of the Hindu gods feel like they were having conversations with their gods, or Christians report being filled with spirit while singing hymns in their cathedrals. Since these are all effectively the same methodology--strong emotion during a worship based experience--it's reasonable to doubt that "strong emotion during a worship based experience" is a useful indicator in the existence of a specific god.
My explanation, perhaps typical of a non-believer, is that human psychology is predisposed to having these experiences, akin to the feeling of something being behind you as you ascend the dark basement stairs, or a feeling of wonder as you see how tiny your town is from a neighboring mountain: while these experiences evoke incredibly strong emotions, they aren't indicators of some supernatural power.
> His experiment is more about a religious text than God Himself, but could something like that provide a framework for disproving the null at least?
If Clayton's experiment were about disproving the null, it would have to be designed around showing the null hypothesis "there is no god" to be false. As it stands, his experiment just shows that he can have a strong emotional reaction to a text he reads late at night while praying that he has some reaction to the text he's reading. To properly disprove the null of "there is no god", or more specifically "this feeling was not caused by a god" he would have to demonstrate that either (a) the god explanation has the strongest relationship over any alternatives, or (b) that no other explanations apply. This would involve things like disproving the experience "just being within his head", or caused by his usual feelings around that time of night, or that they were reproducible in a devout atheist, or similar.
This is broadly the issue when citing individual, personal experience as evidence: it is most often collected by those with an existing bias to the results, e.g. believers hoping to have their beliefs confirmed, and it certainly can't stand up to scientific rigor (repeatable with results observable from other parties, in ways that dispel other possible explanations).
For my part, I experience incredibly intense emotions when I'm listening to recordings of communications between Air Traffic Controllers and pilots in emergency situations; in fact, in the past several years those recordings are the only thing that have moved me to actual tears. Waves of emotion about how lonely it must be to be such a pilot, even as you hear ATC routing other traffic around you, or the professional strain in the ATC's voice as they're routing search-and-rescue craft to the scene, or the intense relief when the pilot confirms they're OK after a landing. Is it reasonable for me to conclude that it's in these moments that god chooses to visit me, and fill me with concern for the pilot or gratitude for the ATC or calm over some future trip I'm to take? Or just to acknowledge that when I listen to these recordings, alone in a hotel room while traveling after a long day, I'm likely more predisposed to these emotions than I am normally?
For Clayton's part:
During my adult life I have been blessed to witness or participate in many miracles – events that the scriptures term “gifts of the Spirit.” I have healed the sick by the power of the God.
Were he such a fantastic healer, driven by the power of God, why is he not sweeping the nation, curing all the otherwise-incurably sick? Surely this would be a stunning display of God's power, consistently demonstrable by Clayton and attributable solely to his god?
>Were he such a fantastic healer, driven by the power of God, why is he not sweeping the nation, curing all the otherwise-incurably sick?
A) He's dead[1]
B) Jesus did this, and, as you can imagine, people weren't willing to see this as "attributable solely to his god". Even I can think of other explanations (e.g., fraud) if a person were going around the country loudly proclaiming themselves to be using God's power to heal anyone and everyone.
Thanks for taking the time to respond! I wasn't sure you'd see it since I got to this thread late. Glad to be engaged in a respectful discussion on a contentious topic that is dear to me.
>This is broadly the issue when citing individual, personal experience as evidence: it is most often collected by those with an existing bias to the results
Yes, I agree here. Maybe I bungled it, but I was not attempting to prove God exists through this one person's experience. Just examining it as an example of a repeatable experiment.
>reproducible in a devout atheist
I would disagree here. A devout atheist presumably has a very strong bias against finding out God exists or interpreting an experience as something supernatural. So maybe "reproducible in a [dispassionate, neutral party]"?
>To this end, we have to design our experiments knowing that our brains will see causality where there may be none, and mis-remember data according to both our hopes and our doubts.
I just wonder if this is an excuse people use for never trying it out at the individual level. A person can say in their heads or out loud "God, are you there?" and observe the results. Of course, there's the question of how long one needs to go through with this. But scientists are often patient and willing to go to great lengths to prove something[1][2]. I don't blame anyone who is not willing to go through with the effort in something they see as pointless as long as they don't take the failure of one or two attempts as proof that God does not exist. E.g., Higgs et al. in a parallel universe quitting before decades passing and before having a multi-billion dollar machine doesn't prove that the Higgs boson doesn't exist.
Maybe my experiment as stated isn't it, but I think there can be a convincing and repeatable experiment along those lines. Millions of people have repeated it and experienced something convincing (to them) (I'm not trying to use "Millions of people" as proof that all of us are right or anything. Just that it can be/has been repeated). But, for sure, it is unknown whether the millions of people and I interpreted the outcome according to their hopes. I think that's why it's worth it for every individual to try for themselves.
>his experiment just shows that he can have a strong emotional reaction to a text he reads late at night while praying that he has some reaction to the text he's reading.
It is true that even very real spiritual experiences can be explained in other ways. So, you're right, the experience still has to be accepted by the observer as from God. Because I believe in an omniscient God who knows you personally, I think you'll experience exactly what you need to experience exactly when you need to experience it. I won't claim it will be irrefutable proof, but maybe it'll be enough to make you want to keep digging.
Thanks for the response. With that explanation I better understand the “null hypothesis” and how you would attempt to “disprove the null”. This makes me believe it could be done in a way where an omniscient and merciful God would knowingly discern such efforts as earnest and sincere. Perhaps answers could be found this way. I think this is an acceptable methodology that could be applied by a sincere truth seeker and still achieve the same outcome I experience, with admittedly a less biased premise.
A conversion in this way would certainly come with an increased accountability and is perhaps why it’s more difficult to come by. Being convinced absolutely and not willing to adhere comes with more dire consequences if one is to believe scriptural record—which admittedly sounds a bit foreboding but may be more merciful than one might assume at first glance. There are even scriptural accounts of similar things being done successfully (see Paul’s experience on his road to Damascus, or if you’re willing to venture into my brand of Christianity see Alma’s experience in chapter 36 of the Book of Mormon).
However, I do think the premise of God helps me understand and open new avenues of thought. Personally, I started from the assumption that an Omniscient being, capable of designing the very reality we perceive and live in, can probably come up with a way to “test” and “prove” us in a way that protects our ability to make our own choices yet extends enough grace to satisfy the demands of justice. If I were obligated to believe because I could not refute the evidence, I don’t know how effective that would be of a test to prove I’ve become what I’m supposed to be. Personally I think this Plan works whether you get behind a belief system or not.
I have very much appreciated the insights you’ve shared. You are right, I could be wrong, and have become heavily indoctrinated with a healthy dose of confirmation bias. But for me at least, I’ve found something that I receive great benefit and perspective from. I recognize it won't be that for everyone.
while I think this is a sensible stance for most highly educated people, for most this just is something they can not cope very well with. And I think that these "simple" minds are then prone to all the other cults out there (like QAnon - what is it else than replacing things people can't know about with faith.) - and from their teachings these are _much_ worse.
> how do you know that your current church is correct on God existing, or knowing what he wants?
The answer is that you don't, and unfortunately society doesn't look too kindly on taking copious amounts of psychedelics and wandering the desert for a month, so unfortunately it ain't as straightforward to rediscover it from first principles like Jesus did.
> I also grew up in a Christian house and am now atheist--I never understood how people could reconcile "church shopping" for a community that aligns with their views (e.g. not homophobic) with the notion that the core religious concepts are supposed to be infallible.
Couldn't you compare that to deciding between colleges? They all presumably will teach you information that is true, yet the academic culture and their perspectives on the more subjective aspects may differ between them. In academia, this sort of disagreement between schools of thought is generally considered a good thing. Not sure folks are as happy about disagreement when it comes to theology, but there certainly isn't a shortage of it there either.
> Couldn't you compare that to deciding between colleges? They all presumably will teach you information that is true
Not even close. No one expects their college to impart infallible, ultimate, eternal truth. You expect to be trained in useful theories and practices, and for them to become outdated in due time. Academic disagreements are all part of the dynamic, living, changing reality of academic knowledge. Not so for final truths of what’s right and wrong, true and false.
Maybe that’s why fundamentalists make such lousy arguments in defense of creationism: “science is wrong a lot of the time so how can you trust it?” They’re evaluating academic knowledge through the lens of ultimate truth.
I will not presume to know your reasons for staying in your church beyond what you said here, and I respect your position on leaving the choice to your kids on whether they stick with it.
I will say though that in general there are two points I often see missing from this position:
1) At what point in the kids’ lives will it be their decision? Many kids are required to attend church until a certain age or until they are no longer living under their parents’ roof.
2) Why not start by not taking the kids to church until they are old enough to make the decision themselves? Instilling a fear of hell can be difficult to overcome later in life, even after people lose their faith, which isn’t fair to kids who don’t get a say in the matter.
I hope this doesn’t come off as hostile, as I sincerely don’t mean it to be. I do hope more people consider this though when deciding what is best for their kids, both at the beginning of their lives and once they’re grown.
There does not seem to be a shortage of church variety to choose from. It's not about churches not being able to answer questions clearly; the reality is just that fewer people believe in gods.
For comparison: in the Netherlands we already dipped below 50% in 2017, and the number of religious people keeps dropping steadily.
In 2019 the remaining religious minority was composed of 20.1% Roman Catholics, 14.8% protestants (various types), 5.0% Muslims, and 5.9% adherents of other religions.
Edit: bear in mind that this is people who consider themselves religious. The percentage of people actually member of a church/mosque/whatever is below 30%.
> There does not seem to be a shortage of church variety to choose from.
I think this is a deceiving metric. Most churches are less places of worship or religious education and more social clubs dressed up in religious phrases and iconography. There are so many of them because each is designed to appeal to a particular social group, but they all feature a very similar watered down message that just reinforces the congregation's preexisting beliefs. They tend to focus less on education and more on community events, activism, fundraising, and growing their community - just like any other social club.
If you're looking for a church that genuinely teaches its congregation, that's much harder to find. They don't tend to be as successful in terms of growth or wealth. To teach someone, you must either add to what they know or challenge something they think they already know. Most people don't like being challenged - they'd rather go somewhere that reinforces what they already think or just ditch religion altogether.
It's no surprise that the social club churches are disappearing. Even the least devoted members of a church congregation feels bad leaving, just as they might feel bad cancelling a gym membership they never actually use. But their kids often have no such attachments.
I no longer see "believing in God" as being necessary per se to practice or benefit from religion. More important is the self-discipline it can create through repetition and habit.
Religion has the same function as "branding" - it's an efficient short-cut to bypass intensive, and possible unavailable intellectual rigor for some. And because Bell Curves are truly reality, providing a moral and ethical framework that works for everyone and that is internally consistent ENOUGH absolutely matters.
NOTHING we can ever know will be absolute truth or knowledge. You can make a simple proof by physical volumes of an individual and of the universe, combined with Shannon's Law. Humans must always come up short on knowledge and understanding of the universe as a result.
Like all things (even science) you can take a thing too far and exceed its limits of explanation or prediction. But that's unavoidable in a static system sense; which is why you dynamic systems defined by reliable and simple rules and waypoints. Religion absolutely provides that in a minimal effort form.
And we shouldn't project upon "average" and "below average" for what we might be familiar with or assume about intellect. Again: Bell curves for all things are reality. The biggest mistake that intellectuals make is that EVERYONE is just like them and thinks exactly the same way. Nope. Not even on a good day.
Even if one believes, the notion that these often corrupt, sometimes malignant control organizations we call churches are a necessary expense of both time and money is a harder sell in the modern world.
The social role that churches play is where the opening raises real concern. What comes after organized religion may well look more like conspiracy theory.
I would argue several modern problems trace to the collapse of churches as a social institution:
- loneliness
- lack of dating/marriage
- lack of community infrastructure
- lack of elder care
If you look at existing charities, much of the rubber meets road work gets done by churches or church affiliated groups.
You don’t have to like the message or the people, but I think it’s pretty obvious ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake.
Edit: reply here since rate limited //
> Yes, this can obviously vary by church--but it's a fallacy to claim that churches as a whole prevented loneliness.
No, you’re the one making a fallacy: your mothers singular bad experience doesn’t refute that churches made a statistically positive impact, which was my claim. You just told an emotional anecdote then declared that I’m wrong due to a straw man. (I never made a universal claim.)
> an entire generation growing up in the shadow of the 2008 financial collapse, as well as unprecedented debt from college
Okay?
The downwards trend in dating and marriage didn’t start in 2008 and doesn’t seem to hold across cultures — there’s a clear cultural component related to social changes in the US.
If you’re saying you think the collapse of churches is on par with excessive college debt as to why two-ish generations aren’t flourishing: I agree.
That’s my point.
> it's a self-selecting population that inherently echochambers, making it difficult to relate to outside groups, thus further damaging community
This sounds like a stereotype more than a fact — and is exactly counter to my experience, where multiple churches collaborate on things like homelessness charities.
That fine grained social structure is a necessary layer of how governments distribute resources effectively, one very poorly replaced by private actors. (In my experience.)
> you don't give any supporting arguments for them
I must have missed yours.
> you quite nicely fit the churchgoer stereotype in that way
Here’s the crux of it: you’re making faulty arguments because you need me to be wrong for your stereotypes to be right.
Eg, calling me a “churchgoer stereotype” when I don’t attend church and you made similarly unsupported arguments.
You’re just a bigot: factually wrong and stereotyping people.
I think you're likely ignoring other confounding effects;
> - loneliness
I'm not convinced churches ever solved this meaningfully--my mother left her church specifically because they never treated her as an equal adult, being a single parent. She was lonely _within_ the church. Yes, this can obviously vary by church--but it's a fallalcy to claim that churches as a whole prevented loneliness.
Especially not for those subjugated *by* the church (LGBT, single parent, unmarried, women [depending on doctrine]...)
> - lack of dating/marriage
* an entire generation growing up in the shadow of the 2008 financial collapse, as well as unprecedented debt from college, climate change, etc. driving down the desire to start a family
> lack of community infrastructure
This is much more influenced by increasing polarization and tribalism, which churches have helped cause by providing a platform and existing insular in-group--it's a self-selecting population that inherently echochambers, making it difficult to relate to outside groups, thus further damaging community.
Overall, you make these claims that churches are significant in these ways, but you don't give any supporting arguments for them--you quite nicely fit the churchgoer stereotype in that way.
Churches absolutely solve loneliness: it's a ready-made community complete with social events and opportunities that, with small exceptions and discounting odd-ball churches, anyone can join. Yes, they have a morality on right and wrong, but from reading your comment, I'm pretty sure you do too.
People are avoiding dating and marriage because of climate change? This doesn't sound real.
I suspect COVID making everything socially bizarre is having a much bigger impact on dating than a financial bubble bursting 13 years ago.
Haha. My mom was divorced and told by the church that she couldn't remarry. Not because it was against church policy, but because the rector at our parish was against it. So she had to petition the bishop who basically ordered the rector to allow it (and forced him to officiate). So I'm pretty sure that at least this church didn't give a flying hoot about whether my mom was lonely, or seeking marriage etc.
Only the state-sponsored dating, which I’m sure is not what the commenter was implying!
If you’ve never lived in a society that offered socialist advantages like affordable health care, elder care, government-funded community engagement programs, etc. then I guess it’s easy to be scared by things you don’t understand.
I’m not putting this on you, but when people turn to religion with fear already pulsing through their veins, good things never happen.
> If you’ve never lived in a society that offered socialist advantages like affordable health care, elder care, government-funded community engagement programs, etc. then I guess it’s easy to be scared by things you don’t understand.
I don’t think it’s commenting in good faith to think the only reason I would find those things dystopic is because I am ignorant or haven’t experienced them.
That sort of insulting non-answer from utopian is precisely what tends to scare me — and lead to horrific outcomes in the real world.
I'm not guessing that it's easy to misunderstand things one has not experienced - that's axiomatic. And there's nothing utopian about, for example, healthcare in Germany (with which I have a decade's experience) - it's just more accessible, more affordable, and more effective at producing public health outcomes than what exists in America, my country of birth.
There is nothing dystopian about having a dental emergency handled in the middle of the night, at no cost to you.
> You just told an emotional anecdote then declared that I’m wrong due to a straw man
...
> That’s my point.
...
> ...and is exactly counter to my experience...
...
> Here’s the crux of it: you’re making faulty arguments ...
Apologies; You didn't provide any evidence or elaboration on claims in your original post, just that "I think it's pretty obvious ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake," so I did make assumptions about your motivations etc. It would have been better of me to ask "Why do you think churches would have addressed these problems?" instead of blindly countering what I thought your arguments were.
That said:
> I must have missed your [supporting arguments].
I'd thought I gave several possible counter-arguments to your points--which you then responded to? I'm confused as to what you 'missed'.
> Eg, calling me a “churchgoer stereotype”
I did not call you a churchgoer, I said you fit the stereotype, in that you made claims without bothering to effectively support them (at the time); you may consider this 'bigoted' to stereotype in this manner, but to me it's a chronic frustration with defenders of churches. I'll grant that it's implied that I called you a churchgoer, but the specifics there are beside the point.
At this point I would also add on the stereotype that, when your ideas are confronted, you act as if you're under "attack" and are being "oppressed," a la "war on christmas."
> You’re just a bigot: factually wrong and stereotyping people.
I'm not certain I agree with that definition of 'bigot'; I'm also not certain you've demonstrated my factual incorrectness.
I'm also rather frustrated around the disconnect of you treating churches as a roughly homogenous group (as in "ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake", "[most charity] work gets done by churches", "several modern problems trace to the collapse of churches"), yet when I similarly generalize it's "stereotyping" and I'm a bigot.
We clearly have different experiences w.r.t. churches, as most people do. I have plenty of friends who have a litany of issues with the churches they grew up in; I have several other friends and family members who have had wonderful experiences in their churches. Both of these common classes of experience (you may call them anecdotal, I call them endemic) existing in the same space makes it very frustrating to me when people make claims around the positivity of churches with little support and ignoring these widespread flaws. You say it was a mistake to ditch churches without "a replacement"--I'd claim there are many whose lives are better off for having not been subject to the whims of their church, and calling it a mistake to abandon them is to ignore the church's share in their own faults where they exist.
> [saying churches are a self-selecting population that inherently echochambers] sounds like a stereotype more than a fact
People who go to church literally self-select in that they all believe in __roughly__ the same doctrine, god, etc. Even more so if you account for the fact that "church shopping" is a thing where people try to find one that "fits," and then they get their general beliefs reinforced by going. I really don't see what's a stereotype here.
The "outside groups" they struggle to relate to is demonstrable by things like how they interact with LGBT people, or folks of other religions, or atheists. There are certainly examples of where some churches do these things well, but again your claim of "ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake" __does not__ makes these distinctions, and ignoring them is tantamount to ignoring the harm churches--generalized or no!--have done to these groups.
Agreed. This was a major component in my switch from Protestant/Baptist to ("Greek"/Eastern) Orthodox. Having thousands of years of prior religious & philosophical discussions to draw from, as well as the experiences of people living under all manner of political regimes provides a much-needed grounding against whatever may be the current, trendy topics.
And a direct result of that history is that the Church mandates certain practices to shape one's willpower: fasting (roughly half the year, in total, though "fasting" here means small vegan meals), some form of tithing &/or charitable work, explicit self-examination (not only standard prayers, but also Confession with a priest, who helps make a plan against bad habits, as well as an annual event where everyone in the parish asks forgiveness of each other) etc.
This approach, "religion as an operator's manual to living one's life" is one of the very rare arguments in defense of religion I can vaguely resonate with.
Unfortunately this argument entirely fails to support all the rest of the luggage, especially the metaphysical hokum: you can perfectly chose to live your life according to a set of rules that will help you (and others) without having to justify it via the existence of some bearded dude sitting on a cloud.
That's a strange straw man. No God-fearing person I know believes in such a thing. God is not a being, but rather is _being itself_. In fact, when Moses asked God what his name was, God replies something like "I am who am". If you prefer an Aristotelian frame, he is the "unmoved mover" [0]
God, as portrayed in the OT, is clearly a being. God has specific thoughts, agency and expresses emotions. God gets tired after making the universe and takes the weekend off. God despairs of humanity and decides to kill everyone in a flood. God calls himself a jealous God. God even argues with Jonah about a houseplant (Jonah 4) and haggles with Ezekiel over what kind of excrement to bake his bread over (Ezekiel 4).
The people you know are most like you (the same is true of the people anybody knows), and are a bad proxy for humanity. The number of people who believe their God is "being itself" is vanishingly small compared to the number who believe their God is a real, specific being who has spoken specific words and done specific things.
I agree that "bearded dude sitting on a cloud" is a strawman, but "entity who spoke directly to Adam and Moses" is pretty accurate, in most Christian's eyes.
Most likely caricatures than popular belief, or caricatures that shape popular belief. Maybe this is why muslims get angry when others make depictions of their prophet?
Ah, you're probably interpreting that as believers walking in fear all day, which again is not the case (side note: studies show that believers are significantly less anxious on a day to day basis. I would link to one study but there are too many that show this so I'll let you Google it).
"God-fearing" is a very ancient phrasing used by the Israelites to refer to anyone that believes in the God as I've described him, "the unmoved mover", "the God of gods", "the Lord of hosts", etc. The term "fear" is our best English translation of the Hebrew text, but the implication here is that we believe that God is just, not arbitrary, and therefore we can respect and submit to his rule and expect fair treatment. Fear only concretely shows up in our hearts when we choose to disobey him. Those who don't believe in his existence or his justice naturally don't have fear when they disobey him, hence the term.
If you think you're not a slave to anything, try just sitting still, not eating or drinking, and seeing if you can truly be free, even free from your own tyrannical desires. Try as you must, you will quickly discover that you are a slave to Thirst. You'll want to spend every waking hour obeying it fully, using every ounce of energy in your body to find water to please Thirst. And if you disobey and don't drink, you will then discover that you are a slave to Fear of Death. You'll be free from Thirst but then completely subjected to Fear of Death, so you'll reorient your whole being to serving Fear and making sure you survive. But let's say you steadfastly desire freedom even from Fear, and if you still don't drink, and then you die, so as to prove a point that you were not even a slave to Fear of Death... we'll know you were a slave to Pride.
And this just strengthens David Foster Wallace's argument: if you're going to be a slave anyway, why not be a slave to the greatest possible thing, Creation itself?
That is a definition of God that is so amorphous that it is completely useless. God is whatever you want it to be in that particular moment. So much so, that there is nothing concrete there.
You are simply living from moment to moment, with no grounding connecting your beliefs aside from your personal desires for them.
He still has a mind we can relate to, like a child can relate to their parent. If you cared to look into Aquinas’ idea of God you’d find many concrete ideas, but he’s describing the spiritual realm so obviously it’s not as concrete as describing a human person... that’s the whole point.
What’s very concrete is what God has revealed to us historically through his people Israel, and through his son’s incarnation. What the church does is try to take these revelations/projections and through reason map out the source.
You're right, but there is value in the community of accountability that churches provide. Fasting, tithing, charity work, and self-examination are objectively worthwhile, but not things I'm likely to muster up the will-power to do on my own, at least not regularly. It's like physical exercise: easier to get yourself off your ass when you go to the gym with a friend, or join a regular class.
Also, even though I don't really believe there's any "metaphysical hokum" going on behind it, I'm still moved (aesthetically, and -- dare I say? -- spiritually) by liturgy and church architecture. I'm sitting in the same place, while seeing and smelling and saying the same things that people have for hundreds or thousands of years. That's pretty cool, and I always feel better afterwards. So, even if I'm rationally convinced that it's a psychological (rather than metaphysical) effect, it's still worth doing.
> easier to get yourself off your ass when you go to the gym
Yeah, I hear you, but this is where we part ways: to me it's not a matter of willpower, but rather one of - a sin, I know - pride: I can't bear the idea that I'm walking the path of my life using the equivalent of moral crutches.
As to your second argument: no argument there, not everything about religion is bad, even if, in the case of beautiful churches, you could argue that the way they were erected wasn't necessarily "ethical".
You do realize that, when talking about a bearded man on a cloud, I was making a point about the fact that most of what the three monotheistic religions you mention (BTW 3 out of many, many equivalently deluded things) are essentially fairy tales designed to control the minds of men?
If at one time the bearded man on a cloud was the useful tool of the day to manipulate crowds and was later "condemned" because better ways were devised to keep the flock believing, in what way does that affect my argument that 90% of religion is utter, unprovable, fairy-tale BS?
[EDIT]: and yeah if you insist on plowing the dirt of literal interpretation, I'll point you to this argument made by another poster : please take a look at the first image that pops when querying google for "god" and come back and tell us that the argument has no basis.
That's a naive view that assumes people are rational but we're not, not even you. Our minds seem to need some amount of hokum (imaginary beings) to remain sane. Children who grow up with a supportive parent who reliably takes care of them carry the feeling of being cared for and the confidence that comes from it for the rest of their lives even after the parent is dead. A dead person is no more real than God, yet they're very influential in helping people cope with life. I think they serve similar purposes. Just think how much people who are not present with you still influence your feelings every day. Until we meet them again, these people effectively don't exist either. It's all in our heads, just like God.
There's even a psychological technique to build confidence by imagining a supportive person helping you. That's even closer to God or Jesus than a real but absent person.
I'm unconvinced that remembering dead parents amounts to believing in imaginary beings.
Reality is less relative than you're making it out to be. Dead people are "real" because I can reliably predict observable effects their past actions would have had on the world and then confirm them with observation. For example, if I wanted to track down some college essays written by my grandparents, I might actually be able to find some, even though I don't have them in my memories. Or, more practically, I can ask a mutual friend, "remember when {dead person} said X?" And they will say, "yeah, and then they said Y", and I will say, "yeah".
The fact that dead people are dead doesn't make them "hokum" in the way that Zeus or Thor or Moroni are hokum. It's fine to doubt your own mind's relationship with reality, but don't doubt it so much that you become totally disconnected and consider all the people in your memories who you can't immediately re-confirm the existence of to be as immaterial as God.
So, in summary: we're not rational beings, therefore improvement through self-delusion?
I'm sorry, but I have two problems with that approach:
1. Knowing I'm willingly drinking snake oil believing it'll somehow improve me makes it very hard for me to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. On a good day, I'd call myself an idiot, and on a bad one a pathological liar.
2. Once you open the door to being told fairy tales in hope of improving yourself, you also open the door to letting yourself being manipulated into believing *any* kind BS by other, manipulative people. This is precisely the kind of mental attitude that has given us all the "interesting" byproducts of religion: religious wars, religious persecution, faith-based terrorism, death cults, debasement of arbitrary category of people (eg women, gays) etc ... (the list is long and extremely gruesome).
I grew up in a church that was very serious about "serious" preaching- Primitive Baptist, very focused on Calvinist doctrine and what could be considered scriptural literalism. It was definitely not "baby food"... but they still could not answer some questions clearly, and that is because it is an invention of man rooted in a prescientific understanding of the world. I would argue that church are losing members not because it is being watered down, but because it is losing relevance.
This is what it was smart for the Catholic church to have to issues with evolution. Maintaining a strict creationist stance just gets sillier and sillier over time.
Couldn't agree more. The thing that drove me away from faith was feeling like it was a set of truths that required obscuring the rest of life to keep true.
To me faith is something that you _have_ to understand through the lens of your life. There is no understanding faith before life. Your experiences allow you to understand faith. Which isn't to say that life is more important than faith, not at all, just that life is the lens in which you view faith.
In that mindset, faith seems exceptionally deep and complex. Full of discussion, learning, change. Not a black and white truth, but a series of learnings and understanding. You can't learn (in my mind) without change, and so the idea of a churn that teaches absolute truths felt fundamentally broken to me. I think faith is a journey in knowledge. And so many churches seem almost aggressive towards knowledge. They favor rote memorization, i think, as a method to avoid change. To avoid their doctrine as being mutable.
This mindset also seems pervasive into how these people behave in life, too. Just like how children need to learn to think critically, adults need to practice thinking critically. Such a strong emphasis on rote memorization has wide affects, i think.
No grand statements here, and i mean no offense to religion. Just my thoughts on some denominations.
Do you not consider God a narcissist? When he says "Worship me", no other gods, I'm a jealous god, worship or face hell-fire, literally threatening if you do not worship?
Why does God need/desire your worship? You know, I have kids. I "hope" they love me and always will, but I'll never force them to say it and I'm definitely not going to punish them if they are mad at me and won't prop up my ego.
It's a question of whether or not you buy into the set of assumptions. If you do, you can avail yourself of any one several strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views, which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff.
It's the on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, brand new, modern theology/philosophy which tends to end up shaky, simply because it's been done with fewer resources and has seen far less attention.
Appealing to history's greatest minds is a weak appeal to authority. Several of history's greatest minds also spent significant time on pursuits such as alchemy. It does them no disservice to suppose that given modern tools and knowledge they would have formed different opinions. But now we have the ability to explain evolution, brains, astronomy, energy, weather, etc.
Whatever your take on religion is, pointing to the opinions of people living in a much more inscrutable world is not good evidence.
Personally I fall into the camp that omniscience omnipresence and omnibenevolence are just logically incompatible with the christian belief of a good god.
This is the fundamental problem, though. There's an internal consistency so long as all evidentiary evaluation is predicated on the underlying assumption that the attestations are true. Confirmation bias does not make a firm foundation for truth-seeking. Once you realize that your standard of evidence could just as easily support any number of (contradictory) belief systems (were you to start from the premise that that particular religion, not yours, was true) the whole thing begins to crumble.
You would think that putting Islam and Protestantism in the same comment would indicate to a reader that I'm well aware that the same standard supports mutually exclusive visions of reality but I guess that doesn't do enough to evangelize atheism or agnosticism or rationalism or whatevertheheck so go ahead and have a fun thread (without me)
>
It's a question of whether or not you buy into the set of assumptions. If you do, you can avail yourself of any one several strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views, which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff.
As an atheist, I do not find[1] those philosophies to be particularly coherent or self-consistent - but obviously, my criticism is only superficial. So, I'll do one better.
A large number of theistic philosophers share my opinion on this - hence the innumerable schisms within Abrahamic religions. Those philosophers looked at their religion, found inconsistencies in it, and forked it.
The problem is that the survivors of those schisms (Catholicism, Eastern orthodoxy, Russian orthodoxy, the Anglican church, Protestantism in its many flavours, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, etc, etc, etc) did not survive because of their logical or intellectual rigour, or because they were more consistent or coherent then the parent branch that they splintered off from. They survived because they won political, violent power struggles. They survived because might made right. They survived because some influential autocratic warlord was personally swayed by their ideas, and imposed his will on his subjects and neighbours.
Less successful heresies (that, to me have about as good a claim at providing strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views as their parent religions) have gone extinct. Not because their arguments or ideas were bad, but because they didn't have enough spear-tips, sword-points, and gun-muzzles behind them.
This sort of selection process does not seem to be like it leads to accurately determining which of these systems survived because they are actually strong, coherent, self-consistent, and which survived because they were better at killing heretics.
[1] My impression of religion is that it tends to identify its inconsistencies and incoherentness, and neatly package it into a black box that it does not engage with, and expects you to have faith. You get a highly self-consistent system, as long as you don't look inside the box.
> The problem is that the survivors of those schisms (Catholicism, Eastern orthodoxy, Russian orthodoxy, the Anglican church, Protestantism in its many flavours, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, etc, etc, etc) did not survive because of their logical or intellectual rigour, or because they were more consistent or coherent then the parent branch that they splintered off from. They survived because they won political, violent power struggles.
Actually, in many cases, they survived because neither side won the power struggle. E.g., Both sides of the Chalcedon(/Ephesus) schism, the East-West Schism, the Protestant/Catholic schism, the Old Catholic/Catholic schism
, the Catholic/Anglican schism (even in England), the reverse schisms between the Uniate Churches and their previous Church of the East/Oriental Orthodox/Eastern Orthodox communities, etc. survive.
Yes, you are correct. 'Won' is a loaded term there - but my point was drawing a distinction between heresies that are still around, and ones that very convincingly lost the struggle for their survival.
From my understanding of European history, that didn't happen because their rhetoricians and intellectuals sat down to peacefully hash things out over tea and crumpets. They didn't survive because of the strength of their arguments - but because of the economics behind them, and because of the caprices of the particular personalities involved.
I'm willing to accept that in the past two centuries, these processes of religious selection have changed substantially [1] - but the fact that this entire argument is painted in the framework of major religions that were established long before the end of European religious wars leads me to believe that 'how religions splintered in 500 AD' is far more relevant for surveying the modern religious atlas than 'how religions splintered in 1900 AD.'
[1] As long as we close our eyes to that Sunni-Shiite thing that's still on-going, and is likely to keep going for the foreseeable future.
If you're not allowed to change the orthodoxy, then the contribution of that generation's greatest minds would by definition be heterodoxies. So what you are really saying is that we should expect the most-patched-up theology to be found in the most recent versions. :)
> Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff.
They did spend a lot of time and they mostly failed. In many cases those school of thought that ultimately failed were also squashed during a religious power struggle (which is gives organized religion a bad outlook).
I see no issues with Christianity from a philosophical standpoint. It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world. I'm curious what you mean in your statement, please unpack your claim.
It depends what philosophical questions you want an answer to.
If you're asking "What happens to us after we die?" then the church has as good an answer as anyone, because nobody's bringing any hard evidence to the table.
If you're asking "How should I act and think to be a good person?" then religion has some ideas - some of them really good ideas, like the golden rule - but it's a huge question touching on almost everything. And some of today's questions require a lot of extrapolation over and above the words of the bible.
If you're asking natural philosophy questions, like "what is lightning" or "what do we need to do to prevent future flooding" then you probably won't reference religion at all (except perhaps when you get back to moral questions, like if your flood defence displaces people)
> It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world.
(1) These two statements seem to me to be incompatible. We live in the natural world. If something "outside the natural world" (whatever that nonsensical statement means) affects the natural world, then surely it's partly part of the natural world?
(2) It is not my business to define what e.g. christians believe, but if I am not mistaken the actual resurrection of an actual man is quite central. How is this not a (bold!) claim about the natural world?
"Naturalism" posits that natural laws are the only rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural world.
So "beyond the natural world" would be shorthand for alternatives to naturalism; the idea there are rules that govern the 'natural world' beyond natural laws or things that can be measured or observed scientifically.
The resurrection is a prime example of rules "beyond the natural" impacting our natural world.
I would advise you to head down to your local university and take a religious studies course covering a bit of the Bible. It's usually split into OT/NT.
What you will find there is that we know that the Bible is an amalgam of a script that was pieced together by many, many human authors. It is trivial today to tell because we can cross-reference Koine Greek versus translations and authors chose different words consistently for the same concepts.
So, no. Not really beyond the natural/physical world at all. Just one lie of many competing lies.
What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion).
> What exactly is there to unpack? You have modern-day humans going around believing that an omnipotent God impregnated a human female so that his son could sacrifice himself for the sins of humanity. It's patently absurd (though really no more absurd than any other religion).
If we're in the business of bad-faith expositions of positions we disagree with, what's so attractive about the alternative that unfathomable aeons ago nothing exploded into something that coalesced in such an improbable way that a bunch of incredibly complicated chemical reactions happened (with no known mechanism for selection, mind you) to produce a biological organism capable of assembling electrons transmitted through the aether to another organism that could make snarky replies?
I'm sure you can reduce nearly any argument into silly-sounding caricatures of itself, but it's not a useful method for actually understanding what's true (or if truth even exists).
The parent is referring to the (actually, legitimately, really bad) philosophy that you can find in the most puffed-up theology books. It comes from the same process of domain envy that makes some philosophers put the worst math ever in their papers, except it started several hundred years earlier. To cut one slice through it, I can point you to a page of 100% fallacious arguments[0] that only survived as long as they did because they had a popular conclusion.
The very page you link lists a logically sound ontological argument[1]. It appears to me that you're judging the argument fallacious because you don't like the conclusion.
The fallacy in that one is thinking that accepting those axioms is any different than directly accepting the conclusion. :) Stating a bunch of axioms and deriving something doesn't prove what you derived, except in a technical sense of the word "prove," not in a useful sense related to determining the truth. Even if we accept that Godel's logic was sound, there is plainly no more reason to believe in his starting point than there is to directly believe in the end.
What? You contradict yourself several times. Does accepting the axioms obligate you to accept the conclusion or not? First you say it does, then you say it doesn't. And proving something is of course quite literally "determining the truth", you can't just dribble it away like that. This comment looks like word salad intended to let the reader believe whatever they want.
Axioms are not something you ever prove, as in, they're not provable even in principle. I would not call this an axiom, this is simply a premise. It can be determined. You'd trace this premise back up a chain of premise-based arguments, and if all are valid, you eventually reach some of the 5-10 (I forgot) core axioms that underlie all of logic. And those are not provable, but you'd generally be considered mad not to accept them.
I'm not sure what you want to achieve by focusing on this topic. You just saying you don't agree with the axioms in the article, right? So just say that.
Claiming that Anselm's ontological argument "survived" for centuries is rather misleading. Being known as a thing did not mean it was viewed as a viable argument. It was subjected to some harsh criticism literally as soon as it appeared, and whenever it was brought up in later centuries (and not very often, because it was something of a curiosity) it was treated more critically than reverently.
It's always fascinating to me to observe the small distance between the two in some philosophies.
The Discourse on the Method of Descartes, in which his famous phrase je pense, donc je suis occurs also includes a preceding segment where he considers whether he can know anything at all, or whether he's a disembodied consciousness fed false information by evil demonic powers (if you will, the "Matrix hypothesis"). He rebuts that hypothesis with a simple assertion that a just and loving God wouldn't allow such an arrangement of events to be the true nature of reality.
Depending on your bent, that can either allow the discourse to continue or put the brakes completely on it.
That's like saying "the most solid philosophy is shaky math." Yes, while plenty of philosophers have physics envy and wish that they were mathematicians, it's not necessarily the best philosophy that is written from that perspective.
i mostly got tired of being told i going to burn and choke and scream forever and ever, amen, because i like guys and gals. and if i disagreed, the pastor made sure i got punished.
the long term effects wast that this not a healthy thing to tell a young teenager, and it's time for society to move on.
I believe this is a way bigger factor than OP comment says: church failing to keep up with modern society.
1000% that's why I am against many (perhaps most by % in the US?) of the organized religious congregations.
those that identify queer, gender-fluid, whatever are told their literal existence is sin. it's hard to imagine how damaging that is if you're not in this community. It'd be like telling someone who has orange hair they are going to hell for something they have absolutely no control over.
In the worst cases they push parents to try to 'change' their kids, which has been shown to be incredibly dangerous and damaging.
Even if you're in a 'liberal' church that says we love gays like we love all humans, but don't think about getting married and in some cases can't have sex, that still does a huge amount of psychological damage and putting us on the outside of 'normal.'
I too got tired of the yelling and the fire-and-brimstone-you’re-gonna-burn-in-hell if you’re not God-fearing. That word: “fear”. They were using it as a tool to manipulate.
Finally, I realized, “Why does God want me to be scared all the time?” Shouldn’t God be allaying my fears, not being the source of them?
Some people go to church for answers, but I think a lot are really just there for the community and play along with the religious parts because of inertia.
What are the questions that church leaders are getting from their flock these days? Some big questions are being debated in society, sure, but the church's position on a lot of things is set in stone, is it not?
Maybe this is my ignorance talking, but I thought those with active church membership continue to go to participate in social events and make friends/partners?
The Christian Church has been getting steadily less monolithic for the past 1700 years or so.
Some of the topics being discussed in our (US) church in the past couple of years:
* the devastating personal and economic toll of the pandemic and how we can help individually and in aggregate
* race relations in the US and the history of injustices caused by racism, including police brutality, and how we can respond in our daily lives
* LGBTQ-related topics, including the ability of people of different sexual identities to participate fully at all levels of the church hierarchy
* the environmental impact of our actions at the personal level all the way up to the institutional level as it pertains to human-caused climate change
You can find many churches in the US with people that believe in every possible belief related to all of these issues.
Take a look at the popularity of "prosperity gospel" with poor and middle class individuals. This is as a response to the inequality and social immobility brought about since the mid 70s. I'll leave out explicit mention of the "C word," because I'll get downvotes for it, but the sociological analysis is fascinating on its own.
I mentored kids for much of my life and you can bet I told them they could be anything they want if they set their mind to it. What should I preach? That they're victims and screwed because of accident of geography/genetics? Is that a useful framework for life?
You can say that you teach them the system is unfair will help them break it. But that amounts to political indoctrination if you're not careful. Instead, teach them to change the world themselves by being kind to those around them.
> What should I preach? That they're victims and screwed because of accident of geography/genetics? Is that a useful framework for life?
> Whats the alternative for those less fortunate?
(disclaimer: atheist)
Your stance is a classic of church thinking: remove the agency from the people in the situation, and delegate it to god, saying he will fix the problem __somehow__, but they need'nt involve themselves.
The alternative is honesty and historical accuracy. To try to conceal or ignore what forces in their past have done to minimize them is to make it impossible for them to decide for themselves how they want to deal with these problems--you're removing their agency.
Maybe they'll choose to dedicate their lives to researching genetic problems, or to correcting social injustice, raising awareness of subconscious bias or changing how certain systems in our culture purposefully minimize portions of the population.
This attitude, that being kind to those around them will bring change, while noble, is incredibly naive and shortsighted. Nearly every major social change in United States history was brought about through groups of people uniting and demonstrating their combined force, demanding the rights they'd been denied.
> You can say that you teach them the system is unfair will help them break it. But that amounts to political indoctrination if you're not careful.
Your alternative will lead to stunted critical thinking, and serves only to prevent the questions many deconverting folk have asked of the god they believed in: "How is this fair?", "How could you let this happen?", "How will you fix this?"
I'm not sure what you mean by "your children" and "your current political ideology," but, no matter what you do, children are going to acquire a political ideology, there's nothing you or anyone else can do to stop it, and there's no guarantee at all that you're going to like their ideology. Most of them get at least the initial version of it from their parents. A lot of peoples' ideology gets shaped in early adulthood, when they're either at school or on their own for the first time. My parents didn't raise a communist, but that's what they got, for better or worse.
I have never personally known a clergy member to be particularly political, but we know that a large part of the US is politically driven by religious forces. Like it or not, church and state are not fully separated.
I guess what I'm saying is that none of what I've written here was particularly intended as advice to you in your position as a religious teacher of children. I will say, however, that Jesus himself did have some explicitly political teachings. Matthew 19:24 comes to mind:
> And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
No, I have never been religious. I did, however, read the entire Bible in high school for a literature class. Well, okay, except for all those pages of "this dude begat that dude, and so on...." I just mentally substituted "uh, yeah, Methuselah was old and Jesus was descended from King David and all those dudes."
That's not nearly as strange as it sounds, because one really does need to understand the Bible to really grasp the nuances of much of Western literature.
I get this, but wouldn’t the flip side be the brightness and relief that hypocrisy is being culled through this? Just a thought — but if you stop acting in a way (attending church) that doesn’t jive with what you believe, that seems to be revealing truth (something which all ca rejoice over, even if it’s a tough truth).
On the other hand — if it is people that are losing their faith, that is perhaps different, and I can see your concern.
I think the word hypocrisy is thrown around easily. I think churches have made mistakes and there are no excuses for them - but painting every single church and every single believer with a broad brush and calling everyone a hypocrite is intellectually dishonest.
My personal worldview - at the end of the day, we're human and should see others as humans who make mistakes and give enough grace for them to try to improve.
I'd guess you're a Gen X from your comment? I'd claim that, for the younger generations (middle millennials and younger), that the very claim that the church has all the answers is the problem itself. They deal in relatives and uncertainty as a general rule and the very assertion that one person (or one group of people) has all the answers is laughable. They appreciate humility and acknowledged uncertainty more than clear answers.
I'd posit that these generations are primarily looking for acceptance, not answers. And they're not getting that acceptance, so they leave. Which was my experience - I started questioning teachings (directly based on my reading of scripture) and had leaders shut down on me entirely and refuse to talk further instead of engaging because it didn't fit in the prescribed "answer" - and this was in a fairly "open-minded" church. I'd come back tomorrow if I could find a church that (most importantly) actually accepted me for me and (secondly) would actually engage in tough topics instead of just giving me hollow "answers" that didn't answer the question (and often conflicted directly with scripture!). I guess what I'm looking for is a church that actually practiced grace and acceptance, answers be damned. That's what Jesus did (see hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes and preaching a message of love for everyone). Why can't the church do it too?
The internet and the ability to discuss these issues anonymously has exacerbated irreligion faster than communism ever could. And unlike stalinist/maoist regimes, people are doing it on their own free will.
As a non believer I love to see it. Believing in something you can’t prove and in turn trying to shove it down everyone’s throat is the antithesis to the world I want to live in. George W Bush and Tony Blair both admitted that the second gulf war was partially a religious crusade. This is who you’re teaming up with.
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
I prefer Camus personally. The act of rebellion against ...well everything, but in this case against things to worship, against stories that try to hide the absurdity of the universe seems to me a narrative much less likely to be led astray in harmful ways, since it gives you no power or secret insight, only personal despair and personal happiness.
"I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?"
I love Camus as well. His idea of absurdism really struck a chord with me. We're on this ride in life where we just keep passing through absurd situations.
It's a really comical extension to an existentialism.
In that quote, Wallace is just morphing, conflating, and fudging the definition of the word "worship". He says people "worship" (with a variety of subtly different meanings) a variety of things and then, implies that because we can use the same word, "worship", to describe those activities, they are equivalent. I despise this rhetorical technique. I find it both insulting, intellectually dishonest and useless.
From the root worth "worth": weorþ "significant, valuable, of value; valued, appreciated, highly thought-of, deserving, meriting; honorable, noble, of high rank.
What do you hold in highest regard in your life? Family? Truth/honesty? Happiness? Other? (Saint) Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor.
None of those things are necessarily bad in themselves—some amount are often necessary for life, and can be be used to achieve good things—but chasing them for the sake of themselves without a higher principle to guide you once acquire them has probably caused many people problems over the course of history.
Asking yourself "what is the highest good in my life? what is the thing/princple that I hold in highest esteem? what do I 'worship'?" can be a good spiritual/moral exercise.
Concepts shouldn't be dependent on the language they're conveyed in, though. Try translating the passage to a language without the word "worship", or with 100 sub-distinctions, or introduce a concept like "zen" and his point falls apart.
He also introduces a false dichotomy which equates "worship" with "theism". If I "worship" money or sex, no one would seriously say that makes me a "theist". So even if we accept his warped use of the term "worship", his claim that atheism doesn't exist still doesn't hold up.
> Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor.
The most typical substitute for Catholic god throughout human history is probably some other god (or group of gods), followed by non-theistic religion, followed by non-religious pragmatic ethics of some sort. I really don't think the quote is relevant outside Thomas' church culture. That's especially true for modern Protestants who might be tempted to think this quote applies to them; you probably don't even know God in Thomas' opinion. I was raised Mormon, personally, and I'm sure the once-human God worshiped by my close ancestors would be an abomination to a Catholic like St. Aquinas.
> you probably don't even know God in Thomas' opinion.
Deus autem est ipsum esse. God is being itself. See Summa contra Gentiles for details.
Or, if you prefer Boethius, see De Trinitate: quod divina substantia est ipsum esse et ab ea est esse. The divine substance is being itself, and from it comes being.
The God I was taught was an entity that actually spoke, or otherwise communicated. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all spoke to him, as did Jesus. He said certain things, which means he necessarily did not say other things. If he said all possible things, he did not say anything at all (see Claude Shannon's work).
I don't see the utility of a God (or the belief in a God) that is everything, or "being itself". I already have words or phrases for those concepts ("everything" and "being itself", respectively). God, to me, was a supremely good entity who created people and who communicated particular ideas to us directly or through prophets. That describes a subset of "everything". For example, I am not God, and my cat is not God. The stories that the ancient Greeks tell about Hades or Zeus or Dionysus are not true of God. Would you say that they are?
For day-to-day operations, believing in such an entity is 'fine', as carrying around some more complicated idea can bog one down. Most of us don't have degrees in philosophy and metaphysics. Newtonian physics and gravity is fine for most of us as well; no need to get into Einstein.
But one shouldn't confuse mental shortcuts with actual reality.
As Aquinas explains it, God could not be a being, even the supreme being, or any other kind of "entity". This is because if he/He is one kind of entity he is not another kind of entity. And there would have to be a reason for Him being one kind and not another kind. But that reason would be external to God, and thus God's nature would thus be contingent on something other than Himself.
But then wouldn't that external reason be greater than God?
Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, I.22.8-9:
> [8] Moreover, if something can exist only when several elements come together, it is composite. But no thing in which the essence is other than the being can exist unless several elements come together, namely, the essence and the being. Hence, every thing in which the essence is other than the being is composite. But, as we have shown, God is not composite. Therefore, God's being is His essence.
> [9] Every thing, furthermore, exists because it has being. A thing whose essence is not its being, consequently, is not through its essence but by participation in something, namely, being itself. But that which is through participation in something cannot be the first being, because prior to it is the being in which it participates in order to be. But God is the first being, with nothing prior to Him. His essence is, therefore, His being.
> The stories that the ancient Greeks tell about Hades or Zeus or Dionysus are not true of God. Would you say that they are?
The entities of the Greek pantheon are creatures. Perhaps powerful ones, but creatures not the less. That fact we use the term "god(s)" for them as well as the Christian God is an artefact of language.
See Edward Feser's book Aquinas for a good treatment of this subject in more modern language. Trying to follow translated Latin can be slow going, and isn't really necessary unless you really want to go to primary sources—but one has to be mindful of terminology and ascribing modern interpretations to certain words used.
> For day-to-day operations, believing in such an entity is 'fine', as carrying around some more complicated idea can bog one down. Most of us don't have degrees in philosophy and metaphysics. Newtonian physics and gravity is fine for most of us as well; no need to get into Einstein.
The only thing I'd say about this is that the omni-God which is everything and being itself is actually less complicated than the God in the bible or any other holy book, who said and did certain things and did not say or do certain other things. A God who's nature is constrained for some reason, even if that reason is beyond our understanding. That God, which I think I'm safe in guessing is the God that most theistic people believe in, is much more complicated than the "superlative" God.
I understand the line of reasoning that makes "God" into a word that refers to everything. I get where Aquinas is coming from. As somebody who no longer believes in any god or gods, I even agree with him to a far greater extent than I agree with most theists. However, I think that what Aquinas describes is different enough from what "God" means to most theists to merit a different term. Christians are relatively new to the game of God-making; they can't just say that everybody else has got it wrong.
> That fact we use the term "god(s)" for them as well as the Christian God is an artefact of language.
I disagree; I think it's an artifact of history. The Christian God is the Jewish God, and the Jewish God was comparable to the gods of other cultures. Specific entity, specific communiques, specific intent.
The "artifact of language" arises much, much later: It is Aquinas and others attempting to use the word "God", which has an ancient meaning, to describe a totally abstract metaphysical concept.
> The only thing I'd say about this is that the omni-God which is everything and being itself is actually less complicated than the God in the bible [...]
The (Catholic) Christian God is not everything. That God is being itself. And that God is the God of the Old and New Testament.
> However, I think that what Aquinas describes is different enough from what "God" means to most theists to merit a different term.
Most believers are not theologians and philosophers, so the day-to-day mental of a Bearded Dude in the Sky may be good enough.
> It is Aquinas and others attempting to use the word "God", which has an ancient meaning, to describe a totally abstract metaphysical concept.
Which is why we get into things like Unmoved Mover, First Cause, etc:
Aristotle, whom Aquinas draws inspiration from, may view the Unmoved Mover as more of a concept. But the Christian God is not a concept, but a person (or persons, given the Trinity), which is seeking a personal relationship with each of us.
the wikipedia hole that begins with "Yaweh" will probably be interesting to you. I found it enlightening - the progression of a monotheism from a polytheist pantheon reads much like a sort of narrative branch-then-retcon.
I'm also tempted to draw a parallel with the hard sciences, though. As the thinking matures and evolves on the shape of a theology, you reduce the fluff and get rid of ideas that no longer fit your concept of reality. Part of the trend we might be seeing with church numbers is that christianity as we know it may have written themselves into a corner.
I'm a particular fan of buddhist concepts of the divine for their ability to be abstracted into many different contexts. they tend not to touch things that can be disproven (yet), and by dealing with only the absolutely intangible, stay relevant. the problem space is limited to the utility of the thought. Stick to the metaphysical and you don't risk dissolution when you do things like make unqualified statements about what makes "God" angry.
>It is etymologically correct though: condition of being worthy, dignity, glory, distinction, honor, renown.
The etymology is not even close to being relevant. Conflating two different meanings of the word "worship" and implying their equivalence is dishonest and deeply unsound. That is true even if it is the definition of worship fits in both cases.
> The etymology is not even close to being relevant. Conflating two different meanings of the word "worship" and implying their equivalence is dishonest and deeply unsound. That is true even if it is the definition of worship fits in both cases.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you wrote, but it seems to me that Wallace is actually arguing the point: that these two senses are in fact an artificial distinction, that people are inherently religious, that they are inherently worshipers, at least of a sort. It seems like he is saying that wherever we find our identity is a god that we worship.
Now one can argue, of course, that idols only exist if God exists, and if (or since) God does not, Wallace is ipso facto wrong.
On the other hand, one might also make the argument that the polytheistic impulse is really a transfer of worship of a particular thing to a properly-named deity with some window dressing, and that all moderns have really done is to disown the deities and ritual while maintaining an attachment to their blessings.
Is that fair? I don't know. But I would wager that Wallace isn't being disingenuous here, even if he's being provocative. I was under the impression he was at least nominally an atheist.
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you wrote, but it seems to me that Wallace is actually arguing the point: that these two senses are in fact an artificial distinction, that people are inherently religious, that they are inherently worshipers, at least of a sort. It seems like he is saying that wherever we find our identity is a god that we worship.
It is perfectly fine for him to argue that they are equivalent (though I disagree). The issue is relying on the etymology of the word worship to argue that point.
I'd also like to clarify that while I disagree with Wallace, the accusation of dishonestly was directed at throw0101a, who made an absurd etymology based argument after it had already been pointed out that such arguments are flawed.
It's pretty clear that that "worship" here refers to where we practice focusing our heart's yearnings, not to a set of religious rites. Synonyms of this meaning of "worship" include "revere" and "venerate".
No. Because he opens his thought with saying that "Atheism" doesn't exist. Atheism isn't a rejection of "yearning" or "reverence". It's a rejection of religion.
He's just playing word games, and you are falling for it.
I absolutely agree. It's just your typical pseudo-intellectualism rant here. It starts with a provocative declaration and then backed up with some explanation that is technically true, but doesn't offer any actual insights or value.
That would be anti-theism, or "strong atheism", though. It's the difference between "not holding any belief related to the existence of a god", and "holding the belief that there is no god".
Not to be confused with "agnosticism" which is "holding the belief that it cannot be known whether there is a god".
He is playing word games, but he's not trying to trick anyone. When he says atheism doesn't exist, it's just a stylistic flourish. It's not the point of the passage; he's not trying to argue that everyone believes in god.
The point of the passage is that everyone needs a source of meaning in their life, and that religious is more psychologically healthy option than the alternatives.
> When he says atheism doesn't exist, it's just a stylistic flourish. It's not the point of the passage; he's not trying to argue that everyone believes in god.
It's not trolling if the audience is intended to see the true meaning. The speech was given to a group of students graduating a liberal arts college. It's a group of people that would appreciate literary devices that don't beat you over the head.
I think you've already fallen for literalness as the only way to interpret or value anything. Which is unfortunate because all of the momentous truths in life (ie, that matter to corporeal beings, to us) are not of the literal variety. You probably know this on some buried level but you cling to the literalness anyway. Why?
DFW is making a compelling point. The words were taken from his magnificent "This is water" commencement address at Kenyon College in the early naughts.
He’s a writer, sure, but that doesn’t mean that bad writing is not fair game for criticism. Redefining words is a common technique in this style of apologetics to avoid having to engage with an argument intellectually and it being used by a famous writer doesn’t make it more worthy.
No it isn't. I'm sorry but not all writing needs pedants nitpicking to get the point across. The point is extremely clear and you can argue about the nuance but there is no hidden meaning or contradiction here.
As evidenced by this entire thread, the point isn't extremely clear _because_ of the writing. I don't think it's just a question of nuance, either, both because he was far too skilled a writer to be unfamiliar with common English vocabulary and it's very much following in a tradition of writing from people who are uncomfortable with wanting to believe in something which they can't justify on the evidence (the very definition of religious faith — see e.g. Hebrews 11:1). Some people react to that by rejecting facts but others take an approach of basically arguing that nobody is purely rational and therefore they can believe what they want, giving them carte blanche to believe things they suspect but don't want to admit are just human creations. As a former fundamentalist, I've seen quite a few examples of that — a very popular one is trying to equate faith or relief in science as being equivalent to their religious counterparts.
Given DFW's history of depression, having rejected his parents' atheism, and having relied on AA in his struggle with addition, I am quite inclined to believe that the latter explanation is true in this case as well. I can understand why he wanted to have a special belief system which would be constructive as a break from the painful destructive behavior he was all too familiar with but that makes it the desperate longings of a broken person rather than a divine truth.
The point is much more clear when taken in context with the longer speech. When taken out of context it confuses the central point.
The statement about atheists not existing is hyperbole used in passing. He doesn't mean there is absolutely no difference between religious and unreligious people. He means they are often similar in non-obvious ways.
The central point of the full speech is that people should be intentional about what they choose to think and care about. It's not too far from stoicism which seems pretty popular in SV/HN.
The chain of points from this passage back to this central point are:
- Atheists and religious people are similar in that they both have a need to find meaning in their life.
- The alternatives that people find for sources of meaning (power, money, looks, etc) are often psychologically harmful.
- These harmful sources of meaning are often adopted by us unconsciously ("by default").
- It is important to be intentional about what we care about because if we are not, we will default to the harmful sources of meaning.
I agree that there is likely some projection of DFW's own psychological issues onto non-religious people at large, and that a lot of people can live happy lives without some form of veneration.
On the other hand, I think his advice is useful for some. I personally find his message about choosing your values intentionally valuable.
----
Even when taken in context, I admit his writing isn't super clear to a general audience. DFW was fond of experimental writing and also believed that writing should be tailored to the audience. His audience in this case was a liberal arts college, so he may have felt comfortable stretching his use of language.
> The alternatives that people find for sources of meaning (power, money, looks, etc) are often psychologically harmful.
This why I generally lean towards the “sloppy writing” conclusion — it is indeed useful to consider your values carefully, but trying to dunk on atheists both confused the language and lead to the incorrect claim that religious beliefs are less harmful than secular ones which is easily disproven by talking to people who were mistreated by friends or family members who saw that as a religious requirement (e.g. many gay people) or whose religion embraced the same harmful behaviors (e.g. some state religions or cults, the prosperity gospel, etc.).
Better writing could avoid that distraction by focusing on the common harmful classes of behavior and how to recognize those patterns in any particular system. I don’t see this as experimental language use because it’s so far from novel in this particular context and the net effect is to obscure the point rather than reach some deeper understanding.
What positive outcome did you expect from a late reply containing nothing of substance? You’ve had 4 days to overcome the initial emotional reaction, why not try for something more?
No substance? Come on now, I thought it clearly communicated my opinion that you were being pedantic in focusing so narrowly on the denotations of English words. Words like "worship" often define fuzzy concepts and do not define things as precise as a function signature. The response to the original quote is so silly to me that I am compelled to continue replying. To ignore the quote's thrust and have your reading be short circuited by its "redefining" of words, especially given that it is a snippet of a wider work, making the initial criticism all the sillier, is too fun to ignore.
If someone is a fiction writer, we shouldn't care what they have to say? Sure. Then let's agree his quote is worthless.
But I'd still argue the opposite. This is a fiction writer who obviously is listened to. He's famous. He's quoted by random people on the internet. And those quotes are taken from speeches that he was presumably paid to give. Words are his profession. It's not correct to say that just because he doesn't do journalism that his words have no impact on reality.
On the contrary, because he is a writer, we should be especially wary of his words. His words are meant to convince you of a point. You can't just ignore his goals and say it's poetry.
His goal is to convince you that Atheism is bad, and he suggests that all atheists worship "something" that will destroy them (since it obviously isn't God, one of the only carve outs he leaves for worship that won't destroy you).
In the context of the above article, the point is crystal clear. The quote was posted with it's intended meaning: that atheists are nothing more than people who "worship" the material. That's bullshit. That's not what atheism is, and Wallace is being disingenuous.
Hyperbole. Of course atheism exists, but its used as an engaging opener.
Contrary to some other comments in this thread, the people complaining about the literal truth value are the ones falling for the author’s writing technique, not the other way around.
Don’t interpret it literally. Its used to assemble an idea that anything can be worshipped/venerated, not to make the argument that atheism doesn’t exist.
No, I agree he's equivocating and creating a false dichotomy. Wallace struggled with addiction and alcoholism much of his life, and said that AA was a powerful force in attempting to turn his life around. So it's not surprising that he sees religion and materialistic self-destruction as two sides of one coin. For an atheist who is not particularly self-destructive and content with his choices in life, the quote above reads as not overly insightful outside of explaining Wallace's character.
This redefining of the word worship do not work at all for me. We do not worship cooking food. The words do not describe well a hobby. It is negative associated with personal relationships. Worshiping a pet sound crazy.
It's worth pointing out that this equivalence is only possible in the English language (and maybe other Germanic languages?) where apparently the word worship means a lot of concepts (adoration, veneration, reverence) that in Romance languages are actually separate. In fact, the disagreement over this words is one of the most important differences between Catholicism and Protestantism.
I don't know how does this distinction work in other religions, but based on Wikipedia[1] it looks like adoration, veneration and reverence may also be different on many of them.
This is the most interesting take on this thread. What is otherwise a lot of atheists misunderstanding the English usage of worship by religious people and those familiar with them.
The crux of organized religion is being so vague that an individual can pick whatever parts of it fits into their own self-image. Thats what OP is tapping into in their quote. The Bible is re-written every 100 years to accommodate this.
>>"The Bible is re-written every 100 years to accommodate this."
This is provably false.
"It cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is certain: Especially is this the case with the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world."[1]
As an example, the New Testament is 25x more accurately copied across manuscripts than the Iliad [2].
"The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice."[3]
[1] Kenyon, "Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts", p. 23
[2] Bruce M. Metzger, "Chapters in the History of New Testament Textual Criticism", cited by Geisler and Nix, "A General Introduction to the Bible", pp. 366f
[3] F.F. Bruce, "The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?" p. 15
I believe he meant that the collective interpretation of mainstream religious leaders changes over time and is radically different from one century to the next.
Exactly. Just look at how the attitude to homosexuality has shifted in the church (which I think is a great thing). They didn’t change the text, but they changed the emphasis and the oral sermons.
That doesn’t hold water either, or Thomas Aquinas wouldn’t still be considered by so many as “the highest expression of both natural reason and speculative theology” and the basis for modern clergical study.
It definitely does hold water. Here are several examples.
Until the Counter-reformation, Catholics were not allowed to lend money at interest due to the ancient prohibition against usury. After that point Catholic doctrine was changed to say that this was one of the commandments for the ancient Jews that was not intended for Christians. The Bible didn't change, but doctrine did. (This despite the fact that the only point in the Bible where Jesus is portrayed as acting angrily was throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. And why was their presence wrong? Because they were engaged in usury!)
The doctrine of papal infallibility is accepted by all Catholics today. Yet it was not part of Catholic doctrine until 1870.
Until 1616, the Catholic Church had no official doctrine on astronomy. In fact Copernicus dedicated his book to the Pope. And then the Copernican theory was ruled contrary to scripture. Catholics were banned from reading various books about it. A century later, the bans on the books were lifted. A century after that, the Catholic Church declared that the Copernican theory was in accord with scripture.
In all of these cases Scripture didn't change. Jesus still threw the moneylenders out of the temple for usury. Peter still received the keys to heaven. And Joshua bid the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth. But the beliefs that people had based on these passages /did/ change.
A minor point, Jesus has anger issues a number of times in the Bible, not just with the moneylenders. As an example, the time he got mad at a tree for not having fruit and cursed it to never bear fruit again.
>As an example, the time he got mad at a tree for not having fruit and cursed it to never bear fruit again.
A tree that was out of season, no less.
And this happens immediately before the verse where he chases out the moneylenders.
And on the way back, they pass the withered fig tree again and one of the disciples points it out and Jesus says "Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them,"
Misc points of doctrine are not really the “collective interpretation” as if fundamentals were changing, and the comment to which I replied said “radically different”.
None of your examples feel like radically different Catholicism, except perhaps the papal infallibility thing, though even that seems it was generally believed, but not categorically, before being written down and today is generally believed, but not categorically, so, not radically different.
I could not disagree more. Wallace's use of language here is instructive, poignant, and immensely useFUL.
I'll bet you're an engineer, data scientist, or other technical professional, not simply b/c you're here, but b/c your response to Wallace's use of ambiguity and multiple layers of meaning reveals as much about the nature of your own relationship with language, which I'd guess prefers that things should be clear, precise, and have singular meaning. (I'm certainly oversimplifying you, so apologies.)
Look into "cognitive decoupling", and you may find a dichotomy that illustrates some of your reaction to Wallace.
Regardless of words being context-dependent and having uncountable number of meanings, in the context of a single argument a word should generally only have one meaning.
Again, I could not disagree more with your interpretation of what's happening here.
I'd recommend you, too, read the article I linked in the comment above. To characterize Wallace's words as an "argument", as if he were a lawyer in the court of being—as if such a thing exists—, is to employ cognitive decoupling, and to miss the point.
There's nothing wrong with C.D.—it's absolutely useful and necessary to have contexts in which words mean one thing and one thing only, but it's equally if not more necessary to have contexts in which that constraint does not hold, in which we are free to make meaning by use of metaphor and non-literal comparison. Indeed, it's the only way in which we can point to dimensions of experience that do not yet have names; it's how language evolves and expands, it's how technical domains come into existence.
In all fairness, this same rhetorical technique was commonly used in the faith that I was raised in. We were often taught that one could violate the Jewish/Christian commandment to "have no other gods before me" by placing more importance on material goods or hobbies (your car, your boat, sports, etc.) than worshiping God.
Judaism was a monotheistic religion surrounded by polytheists, their concern was maintaining their cultural integrity and identity.
Other commandments (though shalt not covet, etc) are concerned with materialism and greed. "Though Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me" is pretty clearly about precisely what it says on the tin.
It's also New Testament, but the "Riches" is capitalized in specific translation you're using, it's not capitalized in New King James, and neither in New International Version. I'd wager it's relatively modern addition.
To see if that point is actually in the sources, you would need to go into Greek, or look for a good historic analysis of Gospel of Matthews.
[edit]
Ten commandments come from oral tradition, but most probably were written down at least a few hundreds years earlier (500 or 600BC)
Yes. Would you lie in court for your spouse? Is telling the truth more or less important than whatever consequences they would face from your honest testimony?
Luke 14:26:
> If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple.
This is hyperbole, which Jesus uses relatively often. It is also more subtle in the original Greek: while we often use the word "hate", the original has more of a connotation of (IIRC) separate-yourself-from. See also:
It is not that one's parents, spouse, siblings are bad in themselves, but that one has to be mindful that the source of being tempted to not act morally and doing the right thing can come from anywhere—even people that we would otherwise cherish.
Given the degree of your outrage, I think something other than "rhetorical technique" has triggered you here. Then again, maybe you are just really really opinionated about "rhetorical techniques" and following strict definitions of words? In that case, you must despise the vast majority of stories and literature because of their metaphors, parables, and subtly different meanings...
This is obviously incorrect. If someone is making an argument then there is a higher bar of what word usage means than stories about santa clause. And using words like "religion" with completely different, fuzzier, less meaningful definitions in order to make a point that doesn't address the topic of religion being discussed is in fact worthless at best. Manipulative and dishonest at worst.
It's up to the reader to decide what is worthwhile for them.
Also, whether that quote is relevant or not is not what is being argued. The original dispute (on a surface level) was about a "rhetorical technique". Now you say it is manipulative and dishonest, which is a completely different thing and obviously false.
It is not conflating. It is essentially giving advice for how to live, which is that meaning and identity and focus should not be on something material since those can and likely will be lost. Wallace even mentioned the Four Noble Truths as an option, which is not even part of a theistic worldview in many interpretations.
This is the same advice that most who study mental health would give.
You know who also sucks at writing? William Shakespeare
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
In this quote, Shakespeare is just fudging the definition of "name". He says people and flowers both have something called a "name", implying their names are equivalent. This is intellectually dishonest because people's personal names are subtly different than the names you use to describe objects. I find this quote insulting and useless.
He's really not, though. He means that these are the activities from which people derive purpose. People derive purpose from religion, or money, or beauty, or status.
“The question is, ” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty. “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Trying to steel man David Foster Wallace here, I would say his point is that, if you define "religion" instead as a sort of personal philosophy, then we all have one. And because we all have a philosophy of some sort, we all have desires, rules, and some sort of ethical principles, we don't have atheists.
The point he has relies on a faulty premise. When people talk about religion and atheism, they aren't using the definition of Wallace. They're using the strict definition - non-theist. Not a theist. They don't believe in god. they are saying absolutely nothing about the rest of their philosophy.
He RELIES on changing the definition of religion into something it very clearly isn't. And he does this in order to provide evidence that people, who obviously exist, must not according to his definition. It's like saying "Homosexuality doesn't exist, because all homosexuality is is is rejecting the beauty of certain genders. But we all recognize the beauty of our mothers and brothers and fellow humans, and the grace they give and the home they provide. No human would be human without loving thy neighbor".
It's insulting. And other than that, it has absolutely no value, intellectually, morally, or otherwise.
Because the absence of logical rigor is what enables charlatans to continue to make a living off of people's desire to believe in something that is not so.
This is a problem that's bigger than religion - when people can't tell when they're being bullshitted to or when they use emotion instead of reason to decide on matters that significantly affect their lives and lives of others (not just which flavor of icecream to have), it's a problem.
Even science is pretty hard to justify with formal logic.
There's a pretty big gap between inductive reasoning (statistics) and deductive reasoning (formal logic), called the problem of induction. No logician or philosopher has come up with a widely accepted way to solve it in the roughly 200 years since David Hume started writing on the subject.
This sort of conflations are typical in social commentary situations, comedy especially. This is absolutely something I could see done in an act done by Carlin or Williams.
Unless you can elaborate and distinguish different kinds of "worship", your accusation is overblown. Maybe he used this word simply because it was the best choice available to capture and communicate the underlined meaning?
1. To believe in something unobservable by conventional means.
2. To value something over anything else.
The word "atheist" clearly implies the first, and he never explains what meaning of the word "atheist" he uses in his "there are no atheists". So this is either a rhetorical trick, or a tautology that defines "atheist" as, roughly, "someone who doesn't value anything that much", but never goes anywhere with this definition.
I like the atheist movement, but there definitely is one major logical inconsistency in it. The whole driving motive behind atheism is that folks have looked at existing religions, where people believe in provably false statements, and – you know, that's "bad". It's bad because it's factually false.
The key thing is that the valuation of objective truth here goes way beyond just a calculus of hedonic means and ends - but is treated as something with inherent moral value. For most of these people (speaking from personal experience as one), if you're given a red/blue pill choice between "hedonic misery but knowing the truth of your existence" versus "ignorance and bliss", most of us are morally obligated to chose the former.
It's a bravery and honor thing. I don't want a security blanket of false beliefs. I want to know the truth.
But that right there - if we're rejecting the hedonic "means and ends" justification - has no logical justification whatsoever. The only reason we want to know "the actual truth" is a completely unjustifiable woo-woo piece of "just because we do". It's like an axiom - there's no proof for it or justification for it. It's just there. We value the truth for no freaking reason - we consider it just somehow morally good in some inherent, unprovable way - dare I say, because it's "sacred", somehow.
I don't mind making a religion out of pure truth-seeking. That seems like a great idea, honestly. But let's recognize it for what it is.
This is useless reasoning. An atheist is someone who is sure there is no God.
An agnostic is someone that admits they don’t know.
A militant agnostic is a person that knows that you don’t know, and wants you to admit it.
The first and third are actual religions / political movements. Claiming the people that ascribe to them are wrong is as offensive as saying all modern members of religion X are self-deluding hypocrites.
Since we’re apparently not using words to mean what they mean, you have no possible rebuttal.
Apparently he is not comparing religion and atheism. He also mentioned money, beauty, etc. You seems miss the point of the quote as a whole. Even atheism is not worship. Atheists, as human, still need something to worship on, like everyone else. But again, the focus is really not atheists.
Getting downvoted. Worship here obviously means something other than religious. Worship money, wealth, power, etc. is commonly used in language. It's pointless to fixated on the narrow meaning of the word.
Here is a glaring example of debating semantics in hopes to discredit the actual meaning of something or attempt to kill the topic altogether. Appears to be a bad outcome from the rise of STEM worship.
I will wholly disagree with this point of view. Telling people that their whole category of thought doesn't exist based on your own personal variants of definitions is belittling.
I put in a different comment that this isn't that different in concept from telling homosexuals that they don't exist because we all love our mothers.
Feel free to assign the meaning you find most convenient to random words, but the fact is, we are in the thick of a thread about religion, in which Wallace's excerpt is being used to make a point ...
Oh yeah i am sidestepping that cause his quote doesn't really apply to religion. It's just a way to appeal to people who see no difference between money and ethics in a nice way.
Actually he's making philosophical commentary about the nature of what people dedicate themselves to. But if you want to get emotionally wrapped up in the definition of a word and ignore the message, go for it.
Exactly, he's pointing out that the revaluation of all religious values does not lead to atheism, but to individually chosen principles that must also be based on a faith due to the uncertainty that such beliefs are meant to deal with. Even athiesm itself can be viewed as a fundamentalist religious belief that is based on faith.
I find the idea that faith can't eat you alive to be strange given that we have so many examples of that happening in real life. Faith is no different than money, power, allure, etc... in that regard.
That's one reason people turn to atheism in the first place, to avoid getting gobbled up by religion.
Personally, I've seen churches eat way more people alive than greed or any other power allure.
Beauty consumes people at the beginning of life, but most get away from it at the start of adult age. The only other things that come close are political ideologies and personality cults.
I have minor criminal cousin named Jake, Jake doesn't claim to be anything else, unlike most Christians I've known who feel morally superior yet hold some of the least humanitarian ideas I've ever known. At least cousin Jake doesn't lie to himself about what he is.
I really don't understand why some people have to turn to atheism when not participating in organised religion is quite easy enough. This is what the article implies, church membership as opposed to faith. Why even bother to deny something that others believe without proof and needlessly argue about it? Maybe it makes them happy, more secure. Vocal atheists usually annoy me more than christian evanghelists, mostly because of the negative message.
Because the U.S. still has not even come close to mastering the separation of church and state which means depending on where you live it will confront you frequently whether you like or not. Burying your head in the sand does nothing if you believe the premise of that separation is virtuous. I am not atheist myself but I have yet to see anyone I know be vocal about their atheism, yet I know many that are vocal about their religious views. I am curious where you see vocal atheists enough that they annoy you?
Most of the ones I've met acted pretty much like Dawkins and got all worked up by their beliefs, mocked churchgoers and called them names. Maybe it preocupies them a great deal but I did not care to hear any of it, nor asked about it, it was them who sought to share their opinion on the matter.
I also live in a country where the separation between state and church is also not clear enough. The church is quite openly corrupt and gets laughed at by my generation and is becoming less relevant every year.
I don’t know about your country but here in the U.S. vocal religion is used to justify racism, sexism, refusal of medical care, and employers dictating their religious views on marriage, reproduction, etc. on their employees. Richard Dawkins is annoying, to be clear, and I am deeply skeptical of some of the factors in how he singles out Islam but as far as I’m aware he’s never tried to prevent someone from seeing a doctor or said that a stranger shouldn’t be allowed to get married without his approval.
Here too. It's used against the LGBT community and my ultranationalists. At least they don't refuse medical care and made no attempts to ban abortion like in Poland, because the country had an awful abortion ban (unrelated to church) in the past and everyone older than 40 remembers it. But rumours are spread amongst the religious community about vaccines, microchips, 5G etc. We used to joke that when getting vaccinated against covid, the state secretly intriduced 5G microchips under our skin.
> Maybe it preocupies them a great deal but I did not care to hear any of it, nor asked about it, it was them who sought to share their opinion on the matter.
Congratulations, now you know how most American atheists feel about religious people and their beliefs.
I am an atheist. I am without god. I respect no external judgement upon me.
Am I pure? Have I fallen victim to the seduction of mammon and the innumerable trinkets of existence - of course I have, and accept I will until the day I die.
Do I worship myself and take excessive pride in my self-stated virtues - clearly I do, as you can see if you've read this far.
But outside of my petty rhetoric, I know I came from nothing and at the end of my life-span I will return from whence I came.
I find this comforting.
There's no game to win, no test to pass, no heaven to enter - just a feeling of solidarity with those I share my temporal-blip-in-the-light with.
I guess this makes sense if you define “atheism” as “not obsessing over something” and “worship” as a synonym for “unhealthy obsession.” I take issue with those definitions, and also with the premise that an adult must have an unhealthy obsession over something.
What if I told you, I don’t believe in god, nor obsess over money or beauty. Oh, I guess I “worship” all things in moderation and healthy relationships.
forgive me if im not moved by the edict of an alcoholic misogynist trying to assuage his own fears of moral impropriety and existential castaway after failing twice to join the Catholic church. Wallace enrobes the exhausted and derisive narrative of evangelicals confronted with an alternative to the almighty they themselves find personally intolerable in an almost comically dismissive tone. At least Thomas Aquinas had the decency to avoid Reducto ad Absurdum when he published his metaphysical treatise.
Had we only outlawed the semiconductor im sure Gallup would enjoy a more sterling report of gods children, however i myself may be amiss. Christian Evangelism on the whole has seen a marked decline since its apex during the second Bush administration.
I imagine that many people might read this quote (out of context) from his speech "This is Water" and in this thread discussing US church membership, and think, "This seems like DFW is defending religion." But, I think this is far from the case. I think this was DFW indicting modern secular consumer society as no better than religion in its vapidity. "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." This is the modern consumer choice, boiled down.
The point of the speech is not to convince you that worshiping religion might be a better idea than worshiping money, things, power, or vanity. Instead, the point of the speech is to convince you that a human's "default setting" (another phrase he uses in the speech) is to worship something. And, often, that worship of something simply happens to adults, as they are going through the motions of the modern drudgery of everyday life.
Thus to move beyond worship requires a level of education (and introspection) not typically accessed by everyday adults -- yet, it's still available to all, should they try hard enough to pursue it and to see it (that is: the water surrounding the fish who swim in it).
This being a college commencement speech, DFW encourages the young graduates to use their education, and the introspection it allows, to rise above the various human psychological biases (especially self-centered behaviors and attitudes) that might make their lives feel meaningless and miserable in the moment (or in retrospect).
> But if we should serve others, and together serve some common goal or idea - for any one you, what is that idea? And who are those people?
> In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible.
> If you love friends, you will serve your friends.
> If you love community, you will serve your community.
> If you love money, you will serve your money.
> And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself. So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others, and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return.
I have absolutely tried to hard wire the "choose how to think" into my brain. It is never easy.
His example of the swerving SUV racing through traffic maybe just possibly driving that way because of a personal emergency stuck with me. I don't have to assume the worst of people who are acting in a way I don't agree with, and to consider this anytime I'm getting worked up over something can be quite helpful.
It is sad that so many people do not understand WHY religion is worse over other things mentioned here.
These things are SHARED among many things, along with religion;
- we humans tend to form social hierarchies
- we all want to be belong
- we want to be the hero of our story
- life is hard, and death is terrifying, so we need lullabies
- some rules/codes required wherever there are more than 1 person alive. Be it religious, moral or written/legal.
- we all need some ideal to work towards
This however, is SPECIAL to religion;
Religion makes it a habit in believers to believe without evidence, forbits questioning, and delays answers to "afterlife".
Hence takes away the power of understanding and reasoning.
It installs a backdoor to people's minds so to speak. From which all the other bullshit are welcome to come in and also take a seat in their mind.
“ Religion makes it a habit in believers to believe without evidence, forbits questioning, and delays answers to "afterlife". Hence takes away the power of understanding and reasoning.”
I haven’t found this to be true, but it is definitely possible in fundamentalist circles.
I have found atheists who run from the question and don’t want to engage with ‘is there meaning, or is there no meaning?’
I think Wallace is right in a sense. But I think 'worship' is the wrong word and if we're interpreting this literally then no, there is such thing as atheism.
I get the sense people too often take this quote out of context to suggest atheism is some form of religion. Wallace was a master of the metaphor. I don't believe that he meant this literally. I think he could have used the word 'nihilist' instead and gotten the point across but I understand why he didn't.
> is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive
I’ve seen plenty of people who have dedicated themselves to religion, made it completely consuming (ie go to church every day, God is the only thing they talk about, and the Bible is their only frame of reference), and they are unhappy because Religion itself has eaten them alive.
I know religious folks who are the most miserable people ever. Because they get jealous when someone else worship more than them. They will criticize and belittle everyone they can. And I know atheists who are way more chill than so called hippie/spiritual/religious folks claim to be. Just because one is atheist doesn't mean they will be greedy capitalist or sex-addict or something else.
Here's what's actually true and not at all weird: religious people from evangelical religions draw parallels to non-religious people by pretending that every human is born with the need to venerate something. It's how they rationalize their evangelism. They have to, because admitting that other people do not share these imperfections is akin to admitting that some people do not need what they have to share. The fun thing about lying is that if you wrap it up in enough gift wrapping, people will tire out and accept it as truth rather than spending the time to uncover the lie.
Nope. I for one don’t worship anything. Everything is flawed and imperfect. But there is still love, happiness, beauty in this world. Right next to hate, despair and ugliness.
> ...pretty much anything else you worship [other than religion] will eat you alive. If you worship money and things... then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
This is implying that worshiping religion/god/spirituality is exempt from extreme obsession. But I have to contest that religion can create far more extreme of obsessions than other forms of "worship" that Wallace references such as beauty, money, etc..
I grew up religious (in a high-demand religion) and saw that the religion created extremists among most of our church members. While an obsessive "worship" of losing weight can lead to anorexia, we see a good thing become bad. Being interesting in beauty isn't bad by itself, but an obsessive/extreme version can lead to depression and many other things.
Religion is no exception (even though Wallace seems to exclude it). An obsession over religion leads people to over analyze their life in the search of being perfect. It forces them to make unnecessary sacrifices for a reward that they will never actually attain. I've seen it tear apart families as bad as alcohol abuse or domestic violence can. There is a very dark, evil side to religion. The religion I was involved with put so much pressure on people to live life a certain way, to be perfect, that it was unattainable. The religion's goal is to enforce compliance and promote unity through shared suffering. But it has negative effects too. I've lost many close friends (including one roommate) who committed suicide from church pressures. Prescription drug abuse is particularly bad within the community that I grew up in, I personally know several people who have life-long addictions to prescription opioids that started from church pressures. I have seen domestic violence and child sexual abuse, all justified (and protected and buried) under religious arguments. My personal experience with religion shows consequences that far exceed those of other obsessions such as wealth, beauty, fitness, drugs, and so on. So I would be very careful about giving religion a "pass".
Are all religions bad? Probably not. I know plenty of people who have healthy relationships with religion. But the bad stuff is definitely there too, and it is FAR from rare. And I am only talking about relatively tame religions too. We can go even more extreme and start discussing the effects that religion have had on promoting unspeakable acts such as the holocaust, the crusades, the jihads, 9/11 attacks, the inquisition, Boston marathon bombs, numerous mass shootings, Incan & Mayan sacrifices, the KKK, witch hunts, wacko in waco, jim jones mass suicide, and this is a short list.
I am no longer religious myself (it was a religion imposed on me by my parents), but I have no problem with other people being religious. I would just caution that there are extremes, and religion is an easy one to fall into an extreme. You are literally discussing something that is "out of this world" and can not have any proof. The rewards are infinite (eternal life, glory without end, etc), which makes them more desirable to attain and justifies more extremes to earn. They also self-exclude and discriminate other people (your religion is right, everyone else is wrong or evil). The stakes that religion creates are simply so high, that it is easy to fall into the obsessive and extreme category, more so than worrying about an obsession over wealth or fitness.
Turing's work has some independent value, it's not just a mess of philosophical/moral opinions like Wallace is offering up in this speech. If nothing else, Wallace's suicide illustrates to me what a gulf there is between "saying things that sound wise" and actually living wisely. One has very little to do with the other.
A suicide doesn't mean your life wasn't lived wisely. He was suffering from a clinically-diagnosed depressive disorder, was told to stop taking antidepressants by his own doctor, and was recommended to try electric shock as an alternative. His suicide was less "stupid man is sad" than "Wow, look! The medical industry isn't even trying to fix depression."
Given that there topic seems to broadly be about happiness and personal satisfaction, you could argue that someone suffering from depression is either wholly unsuited to the task or someone with excellent perspective. I don't think it's overly surprising that suicide undermines your credibility on those topics with some people.
Yeah, I don't think the useful discussion is whether a wise person / person with wisdom would commit suicide, or whether a person who committed suicide could be considered wise.
The useful discussion is "Is this person's way of thinking probably going to help me improve my life?"—if someone committed suicide, I would think twice about thinking similarly to that person.
To illustrate why, I'm depressed. I don't have direct control over this. But I do have some control over what I think. If I bow to the thoughts "this life is not worth living", yeah, I become more likely to slit my wrists. But if I think "I'm not going to identify with these thoughts. I'm going to eat lunch and that will probably make me feel better", I think my life will be longer and better.
Not saying you can think yourself out of clinical depression, but I'm going to be careful about what I decide to think, and who I'm going to model in my thinking.
This doesn't make sense. You can't argue with Turing's math and algorithmic discoveries/creations (unless you can prove them wrong) but you certainly can some of his flawed philosophies. QED False equivocation.
I discount Turing's works because of his suicide. I think the Turing award ought to be renamed.
Consider all the love and respect directed at Robin Williams after he died. The perverse reality is that for someone in a suicidal frame of mind, that kind of love makes "I'd be better off dead" far more credible.
I think the other extreme, outright condemning someone, probably doesn't work either, as it's liable to make a person with suicidal feelings feel trapped.
So I settle for disapproval, that suicide is a permanent stain on someone's legacy, in the hope that it nudges someone to stick it out for another day.
For comparison, UK church membership is <10% and forecast to fall to to 4% by 2025.
Numbers for those claiming to be of "No religion" range from from 50 to 60% depending on region. 38% don't believe in God or any higher spiritual power.
The interesting thing is people will identify as Christian on the census while also not claiming to subscribe to any particular religion in other surveys.
2021 census (just completed this month) results will be interesting
I think part of the problem is that there is no clear tradition of “cultural Christian” like there is for “atheist Jew”. I don’t believe in God. I love the high church and choral traditions. I attend a church where the minister feels the same. Am I a Christian? No. And yes.
No, this is not correct. There are people who go to church and use Jesus as a central moral figure, partake in many or all of the rituals, who nevertheless do not believe in god. Often you find this runs in families, because the intellectual tradition is that it’s fine to go to church and like Jesus, but reject any or all of the supernatural parts or moral teachings.
Then you have people that may have grown up surrounded by some of the trappings of Christianity, but because of their atheism, do not attend church and take part in only the most universal rituals (Christmas, basically, and even then, the Christian bits are mainly removed). Christian thought is not the moral or philosophical touchstone.
The parent poster is more arguing that the atheist Jew label only really exists because most of the atheists in the US are Christian atheists to a certain extent (in that they celebrate Christian holidays and many aspects of Christian culture).
So you need to explicitly define atheist Jews as the exception.
Approximately 10% of the Israeli population identifies as "atheist Jews" (more than that are non-religious, but only a minority of non-religious people embrace the 'atheist' label)
I don't see how the identity of atheist Jews in Israel depends on non-Jewish people celebrating Christian holidays in the US (whether those people identify as atheists or not)
I've been an atheist my entire life, raised by two atheists. But I celebrate christmas and easter, attend my friends weddings in churches even though they are atheists too, so I think I'm a cultural Christian.
This isn’t necessarily true outside the US. The running joke about Greeks is that they are 98% Greek Orthodox (official stats from a while ago) and 40% atheist. You might be atheist and communist (a fairly common combo in Greece) but will still probably roast a lamb on Easter with your family.
Having married into a Greek family, I can certainly attest to this, but I'll shed a bit more light to the sentiment behind that statement. To the Greeks, the Greek church is part of their cultural identity, rather than a purely religious entity. There is a community that stems from the church, traditions that are intertwined in it, and just a general presence in their daily lives in a way that I don't think I've really observed in the US. Oddly enough, it doesn't really outwardly express itself as dogma or doctrine, in the way that I've noticed with a lot of Evangelicals or Catholics in the states. The church is more of an ever present fixture in Greek life than a strong belief in Orthodox teachings.
Turkey is the same way. The government says 99.8% of the population are Muslim by default but it’s probably closer to 60%.
Until a few years ago religion was listed on government identification cards. When you’re born your parenrs must state a religion for your birth certificate or it is automatically listed as Muslim.
You had to go through a burdensome official process as an adult to change this, and once you did this you legally admitted to Apostasy, which opens you up to discrimination (and future consequences if the government were to fall to islamists or neo-ottomans).
Furthermore, it was very common to be discriminated against by HR departments / hiring managers if Islam was not present on your Kimlik (government ID).
This only went away with recent passport and national id standards changing in their futile attempts to join the EU.
(Consider that Turkey is by far the most liberal and secular Muslim nation.)
I think there are more of you floating in the pews with you than you may expect. As I've grown older it's been hard to belong to a dogmatic religion. But I miss those same things you describe. I too attend on occasion for those exact reasons.
It was startling to me, however, to realize that I'm not alone. A large % of people there in the church find value even if they don't actually believe. And that's a strange comfort that let's me continue to appreciate the tradition without claiming the title.
Growing up in the 80's (UK) as a Roman Catholic, I remember the services being full on Sunday mornings. Not been since I left home at 18, because frankly I stopped believing in God the same time I stopped believing in Father Christmas (7?). The only reason I went was to make my parents happy.
Now I'm in my 40's I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place. We know from numerous studies that 2 parent families (mother and father) give the best outcomes for children (education, jobs, etc). In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values? What we are seeing is better rights and fairness for individuals (same-sex marriage, etc) but is that good for society as a whole?
There is no evidence that heterosexual parents are better for children than non-het parents. An important factor is that their parents have a stable relationship.
Despite (in my opinion) missing the point & also leaning a bit toward "yay heterosexuality!", what that poster said wasn't exactly insinuating anything bad about any other group.
When a child has a parent that's died, or a parent that leaves, or a parent that insert 90% of reasons for parental absence, it's natural that they'll have a harder time than anyone else. It's not that the widow would be a bad parent, it's that the kid would have to deal with the terrible situation of having a parent die.
If you were really wanting to get to the source of truth there, though, you'd also show how children that get adopted by a non-couple perform. If I had to guess, they're probably doing the best by far, because adoption as a single person is only really possible if you're incredibly stable.
> Now I'm in my 40's I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place
I'm an atheist and have considered the same quite a bit. I wonder if some people need something to believe and direction and religion helps fence these people into society friendly pockets.
I wonder today if what I would consider is that overly woke pocket (which I respect is very relative to personal views) and generally more extreme politics on all sides need something to believe in a fight for and religion when done well is a brilliant force for good in society this way to coral that energy to good places.
...but at the same time religion can be horribly controlling and toxic. And when religion finds absolute power it tends to go badly so I think the trade off between too much and too little, we are better going towards too little.
Maybe somehow we need to look at the good parts of religion and work that into a non-religious society. Even little things like I'd love to see shops closed on Sunday again and return this as more simple downtime for family, friends and self. Also realise we dont need to spend money every day.
> I wonder if some people need something to believe
I totally understand your point (and agree with the stated goal of a non-religious society with the "good bits" of religion baked in), but, the "some" in your sentence above ... there be really scary dragons.
Here's what I mean: would you say that "some" people deserve the right to vote while others don't?
The argument that "some" people need religion has the implication that they're too dumb to figure out a path for themselves without the help of a guiding book.
And that because of their limitations, the only way for them to "stick to the book" is to shrink-wrap the message into a fairy tale.
In other words, that'd be a world where one part of the population (those who don't "need" religion) brainwashes and manipulates the other part into "doing the right thing" (whatever "right" actually is).
You can see why this line of reasoning is a very slippery slope.
I dont see the slippery slope. You're way over reading into 'some'.
Some simply means, some people need to believe in something, and others dont. You cant thing this is an all or nothing position?
And the leap to conclusion with: "implication that they're too dumb to figure out a path for themselves". I've not said or implied that anywhere, nor do I see that is a obvious implication. Taking this step is creating offence where there was none.
And then concluding this could mean these people need to be brainwashed to believe the preferred format. That's a leap on a leap that had nothing to do with what I said, and pulling a worst case scenario into some semblance of the conclusion to focus on.
And not trying to have a go at you, but I do this you've over read on a work and made fallacious leaps in logic flow to a worse case. We can do that with any scenario. I cant see why it has any significant reason to be the focus point based on the previous comment, so I dont see why this is slippery slope as maybe it could happen but there is no direction from previous to align those events.
But that's me, and some people will agree, and some wont :)
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
> In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values? What we are seeing is better rights and fairness for individuals (same-sex marriage, etc) but is that good for society as a whole?
I understand where you are coming from, I struggle with my atheism/beliefs too.
But without doubt, this is good for society. Think about it, we had slavery because bible and other religions, approved of slavery. Then women had no rights because of religion, finally they do. These are good things. I believe homosexuality is next big step for humanity. Once this is accepted, no one would even think about questioning it.
As for old old family values, I am not really sure what it means, but if it means close family ties, then I have seen non-religious families who are very close and religious families who fight all the time. And vice versa.
Agreed - one of the other things to consider is that the vast bulk of i.e. abolitionist momentum in the US came predominantly from the church.
What slavery was doing, from an industrial and economic standpoint was wonderful for the owners, and very hard to quit - all of the objections to it were moral. I.e. "it's great apart from that pesky little detail where it's horrifically evil."
Quite a few antebellum churches desperately tried to plaster over this extreme cognitive dissonance between their teachings, and the practice of their society. You can find plenty of published material to that effect, but all of it has the same sort of flavor as Orwell's "some animals are more equal than others", wherein it has to somehow invalidate all of their core ideological principles, generally without a logically rigorous reason. ("All humans are equal" -> "well, what about them?" -> "oh well, uh, they're not really human" -> "because?" -> "reasons." )
You don't think holy books and holy leaders explicitly supporting those horrible positions had a negative effect? The Catholic Church still teaches their followers that gay sex is a ticket to hell.
In my mom's case it was religion that directly caused an incredibly toxic family life. God said have a massive amount of kids you have zero ability to care for, birth control is a sin and God will magically take care of the kids, so just keep pushing them out.
> because frankly I stopped believing in God the same time I stopped believing in Father Christmas (7?).
I had a very similar experience. My mother is a (now non-practicing) catholic and my father is more or less an agnostic. We stopped attending church about the time I was 10 because our parish had one of the pedophile priests. My "faith" died out after I learned that all of these supernatural things I was told existed actually didn't, why was the existence of god any different.
Personally, I'd say I ended up an agnostic. I don't go around telling people what I think they should believe and internally I don't really lean one way or the other. One of those "unknowable" things, along with whether there is an afterlife or not. I kind of hope there is something, I can't exactly fathom non-existence.
But as far as "family values" go, I've never felt my parents' moral teachings to be any less reasonable without an underlying fear of damnation to keep you on track. I'd like to think that I'm a good person and that being a good person is my own choice and not something I'm told to do "or else".
Maybe it was Stephen Fry who said it, but there is a quote along the lines of "I'm commiting as many murders, thefts, and rapes as I want - that number is 0" that kind of resonates with me.
This is an interesting point, I think its a valid argument that as America has fractured into vastly different competing social / political groups that the country as a whole has gotten weaker. Media now profits on widening those splits and people find themselves having less and less in common with each other. Religion very likely used to provide a common ground to people and as it fades so too does that ground. I don't think I have ever believed in God or religion but I can understand that it has provided some good. If I was an enemy with a very long timeline (say 100 years) I would work hard at continuing to widen these faults and differences.
It did occur to me that perhaps people who weren't brought up in a traditional (mother+father) Christian family might not know what "good old family values" means. Not meaning to make an assumption about you of course.
That's a term that everyone interprets their own way, without even realising that they have different values to the person standing next to them; different people's "family values" can conflict in significant and very incompatible ways.
So what are "good old family values"? If your young, unmarried daughter falls pregnant, should you cast her out or should you double-down on helping her? Both of those are good old family values.
Good old family values would discourage young, unmarried women from getting pregnant in the first place. That is absolutely not how society works today, so let's start there instead of your absurd example.
They would also encourage helping the weak, the down-and-out, etc.
There was a time in the US when a needy person could walk up to nearly any door (except perhaps those of a few known scoundrels) and expect to find a meal, a bed for the night, clothes if needed, breakfast, and (depending on circumstances) some work to do the next day for pay.
The first great awakening had a profound effect on society - sermons preached in the 1700s directly influenced the US founders, belief in God and moral accountability to him became a basic assumption of society.
"Family values" is a term that focuses on where Biblical teachings have the most impact (the family) but it fails to capture the worldview within which such values arise.
> There was a time in the US when a needy person could walk up to nearly any door (except perhaps those of a few known scoundrels) and expect to find a meal, a bed for the night, clothes if needed, breakfast, and (depending on circumstances) some work to do the next day for pay.
Do you have a source on this? Genuinely asking because I’ve never heard of this depiction of early America, but I’m also a layman and not at all educated on American history beyond 101 college. What if you were black or East Asian?
Well, to pick a more contentious example, how would you find a marriage partner for that young women?
In many parts of the world, the answer is that her parents would either simply pick her partner or heavily influence her options. In much of the U.S., that would be unthinkable! How do we reconcile those different family values?
Unless you can demonstrate how to separate what you classify as "absurd extremes" from your cultural context, I think it's fair to use any examples of stable, religiously upheld, prosperous cultures to criticize traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism.
Is there a causative study that evidences that religiosity prevents unwanted teenage pregnancies? My understanding is that, even as religiosity is decreasing, so are teenage pregnancies today!
It wasn't how it worked then, either, at least for any value of 'then' in England for the past thousand years or so. Yes, premarital pregnancy was strongly discouraged. But it still happened a lot. And both of GP's family responses were absolutely common at different times, and both came from a deeply family-centred place. So I don't see it as absurd at all. Religion has always been for the sinners as much as the saints.
That is how many societies do work today, including societies inside the United States.
Absurd example? It happens every day. Every day parents cut their children off for falling pregnant in some way that's unapproved, and every day parents support their pregnant-without-permission child.
In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values?
Hopefully we figure out how to build more stable unions by rebuilding a supportive framework (which church used to help with). Rather than forbidding divorce- provide tools, education, safety nets, etc, that parents may be more successful nurturing their relationship with each other. I have come to believe community is really valuable for the health of families, despite the nuclear ideal.
As someone who is semi-atheist, I have started to think that the invention of God was mostly to discipline children and to give them hope. Eventually, those children grew up and told same stories to their kids and until one day those stories became religion. Then came prophets who decided to prey upon these people and sold organized religion.
I say this because I got a toddler and sometimes it is easier to make up stories instead of telling truth, like when someone dies they go to heaven. Or if you clean up your room, then maybe elves will come at night and leave a present. It is almost like I can see a religion forming in front of my eyes. Sometimes I am using traditional religious stories like for life and death questions. And at other times, I am using fairytale creatures. This whole thing has made me more atheist while at the same time let me appreciate what religion does.
Which leads me to Santa Claus. I think Santa Claus is a great way to give subtle hint for thinking minds to realize that childhood stories are not real.
But can people still feel good without believing in religion? Do we have atheist societies? What do atheists tell their young kids?
> We know from numerous studies that 2 parent families (mother and father) give the best outcomes for children (education, jobs, etc). In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values?
That’s ironic given that the Church of England was solely setup so that the King could divorce his wife)!
> I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place
With respect, this is a popular right-wing talking point that has been repeated since the 1970s whenever the US is on the precipice of making real progress in terms of equity and rights.
I'm surprised to see this claim here, as I would have thought the previous four years of the Trump admin, and the disastrous influence of evangelicals on policy making and governance, would have prevented anyone from even bringing it up again.
More recent research indicates that when a society is under immense social pressure and internal conflict, and fails to provide for its citizens, religious adherence tends to increase. However, in peaceful societies where the citizens have access to a wide range of services, religious participation drops considerably.
There's a lot more to this than I'm summarizing, but the data is clear: nonreligious societies are wealthier, happier, and more peaceful.
In the US, the most red, religious states have some of the highest poverty in the developed world. This isn't a coincidence. Religion tends to diminish when good governance provides for its people.
And most tellingly, what did we see happening in the US during the last four years of the previous Trump admin? The rise of Christian nationalism, often aggressive and violent in nature, and the loss of basic governance and services for most Americans.
Source: Ed Diener, Louis Tay, David G. Myers. The religion paradox: If religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011
https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0024402
Yes you make some good points - although very US-focused so can't comment too much on that as I've only lived in the UK.
The whole Christian = right-wing is news to me - again coming from the UK it's not seen like that at all.
> The rise of Christian nationalism, often aggressive and violent in nature, and the loss of basic governance and services for most Americans.
Again - news to me. Do you have examples here?
I should add that I'm not religious at all, and don't think a Iran-style religious state is a good thing for anyone. My main point was that we have lost something without religion, and the woke-ideology has replaced some of that in a very bad way.
many of the largely atheist countries seem to be doing ok. But atheism isn't really anything other than a lack of belief in the claim there is a god. So what becomes more important is what you choose to make judgements, and many of the more atheist countries tend to have more secular humanist values. It's much more worthwhile talking about positive belief systems like secular humanism rather than lack of belief.
Also I'd be careful with any kind of statistics that measure people who conform more closely with Christian values in societies who are largely Christian or structured around christian ideals. Being outsiders in any society is often problematic because of how the society ends up treating/valuing you.
Other than my Grandma who is in her 90's and one friend who joined a church later in life (his family are atheist) I don't know anyone in the UK who goes to church. At least among my friends its just not a thing. I find it bizarre how many people in America attend church, but I hold nothing against them for it.
Yes, reading this thread as someone from the UK makes me realise the US is very different culturally from the UK. I'm sure the proportion of people for whom religion is important in their lives is much much smaller in the UK than the US. I think most British people only encounter religion at Christmas and weddings, unless they're of a religious minority group.
It isn't evenly distributed and the US doesn't have one culture, plenty of Americans never encounter much religion, particularly in the Western US which is overall less religious.
The US's First Amendment deals with that, in great part to get away from the (at the time) Church of England and prevent that (mixing church and state) from happening here. It doesn't logically surprise me that the country who left that scenario to worship freely has higher numbers of religious people 300 years later than in the country that still lived under much of the corruption for a longer period of time.
It's Holy Week this week (the week before Easter starts) and every day there is a service in each parish. UK, Roman Catholic churches. You have to book online to reserve a place. A quick look at a few parishes in an area for big and small churches shows that all the services for each day of the week and weekend are booked out in advance.
Obviously the numbers able to fit in the churches are capped because of Coronavirus, but it appears as if there are more people who are wanting to attend than can. What I can say with some confidence is that there is at the very least more demand than the capacity.
Roman Catholicism is the second largest Christian denomination in the UK (after the Church of England). Something like 7% of the population of England and Wales, 16% of the population of Scotland, and 40% of the population of Northern Ireland are Catholic. Catholicism is the dominant religion in many parts of Northern Ireland, and even in some parts of western Scotland.
You have to get tickets to get into Temple on the Jewish High Holy Days too. I know because I take my kids. It doesn't mean we are religious though. I just like to take them for the singing and to see the blowing of the ram's horn, fond memories I have from my own youth.
The difference in politics is interesting too - in the USA politicians have to be shown to be religious - people discuss the possibility that Bernie Sanders' might be atheist like its a potential major scandal. In the UK its the exact opposite, we don't want our leaders to be religious. Its ok for them to go to a big church service or lay a wreath or something but if they start talking about their 'faith' (as Tony Blair did somewhat) we get weirded out.
Jeremy Corbyn's atheism is an interesting example - the right wing press found all sorts of ways to vilify or criticise him, but his atheism never came up as a criticism - because atheism in the UK is a complete non issue. No-one cares. Compare with Bernie Sanders.
If you're running for major office in the US, announcing your fealty to God is a kind of real-world implementation of Pascal's wager. That is, if you are openly atheist you will earn the condemnation of a large cohort of believers, and lose many votes. But if you're religious, only a small few atheists will write you off as a candidate. So it's always to your political advantage to claim religious adherence, even if you're not. Arguably patently insincere lip-service actually works better than principled devotion in this respect.
UK has historically had low church membership. Even novels from the mid 1800s (Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy) talk about how village churches lay mostly empty due to lack of adherents
Having the Church community while growing up was great. But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
Frankly, growing up in the church left me with a broken moral code. It was only once I left it in my teens and had to work things out for myself that I feel like I could properly ground myself ethically. Having a moral system imposed on you can do that.
> But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
I don't think it's bizarre at all. With the church removed from western society something will fill the vacuum. And truly it already has. Our society requires complete unquestioning philosophical adherence to its new religion. What happened during the French revolution? They turned the churches into "Temples of Reason" all the while lopping off the head of anyone that did not wholly and totally adhere to their new moral code. Even in the end the god of this new moral code met his fate by the monster he created. Believe me what is happening is not what anyone here should want. For all of you who are thinking and reasonable. Read the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_d...
Dechristianization does not equal the french revolution any more than the rise of national catholicism equals Franco's fascist dictatorship. Plenty of western nations have dropped the church as it failed to adapt to modern liberal society, and plenty of atrocious regimes have been aided and abetted by the blessings of churches.
You have to put things in their context though. Not saying that the years of chaotic and arbitrary killing that followed the revolution was great, but religion was a different thing in France back then. It was also (and foremost) politics and a system of power before being a religion.
I wouldn't attach the world "moral" to the catholic church back then because it definitely had none.
People have been talking about the vacuum that Christianity has left or will leave in Western society for over a century. Most of the time, however, those who complain about this then completely miss the point.
The new organizations, ideologies, and new-age pseudo-religions "filling the religion-shaped hole" in society aren't inherently "lesser" than religion (or necessarily better). They are simply filling the niches in an ecosystem that many traditional religious structures by and large refuse to adapt to.
Yes, the sudden decrease in religiosity in society is probably just trading one set of problems for another, but if individuals didn't think that leaving their church was in their best interests then they wouldn't have left in the first place. Secularization is an inevitable consequence of freedom.
Religion and Christianity itself probably won't ever go away for the same reason it has clung to life for millennia: it will change and adapt to those new needs. It's only the stubbornly complacent sects and congregations who will dwindle and go extinct.
I don't think you're arguing that it's the same motivation as the French revolution, so it would help to elucidate your point if you said what you think that new thing is. It would also help to explain how you think that enforced philosophical adherence by all of western society applies as there are still 47% of Americans who DO belong to a religious institution.
I agree that it isn't the same motivation but we're on trend to seeing a similar result. If we do get to that extreme then by that time, we'll have a new moral system which won't allow these types of conversations, in the same way certain extremist sects of christianity didn't allow dissidents to live. However, the form of christianity that we have now simply hurts peoples feelings. Hardly cause for such outrage. Though today hurting someones feelings is the equivalent of violence and there is no way to be forgiven except a life of apologizing and groveling. Exciting time to be alive.
Yes, there are abusers and that is heinous. The catholic church has done unspeakable amounts of damage to Christianity. However, that damage was done by going against the teaching of Christ who warned against such evil saying: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea." Mark 9:42. There will be justice. I can't imagine having a worldview where these evil people just die and cease to exist. Totally escaping justice.
100% that second paragraph. Growing up with morals imposed on my, via the threat of fire and brimstone was weird. I did what I had to do, because I was told to do it or else.
Being an adult and doing the right thing, simply because it's the right thing, and developing my own moral and ethical code of conduct has greatly reduced my stress and anxiety.
I hear you. This, reliance on the Old Testament fire and brimstone teaching is a failure of the church. The Law (and the fire and brimstone) is important to show how we (no one) can live up to being prefect and our need for forgiveness and love. We are to do things out of love, not out of fear.
Pretty much sums up my experience as well, I grew up going to church and every week it was ‘follow the church or go to hell’ and ‘you are all sinners going to hell’.
As an adult ( in a different geographic area ) I’ve been to church with my wife and its a much more positive experience.
In the end my ‘belief’ is in a moral code and not in a religion.
> Frankly, growing up in the church left me with a broken moral code. It was only once I left it in my teens and had to work things out for myself that I feel like I could properly ground myself ethically. Having a moral system imposed on you can do that.
How did you derive your moral code yourself? Any action you take has side effects in the outside world, and so some minimal, common understanding of morality is necessary for any beneficial interactions with the world and especially other people (I'll leave God aside for a second). Did you rely on the authorities of non-theistic moral authorities in the past, and if so, how did you examine the bases of their moral beliefs? Were you just relying on personal feelings and maybe some experiences? Did you discover the joys of hedonism?
I want to understand.
Edit: looking at some other comments, it seems you might be referring more to "fire and brimstone" preaching? I never experienced that growing up, despite being on the conservative end of mainline Protestantism and still practicing today, so I can kind of understand the reaction.
Not who you were asking, but I had a similar experience.
Ultimately what I ground my beliefs in is empathy, and the understanding that my actions have an impact on other people. The second very important piece is every human being counts equally.
Our society and inner psychology is complex. So we'll mess up and cause harm at times. Occasionally it will be intentional. But I think it's straightforward to understand committing to this as a guiding principle.
If you do that, and also agree with every human being counting equally, then I've got no problem with you or your faith. What disturbs me is how many people use religion as justification for inequality, or how they use concepts of forgiveness and grace to avoid fully owning and learning from their moral failures.
I find the argument that religion is required to understand and practice morality doesn't hold any water. In fact, I'd say religion makes it harder.
Religion gives you a set of rules, and usually involves some horrible cosmic punishment if you break those rules. But those rules are easy to derive without the need to invoke the supernatural. E.g.
- "What goes around comes around."
- Lying tends to produce more lying, leading to consequences for the liar
- Turning the other cheek gives you peace and endears you to others
- Charity is its own reward
- The 7 deadly sins are all eventually toxic to the individual committing them
- etc.
These would all be true even if religion never sprouted up in our world. Religion coopts basic, secular morality and claims it as its own divine truth. It's done this so effectively that people like you become confused about how non-religious people learn to be good people, and some go as far as to equate spirituality with morality.
My question to you (I'm assuming you're Christian) would be, how do you know that you shouldn't kill someone who works on Sunday? The bible explicitly says that you should (Exodus 35:2). If you know that your morality doesn't line up perfectly with the bible, then how did you arrive at it? There are prominent Christian figures you agree with, and plenty that you do disagree with. How do you decide which is which?
You don't need religion to learn about morality. Watching Mr. Rodgers or reading Winnie the Poo would do. As you get older you can get into Machiavelli and start really becoming a principled person.
I never grew up with watching Mr. Rodgers and only really know about him through the recent film about him, but it definitely seems that his Christian faith shaped his children programs, see:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/how-mister-rogers-faith-sh...
At the end of the day, the basic moral tenets of the christian faith can be found in every other faith, this aspect of the christian faith is the least unique IMO. "Love thy neigbor," being able to let things go, and helping the less fortunate are also in fact Buddhist rhetoric. Mr. Rodgers leaned on his faith because that's the philosophy he knew and understood how to use examples from. If his mother raised him with Eastern philosophy instead of scripture, he probably would have put up words from the Buddha which convey a similar message instead of that bible verse.
> Having the Church community while growing up was great. But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
I sort of feel the opposite, that a moral code that appeals to some authority is much poorer than one justifiable by some first principles. You can get a lot of milage out of just assuming that you do not want to be hurt in some ways and that other people are like you in that regard, and iterate from there.
Moral code is at least partially cultural. Somethings are consider immoral in some cultures while not in others. Although the major ones seem pretty aligned.
However religion isn’t needed for it, as different people from different religious backgrounds more or less got to the same place.
> But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
My grandpa's best friend was a catholic priest. I remember him saying that you really don't need to go to the church if you don't want to, but, if you did good deeds selflessly, always tried to make things right (in the sense of least global damage possible) and to avoid wronging others, you'd be a good enough catolic to pass any reasonable judgement day test.
Which is something I would suspect my idealized Jesus would stand behind.
The only time I saw him actually working as a priest, was when my grandpa died and he delivered his eulogy.
This is false. It is true that the church teaches that you can be saved without going through the church, but this does not apply if you are aware of the church. Invincible ignorance does not apply to those who are not ignorant.
I believe the main issue is whether one refused god or not (i.e. catholic who renounced the faith). Being aware of faith but not practicing while still fulfilling the requirements does count, iirc.
There are diverging views on the subject. For some, it suffices to act according to what Jesus taught. For others, the more strict observation of rituals is a necessity.
In response to your first paragraph: I was raised Catholic, and for a long time I’ve been a little bit envious of my Jewish friends’ ability to still associate themselves with their religious identity even after they no longer identify with the theistic elements of it. “If you leave you’ll burn in hell for eternity” was effective for a long time, and it worked on me for much of my childhood, but it doesn’t seem like a very effective retention strategy at this point.
Of course, I don’t really care to associate with most Catholics as they stand today anyway. But that might be different if Catholics and “I was raised Catholic”s had a more formal shared identity in the same sense that religious and secular Jews do.
> Having the Church community while growing up was great. But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
If you're not talking about the capital "C" church (which I interpret as the Catholic Church), then, it doesn't, really. You can be a Unitarian Universalist and believe in just about anything you want. Their entire philosophy is almost literally "be excellent to each other."
There's pockets of us UUs all over! Is someone asks me whether I got to a church, I have to ask, "Wait, what's your definition of a church?" Some of us Unitarians would prefer to drop the whole "Church" name entirely and call ourselves "Communities."
- Yes, you can believe whatever you want. Everyone is just genuinely curious about your journey. "My father was Jewish, my mother was Catholic, and I'm Wiccan now." is something that people legitimately say all the time, and never in jest.
- We "believe", if that's even the right word, that no one has it all figured out. There's great wisdom in all the world's traditions--and some nonsense too. Let's talk about it with respect.
- The way we teach sex ed is top-notch, educationally and psychologically. It's called "Our Whole Lives" because we know, from a vast empirical literature as well as our own personal stories that human sexuality is a complex, life-long activity. Our sex ed teacher is usually a guy called Mike. Mike is gay, and everyone agrees he is the best one to teach that class, for a variety of reasons.
- We encourage our kids to explore their own spirituality, in a "make your own religion" activity. We ask the kids themselves whether they think there is a god or not (or gods), and help them however we can.
I also enjoyed the Church community while growing up. It was important and no really 'religious' at the same time. Its hard to replace now that I have my own children. We don't go to church but are most certainly not 'anti-religious'. Like other comments, the sense of community was strong. I think society will be worse off as these communities erode or lose favor
Having an imperfect moral system imposed is better than having no moral system imposed. You have a context for which you can deviate, but if morality is all relative, many will be lost. You need something to ground yourself to. That's where familial culture and religion come in. One isn't necessarily better than another, but its useful to have as a starting point
I completely disagree that religion is the only moral system.
If you are not religious you still have a moral system. In the West this had been heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian values, but if you look at countries without that influence you still see a lot of similarities in morals.
I never said its the only one. It's one that has survived over thousands of years. Other places in the East may have their own values imposed outside of the context of religion. But it still exists.
The West for all its flaws based on Judeo-Christian values has its merits. For one, a Japanese person would be more likely to be accepted as an American than an American be accepted as a Japanese.
Religion isn't perfect, but it stood the test of time. It helped guide most of my bloodline to today (apart from a brief detour due to communism). Theoretically you can create a moral system and a way of imposing it outside of religion but I think that's dangerous. How sure are you that your new moral system you just thought of will serve your future generations to be happy and productive members of society? I personally wouldn't gamble my children's fate on it
You said you don't have a moral system without religion.
That's preposterous.
You also don't end up with a moral system you just invented. But how much of it is due to religions present and past is a fair question.
Religion is universal, it must clearly serve some purpose and convey some advantage to humans. I'm not arguing it has no value.
It's also unclear if you could get rid of god based religions if they would not just be replaced with something else similar to a religion. Woke culture makes me wonder.
Supernatural beliefs are universal. Religion is not.
Further, Christianity was the first "religion" to insist on its exclusivity. Others were either "people" religions ("Jews believe this"), animistic/traditional spiritualities, or highly polytheistic systems that willingly absorbed or included other gods / belief systems easily.
Christians were the first to come along and say: you [anyone in humanity] will burn eternally if you don't practice this belief exclusively, only we are correct. And not only that, by the 3rd century they were executing each other for disagreements about very arcane subjects (consubstantiality, etc.) And then later killing non-Christians as well.
It really depends on your definition of religion. We tend to superimpose Abrahamic religious models onto how we see "pagan" practices, but in reality many belief systems wouldn't fit what we call religion now. Almost all of them, including traditional Roman beliefs didn't include any notion of their own supremacy or unique truth, for example. The gods were not "perfect" beings or all-knowing they were just ... more powerful people. What you _believed_ was less important than what you practiced (sacrifice, etc.) Christianity was the first to make _belief_ primary.
And this goes back to what I was saying at the start of this thread: the church community is nice. But it is tied to an insistence in belief. Like, you have to have these ideas in your head. That's actually kind of f*cked up if you think about it, and kind of an aberration in the context of spiritual practices in all of human history. Most of the time it was: put this idol in your house or give a sacrifice for a good harvest and we're good. Nobody cared if you believed it or not. It's a series of practices to hopefully alter the world. And some good stories to go with it.
The Romans were incredulous at the early Christians not because of what they believed ("sure, Christ, why not...") but because they refused to follow along in community practices (no sacrifices to the emperor or city gods) and insisted that _only_ their beliefs were correct.
2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
I think that applies universally or very nearly so to human societies - which is amazing because very little is so universally human.
> many belief systems wouldn't fit what we call religion now
I see that as just a blind spot caused by our Judaeo-Christian heritage, not a fundamental issue.
You've got some interesting points though about how Christianity differs from pagan religions (actually I think it applies to Judaism and Islam as well.)
"Religion-based" morality is dangerous and it evolves with society. What was acceptable by religion 300-500 years ago isn't acceptable today. And yet, God is the same yesterday, today, and forever? No thanks.
We were only briefly religious growing up to satisfy some elders in the family, but in truth the community around our church was no stronger or any different than any other family based community we were in while growing up. You could have a just as strong of a family community with your kid in rec league sports, for example, because ultimately people just want to have a good time and you don't need a belief system for that when a plate of food will do.
Better to join a church/synagogue/whathaveyou that DOESN’T require total philosophical adherence.
There’s a similar problem in political circles, as politics has in many cases (especially last 5 years) replaced religion. Adherence is mandated by many, but the healthiest political circles/communities do not require strict adherence but instead allow healthy debate.
And in part, it is a difference in tradition. In Minneapolis, I was loosely connected with some Christian community houses (which were wonderful BTW), and one of the people who lived there was a (secular) Jewish person who made a kind of funny observation: She noted how Jewish people tended to get together and bond over arguments over the Torah, but in an evangelical Christian Bible study, everyone would “get together and just AGREE on everything!”
I tend to enjoy the process of philosophical/theological arguing as well, although I come from a evangelical Christian background, not a Jewish one. It’s just way more interesting to argue over stuff. And there is way less agreement out there on a lot of these topics.
Whether we talk about social justice, the ultimate fate of the universe, simulation theory, politics, utilitarianism, right and wrong and how that can or cannot have fundamental scientific bases. And also how spiritual vs physical interact with ideas as powerful entities themselves... Materialism is probably true on a literal basis, but ideas themselves have immense power, analogous to what the Ancients would talked about spirits ...is the Self a physical thing like a brain, or an idea or thought process or software that runs on the brain? How is that similar to the idea of a soul? Is it any different, and is dualism viewed from that perspective really incompatible with materialism? Why are people so resistant to the idea that a strong AI could have consciousness like a human or animal? If materialism is basically true (probably is), then it seems there’s nothing that one couldn’t effectively simulate. And why couldn’t we be in a simulation at this moment? Who runs this (possible) simulation and what are their goals? How is this any different from theological questions, and can we bring better insight to them? Are there things like “love” & “kindness” that we OUGHT to follow as our guiding principle in spite of lack of evidence of their utility? Is “right and wrong” purely situational or should they transcend merely being useful?
Anyway, these ideas, which one might think are obsolete with modern science, aren’t going away even from a purely materialist perspective. And neither do I think the need for community is going away any time. But it sure would be nice if we got rid of the “must have strict philosophical agreement” requirement that many (but not all) religious and political communities have.
"Better to join a church/synagogue/whathaveyou that DOESN’T require total philosophical adherence."
I'm a philosophical materialist and I don't believe in any kind of deity or supernatural world. There is no "church" that would have any place for someone like me, other than maybe the Unitarians, and, well, honestly, they're not that interesting.
I hung out in Marxist study groups and Trotskyist groupings for a while in my 20s. That was my replacement for a bit. :-)
You'll have a broken moral system imposed on you either way then, if not by a church than by the shifting values of politics and society. You'll never derive an absolute moral code by yourself, you are forced to accept the changing values of society or risk being ostracized. Most people just allow their morals to shift with society rather than dig in their heels or try to develop an absolute moral code.
> You'll have a broken moral system imposed on you either way
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how moral systems work, one that is perpetuated by the church.
In Christianity, there is a specific "source" of morality, one that's (supposedly) infallible and unquestionable. This leads to problems when the infallible-unquestionable source of morality endorses things like slavery [1]: if it's unquestionable and infallible, how can your moral system be adapted to address this shortcoming? (This is usually handwaved away by theists by saying something like "oh that's the old covenant", or "that was a different god", which uses strange internal doctrinal shenanigans to somehow justify this supreme perfect being's obvious moral shortcommings, and looks to everyone outside the religion like someone just playing the cup game.)
Outside of religion, there is no single "source" of morality. There's a codified system of laws that our societies adhere to, certainly, but there's plenty of examples of how the laws do not codify morality (e.g. I am not required to be even a minimally-decent Samaritan to anyone I encounter on the street). Morality instead is something that an individual has to build for themselves, as a framework for decisionmaking in the wider world: how do you choose between your available actions? what are your guiding principals?
Some decide that, for various reasons, they cannot support industrial animal agriculture, and turn vegan. Some decide they fundamentally disagree with the structure of our police forces. Some turn pacifist--but all come to these conclusions through their reasoning. They absolutely can (and do) borrow reasoning from other sources, but it's impossible for it to be 'imposed' on them because there is no 'higher power' that has the absolute moral right.
This is something that's frustrated me when trying to engage with religious people on other moral issues; a few months ago I was talking to my mom about the concept of wealth redistribution, as to me it seemed incredibly immoral that people like Jeff Bezos can have an insane amount of wealth while we still have children in our schools who can't afford lunch or library books or are even homeless. My mother (Christian) couldn't get around the idea that she had no right to impose her perceived morality on another: that it would be wrong to support laws requiring the redistribution of wealth. She had similar issues with LGBT rights: she could see the harm caused to LGBT people, and did not want to participate in that harm, but struggled to support them because she felt like codifying moral support for something, which she didn't have the power to do.
This removal of one's own ability to develop and test morals is part of what disturbs me greatly about the church. It makes it very difficult to demonstrate when people make mistakes, how they have harmed other people, and how they might go about avoiding that in the future.
> My mother (Christian) couldn't get around the idea that she had no right to impose her perceived morality on another
I mean... you probably can't get around that idea either. Or do you believe that any and all of your rights can and should be taken away if a majority of the people agree you shouldn't have those rights anymore (even if the majority are religious nutjobs who decide you should not have a right to consume alcohol because it's immoral)?
This is generally why I 'advocate' for atheism speficially, and street epistemology [1] generally: I want people to be able to effectively reason through their morals and beliefs, because I believe that will lead to a generally better society--or at the very least will make it easier for people to identify when they're arguing from different base assumptions.
My issue w.r.t. moral agency in religious folks is it's difficult to start having conversations around things like LGBT rights because their default stance is (paraphrased) "It doesn't matter what I think is 'right' or not, because I'm not the one who gets to say what is 'right' or not--that's God's job."
So before we can even get to the concept of "when (if ever) can you impose these moral beliefs on another" they're refusing to engage with the concept of a morality where that question matters.
To answer your specific question, no, I don't believe "any and all of [my] rights can and should be taken away if a majority of the people agree you shouldn't have those rights" because it doesn't align with my own moral perceptions: I don't think the majority is obviously correct. (For example, I am illegal in 71 countries and can be legally executed in 12. Perhaps not a strict majority, and I"m using laws as an indicator of moral policy, but certainly a lot of people--regardless, I do not agree with these things.)
That said, my perceptions __can be flawed__. I would hope that the tools I use to build them, and my willingness to discuss/argue/test them with others will prevent them from being egregiously wrong, but it is still possible that they would remain wrong. This makes it possible for me to correct my moral system where it is found lacking.
I note you don't tell me how my answers fell so short, so that I may clarify--no matter, I have other arguments.
Your god, who you trust to know all the facts of the universe, was okay with slavery. He didn't say "This is a terrible thing that we have to deal with for a few years, but will go away eventually." He didn't say "Treat your slaves as well as you would your neighbors, though they may work for you."
No, he explicitly allowed abuse to be inflicted on a slave, so long as they don't die:
Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod
must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result,
but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a
day or two, since the slave is their property.
[1]
So if you beat your slave so hard they die, you too can be beat--but if you beat them just short of death, and they're walking about in a day or two, you're off the hook. How is that fair? How is it in any way just and moral of this god to allow his followers to be so cruel to these people who have no recourse?
So even supposing that your argument--being surrounded by other slavery-endorsing nations made holding slaves morally permissible in the Old Testament--your god still allows horrific things to be inflicted amongst these people treated as property, so long as they don't die. So, best case scenario, he doesn't even do the minimum of saying "sure, have slaves, but treat them well."
Morality does not scale relative to time period. Slavery was always horrific--it wasn't that it slowly began to become morally-bad as time went on, it was always, always bad, people just chose to put profit over human rights for centuries. Eventually we came to realize the pain and suffering we were inflicting on people (and those people gained enough combined force to actually threaten those abusing them), and we changed our ways and laws. This doesn't mean that morality suddenly changed and slavery used to be okay, but now was bad, and people updated the laws to reflect that; no, people realized the things they were doing were indeed horrific, and changed their ways.
In the Bible, this is not the case--and I would hold that an all-powerful, all-knowing god, who can see all of time, would know that slavery would be immoral--regardless of WHEN it occurred. I think it's insane that some Christians just shrug and say "Well that was then, this is now." The lack of self-agency in such an argument disgusts me, and simply lengthens the tail on such flawed morals. That is, where they aren't actively participating in such things.
From "A People's History" by Howard Zinn:
In the year 1610, a Catholic priest in the Americas named Father Sandoval
wrote back to a church functionary in Europe to ask if the capture, transport,
and enslavement of African blacks was legal by church doctrine. A letter dated
March 12, 1610, from Brother Luis Brandaon to Father Sandoval gives the answer:
"Your Reverence writes me that you would like to know whether the Negroes
who are sent to your parts have been legally captured. To this I reply that
I think your Reverence should have no scruples on this point, because this is
a matter which has been questioned by the Board of Conscience in Lisbon,
and all its members are learned and conscientious men. Nor did the bishops
who were in Sao Thome, Cape Verde, and here in Loando--all learned and virtuous
men--find fault with it. We have been here ourselves for forty years and
there have been among us very learned Fathers . . . never did they
consider the trade as illicit. Therefore we and the Fathers of Brazil buy these
slaves for our service without any scruple . . . ."
So I'm afraid that even your original statement, "Christians do not advocate for slavery. Many laws of the old testament were for the jews living at that moment of human history," is demonstrably wrong in the deepest way.
> They simply boil down to a question of 'does this harm others, in a provable way?'
And when there are interest groups pumping money into research to ensure the thing does not harm others in a provable way?
It's like cigarettes in the 40s. Tobacco usage was both moral and socially acceptable because big tobacco pumped money into the research to ensure the perception was that it did not cause harm.
That was eventually disproven, but it took decades, and we no doubt have modern day "big tobaccos" pumping money into research to ensure their product/ideology/etc. is "proven" not to cause harm. You may think something is moral now but will change your mind later. For example, you may think it's perfectly fine for a person to attend church today, but what if research comes out later that religion provably harms children, would you then be on board with banning religion? And if so, doesn't that disturb you that a slightly different society might come to an equally "proven" conclusion that atheism provably causes harm to society?
To expand on my moral philosophy, I think someone should be free to do as they please unless there is evidence that it harms someone else. Harm is defined by the preponderance of evidence. A few contrarian papers sponsored by big corporate interests aren't going to change that. I take a fairly firm stance on what constitutes evidence, and when in doubt, lean towards individual freedom over society's view of something.
> A few contrarian papers sponsored by big corporate interests aren't going to change that.
It's more than that. Not just big corps but sometimes prominent scientists, or political movements have agendas and biases that influence research (studies related to racism, sexism, and diversity/equity come to mind). There are also research "cabals" that won't let you publish research contrary to the groupthink. And on top of all that there is a "reproducibility crisis" that especially impacts social science/medicine.
> and when in doubt, lean towards individual freedom over society's view of something.
I think this is the right stance. Too many people (in my opinion) cherry pick papers on topics that do not have a "preponderance of evidence" (or have even been reproduced a single time) in order to fight for policy changes or otherwise bolster their stance.
I had a unique experience growing up in a religious family (that is very tolerant and respectful of all world religions) while simultaneously being immersed in Scientology via a private school experience.
The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy. So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach.
I can’t help but think the world will be better off when we abolish big religion.
>The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy.
This is, consistently, what I hear from friends and family as to why they have drifted away from the Catholic church, and is solidly my own reason as well.
You see people, day-in-day out being terrible, judgmental, hateful people, except on Sunday when they're in the front row being holier than thou. It grates on you, and leaves a bad taste. It's even worse, because those people tend to be the ones who gravitate toward leadership positions within your local church.
My theory is that people have always felt that way, but it was harder to nail down these awful people before social media. Now that everyone puts everything on social media, it's easy to see, in plain black and white print, that the deacon really is an asshole.
The one thing that I do genuinely lament from the death of large religious congregations (at least in my part of the states), is that there are no replacement social constructs for people to gather and feel a sense of community. I'm certain this has something to do with the splintering of American discourse; not the religion inherently, but the social aspect is lacking and legitimately missed by most folks.
> This is, consistently, what I hear from friends and family as to why they have drifted away from the Catholic church, and is solidly my own reason as well.
I was raised Catholic and decided, as a teenager, that I didn't want to be Catholic as an adult.
> My theory is that people have always felt that way, but it was harder to nail down these awful people before social media.
IMO, two things:
1: The changes in the 1960s to the English (native language) mass
2: The shift towards conservative politics
Have you been to a latin mass? (The old-style mass that the Church conducted until the 1960s.) It's a very different experience than modern Catholicism, and much more similar to eastern-style worship.
But, more importantly, the latin mass has a lot less preaching. It's a meditation, and then a social gathering afterwards. It's a lot more universal in the sense that you don't really have to explicitly align with the beliefs to still be comfortable with the community. (Edit: As in, if you don't believe in the whole Jesus thing, you can just enjoy the chanting at let your mind drift away.)
But, the thing that really turned me off of the Catholic church was the drift towards conservative politics. I attended a friend's wedding where the church had a massive anti-abortion billboard over their parking lot for the whole town to see. Another time I went to a mass in honor of some deceased family members and there were posters in the church advocating that members vote against marijuana legalization.
At least the abortion thing makes sense: Catholics believe that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception, so abortion is effectively murder. It would be odd for the church to not openly oppose it.
> Catholics believe that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception,
They don't, though, or at least they didn't always. No less a Church authority than Saint Thomas Aquinas said ensoulment didn't happen before quickening. The total prohibition on abortion is a relatively recent theological innovation, and this insistence that it has always been thus is one of the things above mentioned that leaves a bad taste in people's mouths can they can plainly see it isn't true.
St. Thomas also held that contraception was wrong, not merely abortion, so the fact that ensoulment didn't happen before quickening (in his learned opinion) didn't change his understanding of how moral contraception and abortion are (he believed they were both gravely sinful).
St. Thomas said ensoulment happened at quickening because the science of the time said that the zygote was a simple thing. Given that understanding, St. Thomas held that the rational soul was not necessary to explain the developments that happened and in fact, that the soul which animated such simple matter must be simpler. Modern science tells us that the zygote is anything but simple and so St. Thomas' objection on the basis of a "simple" material component are incorrect. St. Thomas also said that all that he had ever written was "so much straw" after receiving a mystical experience of God's love (not _wrong_, just completely inadequate).
Spend a little time researching how the Catholic church used to oppose infanticide. The anti-abortion stance makes a lot more sense when put into historical context.
They also believe that state sanctioned executions are murder, yet somehow the vast majority of Catholic adherents tend to be less willing to make political or advocacy decisions based on that.
Well, when I went to a steakhouse in India, I didn't need to cross a picket line. Nor did I see billboards condemning me for eating beef.
> It would be odd for the church to not openly oppose it
There's a difference between politics and religion. Getting back to my point, my opinion is that treating abortion as a political issue is one of the many reasons why people leave.
> In northern India, cow slaughter is illegal in all the states, with Jammu & Kashmir and Jharkhand leading the list in the terms of severity of punishment. A person found guilty of cow slaughter can be sent to 10 years imprisonment in these two states.
> Kerala is the only state in the south where there are no restrictions on the slaughter and consumption of cow meat
That law in Kashmir is from RPC and was abolished when state was abolished (and isn't enforced in Muslim majority areas). Furthermore you can read DN Jha on how Brahmins ate plenty of beef in Vedic times until Buddhists showed up.
> Well, when I went to a steakhouse in India, I didn't need to cross a picket line.
The comment was specifically about how it didn't seem unreasonable for the church to publicly oppose abortion, in response to a billboard on the church's property.
> the church had a massive anti-abortion billboard over their parking lot
It wasn't about the members of the church protesting at a hospital or other facility that performs abortions. Admittedly, that does happen in some places, but it's not what was being discussed.
The Catholic opposition to abortion is very similar to the Hindu opposition to consuming beef.
Talk to some people from India about political/religious issues there. Eating beef, meat, and/or eggs is as offensive to some people in India, for religions reasons, as abortion is in the US.
Yet India doesn't have the same mass exodus from its churches as the US does.
> You see people, day-in-day out being terrible, judgmental, hateful people, except on Sunday when they're in the front row being holier than thou.
But you see this nearly everywhere, with every type of organization/group. A prime example would be politicians and political groups who constantly talk about how they want to help people, but then throw those same people under the bus to get what they want. This is not something unique to any one type of organization.
From my experience, there are lots of good people in most religious organizations. I would venture to say, at least in the northeast US (which is where most of my experience is), it's the majority of the people. However, as with any organization, it's common for the bad apples to be the ones that rise in power, because they don't care who they hurt to get do so. This, too, is true everywhere.
Those other institutions are also losing credibility. Fewer people than ever claim membership in unions, political parties, and public office holders and legislatures as groups are continually setting new records for low approval ratings.
>> Fewer people than ever claim membership in unions, political parties,
> That is exactly the opposite of my experience.
How so? Union membership has undergone a well-documented decline. While politics/political ideology does seem a lot more prominent, the role of the political parties has seemed to wither. Political activity seems much more ephemeral and individual.
"I can’t help but think the world will be better off when we abolish big religion."
So those people who want to belong to a group and believe in it without seeing what might be better can move into political groups for their identity? The actions and methods are human nature, so I think they will just move to a different domain.
Any organization is political. The difference is whether we are talking about the organization or the members. Most members are not that politically involved. There are plenty of people who are very religious and participate in the religious ceremonies. If these people no longer had that, it's possible some of them would move into material participation in political parties, offices, etc.
Or they may join a band, or choir, or local sporting team, or organize/join an event on meetup. While some of these may be political they are often much less political than a church.
As one who loves the Catholic faith, despite the failings of its members, and who yet also fails to live it well -- I agree with you that hypocrisy is a massive problem.
The group Jesus is harshest with in the Gospels is in fact the hypocrites. He even calls them white washed tombs full of dead men's bones! What a lamentable state of things.
G.K. Chesterton's words in "What's Wrong with the World" come to mind where he points out "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."
Perhaps this applies to all major belief systems though, and not Christianity alone.
I think hypocrisy is inevitable for a couple of reasons.
1) In theory, people go to church because they want to improve, not because they are already perfect. It's not hypocritical to make mistakes.
2) Hypocrisy is everywhere. No one really does scrum, no one really does TDD, no motivational speaker is happy all the time, and no christian is without sin. This shouldn't be surprising.
The hypocrisy is that they preach and ideal and fail to achieve it?
One thinks this is because ideals are meant to strived towards but not necessarily achieved.
A solution of throwing out ideals because they are hard to achieve and a little myopic in my opinion.
What i find an interesting thought is that you either believe these teachings are from a higher power or they are just from man.
The former had obvious implications, but the with the latter you will then need to answer the question is it written by lunatics or people that actually knew what they were doing?
> The hypocrisy is that they preach and ideal and fail to achieve it?
No, I don't think that's the case. I think the hypocrisy is that they don't try. What turns people off of organized religion is seeing so many who participate with words but not with their hearts. Of course when you have Jesus Christ as your role model you're going to fail to live up to it a lot of the time, but if you're not at least trying then in what sense are you a Christian?
I’m not religious in the slightest, but the hypocrisy has always been fairly obvious from the outside.
That said, I have serious doubts religion and hypocrisy are aligned anymore than the other sources of truth - especially when followed without applying critical thinking skills.
Sports, online forums, student fraternities, social clubs of every variety, etc. There are many ways to get active in society that don't involve beliefs in higher beings.
You make it seem like religion is some sort of prerequisite for gaining wisdom, while at best it seems to be orthogonal. For example, reading philosophy from both modern and ancient sources can provide the framework you mention without ever getting all that close to the trappings of traditional religions.
There are tons of higher level lessons to be learned from both religious and non-religious sources.
I'd even go as far to say the "wisdom" gained in church is often far less insightful than the wisdom gained from a pure moral and philosophical perspective.
Few of these instill purpose and influence behavior of a person in the same way that religion does.
You might disagree, but I would argue that the virtues extolled by the vast majority of religious organizations are good ideals to be striving for and wonder what is going to replace this?
I can only speak for myself, but I try to treat the people I encounter well because people that don't are, in my experience, dicks. No higher power necessary. I've also found in my life that trying to derive purpose from some external motivator (religion, self-help books, etc.) is a recipe for temporary motivation only. Real, lasting change comes from self-discovery and discipline, in my opinion.
I would love to see stats on religious prevalence and incidence of crime, homocide, etc. My guess is that such stats won’t put religion (especially Christianity) in a favorable light.
You mean self-righteousness and a superiority complex. The person who lives a decent life because it is right for everyone is morally superior to someone who lives a decent life because he fears of being cast into a lake of fire.
And even then, Christians murder more people in the US than anyone, per-capita or otherwise.
in theories these are perhaps able to replace a religions activities. in reality we are notice large decreasing in socialisation in young people and so this replacement is maybe not working so well as in theories. even social clubs you have mention are on declining also. one go to rotary or others and it is all old persons. have a shared value system is making for great connecting between persons.
> So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach.
And it's not necessarily a bad thing when you frame it as a cultural institution. For many people, they grew up with the church and its traditions. Their families and friends share the same traditions, and it's part of their identity. They may not believe in the supernatural stuff or even feel aligned with the moral system, but it's still part of their culture.
You could say that's hypocritical, but we expect a an attitude of humility in regards to many cultures who have even more "backwards" practices than this. I think we ought to apply the same attitude here.
It becomes a problem though when you don’t subscribe or even understand the core tenets of your faith - and yet it is your identity. So you vote with your friends and family even if you don’t know what you’re voting for. And when you feel your tribe being threatened, you get defensive and defend your tribe - even when you don’t know what you are defending.
That is why the US has become so divided recently. That is why the blind devotion to a cause should be questioned by every believer. “Wait a sec, do I really believe this? Do I really want this to be my identity?”
You can be a good person without being a Catholic or a Muslim.
Sure, there are some people out there like that, and it's true for every culture, and it's true that people ought to think for themselves.
I think we can agree that religion and goodness can run orthogonally, but let's not be so paternalistic to assume that people are unable to participate within a community's cultural traditions without sacrificing their ability to think for themselves.
There's a long way from freedom of belief to the kind of identity politics practiced by religious groups. Ironically religious people are under the risk of getting cancelled by their own group if they dare wrongthink, so they are less free.
>There's a long way from freedom of belief to the kind of identity politics practiced by religious groups. Ironically religious people are under the risk of getting cancelled by their own group if they dare wrongthink, so they are less free.
Are we discussing organized religions or political parties? Your comment could apply to either.
When I say abolish big religion I mean the way it’s integrated so tightly in society. The war on drugs, abortion, non profit tax avoidance, so many fucked up things stem from the belief that my religion is better than yours and you need to believe what I believe.
You can believe whatever the hell you want - but it’s not for you or society or anyone else to decide how I can live my life.
WoD wasn't started by religious authorities at all, but by (secular) technocrats. Whether the motivation was really public health or political persecution is disputed, but blaming the Church is just silly. Some quasi-religious justification was used, but that's just political strategy.
>non profit tax avoidance
All religions are guaranteed equivalent tax privileges in the United States Constitution, as Madison intended and the courts have affirmed.
> When I say abolish big religion I mean the way it’s integrated so tightly in society.
There has never existed a society that didn't have a religion. Everyone has a religion, what they take to be the highest good, what they worship. It just so happens that those who naively brush off what they take to be "religion" simply, probably tacitly, take on some vulgar and crude variety.
> The war on drugs, abortion, non profit tax avoidancee, so many fucked up things
You realize that your views are also views, right? You presume some kind of objectivity while denying that right to others. Sounds kind of intolerant to me, especially if we go by your own prejudices.
You also appear to have scapegoated religion for various things you don't like (mind you, things like the opposition to abortion is a moral question, not a sectarian one, though sadly, the myth that it is seems to persist, probably because it allows militant pro-choice types to exploit "religious freedom" as a way to frame it as a "private matter" since religion under a liberal regime is subordinated to liberal doctrine, which has the interesting effect of elevating liberalism to the rank of state religion).
> the belief that my religion is better than yours and you need to believe what I believe
Hold on. Two things are being conflated. First, if there is one truth, then either a religion is true (or at least contains some truth), or it isn't (or contains falsehoods). That which is true should be accepted, that which isn't shouldn't. The idea that religion is just a thing we believe simply because we wish to believe it is absurd. You believe something because you have good reasons to believe it, not because you wish it to be the case.
Second, what do you mean by "you need to believe what I believe"? This has nothing to do with what others believe. It has everything to do with whether something is true. Of course, you shouldn't try to force anyone to believe anything, even if it is or you think it is true, though any society will punish or constrain someone _acting_ on wrong beliefs in some cases. All legal and judicial systems do this, obviously, and they can do this with a tangible tenacity.
I'd also add that there what falls under "religion" differs enough that it makes no sense to criticize "religion" categorically. This kind of approach typically conceals a particular real or imagined religion that the person in question has in mind, perhaps particular experiences, and from which that person hastily generalizes to "religion" as a category. The error here should be obvious, especially if you take into consideration what I've already written, namely, that everyone has some kind of religion, however vague or crude or mundane or insane.
So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalism, which is the bad theology of scriptural literalism, which brings heresies like hating LGBT, insisting the Bible is also a science textbook, superstitious views of certain Middle Eastern lands, and more.
Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn’t have much of this to react against in my own churches. But we saw the bad fundamentalist theology in Southern Baptist or too many independent churches (those two mentioned because they were dominant where I grew up). I can appreciate the difference.
I’m still happily a mainline Protestant. I’m not instructed to hate anyone, I’m not told to vote a particular way. I’m not going to church to check in my brain to a charlatan who saves me from an angry (false) god. I’m going to be better and to grow my relationship with God.
I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent).
If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. It’s difficult for me though to not think that a religious person’s reasoning is broken in some way, and to be more skeptical of how they verify ideas in general.
If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?
A lot of the rationalization of religious people is complicated in a way that suggests they have some underlying idea of what the accurate world model is (they just want to believe otherwise): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
One thing I credit the internet for is allowing me to read and learn enough to escape it. I think most people will end up with whatever belief system they grow up surrounded by.
As someone who went in the opposite direction, I observed as I got older that “evidence based reasoning” is less useful than I had assumed. Nearly everyone has beliefs about the world that are based on faith whether they call it that or not. Very few political premises are based on scientific evidence that’s well established as say anthropogenic climate change. For the most part the data is mixed and hard to interpret and peoples’ views aren’t really based on the data anyway. (Try talking with a gun control advocate. First note that homicides went down in Australia after gun buybacks. Note reaction. Then note that homicides were going down at the same rate before gun buybacks as after gun buybacks. Note reaction.)
And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to structure your communities and economies and raise and educate your children. Not for metaphysical reasons, just because the strong conclusions you can reliably reach with the current state of social and political science is just very limited.
I don't disagree really - there's still space for intuition and making a guess in places with limited information. I also agree most people are using evidence to drive motivated reasoning for a pre-existing conclusion rather than using it to try to struggle towards whatever the truth may be.
The god question is pretty old though, and most of the religious arguments are pretty clearly wrong/bad. They've lost most of their ground to actual experiments and the scientific method. I suspect this is why we see church attendance continuing to decline.
> And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to...
I can't agree with either point: 1) basing your view on faith is equally as good as non-faith, or 2) expecting a world view based on any belief will reliably lead you to draw conclusions that won't be bad.
Both of these assume that beliefs are primary in shaping "your world view" and that that view is what shapes how you interact with the world. In fact, what's important isn't what you believe; what's important is how you choose to think. It's the questions you choose to ask. It's how willing you are to start without multiple choice answers and then go looking for a multitude of possible solutions. And it's whether you're willing to accept partial and interim solutions, and sometimes, [shudder] no answer at all.
I know it's not popular to look for answers and then be willing to say, "Nope. I can't answer this." But as you point out, sometimes it's impossible to answer a question with a definitive yes or no. Sometimes you have to gather more information. And the useful part of your world view is how you choose to go about becoming more informed.
If you don't look any further and just guess, or just trust someone else to tell you how to think (especially someone who won't explain their sources or their reasoning), then you will make a lot poor choices in your life, regardless of whether faith is part of that formula or not.
If instead you seek out others whom you know are better informed, and if you ask questions yourself and try to test those answers yourself, that will serve you far better than will any belief system. But most of all, if you are willing to stop your quest at some point and say, "I can't answer this question definitively" and accept that you have two choices: a) a tentative best answer that seeks to work around what you don't know, or b) that you simply refuse to answer now and accept that "I don't know", now THAT's enlightenment. In my opinion, that's a world view that will minimize error and make fewer mistakes. Beliefs be damned.
The problem is that for the most part all this asking questions and becoming informed doesn’t get your average person anywhere. I read a lot and know a bunch about a lot of things but at the end of the day I’m left with “the science” Lessing us without firm conclusions about pretty much everything I might care about.
And “I don’t know” isn’t really a practical answer. You have to raise your kids now, decide what to feed your kids now, vote now, not wait around for conclusive proof.
And people who say “beliefs be damned” don’t actually mean it. They embrace beliefs and value judgments all the time. Does scientific evidence tell us we’re all equal and created in God’s image? No, it’s something we choose to believe, and even people who aren’t religious believe a secular version of that as an article of faith. (Which is good!) Science says the average IQ of people in Bangladesh (where I’m from) is 82, a standard deviation lower than Americans. What do I choose to believe about Bangladeshis? Most decent Americans don’t say “well the best answer we have is Bangladeshis aren’t as smart as Americans.” They start from a belief about equality and work backward from there. The death penalty, how to treat murderers, criminal justice, civil rights. Science more or less doesn’t have the answers we need to these human problems.
There is no strongly-held opinion anywhere in the world that you can't play that rhetorical trick on, which may be why there are whole papers that have been written about why it's almost never persuasive to deploy gotcha statistics that way.
is this a rebuttal or an agreement? I think the point of the example was that most people can't rigorously defend their strongly held opinions. they just throw gotchas at each other.
"Suddenly we’ve got numerical infinities on that ethics spreadsheet, inputs that win out against any finite moral optimization. Where to put the infinities on the spreadsheet is of course the entire point of this metaphysical endeavor. We need the axiomatic moral imperatives, whether they be human life or free speech or something else, to which everything else loses in the moral calculus. The rest is mere arithmetic.
And this is precisely where the rationalist worldview grows mute: there’s simply no way to derive the absolute moral principles that should rule our lives from lab experiments, and any such proposal will necessarily require a faith-based leap--the ‘dignity’ of human life, the sanctity of private property, etc.—not very different than the tzelem Elohim or Imago Dei of Genesis. Science is absolutely mute here. There’s no such thing as a ‘scientific ethics’ or a ‘scientific foreign policy’, and the people who claim as much are precisely the same naifs who treat science as a body of knowledge rather than an epistemology, i.e., those who’ve never actually practiced it."
Many decisions aren't primarily based on reason/logic, but on priorities and preferences. Having more information rather than less is almost always a good thing, but it's a lot more useful when you already have some goal in mind.
> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
That line would only hold if fundamentalists have correctly identified the fundamentals. I wage they have badly missed it, which is why their theology is so bad.
> being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness
Being a good person is not the primary point of religion. It is rather a hoped for outcome. Religion is not therapy.
The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things. This means even if most people most of the time are perfectly pleasant, they can get swept up in other stuff that gets out of hand and hurts people. If you can't persuade someone with evidence based reasoning because their position is based on 'faith' or belief in the face of contrary evidence I don't know what to do with that.
There are forms of religious people that dismiss all the 'crazy' things and just have some vague mysticism - which is probably the least harmful form, but is a little odd to me. People like to feel a part of something grand I suppose - but we already are. Existence is pretty amazing even without the human religious myths being true. Maybe one day the myths will be just a part of our collective history (as many older ones currently are).
Everyone is crazy in their own way. There is no rationality strong enough to remove the crazy from people, and smart people over time have formed their own craziness not bound by religion or mysticism.
This site for example is pooh-poohing religion now, but five minutes later will gush over LSD's power to give pseudo-spiritual epiphanies. It used to love stoicism, which was shopworn even in the Victorian age. Probably in a year from now some other retread of old belief system will be rediscovered, maybe EST or Theosophy, or something.
> The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things
I don’t think that’s true at all, and possibly the opposite is true. Comparing Bangladesh, where I’m from, to America, people here are a lot less religious. But I wouldn’t say the net amount of “crazy” believes is different. People in Bangladesh are a lot more down to earth and less likely to believe in faddish ideas that tend to fill the vacuum in the absence of religion.
American culture around eating and fitness, and particularly the “clean food” stuff is a good example of this. It’s for the most part completely unscientific, but fervently believed.
> People in Bangladesh are a lot more down to earth and less likely to believe in faddish ideas that tend to fill the vacuum in the absence of religion.
How do you square this position with all the social media fueled mob lynchings/murders in Bangladesh?
> The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things.
Some examples I can think of are Pol Pot, Stalin and the North Korean Kim dynasty.
My point is there is much rhetoric about religion being a historical scourge of society, but the same people making those assertions conveniently forget that atheistic ideologies had very negative consequences as well.
I'm not arguing based on whataboutism here. I'm saying that blaming religion for the ills of society while exalting atheism is fallacious.
There's an important distinction - the religious crimes are often done because of the underlying ideology. Stalin did terrible things, but it wasn't in the name of atheism.
Throwing away bad doctrine doesn't instantly make you good, but it helps not to have problematic ideology at the start.
If you're going to build a world, one that updates based on evidence is a good place to start. Seek out evidence that violates your confirmation bias, steelman arguments, change your mind when warranted.
> Stalin did terrible things, but it wasn't in the name of atheism.
USSR anti-religious campaign of 1928–1941:
"The campaign began in 1929, with the drafting of new legislation that severely prohibited religious activities and called for an education process on religion in order to further disseminate atheism and materialist philosophy. "
"The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church and Islam, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labour camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited.[1] More than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone.[2] Only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church's priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941.[3]"
"Stalin called for an "atheist five year plan" from 1932–1937, led by the LMG, in order to completely eliminate all religious expression in the USSR.[43] It was declared that the concept of God would disappear from the Soviet Union.[43]"
if you've ever talked to non-fundamentalists, usually they just regurgitate whatever the contemporary secular morality of the moment is with a mild religious gloss, and they suffer in membership much worse than the fundamentalists because it's obvious.
Fundamentalism is usually just taking the source material seriously at what it says; liberal Christianity tends to try and reinterpret the source material to fit contemporary mores. It's impossible to justify homosexuality in the scriptures for example; most progressive arguments end up just setting fire to the inspiration of the bible to do so, by saying "they weren't really speaking about homosexuality" or "why should we trust what Paul says about it?"
Fundamentalists are disliked, but they are a lot more logically and internally consistent than the mainline. Mainline is just the halfway stop to atheism, honestly.
Exactly.
Fundamentalists miss the actual fundamentals.
People mistake the American Evangelical Christianity that is a few hundred years old for the church established by the apostles nearly 2000 years ago.
That church was it which considered the weak as equally valuable as the strong, that insisted on helping the poor, that believed men and women both to be of the utmost value.
That established hospitals to care for the sick.
All of these things were not the norm.
The weak were considered less valuable.
Women were not worth as much as men.
Sick people should be avoided.
The poor aren’t worth helping.
People are rightfully scornful of American evangelicalism, but they throw the baby out with the bath water and try to pretend that the orthodox (in sense of true and right) church has not done tremendous good in this world.
> People are rightfully scornful of American evangelicalism, but they throw the baby out with the bath water and try to pretend that the orthodox (in sense of true and right) church has not done tremendous good in this world.
There's no "true and right" church. In fact the non-stop schism of the christian faith is evidence that the views espoused by christians are incredibly incoherent. One model to use is that the bible is a map and your interactions with actual people are the actual road. And you're trying to navigate your life with this map. You have a few options:
- Trust the map no matter what (fundamentalists)
- You end up also arguing about how the map *really* reads, because it's incoherent at its core! Denominations are started by people trying too hard to ascertain the "fundamentals."
- Trust the road no matter what
- Is your map even relevant then? What's the difference between this and being an atheist?
- Trust the road when you can see it and can't argue with it, trust the map otherwise
- This leads to shit like voting against progress because you are ignorant to the harm it does. Since the map is incoherent you still end up drawing incorrect conclusions in directions that are harmful.
These basically all suck and cause problems vs the strategy of "live in the world, and use some other map."
To take a counter example, do you believe that the Catholic Church has had a pattern of covering up for pedophiles in its clergy? If so how far back does that pattern go? Why shouldn’t we assume it goes back hundreds of years, or the full 2000 year history of the church?
By the way, that same old church taught wives to obey their husbands and to this day does not allow them to be clergy. The notion that women are not worth as much as men was not recently introduced.
Virtually every youth-serving organization used to not handle abuse of youth properly. I am not going to pin this just on the Catholic Church. Other youth-serving organizations, like sports, other churches, YMCAs, etc. were all deficient.
I am a volunteer in the Boy Scouts of America. Its market-leading and pioneering youth-protection programs are still examples to this day, and the vast majority of claims in its current bankruptcy process are from before these programs started. Society has changed, and youth are much better off for it.
"Virtually every youth-serving organization used to not handle abuse of youth properly."
This again? The existence of others committing the same crimes does not indemnify the Church.
Love the "Society has changed" argument. Clearly, recognizing that pedophilia is wrong by the Church is a product of changing times...not like they moved clergy from parish to parish to avoid them being caught.
I’d say the church from Rome has always had problems like any group of humans. Collectively the churches established by the apostles I’d say got the truth right.
Though if I were to pick a date where they went seriously wrong and led to what you saw at the time of the reformation and today I’d say 1054 AD
As for women being treated poorly that is not something the church introduced, but has practically been done by men since time began. If you read early church history you’d probably realize that your moral basis itself is founded upon the work church did.
What I’ve found is people who actually don’t believe their opinions strongly avoid books challenging those opinions, while those who do are perfectly willing to be challenged, because they are confident their opinion is the right one.
For example a person who weakly believes in a free market will avoid reading Marx, a person who strongly believes it will. And vice versa for let’s say Ayn Rand.
If the whole point of an organization is morality, and the organization doesn't do any better in that arena than society at large, I don't see much point in the organization.
On the topic of the treatment of women, you'll note the original assertion was that this was something the church was especially good at, and I pointed out a sexist practice core to the church as currently practiced, not in the dustbin of history.
Well my guess is you haven’t been to many non evangelicals churches nor looked at how they act or behave.
The church reveres a woman above all other humans save him who was both God and man.
Orphanages were setup by churches. Hospitals, schools, homeless shelters. They do that explicitly because of their beliefs.
I contest that organized religion, particularly Christianity has done net positive to the world though. From the crusades til now, Christianity has always seemed to demonize other groups, and for people in those groups especially (non-Christians, gays, women), the church has not done any good for them whatsoever.
But even I accept your argument that they had, why is organized religion the only way to achieve that good? Why not provide societal benefit through secular and people focused governance, for instance? Why does the teachings of thousands of years old people have to do anything with it, even if we do cherry pick them and only listen to the parts that we as a modern society agree are good? When you draw your philosophy from a book that says at the end “don’t change this or you’re going to hell”, then it’s little surprise that extremists arise with what are actually fairly reasonable interpretations of the Bible.
See, but even your straw man is based on that post schism period. And the church is what taught us that even those traditionally “on the fringe” should be valued and not discarded. You’re taking up the position the church convinced the world of to argue against her. I really do think your beef (and a legitimate one) is with evangelical Christianity (and possibly Roman Catholics but probably less so). You should read up on where those traditions arose from.
The question really is did Jesus rise from the dead?
Was Plato actually on to something when he said there were more “real” things which made our reality look like shadows.
The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus. There is no getting beyond that idea. Once you see it, there is no going back. So I’d be very careful reading old books if I were you.
Even quantum mechanics is starting to make us realize we might not understand what really constitutes reality. That at the deepest levels there is two eternally existing relationships.
> The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus.
Do Hindus agree? Do Muslims? Do Buddhists? If not, are they wrong? Why?
The statement you made is an opinion of a group, stated as a fact. There is nothing wrong with groups having opinions, but they shouldn't be pushed to others as facts. That's the source of many past and present conflicts.
Oh don’t get me wrong. I know this is my opinion. And I don’t think Hindus and Muslims don’t have very high symbols and good world views.
I’m just saying from what I’ve seen the symbol that Christ is it is very high and explains the world well. I’d love to have discussions over coffee with people with different cosmological explanations of the world.
The question why this isn’t something to be discarded is because a billion people share my opinion and we aren’t unreasonable for having it.
The idea that the most powerful king took up the side of the poor and needy, and aligned himself with them is an idea that I can’t see being defeated. The hero looking like he lost only to win once for all, to set the captives free is a story that is endlessly being recreated in books from people of all world views.
True though, to many, Christ is the symbol of what they’ve seen in
American Evangelical Christianity and that symbol might just die out, but the one taught in the 1st century till now I can’t imagine ever dying out.
A lot of christians foolishly think there is not any truth beauty or goodness in other world views and refuse to learn from them. There is a lot a Christian can learn from Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, even Mormons, and probably a whole ton of other religious beliefs. They can learn from Greek myths, eastern myths and so on.
I actually just wish non christians would just at least take the story of Jesus as a myth or legend that they could still learn from like other enduring myths. That would at least give the idea behind it the respect it deserves given its huge influence. The story of Moses even if just fiction is still a powerful story. I mean have you never read a book like Les Mis or LOTR or something and not seen the power those stories have for good?
> The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus. There is no getting beyond that idea. Once you see it, there is no going back. So I’d be very careful reading old books if I were you.
Many countries in Europe have >50% of young people who identify as non-religious [1]
Don't the declining numbers of religious people in Europe contradict that statement? Younger generations in these traditionally Christian countries are very aware of the symbol and idea - and many are in full agreement with many of the values you mention, except they just don't believe the mystical part (and refuse many of the conservative stances from the church).
If this happened in countries that have had Christianity as their foundational identity for hundreds of years, why can't it happen elsewhere?
> Why not provide societal benefit through secular and people focused governance, for instance?
Because they weren't. That's the point. The culture at the time didn't care to support anyone but the most powerful.
Could a non-religious approach have fixed it? Maybe, but none emerged that did so. Not 2000 years ago, anyway.
So Christianity entered the scene at a time when no one was doing these good things, and gave people a reason to rally behind them.
Even today, statistically speaking, Muslims give far more of their income to charity than any other group, and if I'm not mistaken, Atheists ranked last. (Christians only marginally performed better, which says a lot about the state of modern Christianity.)
So why is that? I think it has to do with tribalism. You can't form a strong tribe around NOT believing stuff. Not believing in something isn't enough of a reason to form strong social bonds and take on major projects.
Does that mean you can't come up with a good secular belief that people can rally behind? Of course not. Liberalism was a secular idea that made massive changes. Same for democracy. But you need a flag to rally around.
"Disbelief" makes for a poor flag. It's not much of a rallying cry.
What's more, the rationalist/atheist community tends to be very strongly individualist. Individualism, almost by definition, isn't particularly interested in things like hospitals or caring for the poor.
> People mistake the American Evangelical Christianity...
Hell, people mistake American Evangelical Christianity with "true Christianity". Far too many allow themselves into being duped into thinking that the loudest, most odious, and most forceful are the most legitimate claimants to Christianity.
> Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness.
Religiosity is highly inversely correlated with criminality amount Americans.[1] Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity. To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially.
It's certainly not the only way to promote ethical behavior. But even as an atheist, I'll freely admit that religion serves a pretty beneficial important role in our society. A role that we haven't really figured out how to replace with secular counterparts.
Charity - religious people are more likely to donate to religious organisations. In fact roughly a third of all donation money in the US goes to supporting religion.
Large churches are quite astonishingly wealthy and also tax exempt, so it's not clear why they need the money more than any number of smaller charities and social programs.
Crime: There isn't any reliable evidence that religion reduces crime in general. It may make certain kinds of crime less likely, but it's very difficult to disentangle all of the influences - because of course religion also affects crime reporting, and defines which actions can even be considered crimes. This can be a huge problem for victims who live in the same religious community as perpetrators.
One textbook example is the history of child abuse in Catholicism. It didn't show up in crime figures for a very long time because the Church worked hard to cover it up. The truth didn't come out until the political power of the Church was reduced to a level where it could no longer do that.
There's a good case for considering the possibility that religion actually encourages these kinds of abusive cultures - whether or not they're considered criminal at the time.
So there really isn't an argument that religion serves a beneficial role. It has some benefits, but it also causes a lot of social and political distortions, some of which are extreme and persistently harmful.
> Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity.
Religious people donate significantly more to their churches. Whether that's charity which actually goes on to help people is highly variable. You can say we haven't really figured out how to replace them, but to me it seems pretty clear. Replace a patchwork of "charities" with an actual support network which works for everyone and not just parishioners. Fund it through taxes. You know, the was every single other developed nation in the world handles things. The whole "charity is just as good as sound policy" thing has never panned out and is why we have so many medical bankruptcies as just one example.
> To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially.
That's different from religiosity correlating with "being a good person" though, which I'm interpreting as "the ability to act both morally and independently".
It does seem that some people need religion to be a good person, because they lack the moral structure to do without (due to trauma or bad parenting or whatever). For those people, religion allows them to function in society with a set of business rules, but they still tend to lack a solid moral/ethical decision matrix to function on their own or act outside the contexts they have rules for.
You are assuming causality there. It could be that an individual’s mindset could lead to both less criminality and more religious participation. It’s not obvious that sending criminals to church would make them less criminal.
Throughout history, religious leaders have very rarely opposed killing "the enemy". Likewise it's a rare soldier in a time of war who is insists on obeying, "Thou shalt not kill".
Yet if this is true, then how do you define religiosity if it overlooks willingly acting in contradiction to the most essential laws that a faith and its faithful claim to believe?
> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
Not a bad argument, but if we need religion to be 100% accurate then we'd only ever support the most modern and innovative religion.
The issue is that most religions (including my own) place tremendous importance on the accuracy of teachings that go back hundreds or thousands of years. It was impossible for the original authors to know what we know today, yet we either fault them for it or declare any advances in knowledge to be heretical. Clearly, both of these positions are wrong in the extreme.
And yet, there's a good reason for that, too. If we subject religion to every modern idea, then the religion doesn't really stand for anything. It simply mirrors society back at it.
I don't know the solution to this. There may not be one (short of saying "f--- religion" as a whole, which I think would be a terrible mistake).
If anyone has ever participated in a 12-step program, you can see this in action in a much more modern way. Every program has an unchanging dogma, based on the assumption that the founders hit on something special and right, and that any changes would risk watering it down. As a result, you end up with programs that have ideas that would have been very mainstream when they were founded, but are now largely viewed as wrong-headed or even cruel. And yet, these programs continue to be a lifeline to many people who would have otherwise spiralled into self-destruction.
A lot of the creationist arguments stem from "irreducible complexity" or a misunderstanding of natural selection (the "eye just formed itself somehow"). Both of these things sound reasonable when explained in isolation to someone who grew up with religion, but natural selection is much stronger (light sensing cells benefit survival way before they're an entire eye) etc.
It's the 'watchmaker' argument - things must have come from a creator because nothing can ever just exist. This always ignores the natural follow up - who created god then? There is no good answer for this (and it just creates an infinite regress).
Religious steelmans are weird, because the arguments out front are not the real objections or even the real debate (which makes things confusing). The real debate is more about belief in belief, tribal affiliation, perceived morality, and identity. The arguments out front are mostly rationalizations to try and explain away contrary evidence.
Religious people are arguing from a position entirely driven by motivated reasoning. They're not trying to uncover the truth, they're trying to defend what they already know to be true.
> things most have come from a creator because nothing can ever just exist.
This isn't the "watchmaker" argument, this is the "principle of sufficient reason" argument applied to existence. The principle of sufficient reason is "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it". Things exist _right now_, but (so goes the argument) they didn't always exist (that is they are not things-which-must-by-their-very-nature-exist). Therefore, the fact that they exist _right now_ needs a cause that operates right now. The causal chain of why-does-this-contingent-thing-exist-right-now cannot be infinite. Therefore, the causal chain must terminate in some being that must by its very nature exist.
This argument was not made by Christian theists, but by Aristotle over 300 years before Christianity came into existence. It was rediscovered by Christian theists a millenium and a half later (in the 1200s) and accepted because it matched what God said of Himself to Moses 1200 years before Aristotle (Exodus 3:14)
This line of reasoning is totally unconvincing to pure naturalists like me.
I simply believe that the universe exists, and that we'll likely never know anything beyond that, as the big bang appears to be the limit of what evidence is possible to measure.
What I don't see is anything that necessitates turning the fact that the universe exists into a principle that the ultimate "cause" must be a being that frankly behaves like a abusive patriarch while threatening humanity with eternal torture.
I'd recommend Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe which goes into some of the more modern theories beyond The Big Bang (Inflation Theory, MWI of QM) - I thought it was pretty interesting and didn't know about.
My interpretation of the comment you replied to wasn't that they were trying to justify the argument, but just clarify what the argument specifically was (and where it came from).
Agreed, I don’t think one should try to prove the supernatural starting from the Bible.
One first has to define supernatural :)
My general thought is that at the deepest possible metaphysical level, everyone has a foundational framework that realize on untestable axioms. (Eg. we have free will)
Identifying those is an interesting exercise, but then at some point I realize that at all levels of natural depth, the universe has extreme order and intelligibility. Eg. The simulation argument is a reframing of the creation arguments.
From that point, one can surmise that some creator would be intelligible, and would likely communicate with beings that have free will. Eg. humans are a cloud of hydrocarbon atoms that contemplate their own existence.
"That the universe exists" isn't a sufficient explanation since we know that it doesn't exist of necessity (since it is composed of parts). The argument doesn't say anything about what this "First mover" is like, only that it must be sufficient to explain the effects it produces (which includes being-a-person since that's qualitatively different than not-being-one). It's only when you come to the realization that to-be is the same as to-be-beautiful is the same as to-be-true that things start to look vaguely like the God of the burning bush and the problem of pain starts to raise its head (and then you have to meet the cross and either break on it or be saved by it).
Thanks - I think this does a better job clarifying that bit better than I did (which notably doesn't address the infinite regress issue).
The watchmaker argument is more narrowly the creationist 'eye can't have just formed itself' argument (basically the eye must have been made by some sophisticated watchmaker: god).
When you say "which notably doesn't address the infinite regress issue" are you talking about what you said or what I did? (Just trying to understand if I wasn't clear enough in my explanations).
I think you clarified where the 'something can't come from nothing' argument originates from (and that it's separate from the watchmaker one).
My point was just that as an argument the answer being 'god' isn't very compelling when it then just moves the question to 'where did god come from', nothing is actually explained by this.
In my experience with religious people you get unsatisfactory answers to that, so adding massive complexity (god) as an answer doesn't really help when it can't answer the underlying question (it just introduces a new and more complex one). This is ignoring all the other problems with the god hypothesis which don't hold up either.
Irreducible complexity is a somewhat compelling argument to me (a life-long atheist).
I understand natural selection. I've taken graduate course in genomics with top grades. Still, the concept that random point changes to a several billion base pair sequence could produce advantageous new genes goes against everything I know about complexity and combinatorics.
But I admit natural selection is still a far better explanation than anything else we have, so I continue to accept it grudgingly.
I understand why scientists don't want to give religious leaders a foothold to sow doubt and push their nonsense, but I wish the scientific community was more open to criticisms of evolution that are presented rigorously. For example, a model of evolution where proteins first evolve in microorganisms before being integrated into larger organisms (for example through viral vectors) makes a lot more sense to me than SNP-driven natural selection.
As a religious person, I don't see how the issues you describe are any lesser in non-religious populations. You're misplacing your blame; society would still have these problems without religion, and it'd arguably be worse, too.
Indeed, I've known a lot of religious people like the ones you speak of. And I've known and read from many other "religious"/deist people who think those types of people are silly.
>If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit.
How is it possible to test for "supernatural behavior"?
> ""How is it possible to test for "supernatural behavior"?
- "I'm a psychic and can tell what's in these containers without looking"
- "I can detect water with magic rods"
- "I can heal you with the power of god"
It's worth watching An Honest Liar about the life of the Amazing Randi.
What's interesting is even when Randi shows people how they're being tricked they refuse to believe it.
The above examples are pretty easy to test (and people do), but believers just ignore the results or make up reasons why results don't matter or can't be tested.
Those are of course easy strawman examples of charlatans trying to make money.
This Carl Sagan quote is relevant:
>An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.
Sure - technically every atheist should be agnostic in the sense that you can never know anything with 100% confidence, but pragmatically you live as if you're an atheist. In the strict sense I'm "almost certain there is no god", but no one can be truly certain given the nature of the things Sagan points out.
Just because something is hard to prove with certainty doesn't mean the probability is equally likely. You can't really be a strict atheist about magic sea fairies either, but you probably are (in the sense you that you think they don't exist). Priors matter for things.
While many of those people were charlatans, many of them are also earnest. The water rods people really believe they can detect water with the sticks and have stories about how they helped a friend with a leak and such.
Many astrology people really believe they can make personality predictions (they can't unless they're vague enough to be predictive of nothing). It's not all conartists.
Maybe I'm just being snarky or missing the real meaning of the term, but I think of "supernatural" as something that is beyond any capacity to test or prove. Anything that can be proven would fall under my definition of "natural", even if it's beyond my capacity to explain or understand.
By definition, I'd consider any sort of gods, demons, ghosts, or whatever to be either nonexistent or something that exists (which would imply that it's something natural and operates in some currently unknown way).
>I think of "supernatural" as something that is beyond any capacity to test or prove.
I agree. It's worth noting that the fundamental nature of our consciousness could fall into that realm, judging by how it is scientifically impossible to isolate and control for, and is thus seemingly indefineable.
I think that's the reason it's possible, but how can you trust they've compartmentalized the right thing?
Basically you can be a great surgeon and religious, but you can't be a great evolutionary biologist and a creationist (at least not without some serious blinders).
If I'm talking to a doctor that's a creationist and they're skeptical about a vaccine - my prior would be that it's more likely this doctor was corrupted by anti-vaxx pseudoscience woo than has an accurate model of the vaccine's risk. I'd want to talk to someone who I know doesn't have a core example of corrupted reasoning.
I’d prefer my scientists to be less confident in their understanding of the world, and more humble about their knowledge. Maybe reading Kuhn does that for most people today, but there’s a long tradition of religion fulfilling a similar function, allowing “mystery” back in, emphasizing the imperfection of man. Religion should instill an attitude of “I don’t know, but I want to know.” That’s the right attitude for discovery.
" before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time "
Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion.
Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point.
Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.
Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe.
In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason.
In order to even accept the very notion of 'reason' you have to accept some kind of higher truth.
In addition you have to accept that there is 'a reasoner'.
You can't avoid taking a metaphysical posture - this is the anti-rational position that a lot of knee-jerk opposition to religion is founded upon.
There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason' - the Church founded all the best/most Universities in the world, and every other university is modelled after that.
The Motto of the Ivy Leagues are: 'Truth' or 'Truth and Light' or 'Light' etc. i.e. metaphysical aspirations.
Religion is the contemplation of higher order truths, mixed in with a bunch of applied social stuff.
Therefore: "Preferring Reasoning to Religion" is to misunderstand religion (i.e. Apples to Oranges), although to be fair, a lot of religious adherents do have a problem with that as well.
> Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe.
No, it doesn't. (Scientific materialism posits rules, it concludes (or models with) randomness only where the best efforts to model rules without randomness fail.
> In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason.
False. There's not teleological purpose, if that's what you mean by “reason”, which is a heavily overloaded term, but all the others (including reason in its causal sense) are compatible with scientific materialism.
> There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason'
That depends on the Church; and recently the ones which don't have a fundamental conflict with reason have been losing people to irreligion, while those which do have such a conflict have had all the growth. So, over time, the religion that exists progressively has more of a conflict with reason.
Religion is a social organization and embodiment of a Spiritual practice.
Technically, not necessary, but that would be like saying, technically, humans do not need 'each other' or need 'education' In reality, we do, immensely. When we don't have it wee seek it out learning ans religion, couched in different terms.
A good example is 'Yoga'. Yoga is 100% a religious practice, it's Hatha Yoga, a subdomain of Hinduism. Yoga exists to help prepare the body to be enlightened, specifically via the Kundalini Fire.
By removing the direct, religious language from Yoga, it's promulgators hoped to make it more amenable and acceptable to Westerners and it has been. (I do Yoga myself).
But merely changing the words to make them 'not seem religious' doesn't really change the underlying religious practice.
You make strong assertions that would be difficult to prove in general and based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. that materialistic reductionism is the only accurate worldview). I believe the viewpoint you espouse that religious people have broken reasoning is bit myopic in understanding human rationality and intellectual pursuits as well. Humans are complicated as is our understanding of reality we all share.
Good counterpoints are people like Donald E. Knuth, who is a preeminent mathematician, Turing Award recipient, and also a devout Lutheran [1]. He gave a talk on science and religion at Google even that gives a more nuanced view on science and religion [2]. There's also Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project who is a devout Christian as well. Other non-western examples include Ramanujan who attributed his mathematics to "divinity" [3]. Of course otherwise rational scientists can also become besot with irrational pursuits and beliefs, like Linus Pauling obessions with Vitamin C [4].
More broadly the religious concepts implicit in the Judeo-Christian creation mythos (and other major world religions) also encourage (in many scholars opinions and mine as well) a view that the world is a result of rational thought and not purely a choatic war that man happens to be besot by and perhaps might survive. For example compare the differences of Genesis to the Enuma Elish "There is no suggestion of any primordial battle or internecine war which eventually led to the creation of the universe. The one God is above the whole of nature, which He Himself created by His own absolute will. The primeval water, earth, sky, and luminaries are not pictured as deities or as parts of disembodied deities, but are all parts of the manifold works of the Creator. Man, in turn, is not conceived of as an afterthought, as in Enuma Elish, but rather as the pinnacle of creation." [5]. It's my belief that the inception of science (not mere technologists vs philosophers as the ancient Greeks or Romans had) is encouraged by a societal belief that the world has rational underpinnings and isn't just mad chaos.
I don't mean to imply that a religious person can't be outlier smart in other ways (Knuth being a great example but there are many others), but that doesn't mean something isn't broken with their world view. People are wildly inconsistent by default (myself included) and it takes great effort to try and recognize these kinds of failures in order to correct them.
In fact, the smarter the person is - the more complex their rationalizations typically are.
As far as finding major religions support a rational world view, it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything so I won't do that here. I'll just say that while I'd like that to be true, I think that it's not.
Your comment does directly imply that you don't trust their overall decision making and/or rationality based on your personal worldview. I believe that's bordering on a vary narrow and limiting view of human rationality, culture, and worldviews. Though yes I would agree with you to an extent as overly dogmatic religious beliefs leave little for other viewpoints or venues of thought as well.
> it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything
Certainly it's easy to cherry pick religious texts -- though there is some serious non-religious scholarly works in these areas as well but it's an area fraught with assumptions. The point being that it's not completely unreasonable to argue that (some) major world religions do promote aspects of rational worldviews (those being an orderly universe governed by knowable discernible rules). Perhaps your rationalistic or atheistic worldview is more correct but as with the view that certain religions promote rationality, that argument is fraught with challenges as well. That's my primary point.
>If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
What people call fundamentalists are often not all about the actual fundamentals. Rather, they're stuck on one or another bad, but still old idea. Actual fundamentals do not reflect the hateful, angry, bitter image that's conjured up by the term "fundamentalist."
My own experience being raised mainline Protestant was a bit different which might be illustrative: My parents were not at all devout, but still took wisdom and moral lessons from the Bible, especially from the teachings of Jesus. At the same time the preachers in town leaned right in their beliefs and focused on reading and interpreting more obscure passages. This resulted in a modest ongoing tension about what exactly it all meant. Then one Sunday School a conservative leaning preacher taught the kids how to spot witches. That was the last straw and we never went back to Mass or Sunday School and gradually withdrew from everything else with Easter and Christmas being the final holdouts. So I drifted to atheism but still find wisdom in the Bible and dare to compare the passages that focus on Jesus to stories of the Buddha. Culturally there is still quite a bit of influence there, but the fundamentalist component is a massive division like a great wall.
As a non-practicing Jew, I found the Jefferson bible very inspiring. Stripping the religious trappings from the teachings tempers the whole thing; I really like the humanity: it’s a story about a man with his own foibles, attempting to teach himself & others to be better people.
"The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, is one of two religious works constructed by Thomas Jefferson. The first, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1804, but no copies exist today. The second, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting with a razor and glue numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson's condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine."
Reading it I couldn't help but see Jesus as something of a troll. Like in this passage:
JESUS went unto the mount of Olives.
And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.
And the scribes and Pharisees brought in a woman caught committing adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,
They say unto him, Master, this woman was caught committing adultery, in the very act.
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?
This they said, to test him, that they might have cause to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground.
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him be the first to cast a stone at her.
And again he stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground.
And they which heard it, began going out one by one, beginning at the eldest: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
When Jesus had lifted up himself, he said unto her, Woman, whither are they gone? hath no man condemned thee?
She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
Jesus was the ultimate troll to the religious authorities, that's why they killed him.
Another great example of his trolling was when he was cornered by a bunch of people wanting to stone him to death:
>31 Again his Jewish opponents picked up stones to stone him, 32 but Jesus said to them, 'I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?'
33 We are not stoning you for any good work,' they replied, 'but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.'
34 Jesus answered them, 'Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are 'gods''? (He's quoting the 82nd Psalm of the Old Testament here)[1] 35 If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came--and Scripture cannot be set aside-- 36 what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, 'I am God's Son'? 37
[1]82 Psalm if the Old Testament: I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’
That's great hahaha. There are some who believe that's actually what Jesus was trying to say: the he was a son of god (there was no definite article "the" in ancient greek), and that everyone else is too (essentially what the Buddhists and Hindus claim); but that message was misunderstood, misinterpreted, censored, and modified to suit political ends.
There are a number of more esoteric quotes attributed to jesus like the one I posted above which make this case quite compelling
If you have that list, I would be very interested to see it! I've never heard of this interpretation, and my ancient greek is very poor. Not trying to be snarky, or clappingback, or anything, I am actually genuinely interested.
There are many quotes where Jesus spoke about the union of all people within him and within god. This is basically the same as the Buddhist concept of Indra's Net: the divine unity and mutual interpenetration of all things.
>"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus"
>"I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me."
>"For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ."
This idea seems to be the logical basis for many of his more commonly known teachings:
>"Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you."
>“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
>"whatsoever you do to the least of your brothers and sisters, you do unto me"
This last quote seems to indicate that when people realized all of the above, they would also realize their equality with jesus as children of god; which is essentially blasphemy to the modern day mainstream interpretation of the King James translation.
>"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father."
When he was asked about what to do with the woman who was brought in, he immediately started ignoring everyone and started doodling in the dirt, and then continued doing so as everyone slowly left. That's a little trollish (although not necessarily in a bad way!)
Except that without the supernatural part, it was a wandering, homeless religious teacher who got himself killed at an early age teaching things which got his followers killed too, and end up being pointless.
"Blessed are the meek; for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven." Except there is no kingdom of heaven, after all; and the meek are not blessed but oppressed. The supernatural stuff was there to show that the oppressive nature of the world and its cruelty was not the only thing; there was hope beyond it in the world to come, which gave the strength to believe in something absurd.
Otherwise its just John the Baptist; a person preaching who ended up dead on the whims of the powerful.
This demonstrates the big flaw of Christianity. Even thought there are millions of sincere, loving and friendly Christians around the world, the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism. Sooner or later someone will be confronted with the fundamentalist ideas about women, non-christians, and sexual diversity (for example), and start spreading the hate ideas contained in parts of that book.
I would posit that the most fundamental idea in the Bible is that humanity has fundamentally continued to be selfish and prideful while God has continually chosen to extend grace and keep his promises to people (mainly covered in the Old Testament). He dis this to the ultimate extent by living with us and dying on the cross so that all of the promises could be fulfilled once and for all (new testament).
It is exactly the selfish and prideful that decide to leverage select words/passages/ideas out of context for their own power over others rather than their inward correction of self.
Lastly, I’d add that many of the passages/letters written were to the audience of CHRISTIANS. I bible doesn’t really demand that non-Christians apply any of this to their lives until the first foundational stone is set. Paul even writes to this effect in 1st Corinthians.
The fundamentalist interpretation is only one way to read the biblical text, and it tends to ignore the context the text was written for.
Women: Jesus' ministry was financially supported by women. Jesus explicitly did not condemn the woman caught in adultery like the Pharisees did although he did not condone her conduct, either. Jesus taught to women (e.g. Mary, Martha's sister) while the rabbis forbid it; one rabbi said he would rather burn the Torah than teach to a woman, and the Torah was so sacred that they put old unusable Torah scrolls in the walls of the synagogue rather than the trash. A woman dealing in purple cloth hosted one of the early churches (and probably led it after Paul left). A woman is mentioned with the title apostle.
Homosexuality: nowhere does the Bible hate homosexuals. It says that it is a harmful behavior and is not to be tolerated in God's people because it leads to death. It is not "hate" to consider someone's behavior unhealthy, or even to disapprove of someone's behavior. We don't "hate" thieves because we disapprove of thievery. In fact, most people hate thievery and think it is so harmful to society that it should be repressed, but it does not mean we must hate thieves. American LGBTQetc seem to require love to look like complete acceptance and consider anything else as "intolerance", but that is a false dichotomy.
Jesus might not have been anti-women, but the New Testament certainly is.
> A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
The problem is that people are applying the morality of the Bible in the modern era when it's clearly outdated. Biblical morality is clearly not correct now on a number of issues (divorce, gay rights, etc, etc).
> the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism
But I think your degree of fundamentalism-ness is defined by your relationship to that book. If you see it as completely inerrant, then yeah, you're instantly in trouble because it can be trivially shown to be in self-conflict.
If you're willing to examine the book critically and in context, you do a lot better. Obviously the risk with this is that those doing that interpretation are entrusted with a lot of power over what people believe. But I think there's a middle ground here between the medieval Catholicism that the reformation reacted against (where the Word is obscured to the point that even the secondary texts like the liturgies weren't given in the vernacular) and the rugged individualism of modern evangelicals (where it's Bible-or-bust and writers like Rob Bell are excommunicated for daring to suggest that universalism might actually be consistent with the character of Jesus).
I would see this wide middle ground as a place where we agree on a very short list of actual fundamentals (something like the Nicene Creed, basically), and other than that people are free to study and believe what they want, as long as it isn't hurting others.
> If you're willing to examine the book critically and in context, you do a lot better.
Yeah, but in that case you have to concede that the Bible is not miraculous inspired, so why is it any better than other books such as the Vedas or the Iliad? This is the whole problem in the foundation of religion.
It also shows the blindsight of progressive Christians: they're following a religion that at the foundation goes against things they believe. For example, new testament writers say that Jesus came to save from the sin of Adam, but if no Adam and Eve existed, the explanation does't work anymore.
I don't think a literal Adam is necessary for the "sin of Adam" to be a thing, particularly if you're in a mindset already where the purpose of Christ's time on Earth was to establish a kingdom, rather than just to deliver some pleasant homilies and maybe troll a few pharisees on the way to his real intention, which was dying and being resurrected.
In any case, the Bible can absolutely be miraculously inspired and still be subject to critical examination. Looking at the history of how the individual books have been studied, translated, and selected, it's obvious that the text itself had always been very much interwoven with academia and tradition.
Eph 22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Cor 33 For God is not a God of disorder but of peace—as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people.
34 Women[a] should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.
Tim 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[a] she must be quiet.
I think those constitute clear sexism and/or misogyny?
Note: this is a bit cherry-picking out of context, which I'll admit sometimes happens in Christian circles as well. But I think understanding the context and culture of the time can make things a bit more clear. Yes, the culture of the time had a different handling of gender roles, and some of that persists in other cultures around the world to this day. These were letters written to the Christians in the churches of the day. Likely the content would be written slightly differently if it were written to a church in the modern day USA.
For example: Ephesians 6 goes on from what you clipped:
25 For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her 26 to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. 27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. 28 In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. 29 No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. 30 And we are members of his body.
This seems to me to indicate that husbands should be self-sacrificing and putting their wives' needs above their own. All the submission indicated here is similar to the way that Christ (the Son) submits to God the Father. These would have been very strong and shocking words in that culture, that normally would have allowed for husbands to have complete "rule" over their wives, and instead is urging husbands to self-sacrifice for their wives. So if anything, it would have been improving the standing of women rather than "keeping them down."
If you're married, have you ever willingly given up on your own desires, instead following your spouse's needs/wants? Have they ever done the same for you? This seems to be what this passage is encouraging.
I'm not cherry picking out of context. The following lines don't make it any better to me. The text is ultimately still saying women should bow and submit to their husbands decisions in all things, as long as their husbands treat them well. Yeah, I get that this was 'progressive' for its time. I still find it absurd people follow text like this as holy.
Your interpretation is well and dandy but perhaps as a society we need to stop holding text that's so dated in such high regard, where many peoples interpretation is far less optimistic and charitable than yours.
Yeah but this subthread discussion is regarding "are those passages taken out of context by preachers?" And it is interesting to note that the quotes given are all examples of 1st century preachers attempting to apply Jesus' message out of the original context. Yes the epistles are part of the Bible, but they are a distinctly different category from the gospels or accounts of Old Testament prophets. The guys writing them are not believed to be infallibly writing from the hand of god, and even fundamentalists agree they must be interpreted within the context in which they were written and their intended audience.
Mind you I'm an atheist, albeit with an amateur interest in biblical scholarship and archaeology. I just find that period interesting. And I think there is plenty of bad things Jesus actually said or did to point to. But I do believe the most egregious moral flaws of the New Testament are in the epistles, not the the gospels.
I think you're committing a historical fallacy. What you're saying is like condemning Abraham Lincoln because he said things that today we'd find unsavory or unenlightened. Fact is, Lincoln was highly progressive in his days.
Yes, the scriptures include things that are problematic, especially in the context of today's mores. But in so many cases, understanding the norms of the times really helps understand the "why", which is important.
The historical fallacy would be saying that early Christians were reprehensible because of their views independent of the time they existed in. I never said that. What I am saying is that following the teachings of those people 2000 years later is what's foolish, as we've come quite a long way in moral development since then.
In the case of Abraham Lincoln, he deserves credit for being progressive for his time in his pursuit of abolition. Does that mean we should follow his views on the inequality of white and black people, because he was progressive then? No, we've come a long way since then.
For Lincoln, celebrate his accomplishments and how he helped us progress. For the difficult things, understand they are artifacts of his time. They are important to understanding him and can further help color who he was.
Lincoln was a person. The Bible is meant to be the actual teachings of divinity. That's a key difference.
If we're meant to update for modern morality maybe we need a Newer Testament. Until then, the ambiguity of the words of long dead shepherds leave quite a lot to be misinterpreted, as well-intentioned your interpretation may be.
However, people don't go around claiming that Lincoln was God's chosen one and that his word is sacred. That's why we're fine in understanding that Lincoln was a man of his time and many things he said should nowadays be considered garbage. This is not how religion sees the Bible and the words of Jesus and other prophets.
My problem with this perspective is that, sure, the bible had some teachings that could be considered an improvement at the time. But if it really is a divinely inspired text, the teachings wouldn't be just a slight improvement of the norms at the time, but would consistently teach equal standing of every person.
And considering we have the old testament which was full of, let's be honest here, barbaric teachings but apparently were appropriate for the time. You would think by now we would have the New Testament V.96 that would contain teachings that are relevant today, not forcing you to pick and choose just the good parts.
There are many different ways to read the bible. Mainly, the bible is not a literal instructional manual unless you are a fundamentalist. And fundamentalists suck. For others, it's a written record of humanity's relationship with God. It's also a collection of writings from a number of different authors and genres - it has history, poetry, letters, and so on. The old testament was written by people thousands of years ago who had an imperfect understanding of God, nature, humans, society, etc.
In large part, the story of Jesus demonstrates how we should reject those archaic rules of our ancestors and act according to very simple principles; nonviolence, love for God, and love for all humans.
Paul claims to have met Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3-6) [1] and claims apostolic authority because of it (Acts 15:3-8) [2]. Furthermore, other apostles agreed that he had, or at least that he had the correct message (Gal 2:6-10) [3] and that his writings had the force of scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16) [4]. It is a letter from Peter, the head of the church in Jerusalem, claiming equating Paul's writing with "the other Scriptures", so you can't take out Paul's writing by claiming that that the original apostles did not believe what Paul wrote.
I can't remember ever being in a church where women were required to stay silent. So not quite dropped but at least not enforced by most. Ask me again once everyone dropped miles for metric.
Ah yes, the old 'ephesians is mysogyny' out-of-context quote, which always manages to completely omit the lines which follow:
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.1 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 o“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
won't get into the others, i'm quite sure there are cohesive rebukes / contextualization elsewhere
How does saying a husband should respect and love his wife mean that wives having to submit to their husbands isn't misogynistic? Yes, treat them well, but women must bow to their husbands in all decisions. It's a clear reinforcement of a power dynamic that ultimately means men control all the power in society.
The husband is to love his wife as he would himself; moreso, actually, he is to love his wife in the way Christ loved the church--who sacrificed his life for the well-being of the church (namely so that we could have an intimate relationship with God). It is with this understand of what a husband is that the wife submits to the husband. Submission is not unquestioning obedience, unless you insist on taking the most fundamentalist interpretation. And a husband that insists on unquestioning obedience is failing to even love his wife as himself, and certainly not with Christ's self-sacrificing love.
Your interpretation is certainly kind and would probably lead to a great way of life - my issue is still this text can easily be interpreted to be far less charitable and imply that the power of household decisionmaking lies with the husband, so long as he respects and loves his wife. Respecting and loving your wife is really, really up to interpretation. There are plenty of people now and throughout history who would not interpret this text the same way you have.
The text unequivocally gives different instructions for men and women, and the instructions given to men imply having the power in a relationship. Your interpretation doesn't sway my reading of the text as it is.
It's hard for me to see how you're reading Ephesians 5 in good faith. Wives submit to your husbands, husbands sacrifice your lives for your wives (like how Jesus ya know, was crucified for his Church). And you read this as misogynistic?
This is not by far the most problematic Pauline passage in terms of male/female roles. Taken at face value this is some pretty deep advice for how to have a functioning marriage where two people need to make decisions for their family and don't necessarily see eye-to-eye on everything.
Your explanation doesn't make sense because the roles are unequal. The text requires sacrifice from men but subservience from women, creating a hierarchy of powers inside the family. Your interpretation would be acceptable if the text said that both women and men had to sacrifice and submit to each other.
Yes, the husband in a family making all the decisions as long as they respect their wife is for sure misogynistic.
Your interpretation of this being advice for a family to function even when they don't see eye to eye everything makes no sense to me. So if a man and woman in a marriage don't see eye to eye on an issue, the man makes the decision as long as he's kind to his wife? A wife may have her opinion, but really she has to submit in all things to their husband?
I'm all for husbands loving their wives, but maybe text that clearly says that men have the power of decision making in a household could be interpreted as meaning...men have the power in a relationship.
'Power' in the Christian context is quite a lot different from your impression I think:
> And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10:42-45
To read Ephesians 5 without this in the background is totally misconstruing the text.
I'm one of the fundamentalists everyone here seems to hate. My wife is a very strong willed person and she does submit to my decisions (never because I ask or demand it) but because we see Christ submit to the will of the father. Just as I submit to Christ.
For clarity, I in no way rule over my wife, and am in no way of more value than her. The Bible makes it clear that all people are of the utmost value because they are made in the image of God.
For additional context, yes my wife submits to me, but I make no decisions without her consent. I don't even buy a $5 item off Amazon without talking to her. My Biblical role is to serve my wife and family which I'm thrilled to do each day, just as we see Jesus serve his disciples when he washes their feet.
What I'm trying to get to is that please do not mistake a fundamental view of the Bible as misogyny. Any teaching or text can be cherry picked without context to make any view look evil and cruel.
Your description of the dynamic between you and your wife is incoherent. You assert that she submits to you, but then you say that you make no decisions without her consent. So when she does not give her consent, she doesn't submit to you? Or does she simply always gives her consent, because the submission to you is a predicate. But then asking for her consent is a complete sham, a pretense to give her some agency in your mind.
Irrespective of those contradictions however, a social dynamic in which the woman must axiomatically submit to the man is always inherently misogynistic no matter the justifications, be they religious or not.
Sorry, rereading my post doesn't really make the dynamic clear and I'm not sure I could do it justice without having a dialog, but I'll attempt it.
First, neither of us make purchasing nor time commitment decisions without checking with each other, my last comment made it appear there's a large imbalance in the relationship with her making all decisions.
Our natural dynamics are that I operate on a system of respect, and she operates on a system of love. Yet the Bible calls us to do the opposite, I am to act in love, and she in respect (basically showing each other care in the way we best receive it).
Earlier in our marriage, I was really bad at showing her love as she received it (acts of service and giving her verbal feedback to her opinions and thoughts --- sometimes I still fail, but I get better as we grow). She was bad at showing respect (when she didn't feel loved/heard she would yell).
Regarding her choosing to submit, it's a motivation/outlook more than anything. When we are discussing a decision, she most always asks what I think we should do first. She will then give her thoughts on the topic and then leaves the decision up to me. There have of course been times where I end up making decisions that don't end up being the best in hindsight, but she never comes back and throws it in my face, because she chose to submit to my decision.
Since it's easy to say something that is misconstrued in text, I do want to be clear I never lord over my wife. I never demand that she submit to me, she chooses to do that on her own.
Hopefully that helps a little, I'm sure it's still probably unclear, my mom (who is quite left leaning and a feminist) doesn't grasp the Biblical concept of submission (thinking it means being weak and timid) and doesn't feel women should submit. Although she admires my wife's and my relationship, even though it differs from her views and has zero concern that both my daughters are raised in a household where the wife submits because the leadership is carried out with love and patience.
The verses you mention don't negate the previous ones. Yes, they said the husbands should love their wives, as long as the wives are subservient to their husbands, i.e., both things are considered necessary.
Taking the scriptures literally and limiting yourself only to direct recommendations from New Testament (i.e. no backlinking to Old Testament), at the very least, treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal[0].
It's interesting to observe the ways various Christian groups try to navigate their way around gender roles in their communities. You have a full spectrum here. From some fundamentalist US churches that will take everything super-literally, through groups like Jehovah's Witnesses[1] who sort-of take this literally, but make reasonable exceptions[2], through Catholics in Western countries, where most believers probably haven't even heard or thought about these passages, and any semblance of adhering to them is likely seen as more traditional than religious - all the way to lenient Christian groups that allow women priests.
In my experience, all Christianity is like this. Every group in every location[3] has their own specific understanding of which words are to be taken literally, which ones figuratively (and to what degree), and which ones to be completely ignored.
[1] - If I seem to focus on JWs too much in this thread, that's because I spent 20 years being one.
[2] - E.g. over at Jehovah's Witnesses, there's a lot that would technically qualify as "praying or prophesising" where women are't required to cover their heads, and men are not required to uncover theirs. Also definition of "cover" is "with a hat or similar", probably not what the authors had in mind.
[3] - As I understand it, Catholics in the West and in Africa are essentially two different religions. The former, having lived with it for centuries, ignore or pay lip service to all the rules that the latter obey to the letter.
> treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal
It reflects the mores of the times, which were different than ours. People 2000 years from now will certainly look at us and be aghast at some of our norms.
My denomination has had woman pastors since the mid 1800s.
There are real issues there, but the homosexuality quote is one of the "big eight" anti gay quotes that come up often and turn out to be misunderstood or translation errors that don't hold up to serious scrutiny. Homosexuality as we know it today was not well known or named at the time that text was written, just to start. Searching for the "big eight" helps both with that specifically and the general business of understanding how ancient stories get misunderstood by our modern news clip processing habits.
The New Testament is often mistakenly touted as a "reformation" from the Old Testament, and cherry-picked apart into a more progressive form of Christianity, but, it's not all that different from the Old Testament in actuality. New Testament also defines dress codes for women and re-affirms a patriarchal family heirarchy.
Agree completely. While both texts do largely focus on people of Jewish origins, there is not a lot of actual overlap on content. Some of the NT books are seen as prophetical, so that lines up to some degree - but even those read very different.
It's not just content that differs either - the literary style of the NT also deviates greatly, since it borrows much more from hellenized culture than the OT. Especially the synoptic gospels. For example, John, was composed using a layered "onion" type narrative structure which was popular in other greek texts.
They're even so different, that one form of heresy that was more common back in the day (Gnosticism), would sometimes claim that the OT deity was a false-god (the demiurge), because how else do you explain such a personality change?
You mean, the same Jesus who appointed only men to be his disciples, while the women in his entourage were servants? It seems that Paul was just putting into words his practice.
Funny you mention that! Yes, the four gospels that were canonized by a patriarchal church organization do seem to paint a picture like that. But the Gospel of Thomas, and other ancient "heretical" texts tell a different story, where Jesus explicitly acknowledgd women as equals and Mary as the favorite disciple. So even some very early Christians would disagree with Paul here.
I know, but the concern about Christianity is that it is a majority religion in the West, with strong political power. This has to be focus at least where I live.
I take it that "last straw" means the "straw that broke the camel's back". I just hope that stories like that won't be conflated with healthy practice of Christianity in people's minds.
I get your point, but isn't this the "no true Scotsman" fallacy? I know Christians like you exist and I like that most media portrays "good" Christians to look basically like the prototype you described. However, I have personally met only one Christian of this type and all my other interactions have been with the fundamenlist caricatures described elsewhere here. (Who is vocal about their Christianity might be skewing my observations, but this is a problem in its own: why are only the fundamentalists vocal around me)
You have a point. The definition of Christian is flexible, so how do you define "true"-ness? In my denomination, you'll find a wide variance of views on whether Mormons are Christian, for example.
> all my other interactions have been with the fundamenlist caricatures described elsewhere here
Like what you later intimated and what someone else said, I'll bet significant money that it's because they are so vocal. They are called capital-E evangelicals for a reason. The United Methodist church is lowercase-E evangelical; very much not in your face.
Grew up Protestant and rejected it because of the hypocrisy I saw around me. I saw "good church going people" who I knew were not good people and I saw how they were able to use the authority of their positions to exert influence. I also found that asking too many inconvenient questions in youth group meetings led to uncomfortable situations. It became clear that the religion part of things had little to no impact on how good, bad or decent the people practicing it were. People were good or bad, religious people simply had a metaphysical framework they could use to excuse themselves... and the bad ones would do just this. Led me to reject confirmation and leave altogether. Now it's been 40 years and I am more convinced than ever that I made the correct decision. Religion is fundamentally flawed as I see it practiced around me and needs to be kept out of civil society strictly and completely. You want to practice it in your home or church? Go for it. You want to inject it into civil society (schools, government, etc)... you need to be stopped utterly and completely.
Do you know if it was PC USA (which is more mainline) or PCA (which is more evangelical/fundamentalist)? It's actually a pretty huge split in that denomination.
After being raised in a non-Fundamentalist denomination I'd say the progressive ones are more insidious and no less harmful. Their foundations are all the same text, no matter how literal or figurative they interpret it. IME they usually also teach the same bad ways of thinking: emotion over logic, testimony over hard evidence, authority beyond your understanding, etc.
I suspect you're setting up a false dichotomy. There are more choices on theology than ones that require you to check your brain in at the door, such as 1. fundamentalism and 2. feel-good pop psychology.
I am not taught emotion over logic. In fact, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (a framework derived from but not described by him) has you evaluate beliefs with reason being a co-equal base. In confirmation and later in-depth adult classes, we were instructed to wrestle with the scripture. For example, we dug into the context of the times to understand better why certain things would have been said. We acknowledged selected verses made no sense. We agreed some parts we have no choice but to disregard. We frankly don't take Revelations that seriously because it's mostly batshit crazy. :-)
I am not taught testimony over evidence. My church fully embraces evolution. We see Genesis for the story and the poetry.
Authority beyond understanding: that gets back into the theological allegiance insisted on by the fundamentalists mainly.
As much as I appreciate your level headed approach of the whole thing, the very basis of most religion is based on _faith_ that [insert relevant scriptures] are holding some truth about the very existence and power of [insert omnipotent entity]. I'll be honest, I have a hard time putting this very fundamental point as having any basis in logic and reason. Even putting beliefs at the same level as reason is rather questionable, IMHO.
Edit: I'm not here to tell you you're wrong or to question your beliefs. You're very much free to hold them. I'm just having a hard time equating religion with objectivity when they are fundamentally rooted in something subjective by nature.
While I should attempt to create objective and rational explanation for everything, I think most people recognize I'd be hubristic to assume I can do this in all cases. Whether or not a belief system has to come into play is perhaps subjective.
The irony is that I think most belief systems have the staying power they do because they cannot be entirely discredited through logic and reason.
I agree with you that it's not based on logic and reason. And I am OK with that. The mystery and subjectiveness is part of the point and part of reality that we need to grapple with.
"Mystery" and "subjectiveness" are euphemistic descriptions of mythology and fairy tales, used to justify some pretty terrific political and military policies even today. People who go to church are implicitly supporting these things. Some of them have an excuse, in that they were simply raised that way and never had an opportunity for enlightenment. People who should know better don't have that excuse.
I went to a Catholic highschool as a non-catholic. It was taught by marianists and we had visiting jesuits often. They generally taught that you reached your faith through logic and exploration and doubt of faith until you hit the point where you realize you can't explain it all with logic. They were very harsh on everyone's beliefs and made you analyze them. It didn't work for me but I appreciated the emphasis on critical thinking.
I did enjoy the classes where we just gutted and analyzed the bible like any other literary work, they were not shy about it and it was fun to watch it shock the "devout Catholic kids".
> They generally taught that you reached your faith through logic and exploration and doubt of faith until you hit the point where you realize you can't explain it all with logic.
So the absence of evidence is evidence of the supernatural? Isn't this the god-of-the-gaps?
> They generally taught that you reached your faith through logic and exploration and doubt of faith until you hit the point where you realize you can't explain it all with logic
I'm fine with this... until they start proposing that the explanation for "you can't explain it all with logic" is "therefore there is an almighty God" rather than "therefore we don't how it works yet". At this point, my level of faith approaches zero (I sit somewhere along the lines of agnosticism or apatheism, depending on my mood) so you're losing me completely.
You just said that beliefs and reason are a co-equal base. This is exactly against reason, as reason cannot be bended in some cases just because you believe it should not apply in certain areas. That's why your denomination continues to subscribe to ideas that go against reason like Trinity, just to name a very common one.
Methodist Quadrilateral still teaches their followers to view issues and compare them to their scripture, then their traditions, then reason, and Christian experiences...
Those are literally the four pillars of Wesleyan, which are all emotion over logic.
Yes, but you've conveniently left out your other pillars...
Reasoning is just the act of thinking. An explanation for something which, according to you, should be framed around: Scripture, Tradition, and Christian Experiences.
Scripture: Tells you how to feel (emotion)
Tradition: Tells you this is how we've always felt (emotion)
Christian Experience: Is a grouping of Scripture and Tradition (emotion)
Reason is also the invitation to use our God-given intellect to help us come to conclusions. Otherwise we're disparaging God by disparaging that intellect.
Otherwise, yes, the other three bases of the Quadrilateral aren't "reason".
Not sure I follow. If the religious outfit is teaching things like:
- This book is a set of moral guidance aimed to cause favorable social outcome.
- These stories are myths.
- We should analyze these books to critically determine their relevance to our modern lives.
- Your personal understanding of spirituality is unique to yourself.
It seems only productive? It seems a much more dangerous stance, one even paralleling a fundamentalist stance, that there might be nothing to learn at all from scripture and millennia of human organized religion and so it must be completely discarded.
I haven't encountered a single religion that would teach what you just described. Can you name some?
I can't imagine such religion staying around for long, as presenting things this way leads to obvious question: what makes $holyBook special over, say, Harry Potter? Or Star Trek? Or your national fiction writer of yore that wrote stories to cheer up their readers in difficult times[0]?
This is not a joke question, by any means. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, so I had (my religion's interpretation of) the Bible down pat. And yet, looking back, even when I still believed I already realized my moral compass was built 50% on the Bible, and 50% on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's probably the latter that kept me from becoming a fundamentalist believer :). Alas, while I could easily find a community of people willing to wait for Jesus with me, I have a hard time finding people who want to work towards the utopian ideals of the United Federation of Planets with me.
Universalists, Reconstructionist Judaism, Quakers with unprogrammed worship, virtually any panentheist religion which asserts that the concept of God is universal and inherent in every element we can perceive. Even early Christian Gnosticism had echoes of this style of thought.
- These myths are the only ones we believe. The other ones are false and harmful.
- There is an invisible man who created everything and sits in judgment of all of us for the purposes of what happens to us in an afterlife that nobody has been able to observe.
- Follow us so that he does not judge you unfavorably.
The problem with the Bible is that the main character is God, and so everything that happens in the book affects him. The lessons do not give proper ethical cause and effect reasons for why you should do or not do something except that God is displeased with your humanity. Churches can add to these lessons and actually teach ethics, but they originate with the idea that a perfect being is really bad at creating perfect beings.
Despite how many churches start having pastors with spiked hair and jeans and sneakers and tattoos, THAT does not change, and it's fundamentally ridiculous and harmful.
This is a strawman for what you believe all religious organizations to be. In fact, you don't even need to be a religious organization to hold such beliefs. See: Alcoholics Anonymous.
The problem that religious doctrine seeks to address is one of how to preserve our sanity when we're inexplicably stuck on this rock together. Science doesn't seem to have any good explanation for why we're here either -- just that we exist and the universe has for a long time too. There a multiple colliding personal beliefs of individuals on things like: fairness, justice, or whatever a favorable outcome socially even might be. I think it's fine that people might seriously study the mythos of Greek, Abrahamic, and Eastern religion together.
People are born without a purpose other than survival and it is perfectly normal, if not recommended, that they maintain a healthy curiosity about the meaning of their existence. The alternative, unless I'm mistaken, is nihilism.
> In fact, you don't even need to be a religious organization to hold such beliefs. See: Alcoholics Anonymous.
Alcoholics Anonymous is an explicitly religious organization is it not? To me they certainly cast themselves so strongly in that manner that to claim they are a not is to make a distinction without a difference.
Note: I have not attended ?A itself but spent time with adjacent ?anon groups designed to support people whose friends and family members are struggling with addiction. The messages I received were, to me, pretty hard core religious, and one specific kind of religion in particular.
But you don't need religion for that. The ancients already knew this by creating the arts as an expression of humanity looking for its meaning. My opinion is that modern humans debased art and nowadays have difficulty finding things that are meaningful. Religion and superstition, on the other hand, have maintained their focus.
I’ve met a handful of Jewish rabbis who teach exactly this btw.
However their comment is not the stories are “myths”. But instead are verbal stories that likely greatly exaggerate the situation to teach us a lesson and keep us engaged.
They didn't keep the Bible around for thousands of years because they compared it with other myths and thought it was the best, they did it because they thought it was true. The "natural selection" argument for the Bible leaves out the fact that reading it as a myth is not its "habitat," to keep up the analogy. On a comparative mythology basis, the winner will probably be a work of fiction written after the printing press.
Who is "they"? This seems like an argument against organized religion because of religious hegemony in certain cultures.
Certainly people _do_ gravitate towards moral mythology whether they like to admit it or not. The popularity of superheroes in North American culture speaks to this in modern times, most of which appear to be stories about defeating evil in ways that parallel those of ancient myths.
The argument is that the Bible is a really great myth because it survived for so long. The fallacy in that argument is that the Bible did not survive as a myth, it survived as a written record of events.
The Catholic approach, at least, is that the Bible contains a variety of literary styles, and so it's both. Some books are records of events, some are letters, some are myths in the Joseph Campbell sense of stories that are meant relate deeper truths about human nature and mankind's relationship with God. Most of the people who did this preserving over the centuries didn't subscribe so much to literal-minded fundamentalism.
The Catholic approach doesn't allow for swapping out biblical myths for other myths, which means that the Bible wasn't competing as a myth in their cannon either. If there was a form of "natural selection" operating on it, it was not operating on it as a myth. However I grant that "they thought it was true" is a vast oversimplification of the many motivations that people have had for printing copies of the Bible - which can include purely financial ones!
Ah, I think I see what you mean. Yes, most of the curation of the biblical canon was settled by the 4th century or so, and after that it came along with the religion as a fixed entity. But that doesn't mean there wasn't some natural selection of myths before that, especially those that had already been around for a long time before they were written down. Some weren't exclusive to Judaism; compare Noah to Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
I don't think 3rd century Christians were comparing different accounts and selecting them on the basis of how well they would function as allegorical myths. I could be wrong, but as far as I know that is a modern invention, developed to reconcile the supernatural elements of scriptures with the naturalistic worldview that developed during the enlightenment. To understand the setting of early canonization, you have got to picture a world of persecution, faith and martyrdom that is hard for us to imagine in our liberal, secular and comfortable world.
I understand that the view of the Bible as a product of natural selection is a way to transpose the belief that it was not made through purely human forces to a philosophical system where all nonhuman forces are natural. However, the argument for relevance to modernity is severely weakened by this rebasing. It is not the present environment that determines the shape of the animal, but the historical environment, and while the survival of a species is a testament to its adaptation for the historical environment, it is not a testament to its adaptation for the present environment. Since the historical environment was a combination of true faith, and later illiberality, there is no reason to think that it should be adapted for the modern environment of the allegorical view and religious freedom. That is why I do not think the naturalistic view works as a justification for the providence of the scriptures.
I've seen the churches you talk about, and I would almost call them "progressive-fundamentalist". The hallmark of fundamentalism isn't really adhering strictly to the text (after all, the text is so multifaceted that there's not even just one definition of "strict adherence", despite what they would tell you). The defining trait is turning the text into a battle-cry instead of an invitation for contemplation and love and self- and community-work. Progressives are just as likely to do this as conservatives.
I was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools until college. When I was in high school I recall having serious issues with what they were teaching. Here's a few of the gems they left me with:
1. You should only get married if you intended on having children.
2. If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled.
3. Homosexuality was abhorrent and sinful.
4. Women should not obtain positions of power in the church. They used Adam and Eve to justify their position.
Many years later I found out that the reason why my freshman year biology teacher left unexpectedly over the summer was because he had been shuffled to another location after molesting young boys. He was eventually imprisoned for this, after being extradited to Australia. The church and the school knew this but said nothing to the parents or the students and it was swept under the rug. It was complete silence until they were forced to say something at a point where those who were molested were fairly far into their lives.
Thinking back on all of this still makes me angry today. A priest in my elementary school was brought in and then quietly and suddenly left a few months later and I am left with unanswered questions.
I don't need that in my life. I don't need religion to be a moral person, and from my point of view the system that I was raised in was very far from moral. The Catholic church has done more to affirm my Atheist .. non-beliefs? .. than anything else.
> If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled.
This depends on a lot of things. If two people get married, and one of them already knows that they are sterile or for whatever reason cannot have children, but they don't reveal that to the other until after they are married, that is grounds for the other person to seek an annulment. This is not the same thing as saying that the marriage "should" be annulled.
If on the other hand, knowledge of the person's sterility doesn't arise until after they are married, I don't think that's grounds for an annulment.
In the eyes of the Roman Catholic church women are still not equals, homosexuality is a sin, and a major purpose of marriage is still to bear children in the name of the lord.
Women and men are not equal. We have equal human dignity, but for example our bodies are different. What level of "equality" would you be content with?
Yes, the purpose of marriage is procreation. What else would its purpose be, a tax break? I don't know exactly what you mean about "bear children in the name of the lord", though. Personally, I see having and raising children as a way of bringing me closer to God, because being in the role of the father forces me to sacrifice for the kids. Every tiny sacrifice I make is a reminder of Christ's supreme sacrifice. There are a thousand ways being a father has made me humble. Both going from zero to one kid, and then going from one to more-than-one, showed me that it's possible to love more than one person with all my being / I didn't allocate my love among my spouse and kids, I have 100% for all of them.
The Church doesn't say "Homosexuality is a sin". The misuse of the procreative faculty (by anybody, heterosexual, homosexual, etc etc) is a sin. It's exactly as grave a sin to use contraception, or to have an extra-marital affair, as it is to engage in homosexual acts.
N.B. I'm just some guy with a keyboard. I'm not a canon lawyer nor a Church historian or anything like that. If and where I've gotten things wrong, I want to learn the truth.
> Women and men are not equal. We have equal human dignity, but for example our bodies are different. What level of "equality" would you be content with?
How many women priests does the Roman Catholic church have? I'll give you a hint, it's ZERO. In fact, you will be excommunicated from the church if you ordain a woman as a priest. I think that equality there would be a good starting point. If the church can not condone women in equal positions of power, how can they possibly see the common man and woman as equals?
> Yes, the purpose of marriage is procreation. What else would its purpose be, a tax break?
Not in the slightest! It is a bond of commitment between two people. Even the "standard" marriage vows mention nothing about children or procreation.
> The Church doesn't say "Homosexuality is a sin". The misuse of the procreative faculty (by anybody, heterosexual, homosexual, etc etc) is a sin. It's exactly as grave a sin to use contraception, or to have an extra-marital affair, as it is to engage in homosexual acts.
This is where we disagree, hard. As long as two consenting adults agree, I do not care what they do with each other. So the church says that homosexuality is a not sin, but they can't have a sexual relationship with each other, they can't get married, and they are misusing their procreative faculty? That's equating homosexuality with sin but with extra steps.
Serious question here -- what would you do if one of your children was gay? Would you tell them that they can't be married, can't adopt children, or that they are sinners? If so, how could you possibly be 100% for all of them?
N.B. I'm just some married guy with a wife and a keyboard. I have two daughters, and I don't care or worry about their sexual preferences. I've known plenty of gay people throughout my life and feel that they deserve equal footing in the eyes of their peers, the law, and the church.
You've got a lot of "I do not care" and "I think" in your reply -- I'm not necessarily trying to convince you, I just saw the misinformation and wanted to move it more in a direction that the Church actually holds.
That’s the predictable, and in the end, best outcome. The most foolish thing cultural “christianity,” could do is pick a political party. Now that we’re a generation past that, the so-called “religious right” has evolved into a thin veneer of pseudo-religion over a very specific political faction, and that shallow falseness is driving most people away.
As for actual Christianity and those who study it, in many ways the teachings of Christ could not be more different than the “religious right” advocates today. Christ taught followers to love their neighbors as themselves, and not to judge other people, because in God’s eyes all humans were equally and impossibly flawed. When a mob formed to stone an “adulteress,” as was the prescribed punishment for that “crime” in ancient Judaea, Jesus said “let the person who is without sin throw the first stone.” The mob dissolved, and he told the woman she was forgiven.
Note that this is not what the religious-political faction of Jesus day wanted either, and in the end they arranged for him to be crucified as a result.
I emigrated from another country to the US and, having participated in religion in the past (even if just for socialization), became frightened to discover that American churches (at least 90% of them) are nothing more than a cover to conservative political activism. I never entered into a single one after that.
I doubt that the number is 90%, and I have no idea how anyone would rigorously measure it, but I understand your point.
One of the annoying things is that it isn’t even quite true to say they preach “conservative,” political action. There’s a particular political philosophy of the “religious right,” which is really it’s own flavor of thing and doesn’t fit the classical definitions of liberal vs conservative that we would have used in say, 1980.
That’s a lot of what’s turning over the Republican Party right now. Old-fashioned “conservatives” like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney are being uprooted in favor of... whatever you call the hodgepodge of today’s Republican ideas.
I'm not religious, so I don't go to my wife's church, but with the pandemic now, they are streaming their services on Sundays for the few of their congregation who are respecting stay-at-home. Now that it's background noise Sunday mornings, I can hear what they're saying, and it's essentially a Republican sermon. Sure, the pastor mentions Jesus every once in a while, but for the most part it's straight up conservative talking points and propaganda. If I didn't know it was a church service, I would have thought she was streaming Fox News. I know, anecdote and sample size of one, but wow.
They're all anti-maskers, too. She had to stop by once to deliver something during service, and everyone's packed in there singing and shouting, zero masks to be found. Pretty scary.
Jesus also told the woman to "go forth and sin no more" as part of being forgiven, which is a significantly important detail that often gets overlooked when paraphrasing this story.
The entire story of Christ is based on redemption from sin - if one tries to eliminate that because having extrajudicial demands on one's conduct is not fashionable in the modern day, what's left is, objectively speaking, not Christianity anymore, not even qualifying as a moral framework, and leaves you with nothing more than a nice story about a nice guy.
Let us not forget that Jesus was described as fashioning a whip (which is not something you do on a momentary whim in the bronze age, that takes time and effort, and in this case, likely stewing the whole time) and deploying it against scalpers in the temple. What the "judge not" passage calls for is recognizing that you aren't the ultimate authority worthy of meting out punishment at the end of the day (which also jibes with significant portions of the Israeli covenant and its lethal punishments being deprecated), but it does not demand that people remain tolerant or silent in the face of sin.
I agree with everything you said. I’ll also admit, it’s hard for me to see much difference between today’s “religious right” and the temple market that Jesus personally wrecked.
Agreed.. but I think that intent factors into it a lot more than people tend to give credit for. If one of the key takeaways of Christianity is "don't sin", then right behind it is "you (and everyone else) will screw up, try to be better anyways". And that applies just as well to things like lying and cheating as it does to scrupulosity and being judgmental.
Your typical fundamentalist might be nominally Christian by declaration, but they give short shrift to so many things they deem not important that it amounts to shallow virtue signaling. The moral guidelines are all-or-nothing. You either accept it all or you might as well save yourself the time because there's no such thing as partial credit. Sin is sin.
For me, and many I know, anti-religious sentiment is pretty simple. We just think it is science fiction, and thus not good to believe it is real. Even if its all very nice and friendly and reasonable fiction, it is better to understand it isn't real.
My anti-religious sentiment goes far beyond that. I could not care less if people believe in science fiction. We all believe lies, don't we?
My problem is that religions dictate universal truth, which is used as a justification to oppress. Many of us were abused or oppressed by mainstream religons as children.
The reason fundamentalists are so appealing is because they at least try to maintain some level of consistency.
How does one know which parts of the bible to accept or which parts are metaphor and which parts are literal or which version of the bible to believe? At least the most literal interpretation always tries to be consistent.
What makes any interpretation better than scriptural literalism? Is it the fact that some happen to agree with current social trends? Seems like the source material is flawed and unnecessary in the first place.
Totally agree. I'm not religious at all, but at least being a "fundamentalist" seems intellectually honesty. If you believe your religious text is the true word of an all powerful God, surely it's infallible? What gives you the right to pick and choose which parts to take literally or not?
Would an all powerful God who wants "true believers" to find salvation leave them for thousands of years muddling through with just an ambiguous and inconsistent book to live by?
I think fundamentalists care less about consistency than closure. They want to minimize mystery and unknowns by insisting that even some very implausible parts of the Bible are expressly and unquestionably true. Similarly, Catholicism seems also to be quite formal about Biblical interpretation, but willing to let the church decide which tenets should be explicit vs metaphor. In contrast to both, I understand that Orthodoxy is less concerned about closure and more willing to leave 'lesser' questions unanswered or remain ambiguous.
Religious truth isn't decided only by scripture or church hermeneutics. Sometimes it's just what your community chooses to care about (or not).
The whole implausible argument always struck me as lacking.
You accept the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent god, but then say they couldn’t possibly do anything supernatural because that would go against the science they created.
Without "scriptural literalism" how do you know what bad theology and heresy are? Is good theology not simply that which most closely corresponds to Scripture? Your comment makes sense on a Roman Catholic view – in which the traditions of the church are authoritative – but not on the Protestant view (sola Scriptura).
Fundamentalism is still a vague description. I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had. As I grew as an adult my ire went from "religious institutions" to "certain moral communities".
In any moral community there will be outliers and some of those outliers can take hold of a message. You can see this in modern day with secular moral communities as well. My main takeaway, after 20-some years of evaluating this is that morals are something okay to evaluate your group on, but they are not ethics. They cannot apply widely, make their way into law, or try to shape society because by their very definition they are intrinsic to small groups. That doesn't mean these groups can't teach us something, but the foundation of their ideas requires subscription and often holistically.
> I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had.
I know of too many Catholics who say the same. Not growing up Catholic, it's hard to relate. Their stories often involve excessively strict dogma or scriptural interpretation that denies or vilifies innocent human nature. E.g., taking your girlfriend to mass to hear an incendiary anti-abortion sermon, then losing said girlfriend due to that mass, then later ending your relationship with the church out of frustration.
Unfortunately, you are the exception. I grew up in a church household and family. It is sad that so many people see the bible as a weapon to enforce their point of view instead of a manual to direct their own life. It is crazy the amount of hate that my "christian" family members post on FB.
Jesus drove people out of the temple with a whip for disrespecting it. He called people (these are all based on KJV translation) "generation of vipers", "hypocrites", "whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones", he said it would be better some people to not have been born, that it would be better for some to have a millstone hanged on their neck and be drowned in the sea.
None of that was hatred. It was love. He was dealing with people's religious and moral failings.
It is not love to tell people they are okay when they are morally bankrupt.
I've talked to people of the younger generations (in the USA) who are not even aware that there is anything other than fundamentalist literalism. Either the Earth is 6000 years old and Jonah literally rode in the belly of a whale, or there is no God.
This sets up a situation where you have to be willfully ignorant or lie to defend the existence of God, since this stuff is bollocks.
In reality fundamentalist literalism is a relatively recent (19th century) theological development, but it's taken over completely in many US denominations.
A further wedge has been driven by the total politicization of religion. Many also believe that you must be a far-right Republican to be a Christian. If you'd asked me as a teenager or early 20-something what it meant to be a Christian I'd have thought "you have to support the military and vote Republican."
Well given the logical definition of God 6 day creation and riding in a whale are not a problem at all, anything is possible. I never saw a 6000 year old Earth in the Bible though.
The idea is to assume we have an unbroken record of genealogy in the bible and add up all the lifetimes of people mentioned, which gives the ~6000 years. [0]
I'm not sure whether there is any basis for this assumption in the text though..
Yeah I don’t think there is, and doesn’t need to be either. If you believe it’s the Word of God then it’s got just what it was suppose to have in it, nothing more and nothing less. Most of the debated things are just not that important on the scale with things that are cut and dry, by design.
It’s like the science thing, there is science in the Bible, but the Bible is not a science book. Science is more of a way to describe the function of the lego blocks that make up the world around us, the Bible is more concerned with how the lego blocks came about and what the cosmic purpose of them is. Which is why science and Bible are never at odds, just like how metaphysics is never at odds with physics. Or how things like gravity and light are well beyond the scope of biological evolution.
Nobody hates you. The gallup just shows that your belief system is slowly becoming irrelevant. If you can still draw anything from it (while leaving the rest of the competing sects alone), all the more power to you.
The beauty of protestantism is that there is no ultimate arbiter to decide that one sect is "good" or "bad."
You view certain fundamentalists' interpretation as somehow "bad?" So what? They probably view your sect as being equally degenerate.
What gives you standing to cast this judgment?
The framework of Protestantism allows and accounts for these divergent views. So you really can't throw down the "no true Scotsman" fallacy against those sects you disagree with in its broader defense.
I think you're missing the bitterness that comes from growing up with a set of coping mechanisms and losing them. Moderate Christianity, taught by moral and good people, nevertheless can lead one to use the thought of eternal life as a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the reality of death and suffering in the world. If you eventually lose your ability to believe in that (which is involuntary for many), it can be quite painful.
1. Stance on abortion among your brothers in church? As if brothers should even have one that matters?
2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell?
Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I don’t come here as an atheist, just as someone who’s trying really hard to believe but finding no acceptable ground to stand at all. The only smart people I find religious (especially Christian) are ones who were born and grew up forced to go to church. Typically they’d give up on practising it in their teens, basically break every rule in their book for two decades and then somehow rediscover it because now it’s convenient to find some community and higher purpose in their life. The ones who convert from elsewhere when they are adults are almost always gullible and did so for the most transactional reasons you can think of.
> Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable.
I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he's ever met". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between.
Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about rules at all, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with rules you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with rules you become a bitter atheist.
A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion.
Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me. Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it. Most, I think, see that even if it does, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and osmosis, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into whatever. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads.
I like this quote from Pope Francis:
> We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.
You say that most Protestants are loving people but that doesn’t seem to be the case at least in the US. Evangelicals are not the only group to vote republican/trump, but they are the vast majority. Very few Christians seem to see the problems (fundamental ones) with that regime but just want to vote for a madman because their goals are met at the expense of literal death and suffering (see Birx’s statements from yesterday).
Again to iterate, it’s not just Christians who voted and continue to vote for him, it’s also a bunch of other people, but the common denominator seems to be an undertone of selfishness and heartlessness, people who are afraid of everyone else and want their life to not change the world be dammed, so yeah can’t really see anyone supporting this ideology to be a good person.
> the common denominator seems to be an undertone of selfishness and heartlessness, people who are afraid of everyone else and want their life to not change the world be dammed, so yeah can’t really see anyone supporting this ideology to be a good person.
This seems to be a pretty close-minded view. Sure, selfishness and heartlessness could be a big motivator to vote one way. But as someone who knows Christians who voted for Trump, here are a few reasons which I'd argue aren't due to moral failings:
* Some strongly believe abortion is murder, and are worried about the number of lives thus being extinguished.
* Some believe that there is a growing anti-religious sentiment in their opposition, and they vote against that anti-religious sentiment. Every one of these friends is a strong proponent of religious pluralism.
* Many Christian voters come from less urban, less affluent areas of the country. These voters felt ignored by mainstream candidates, and Trump courted them better than most candidates in decades, actually speaking to the day-to-day issues of that constituency.
* Many Christians have different moral views than society at large. When viewing males as "the head of the household" is considered sexist and oppressive, couples that (both) opt in for such a household-model will understandably not be drawn in by progressive rhetoric castigating them for it.
Again, this isn't to paint a rosy picture saying "Bad people of group X are just as likely to vote either way". But to say that you can't see anyone supporting an ideology to be a good person under the hood is going to lead to a lot of animosity in life.
I didn't say that actually, though I also wouldn't say the inverse. I don't really know the exact answer, and I don't really think it's important here.
> Very few Christians seem to see the problems with that regime
It is important to note that Evangelical != Protestant, and Protestant != Christian, and Christian != Religious person. There are huge gaps between each sub-category and the parent category; evangelicals may be one of the larger categories in the U.S., and may be largely Trumpist (though even then, not all of them), but they hardly represent the whole of religion.
> the common denominator seems to be an undertone of selfishness and heartlessness
I feel an immense amount of anger towards Trump and his entire movement, not despite but because many of my family-members have aligned themselves with it. And yet, outside of those contexts, I still see them being good and kind to their loved ones and others. I've also come to see that their alignment is largely based in fear - which, even if it's ill-founded and driven by false narratives, is an emotion I can feel sympathy for. Wrestling with this dichotomy - seeing the evil they've confused with good and the ways it's changed them, while knowing that they are still my loved ones and they still contain some goodness underneath - has been one of the most stressful and difficult things I've had to grapple with in my entire life.
But one thing I've held onto from my religious days is the principle that human beings are not simply good or evil. All of us contain good and evil, and (both as individuals and as people with individuals that we care about) it's a question of identifying and nurturing the good, and trying to let go of the evil, each day anew.
> I feel an immense amount of anger towards Trump and his entire movement, not despite but because many of my family-members have aligned themselves with it.
> Wrestling with this dichotomy - seeing the evil they've confused with good and the ways it's changed them, while knowing that they are still my loved ones and they still have bits of good underneath - has been one of the most stressful and difficult things I've had to grapple with in my entire life.
Hear, hear. It was hard for this to come to a reckoning last year with everything else bad going on.
I grew up being bullied by people because I was different. I was a mess honestly, a weird, smelly kid who was a bit of an eyesore. These are people who were nice to each other, and people who would have been seen as caring, loving and kind people to their families and others that liked them. I was even mocked by one of my teachers.
Very few people think they are not forgiving, loving and caring. Many people will open the book, find the things that reassure them they are loving, caring, and a wise person, and close it happy.
Your friends don't try to convert you because they hide themselves around you. If they tried, you would cut them out of your life, despite your empathy; just mentioning that you will pray for someone can make them angry. If they persisted, really believing their friend was in danger of losing eternal life, you would end the friendship.
Really, all the stuff you say sounds nice, but secular people only show love to people who they think are lovable. When you become one of the unlovables, they will cheerfully drop what you say and bring out the knives, and your philosophy is worthless to stop it.
I don't want to minimize your experiences, but you're taking those experiences and projecting them onto people and things (both those I mentioned as well as entire categories) that aren't really tied to them.
> people who would have been seen as caring, loving and kind people to their families and others that liked them
Good and evil can exist within the same person. Evil can also masquerade externally with the signifiers of good. I don't know the people you're talking about so I can't really comment on them specifically; but being a human means being a paradox.
Not that that excuses what happened to you. It sounds like that was very hard and I'm very sorry to hear about it. I can't really speak more to it or to the people involved because again, I don't know much about it. I simply don't believe that even the worst human on earth is irredeemable or worthless in principle, whether or not they ever change in practice. Of course that doesn't mean they should be left to get away with doing whatever they want to whomever.
> Many people will open the book, find the things that reassure them they are loving, caring, and a wise person, and close it happy
The other half of "nobody is completely good or evil" is that life is a never-finished journey of self-work. Doing what you describe is a trap that many people fall into, sure. But I don't think it invalidates the efforts of people who decide to do otherwise.
> Your friends don't try to convert you because they hide themselves around you. If they tried, you would cut them out of your life, despite your empathy; just mentioning that you will pray for someone can make them angry. If they persisted, really believing their friend was in danger of losing eternal life, you would end the friendship.
With respect, you don't know them. My parents, unlike my friends, do try periodically to convert me, and I haven't cut them out of my life. It causes friction between us, sure, and they've learned that and they've dampened it some. But we make the relationship work.
When it comes my friends, I simply know they aren't hiding themselves. We talk openly about this stuff sometimes; we have good conversations. We don't avoid it like I have to with my parents. I don't mind when my friends say they'll pray for me, because I know they're saying it out of open love, and not passive-aggression. We respect each other's agency, we know we're on different journeys. I've known people who weren't that way. I've seen the hollowness of ulterior motives behind their smiles and their social gestures. I know the difference.
Real relationships go beyond and above disagreements, and the ones I get to pick for myself are with individuals who can tolerate nuance and paradox.
> Really, all the stuff you say sounds nice, but secular people only show love to people who they think are lovable. When you become one of the unlovables, they will cheerfully drop what you say and bring out the knives, and your philosophy is worthless to stop it.
I'm not sure where this came from (though I'd be happy to hear more about it). Above you seemed to take issue with religious people, but here you mention secular (non-religious) people
> Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell
I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology!
Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.
The idea of hell was widespread in ancient times. For example, the Greeks believed it. They also believed that everyone went to hell. This is exactly the mythology that christians spread nowadays. The only difference is that Christians believed that the few who accepted Christ would be rescued from Hell, the same way Eurydice was saved by Orpheus (hence the idea that the church is the bride of Jesus). It is all a rehash of ancient myths.
I think calling it a rehash is unfair. I would call it "independent discovery", where the same general lived human experience gives rise to the same general ideas about the universe and society and right and wrong. Religion is a technology for dealing with the experience of being a person.
I don't think it is independent discovery, because Christianity was born at a time when Greek ideas were widespread (Palestine having been a Greek-dominated area for centuries before the arrival of Romans). I believe there was an amalgamation of elements from ancient Hebrew religion with other pagan myths mainly from Greece.
"Independent" may have been overstating it, I just think something is being lost when we frame one religion (or even a subset of its concepts) as being purely derivative of another. Just because ideas are similar doesn't necessarily mean they have the exact same origin, and in fact I think it's much more interesting to look at the cases where they didn't have the same origin, because it tells us something about ourselves as human beings.
> 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell?
I'm not a Baptist, but presumably nearly all of them find it sad and unfortunate and feel compassion for most of humanity.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, though. Only believing things that make you happy isn't a very good philosophy of life.
That's fair, but to play devils advocate, every sect can point the finger at some other sect, or at heretics within their own sect. No sect will agree to any negative critique, and because their doctrines tend to be self consistent, critique is pointless anyway. Yet the sects are not completely separate, but are collusive to some degree. And individual beliefs may be a mishmash of ideas from multiple sects. Indeed for this reason, the divisions between sects are not hard edged.
American fundamentalism would have no political power without the tacit consent of the mainstream. The predominant sects in my state are mainline, yet they voted en masse to outlaw gay marriage (before the US supreme court ruled otherwise).
Fundamentalism is corrosive and detrimental to society. I don't get angry at moderate religious views but I still think they're laughable superstition. I respect your right as a human to believe I just think it's silly.
I'm not sure the narrative you're trying to paint here actually works. If you dig deeper into the actual poll, it says:
> In addition to Protestants, declines in church membership are proportionately smaller among political conservatives, Republicans, married adults and college graduates. These groups tend to have among the highest rates of church membership, along with Southern residents and non-Hispanic Black adults.
For better or worse, conservative (both politically and theologically) people seem to be holding on to their Christian faith in greater numbers (at least marginally) than their more progressive or liberal leaning counterparts.
Anyway, as someone who almost left the faith, I would agree with the overall narrative that Christianity became ineffective in the late 20th century. Personally though, I would attribute it to a lack of focus on youth and issues relevant to youths. I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I saw a poll that indicated most people who leave do so in the transition from high school to college. That certainly lines up with what I observed, most people just didn't care enough to keep going (regardless of what branch they were in). I would have been one of them myself, if I hadn't been able to find a college Christian community that was dramatically more vibrant than what I grew up with. But overall I think I'm one of the lucky ones.
Yeah, I suspect this news story (and poll) only scratches the surface as to identifying the multiple demographic trends afoot. Most notable to my eye was the 15% drop in church membership between GenX and Millenial. Of course, to do that metric justice we'd need to monitor change in that age group over time. Are today's 18-to-30 year olds so different than 18-to-80 year olds were in the 1970's or 1990s?
I suspect the range of ages that are today's Millenials has forever been less traditional than other age groups. That's unsurprising given they have the least personal history of any adult group to weigh when deciding their life's priorities, and are likely to think least about their relationship to others in their family (since they just left the parents behind and have yet to add any more). At that age, the need to join another 'family' and adopt a bunch of new familial responsibilities is likely to be less compelling a notion than it may be a few years hence.
I became an atheist/agnostic as a teenager and now in my late 20's I have slowly come back to religion. So I am really interested in this topic.
My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment.
These online atheists communities can be very unfortunate. Your noble search for the truth leads you to question religion - but then you get caught in an echo chamber spending a lot of energy hating on others for their beliefs. A noble pursuit devolved into hatred and groupthink. On the other hand, fundamentalists took a religion which preaches love and acceptance and twisted it into something bitter and hateful. I think it's kind of poetic how much those two communities mirror each other.
The fixation on fundamentalism is a combination of two things. First, there are people from those fundamentalist churches who were damaged in some way and have now swung way to the opposite extreme of hating all religion. They grew up learning to see the world through rigid dogma, and online atheist communities tend to be fairly dogmatic themselves. Not hard to see the appeal there. Second, and probably more common, are atheists who never had any close contact with fundamentalism but they justify their beliefs by taking on the low-hanging fruit. It is very easy to pick on young-earth creationists, vehement anti-gay groups, prosperity gospel, etc. Those groups' thinking really does rely on fear and hate, things that the bible actually tells us to reject.
What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.
As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? They think that all Christians are anti-science when Christian monks were pivotal in the discovery of genetics and the big bang theory, among other scientific achievements. They ignore that some giants of Enlightenment philosophy, like Descartes and Spinoza, were attempting to use new rational methods to affirm the existence of God in their major works.
The problem is, when you are an atheist engaging in the really complex arguments posed by the most intelligent and eloquent religious people of history, the waters become very muddy. You might even have to concede, just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith, too. It's much easier to feel good about bashing the usual suspects - Joel Osteen, the 700 Club, Westboro Baptist and friends. And so a lot of people get sucked into that low-level discourse, and never get a chance to make the exhilarating journey back to religion. I don't really care if someone stays an atheist, many good people are atheists. But I do care if they never get a chance to see the promise of religion because of toxic echo chambers and groupthink.
As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.
> just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith
Well, that's the whole point: Atheists don't.
Indeed we can't explain everything, not even close. But we don't have any reason to even remotely believe in any kind of supernatural power, which in turn begs an explanation it self ad infinitum.
You don't have any reason that you have considered. Which is totally fine. The problem comes when atheists believe a priori that any argument for God's existence would be automatically false, even the ones they have never heard or considered.
Your statement suggests there are infinitely many hypotheses that posit "a thing exists, but there is no evidence for it". Then you say others have failed to (properly) consider those hypotheses that you choose to believe. (Which may or not be true, but no evidence either way is evident.)
However, aren't you also saying you are not willing to (properly) consider the infinitely many alternative hypotheses to your own, much less the negation hypothesis of "NOT God"?
Which is better then? To choose to believe in one untestable hypothesis or to believe in none?
A suggestion that there are things you haven't heard of doesn't equate to infinite things. Let's say there are 10 arguments for God's existence, but the only one you are familiar with is "a thing exists, but there is no evidence for it", isn't my statement accurate?
In turn, your statement suggests that all possible ideas about religion for the past thousands of years of human history can be boiled down to a single sentence. You have assumed that everything you don't know about religion is exactly the same as the very little you do know about it. Which one of us is supposed to be close-minded again?
I am willing to consider anything and listen to what anybody has to say. As I said in my post above I went through an atheist period of my own, after all.
>What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.
I'd say you're being inconsistent with your religion and that the religious part of how you came to these views is unnecessary. Sure I agree attacking the very worst of religion is easy, but even at its very best, religion doesn't make a compelling argument for its necessity.
The reason for fixation on fundamentalism is because they have the most consistent story that can be argued against. Once you start cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible seem like it could fit into today's social norms and current understanding of the physical world, you're basically showing none of it necessary.
What would you say to someone that believes a giant turtle created everything, is the one true god and also held those same stances on evolution etc? They just prepend the fact that a giant turtle created everything and then vanished without a trace. Anyone could come up with a number of creative stories that are unverifiable or disprovable and seemingly are compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. What makes your god or any god(s) in particular more reasonable or necessary than the great turtle?
I think you betray your lack of understanding by categorizing any religious belief aside from fundamentalism as "cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible...". There is a 2,000 year old tradition of hermeneutic interpretation of the bible, resulting in dozens of different, more nuanced approaches to reading and thinking about the book. But you've brushed all that aside as "cherry picking" so that your criticism can still be coherent without having to make any effort to learn more than you already know. You must maintain a narrow, simplistic definition of religion in order to retain confidence in your belief system. Isn't that a bit backwards?
One individual making up a story about a turtle is not a religion. Religions emerge from thousands of years of collective human consciousness. The stories are told and retold from millions of mouths to millions of ears. You understand that input to a human's cognitive system can shape their perception, consciousness, behavior, of course? These stories and characters have accompanied us through every technological revolution from agriculture to smartphones. Repeated through countless generations, they have literally shaped us as a species. With that suggestion in mind, can you really confront the idea that God is "The Word", and that we are "made in his image", without even a tiny amount of awe and wonder?
Ok ignoring the appeal to tradition, how would you argue for hinduism over christianity or vice versa? Both are 2k+ years old with very different beliefs at their core. Reincarnation vs an afterlife, single vs many gods.
Nothing about having a long history and nuanced approaches over the years answers my question of necessitation.
It's easy to see parallels if you really want to look. The cycle of reincarnation is the thing that Hindus want to escape from (both seek unity with god), and it can be described as monotheistic as well.
No that is the entirety of your comment. Without the appeal to tradition there is nothing separating a random turtle god from an actual religion.
If there is more than an appeal to tradition how would you argue for or against different religions? Religions with as much tradition as Christianity - Hinduism, Buddhism, and even some monarchies and dynasties also have the same stories that are told by millions of mouths to millions of years over generations as you say.
I don’t understand atheist online communities like you talk about. I’m very much an atheist, but I’m baffled by anyone who desires to have atheist get-togethers. What is the point? is it like fake bacon for people who like the taste of being preached to and preaching, but are atheist? Religious people do it because their are supposed to but what reason would atheists do it? When you were exploring atheism why did you go?
People tend to participate in online communities that affirm their sense of identity. Maybe people who get really involved are those who see atheism as a more important aspect of their identity?
I was definitely turned on to atheism on the internet, but I never really stuck around those forums. I grew up in a fairly liberal Catholic church, so I didn't really relate to all the vehemence against fundamentalism. Even though I grew up in a church, I didn't even know about "young earth creationism" until I learned about it from atheists on the internet. In my science class in Catholic school, we learned all about evolution. We used the same textbooks as the public schools. I don't remember hearing anything bad about LGBT, though I'm sure people talked about it since it was the early 2000's and gay marriage was still a real widespread controversy, as incredibly dumb as that seems now.
Overall I guess my experience was very different from someone who grew up conservative protestant and found atheism. As a result I never hated religion, just didn't believe in it for a while.
This is such a refreshing comment. It's far better to engage in dialogue with those whom you disagree in order to understand their position opposed to assuming they are evil, stupid, or otherwise sub-human. Wouldn't it be wonderful if such an approach was applied not only to religious conversations but those of politics, work disputes, conflicts with your significant other...everything?
> As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right?
The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that they don't prove anything even worth refuting. Almost all of them simply attempt to prove the existence of a deistic God that does not meaningfully interact with the world (beyond creating it or sustaining it).
Deistic Gods by their vary nature don't provide any meaningful knowledge. Believing that there was a creator doesn't provide any useful information about how to help live your life or how the world works.
As a starting point I don't think there are any good arguments for why a person should believe that the bible was influenced/written by God any more than other books.
I already replied to your comment below, but this one is interesting too.
> The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that they don't prove anything even worth refuting. Almost all of them simply attempt to prove the existence of a deistic God that does not meaningfully interact with the world (beyond creating it or sustaining it).
I don't think any good philosopher would admit to the embarrassment of actually having "proved" something!
Jokes aside, you wouldn't consider "sustaining the world" to be a fairly meaningful ongoing interaction?
> Believing that there was a creator doesn't provide any useful information
Very pragmatic! Assume there is a God - what kind of things would he consider "useful"?
> Very pragmatic! Assume there is a God - what kind of things would he consider "useful"?
I generally define usefulness in terms of helping a person make better decisions to help increase the utility (bringing joy, fulfillment, happiness) of sentient creatures.
How does knowing about the existence of a deistic God help a person make better decisions?
This is my issue with deism. It could be true or false and my life wouldn't change one bit.
I'm not a Christian, but a lot of this matches my experience with the overwhelming majority of atheists. There's a severe echo chamber effect and ignorance of both Christianity itself and especially of other religions, to the point that they make wide-ranging pronouncements that only really apply to a single perverted branch of a particular religion.
> As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.
I disagree here though. In a secular world, rejecting religion isn't exactly the mark of a radical truth-seeker. When I started through my own atheistic phase as a teen, the greatest disappointment was the observation that my 'companions' in that regard weren't exactly insightful, just followers of the zeitgeist; if anything they mirrored the fundamentalists in their ignorance.
> "that you take your atheism on faith, too."
This is a nonsensical statement. Atheism is a recognition that there is zero evidence for the existence of any gods. It requires no faith.
> "Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre ... should be super easy to refute, right?"
You're shifting the burden of proof; there is nothing to refute. It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions. Regardless of a persons' intelligence, they cannot argue their deity into existence. It either exists or it doesn't. None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.
>Atheism is a recognition that there is zero evidence for the existence of any gods.
You're bemoaning a lack of empirical evidence when the problem is actually a philosophical one.
>there is nothing to refute
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like your stance is that God doesn't exist because God doesn't exist? Circular argument much? Atheism is a positive statement, too.
>It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions.
Of course it's not your "job". But I'd rather talk to someone who can actually explain why they think what they think.
> It either exists or it doesn't.
We are not omnipotent beings. We must strive to gain knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in. How do you know whether or not it exists?
>None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.
Disagree completely, they all presented interesting arguments.
This is what I would say too if I had no evidence for the things I was claiming exist.
> your stance is that God doesn't exist because God doesn't exist?
You said Kierkegaard et al's arguments should be easy to refute. If I come up with a clever argument for the existence of leprechauns, and no one can refute my amazing logic, do leprechauns all of a sudden magically exist? Again, there is nothing to refute. You can come up with the most magnificent argument you like for a god, but that god either exists or does not, independent of that argument, and my inability to refute any claims you've made is not evidence your god exists.
>How do you know whether or not it exists?
Is there a hidden third option I'm missing?
> Disagree completely, they all presented interesting arguments.
Replace in any of those arguments the word "unicorn" instead of "god" and they are as equally meaningful.
You don't believe that we can access meaningful knowledge about the world through logic? If not, then what the heck are you doing on a forum about computers?
I think the issue is that we can't access meaningful knowledge about the existence of a God that interacts meaningfully with the world through logic alone. Why do you think the Bible is inspired/manipulated/written by God more than other books?
Well it depends on the nature of God's interaction, doesn't it? There are no big hands coming out of the sky and moving things around, I'll give you that. The theologist Paul Tillich argued that God is not a being-in-the-world, but exists outside of time and space. Given that, atheist expectations of an empirical proof of God tend to miss the mark.
On the contrary, I think that tons of other things were inspired by God. As Walt Whitman wrote, "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars". A healthy dose of relativism is not incompatible with religious belief - see the Trappist monk Thomas Merton who famously took a pretty serious spiritual interest in both Zen Buddhism and Islam.
It's so refreshing to see somebody who has had a similar experience to my own. I've never been a member of a church like the ones that people describe in a lot of the comments. We focus on devotion to God and improving the earth. For example, here's how we marked our church's 100th birthday:
I was raised liberal Catholic by an atheist father and an eclectic hippie New-Age-Catholic-Hindu-dowsing-crystals-homeopathy-and-runic[0]-divination mother, for the purposes of getting into a good school.
While it is fair to say that one specific fundamentalist young-Earth creationist Baptist certainly turned me from “it isn’t true but it doesn’t matter” to “it is actively harmful for people to believe this”, I should also say that the liberal version of Catholicism at my school — liberal enough to not explicitly condemn abortion or homosexuality, even though this was the U.K. in the 1990s and Section 28 still in force — had terrible sex education which completely ignored the existence of e.g. chlamydia, and I do think that was due to the religion given how quickly I learned about it the moment I moved to the next step in my education.
The open-mindedness may have been good for me as a teenager going through a goth-paganism phase, but it also meant she gave my dad homeopathic remedies when he got bowel cancer, and she got Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother “despite” her use of Bach flower remedies for memory.
it also depends on the church and with time. the southern baptist church i went to when young didn't have much if any extreme fundamentalism. the one i attended for a bit as a teenager (not by choice) was a little more fundamentalist, but not extreme. i stopped going to church after that.
but really, teasing apart the strains doesn't matter in the long run. our gods are changing, just as they always have.
A lot can change in a couple of centuries. Right now, Catholicism is still growing in South America and Africa. As people in those regions become better educated and affluent, they may indeed follow the evolutionary path of other more affluent economies.
But with the resounding recent rise throughout the world in populism (which is a form of faith, but in a person or a dream rather than an economy), it's hard to know how humankind will respond to the challenges of the modern world.
We could choose to retreat from our current immersion in fast-paced life via technology and withdraw into one (or many) 'simpler' ways of life. If we do it wouldn't surprise me if we also choose to reimagine the world that surrounds us as being less concrete and more a realm of possibility in which choose our own reality.
I find it perplexing that you describe catholicism as progressive, since it maintains strict sexual purity standards, a male clergy, anti abortion and homosexuality etc.(Perhaps I misread you)
Isnt it true that SA is having extreme growth of the prosperity gospel form of fundamentalism too?
I wouldn't write it off yet. The popularity of protestantism is very prone to wax and wane with the times. A really charismatic preacher or two can make a big impact. Most of the mainlines we see in the US today started from just itinerant preachers and camp meetings. Personally, I think that's because the emphasis on "personal relationships" with God lends itself to more of a "social contagion" model of popularity, as people seek to imitate friends and neighbors who share spiritual experiences. That's not a negative thing necessarily. But they can't lean on tradition like the Orthodox or Catholics do.
Seeing those same comments in this thread reminded me of something Jordan Peterson questions: with this decline of religious-based narratives for guidelines, what is replacing it?
I had a similar experience as a Catholic in the northeast.
Lately as the politics of old people and loud young people have tilted right-wing, and more extreme philosophy is accepted, it’s disturbing how the theology has followed the money.
I probably sound like a simpleton here, but I’ve always found religion to be a source of peace and solace and a positive influence. Some of that is a result of ignoring teachings that are more... noxious to me personally or focusing away from behavior of the human agents of the church.
Unfortunately, cycles of religious fundamentalism is a feature of the American body politic.
[Posted this under a reply below that got downvoted, so reposting here]
I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he knows". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between (and these are all independent axes, to be clear).
Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about technicalities, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter atheist.
A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love (as well as forgiveness and growth) toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion.
Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me (if they were to do that on a regular basis, we wouldn't be close friends). Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it; they know that spirituality is a matter of the heart, and the heart isn't so simple. Most, I think, see that even if hell does exist, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and friendship, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into anything. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads.
I like this quote from Pope Francis:
> We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.
ADDENDUM: So where has that left me? I don't practice religion, though I read from the occasional religious author and I think spirituality in the broader sense is a useful metaphor for matters surrounding the heart and trying to be a better member of the world. I have really nice conversations, even with religious people, around those subjects. I've been known to go with a friend or relative to the odd church service (as long as it's at a church that's reasonably compatible with the above), and I often get some benefit from it in the form of meditation on myself and my relationship with the world. I've thought about finding a church to join for the sake of community, though I go back and forth on that since I don't believe in even the smallest literal sense (I try to let go of my literalism, but I still have mental habits from the days when I thought it was all about that, both religious and not). Maybe one day I'll find the right church and get past that.
This is funny to read because LGBT and a series of other movements cause me to feel much the same as I do about "religious" fundamentalism. Excessive self-styling and countering any adverse ideas with a refusal to compromise or cede any ground. Not tolerating adverse ideas and manifestations thereof in daily life but "calling it out" and attacking them constantly.
Extremism in opiniated/constructed ideas, polarized cancel culture etc has become much more popular and dominating in the public discourse and media than it has been for the past 50+ years.
I just don't get how fundamentalists can remain so busy going on about their fundaments. It's all very tiresome.
I suspect one factor in the declining membership is shared with other mid-century social groups that have also dwindled (e.g., men's lodges): it's easier to find community elsewhere.
For my parents -- born in 1940 -- church and men's service clubs/lodges were the primary areas of social interaction outside work. Dad ran his own veterinary practice, so his social interaction there was limited (I mean, everybody worked for him). Mom stayed at home until the late 70s. Church was the center of their social life.
Now, nobody wanted to say that out loud; it was all about the faith. But that's what it was.
In my life I've had no need for that, because people of my generation (b 1970) have generally found other communities of support/friendship/connection. None of my friends are Masons, either.
Men's lodges, fraternal organizations, and so on around here tend to have a religious underpinning of specific faiths, or seem to be charities of some kind with a connection to religion. As such, I think declining church membership would drag them down as well.
I wonder if men's clubs exist which are neither, just completely secular. I haven't been able to find any when searching, aside from The Club, which technically fits but as a bathhouse for hookups, wasn't really what I had in mind. I know lodges centered around professions more or less fell apart, and perhaps the last vestige of secular groups would be country clubs.
It's hard to tell how much of this is just "people aren't joiners anymore" and how much is declining church membership.
It's definitely not true that all men's lodges/clubs were religious in nature. The big three service clubs (in the US, at least) are Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions, and none of them have ever been religious in nature. (Though certain in the eras and areas where they had the biggest membership, the populations would be overwhelmingly American protestants -- but that's demographics, not organizational affiliation.)
Freemasonry may or may not be "religious" depending on your definitions, but has traditionally been a target of some faiths due to perceived conflict between the club and the church.
This misses the forest for the trees: Membership is down at organizations across the board - scouting, group athletics, Rotary clubs, unions, even things like PTAs and neighborhood associations and model train clubs.
There is a society wide "apathy" event happening right under our noses. Maybe we're just seeing a new generation moving to new niche groups that aren't being seen yet. But it seems that technology is doing something with our desire to form communal bonds.
I don't see it as apathy. I suspect people are simply choosing to put their time into pursuits other than attending meetings with other people.
In the past 20 years, there's been a large rise in the time the average person spends on the social web. In the past 10 years, with the rise of mobile platforms, that time has gone up even more. In addition, streaming media has become very big, thereby consuming even more of our free time.
That additional time spent online has to come from somewhere. As Sherry Turkle put it, we are increasingly choosing to be "Alone Together" probably at the cost of old school forms of togetherness like church and social clubs.
Yes I agree. This seems to be a continuation of the trends described in “Bowling Alone”. The book argued in 2000 that television was a contributing factor. It is probably further worsened by the rise in online entertainment since.
Hard to tell if that's permanent; it may be a temporary thing due to COVID, people being afraid of gatherings. Is that possible? Probably only part of the picture: the poll sited elsewhere in this thread says the trend goes on for quite some time: https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-...
Membership is down at in-person organizations across the board. I doubt the census includes the many different online communities I am a part of.
I have friends I have known for 10+ years which I have never met in real life. Friendships which are deeper and longer lasting than anything I have “in real life”.
But as (in the words of the at-present top comment) a fundamentalist adhering to scriptural literalism (aka a conservative Lutheran) [addendum: who does not hate everyone], I feel compelled to offer to answer questions anyone might have for me, so AMA.
I don't really want to individually respond to everything throughout the rest of the comments, but I will begin by saying that most churches have either very little by way of actual bible-based doctrine, or very little by way of in-depth theology. (Prosperity gospel/megachurches fall in the latter, a decent portion of other churches - eg. the Roman Catholic Church - fall in the former.)
Responses will be sporadic throughout the day, I'm a bit busy at the moment, but I'll do my best to get to it.
I think it's helpful to point out that the Bible contains a variety of types of literature including historical narrative, poetry, etc., some of which uses figurative language that is not intended to be taken literally.
We all understand this when we use modern language such as "sunrise" which is not literally true (the sun does not actually "rise" in the sky though it appears that way to the casual observer) even though we're educated enough to understand basic astronomical phenomena such as the rotation of the earth giving rise to daytime and nighttime.
A Biblical literalist who takes figurative language in the Bible literally would end up making the same mistake that someone taking "sunrise" literally would. This is not at all an attempt to classify as figurative language all controversial or supernatural claims of the Bible (its claim that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised from the dead is clearly supernatural and impossible to classify as figurative), but so many of the lists of contradictory claims in the Bible rely on wooden interpretations of what is pretty clearly figurative language.
Thank you for making this point. It is important to recognize that the Bible does make use of a variety of literary techniques (eg. psalms, parables, etc. especially). However, there are vast swathes of history throughout; it isn't just a book of fictional stories.
I think when people talk about a "literal" interpretation of the Bible, they mean that it uses human language (including figures of speech like "sunrise", number rounding/approximation, etc) to describe literal, historical events with exceptions for explicit fictions or metaphors (such as psalms or parables).
How do the aspects of the early church align with scriptural literalism? Specifically the split of the early church between Paul and Jesus brother James. James was Jesus's choice to lead the church in his absence. A direction which aligned more with Judaism - including circumcision, and kosher foods. Yet later Christianity revolves around Paul at odds vision. Paul was a Roman who 'saw the light' whilst being sent after Jesus. He never met Jesus. His version of 'Christianity' didn't require those aspects - not least because adult male Romans who were interested in Christianity, weren't too keen on circumcision.
If this is correct, it means modern Christianity, is not based on Jesus stated future direction of his church.
What does your 'scriptural literalism' say about this? If your literature doesn't cover these aspects - then what is decided is canonical and what is not? Presumably such a distinction has to be outside of said literature - and therefore not 'scriptual literalism'. Implying 'scriptual literalism' itself is not grounded.
I should probably also say that it seems to me that claiming 'scriptual literalism' is a defensive position against claims of subjectivity. It is 'literal' and therefore not subjective. This is a fallacy - as there is always subjectivity and interpretation in human understanding, and certainly in interpreting something as nuanced and contradictory as the bible.
This might come across as somewhat aggressive questioning, and I'm sorry for that - but I am legitimately curious how it works.
I'm not sure where you're getting some of these ideas. Paul was very much a Jew. He trained under Gamaliel, one of the most prominent Jewish rabbis of the time. He did also have Roman citizenship, but those two things were not mutually exclusive.
Also, James, while prominent in the early church, was not in any sense Jesus's choice to lead the church. The closest thing to a single designated leader of the church was Peter though that is a point of contention between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Nowhere are circumcision or kosher foods required for Christianity, either.
Indeed, some points were a bit unclear. This is literalism in the sense of "God is real, created the world, Jesus lived and died to save you from your sins", not "there is no figurative language in the bible" or "the Bible is a bunch of stories about how to be a good person."
One important phrase in interpreting Scripture is "let Scripture interpret Scripture." (cf. 1 Cor 1:18f, Romans 11:33-35, 2 Cor 10:5 - our reason is not capable of fully understanding God, so we interpret it as his Word says and leave it at that.)
I should point you toward the Council of Jerusalem for part of the early history of the church, and I'm not really sure where you're coming from with the rest.
As for the rest (mostly about the history of biblical manuscripts), could you please put what I missed into a couple more clear questions?
> If this is correct, it means modern Christianity, is not based on Jesus stated future direction of his church.
One view is that this was resolved at the council described in acts, and all agreed. The view that there was some paul-led split that is covered up by the selection of the NT canon is often used by detractors of christianity, who typically try to frame Jesus as purely a jewish reformer, and that Paul was some 'kook' that invented his own religion (despite the texts that he was working with, rather than against, the rest of the apostles).
YMMV, but probably useful to be just as skeptical to sources on both sides when trying to ascertain what might have actually happened historically
> It is 'literal' and therefore not subjective. This is a fallacy - as there is always subjectivity and interpretation in human understanding, and certainly in interpreting something as nuanced and contradictory as the bible.
At the sermon on the mount, Jesus said "you are the salt of the earth". A literal take would be Jesus was saying the listeners were salt. You can be subjective and think this is a metaphor, but allowing for metaphors in the bible puts an end to literalism.
the universally considered authentic Pauline epistles are commonly dated from the mid 40s to the late fifties AD.... So any arguments made about church leadership 'before' then are arguing from a very small body of evidence (luke/acts) ... rather a less persuasive argument than the iron clad one you present here.
What scripture? As Bart Ehrman has written in his books condensing scholarly tomes for the layman, there are many scriptures, and we don't have the originals. The Comma Johanneum being the clearest passage that there is a trinity is not found in the Greek until the 15th century. Mark thought to be the earliest gospel, it ends without a clear resurrection from the earliest manuscripts - a resurrection was tacked on later. The story of the adulteress Jesus refused to condemn is not found in the earliest scriptures. And on and on. Much of contemporary scripture were things invented centuries after the events recorded.
Scholars are pretty divided on the long ending of mark , it's TRUE to say the oldest codices do not include it, but some old manuscripts do.
There's also some slight of hand being done by Erhman, the codex Vaticanus does not include the ending but the scribe has left space for it at the end of the chapter, showing that they had access to it and were debating putting it in... So you can say 'oldest manuscripts don't have it' but that isnt as conclusive as one might assume... This slight of hand is extremely common in Erhmans work.
As far as the woman taken in adultery, this passage is found in early manuscripts/lectuonaries but its position is being moved around d. Erhman is more committed to selling books and impressing undergrad baptists at UNC than be is with nuanced treatment of the facts...and his background as a low church protestant shines through all his work.... From an easterner perspective it's far less persuasive
I suppose maybe I'm missing something, but this seems a bit on the vague side. Furthermore, I am far from an expert on the history of biblical texts; to be quite frank there's a general text (okay, maybe two) that's accepted by every Christian church I know of. I'll try to answer your point regardless. While over several millenia there certainly may have been some minor changes to the text, I would like to break this down into two major points:
1. The Bible is has (to my knowledge) by far the largest corpus of ancient texts compared to pretty much anything prior to the invention of the printing press. The existence of so many ancient texts (both directly, translations, and quotations in other materials) spanning so far both geographically and temporally with fairly minor differences is rather compelling evidence for the accuracy of many biblical manuscripts. A similar interplay is found within the Bible itself. I can think of numerous other passages commonly used to support the doctrine of the trinity from both the Old and New Testaments. Similarly, there are several accounts of as well as numerous prophecies of Jesus' resurrection. The adultress in Mark is actually found in a significant portion of ancient manuscripts; that it is not found in all is noted in most translations I've seen.
2. I stated this somewhere below, but put simply: God isn't going to let the Bible change contradictory to its original meaning (cf. Isaiah 55:11, although I could probably find a better reference for this).
Here’s some to kickstart things. Genuinely curious
1) did you grow up in the church you currently belong to or did you join later? If the former, did you ever explore other ones? Why/why not?
2) there can be doubt about what the Bible literally says given the number of authors, editors, and time involved. For example, someone chose x word when translating to English, that also could have meant y. Or, x book was included and y book was not. What are your thoughts on this?
3) there are a lot of rules in the Bible, especially one like Letiviticus (sp?). As someone adhering to literalism, do you aspire to follow them all? If not, which ones do you? If so, how do you deal with (likely) not following them all?
4) how do you keep your faith nourished / going in today’s society, where membership in churches is declining and Internet denizens can have a lot of skepticism toward religion?
The entire point of the law was to show that it couldn’t be followed, they nearly always failed miserably, even the most famous and well regarded people in the Old Testament that were spoken very highly of like Abraham and David had their fair share of major fuck ups. The point was to show that we couldn’t do it, we were fundamentally flawed and needed Christ to take the burden on our behalf, and needed to be wholly remade through death, “born again” literally as a new creation, into a new lineage, that of Christ, after dying to the lineage of Adam that we inherited from our parents. It was never about doing enough right to outpace the wrong, it was always lineage and inheritance that determined our fate.
This paved the way for the Holy Spirit to come at Pentecost and basically kick off the church which has been growing and spreading from there ever since, and the church has only ever grown, never has it lost numbers, because it’s not an institution of man measured by attendance, those who are born again and counted cannot become “un” born again.
It also says that the path to life is narrow and few find it, there was never a heavenly expectation that they would ever be in the majority, despite that there is also a desire for all to be saved.
The difference is the human view and the God view. We were instructed to have the human view and act accordingly, spread the gospel far and wide because we didn’t know where the seed would fall and take root even though God knows, he didn’t want us to be choosy, that is his domain. All part of this grand cosmic theater that is infinitely beyond my limited perspective.
1) yes I did. I did not join later. I have attended many other church's. Many are trying to put butts in seats and are focusing on which distortion peddle gets more people in than using the scriptures and lessons in those words to do it. If you read the gospels you will find them full of life lessons you can apply right now, today.
2) This is an issue. What is more of an issue is the way words can and do change meaning over the years. So you can have a translation from 100 years ago and it takes on a different meaning. All because the choice of words they used just happens to mean something similar now vs then. The cure is to read many translations. Also keep things in context. There are online resources which you can use if you are unclear on a particular meaning in that context and go back to the original texts. Context for many translations is also the context of the year it was translated. There are also some translations that leave things out, or change the meaning, because they decided for you what you should hear so you have to watch out for those.
3) Many of those rules are wiped clean at the end of the 4 gospels. As the price has been paid. But there is a simpler price to pay.
4) It is good to find a church in your area that sticks to the gospels. Does not try to be trendy and use worldly lessons replacing gospel. That does not mean they do not talk about world events, but that they do not take on fads. There is also a huge amount of youtube and individual pages you can go to. In many ways the internet has made it even easier to converge all of these resources. Remember many searching engines try to tailor your search to what you like. So you may not even be seeing them.
I would also add many times you find that if it is out of context it is someone trying to distort a meaning. The trick is do not feed the trolls and ignore them.
2a. "Verbal inspiration" - while the words were written by people and they certainly did recount their experiences in their own styles (perhaps involving consulting others who had been there), but God (through the Holy Spirit) breathed into them the words they were to write (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16). Basically God's not going to be like "eh oh well whatever if the Bible just goes away."
2b. Translation is, inherently, inexact. This is why it's good for pastors to learn Greek and Hebrew; but there are two main points I'd like to make here. The first is that while not all of the meaning may be conveyed perfectly, there is a lot of effort that has been put into ensuring that the essence will remain there. The second is that, when the meaning may be initially unclear, let Scripture interpret Scripture.
2c. As for which books are included and which are not, I haven't researched this enough to give a thorough answer.
3. Laws are divided into three categories: civil, ceremonial, and moral. Civil is laws to govern the nation of Israel, which don't apply today. Ceremonial laws related to the worship life of Israel. Jesus is, in essence, the fulfillment of these laws (cf. Romans 10:4, Acts 15); as such, we are no longer required to follow them. This leaves the moral law, God's will for believers. Most of the 10 commandments fall into this category (as summarized further by Jesus saying "love God and love your neighbor"). Anyway (as pointed out below), Jesus kept the entire law because we, with our sinful nature, cannot.
4. I'm lucky enough to have a church that believes what I believe near me; regular bible studies and a few online devotions that I follow also help.
This was a but rushed to finish; sorry. Feel free to follow up.
I'm not OP, but I felt compelled to offer my own response to this one. Hopefully some people find my perspective interesting.
1) I grew up in a different church - the Catholic church. It felt more like a social club than anything else so I grew up with barely any understanding of the religion to which I supposedly subscribed. I became somewhat jaded towards large, organized religious organizations and floated around a few smaller-scale churches as I tried to learn more about Christianity and, in particular, the Bible. I no longer attend a "church" but I regularly attend lecture-style bible studies put on by a local middle school teacher.
2) One of the things that appeals to me about the Bible study I attend is that it's very very slow compared to most churches. We often spend an hour doing nothing but covering as few as one or two verses. That time is spent analyzing the text by comparing translations, linking it to related verses, explaining the Hebrew/Greek words used in various manuscripts, filling in historical context with what we know from archeology and other ancient records, and comparing interpretations of various theologians and denominations. Often times the teacher will present his own interpretation, but invite us to be critical and point to other possible interpretations.
One thing I've discovered since leaving the Catholic church is that studying the Bible goes far beyond just listening to sermons and reading what ever hard copy happens to be most accessible to you at the time. It's hard work and I'm not surprised most people aren't interested. I doubt I'd get far if there weren't scholars and teachers compiling and presenting the information for my benefit.
3) This question inclines me to believe you don't understand a fundamental aspect of Christianity, which is that God's sun (Jesus) was made a sacrifice so that humans would no longer be bound by sin or the laws of Moses. Christianity teaches that people are saved by faith alone, not by adhering to laws or refraining from sin. Or course, part of that belief suggests a desire to recognize and refrain from sin. I do not use grace as an excuse to sin, but I recognize that I fail from time to time and so does everyone else. Also, while societies values sometimes align with those described in the Bible, I do not expect non-believers to adhere to Christian values nor do I have any desire to enshrine Christian values in secular law.
4) It's interesting how many people have strong opinions on Biblical Christianity without knowing hardly anything about it. I still consider myself a complete novice, but I know enough to recognize how shallow a lot of the criticism is. Of course, there is also plenty of intelligent criticism and I don't pretend to have all the answers nor can I promise that future me wont be persuaded to abandon his faith. But so far I simply haven't seen anything that compels me to believe the Bible is wrong.
Some people believe science and the Bible are at odds with one another, but I don't see how. I've had no trouble embracing both and I'm perfectly capable of differentiating between knowledge based on science and knowledge based on the Bible.
A quick google search for 'contradictions in the {bible, new testament, jesus, etc.}' turns up a fair few pages. Viewing them either gives the answer as zero full-stop, or a long list of subject and their relevant citations. In looking at the citations, there does seem to be merit to the contradictory claims. I'll admit that the contradictions are a bit 'small' and may not always alter the main theme or may mix up the new and old testaments, but they seem to exist nonetheless.
I may not be all that up to date on what 'scriptural literalism' is exactly defined as, but as a lay person that would mean to me that contradictions would be a difficult circle to square.
What do you make of such contradictions and how do they affect your adherence, if at all?
Looking through the top few, most appear to be intentional misinterpretation, one has to do with much of the Old Testament law not applying in the New Testament (see above or below somewhere), different focuses (i.e. something being mentioned somewhere but not somewhere else doesn't mean it didn't happen, the other may have just had a different focus), etc.; if you have anything specifically you want me to take a look at I can, but it generally seems to be a combination of poor understanding of the Bible, failure to let Scripture interpret Scripture, trying to use the human mind to understand the full mind of God, etc.
My personal observation (having left a fundamentalist background, though still identifying as Christian) is that hardcore young-earth creationism of the Ken Ham variety has driven a ton of deconversion in my generation.
Ken Ham & his ilk have been teaching for decades, explicitly and repeatedly, that if you do not buy into their specific 6-day literal interpretation of Genesis, then you might as well be an atheist. [0] This line works great to rile up the faithful, but...
Fast-forward to today, and you have an entire generation of young adults who can no longer square YEC with reality, going: "Huh, I guess I'm an atheist then?"
Ham-flavored fundamentalism rules huge swaths of orthodox Christian tradition out of bounds, and it's been devastating for the future of the American church.
Except, mainline Protestants are shrinking at a much faster rate than evangelicals. If church attrition was driven by a rejection of fundamentalism we wouldn't expect Unitarians and Episcopalians to be losing members faster than Baptists and Pentecostals.
There are certainly other factors at play in the decline of mainline Protestant churches. I'm not sure that evangelicalism's problems (subject of my comment) imply anything about whether they should be shrinking faster or slower than other types of churches.
How did you personally abandon fundamentalism and end up still identifying as Christian? I grew up learning from Ken Ham (literally shook his hand at summer camp), but I'm now a genuinely atheistic apostate and I can't comprehend what you have left of Christianity when you abandon a literal understanding of the Bible.
Young Earth Creationism pseudoscience is one reason, but there are tons of others. Ham, I think, is mostly right: Either (1) it's all true, in which case you have all the problems of fundamentalism and have to disbelieve science. Or (2) or some subset of the factual claims it makes are true - the Bible as miraculously inspired and truthful, YEC, the very existence and nature of the supernatural, Old Testament miracles, New Testament miracles, eschatology, and so on - but as Ham eloquently points out, once you abandon one of the claims that the supposedly truthful book makes, you call them all into question. Or (3) none of it is true, it's all fiction, in which case you can use whatever you want as a moral framework, but it has no special value. In that case, it's merely a socially evolved construct like every other superstition throughout the history of our species.
I don't know you, but I love that you commented on this because your history and perspective is a perfect example of the phenomenon I'm talking about.
TO your question, I don't claim to have all the answers (let alone all the "Answers in Genesis") but I've come to understand there's a lot more nuance to a "literal" understanding of the Bible than Ken Ham may have led you to believe.
A couple of resources I've found helpful when navigating the intersection of historic Christianity and modern science are biologist Joel Duff [0] and physicist Aron Wall [1]. (Fun side note on the latter: he's the son of Perl creator Larry Wall.)
The issue I have with (2) is that Ham's construction of the three choices doesn't take into account that what the modern mind and it's assumption about what is "factual" (and valuable) is substantially different from the ancient audiences that listened to these texts.
On the point of creation, while Ham contends we MUST take it literally or the entire veracity of the Bible falls apart, there is an inconsistency even within the literal YEC interpretation. Consider Genesis 2:7 "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." If God breathed into the nostrils of does this mean that God had lungs? A YEC would say "of course not, this is a metaphorical/poetic description of the action". And thus they reveal their inconsistency: the YEC demands a literal understanding of the first six days, but when pressed for a simple implication like this, they revert to a metaphorical understanding.
Trumpism (and the past couple decades of political lead-up to it among fundamentalists) being the other big one. I think these are the two major forces that actively drive people away.
"For the first time" is probably not true. This is since Gallup tracked this number. Post WWII church attendance really sky rocketed for reasons that are still not fully understood, but a lot of people think the emergence of the Evangelical movement bears a lot of the responsibility. It's much harder to track pre-WWII numbers, but according to the "Mapping America's Past" authors[1] church attendance was as low as 35% in the 19th century (sometimes).
In mid-century US, religiosity/faith were also promoted by capitalists as counters to rising global popularity of Communism/Socialism. The 1954 addition of "Under God" to the USA's Pledge of Allegiance was marketed (in part) as a means of differentiating from the Godless Communists. I'd be surprised if this big push toward an obvious "Blessed Nation" wasn't a primary driver in the shift.
Do you suppose it has anything to do with all the infrastructure that had to be built out new for the baby boomers? All of a sudden you needed twice as many grade schools, then middle schools, etc.
We don't do catholic boarding schools as much any more (too much bad PR of several flavors, for example) but they definitely did at the time. I wonder if the church-going came first or the religious schools did.
I think a number of the traditionally religious immigrant waves arrived well before WWI, so that probably doesn't have anything much to do with it, unless those groups had far more children post WWII...
There's a great discourse in one of Dan Brown's books about whether people leave religion because they have found better answers elsewhere, or because they have stopped asking the questions.
Separately, I observed that that the areligious are much more likely to have few or no kids while the religious folks put a much greater emphasis on it. As the secular world moves towards a place where there's no pressure to marry and procreate at all, how long before it is once again relegated into a demographic minority?
There was a religious leader making a similar argument some time back, but I don't think it holds together all that well. After all, back in the middle ages the amount of churchgoing people was near 100% and religions were promoting big families then just as much as now. So if religious parents "out-produce" their non-religious counterparts how did we ever get to the current situation where a majority is not religious?
The answer is of course that children choose their own way and don't stay religious just because of their parents.
From basic evolutionary biology, there is no universall "fitness", only situational fitness.
In the middle ages, in a world without contraception, with extreme pressures to marriage, without pornography or any other non-intercourse sexual releases, being religious or not matters little in fertility rate.
Although in frankness, it still did, that's how rome became christian in the first place, Christians married later (so had higher chances of survival), and treasured their baby girls instead of exposing them to death, small fertility advantages added up expontentially over time.
In the 21st age, the environment has shifted so much against irreligious/low commitment people in terms of reproductive fitness, due to those above factors heavily selecting against them.
Literally only religious people, no matter what part of the world you are looking at, are able to maintain above replacement fertility. Irreligious people' population decline, in the long run, at least 25% every generation, will be far faster than they can "convert" religious people.
Look at the amish and mormon fertility rates, read decades of research by Eric Kaufmann, and the answer is rather self evident
I think that areligious is not a state in itself but a void to be filled. There are secular truths or causes that people adopt and follow with the same passion as those that follow religion.
I'm tempted to think that the correlation isn't religion per se, but rather a pragmatic attitude towards the 7b people on the planet today.
If you're reasonably 'rational' (but not especially religious) you're not going to look at those numbers and think procreation is compelling for the sake of keeping the tribe alive.
OTOH if you're thinking that your particular religion needs a numbers boost, then the imperative may feel differently.
"religiousness" is not likely to be an inheritable genetic trait, so the children of a religious person may or may not be religious themselves, and vice-versa. The overall culture is likely to have a more powerful impact on this than solely parenting.
Of course they are, but the more important point is whether out of 100 children of religious parents, 0 or 10 or 90 or 100 are likely to be atheists themselves.
I would expect that in most secular cultures you'll see something like, say, 60/100 children of religious parents becoming atheists, and 90/100 for children of atheist parents.
These kinds of dynamics would still mean that overall, even if religious people are having more children than atheists, the population is still growing more atheist with each generation.
Although I believe religion is outdated and in many ways I'm happy to see it in decline in the West, I do worry about the side effects the decline of religion has.
It seems to me that people my age today (late twenties, early thirties) are extremely self-centred and struggle to see any higher pursuit in life than self-satisfaction. This is in contrast to the few religious people I know who are far more family focused and believe in self-sacrifice in the pursuit of what they believe to be morally good - charity, children, community, etc.
As a teenager who went to a catholic school I often found myself in trouble for mocking things we were taught from the bible, but as I've grown up I've come to appreciate religion and the role it has historically played in our society.
For example, my sister has made a lot of bad decisions in life - drug use, having a child to get a council house, arrested for violent behaviour, etc. Something that made me reflect on my attitude towards religion was that I realised my sister would likely be in a much better place today if we lived in a more religious society. Many of the legal things she did for self-satisfaction would have been look down upon just a few decades back and if that happened she may not be the way she is today. I see this all the time as someone who grew up in a poor area of my city, the lack of religion promoting family values and self-sacrifice is clearly hurting those on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder the most. Almost everyone young female in my family is a single mother living in government housing today, many struggling with drug addiction and mental illness. This just wouldn't have been the case in past decades.
If you educated and middle-class you're far more able to go a bit crazy in your twenties before you you settle down in your thirties. If you're able to responsibly navigate between self-satisfaction and self-sacrifice then religious values are less important and perhaps even seen as a burden in your life, but if you have less self-control and perhaps don't have the intellect to form your own secular spiritual meaning to life, then what else is lack but the pursuit of self-satisfaction?
Sorry for the ramble. This is a topic I think about a lot because I'm so split in my thoughts towards religion today. I don't think we should go back to religion, but I suspect we might need to find a substitute for it.
> I realised my sister would likely be in a much better place today if we lived in a more religious society.
I'm really not so sure about that. For instance, the top 10 states in terms of teenage pregnancy in the US is mostly dominated by religious states[0]. I'm not sure I've ever seen a stat like crime, drug use, etc, where the more religious states perform better than more secular states.
Of course, other factors might influence these stats. But at the very least it seems that, even if religion isn't actively harmful, it doesn't seem to be helping all that much.
Quick note: your sister's story was also common enough in the 1880-1950 timeframe. She'd also have been considered a loose woman, immoral, etc, and come under vicious religious censure. Now, statistically, would that have improved things more generally? I don't know. But it was a thing.
If we were to spin the clock back to pre-industrialization and its concomitant labor crunching, I don't know that period of history quite as well.
While I think the lack of good religious thinking is causing all sorts of odd misfires across society, I'm not sure it would improve "bad choices" though. C.f. canturbury tales...
Sure, it happened, but the rate of single parenthood has historically been in the single digits. Today I believe around a third of children are born into single parent families.
To be fair I don’t think it’s entirely a lack of religion to blame for this trend though. I think a less religious but more culturally conservative society would also see lower levels of single parenthood. It seems likely to me to be partly the absence of religious beliefs alongside the promotion of more destructive cultural values that has done the damage.
A third component is the way in which the welfare state (at least here in the UK) “rewards” people who make poor life decisions. My sister rightly understood the only way a working class girl with no qualifications is going to move out of her parents’ home is to have a kid. In the past she would have been forced to have found someone who could provide for her or she would have needed to find a way to earn a living.
Now if despite she would have made all the same bad decisions anyway I suspect you’re right, past societies would have looked on her decisions much less favourably and she would likely be far worse off. But I doubt this would have happened. She was always a smart kid - far smarter than me. But when everyone around you is skipping school to smoke in the park or having kids at 15 while being given a new home by the government it’s hard to resist what seems like an obvious path.
I guess what I’m saying is that I would acknowledge that it’s not entirely a lack of religion at play here, but the decline of family values that religion promoted and the lack of moral objection to certain lifestyles has given room for less preferable cultural attitudes and beliefs to arise. The fact people think I’m wrong to criticise my sister for choosing to have a child with an alcoholic she barely knew to move out of my parents home, for example. It honestly annoys me how many people say her selfish decision which her child will bare the brunt of is something that she should be proud of. I love with all my heart but it’s selfish and wrong, and she was failed by everyone who didn’t plainly tell her that.
So this is something that I am personally very confused about as well. My wife and I both grew up poor (how poor depends on who's asking, we had food, we had clothes, we had housing, but not per se that very much more); both our sets of parents have maintained traditional morality around kids. To this day, I am always confused when people from similar economic places make substantially worse choices. We really weren't that special.
A few books:
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005T5O9QW/ This is a survey of late 90s Philadelphia very poor mothers, who decided to have kids very young. I think you might find this a fascinating work, harmonious with your family's experience, even if it's from a different time and place.
I also am sort of loafing my way through a book, "Taming the Troublesome Child", on the professionalism of social work around children - I actually was hoping to learn how troubled kids were handled in the past, but it's actually about "social work". Ah well. A lot of what it is indicating is that poverty and, to some extent, immigration status (in the US) had a heavy interplay in how families were treated by social workers, considered by society, and understood. At least in the Northeastern US.
I don't mean to say your sister thought ahead, or that you shouldn't be bothered by her choices, or any of that. For what it's worth, I noticed years ago that the really smart kids struggled in school. I have a few pet theories, mostly related to systemic disconnection in society (and here that circles back to churches - a good church design is a cross slice of society, not just 'the rich church', or 'the black church', etc). Individuals have a chance to shine brightly or be a dark spot against a statistical haze. It's always sad when someone really sets up a failure and pain pattern.
I'm in a similar boat. I grew up Christian and then became a very "online atheist", but since the mid-2000s I've become more worried about the lack of what feels like a real in-person community.
My wife is Reform Jewish and one thing that I have come to appreciate is what seems to me a good balance between community and a good dose of secularism--I agreed to help raise our children this way with her for this reason (without converting myself). The most dogmatic thing you could maybe argue is some kind of allegiance to Israel, but this isn't present as much in the younger / millennial Bay Area Jewish community that I've witnessed.
It's interesting to read a HN thread regarding theology. It seems there is quite an interest in the topic, and affirms another thing I tend to see: That many in this field identify as a Christian but don't really seem interested in saying so unless it's in a thread which expressly mentions it. Maybe it's my own bias and I'm just viewing it that way, as a Christian myself, as it feels hard to talk about it within the tech sphere with nuance and empathy.
> That many in this field identify as a Christian but don't really seem interested in saying so unless it's in a thread which expressly mentions it.
Wouldn't it just be off-topic in other threads though? It's not a surprise it doesn't come up when it's not the subject of a given conversation. I have all sorts of interests that I don't tend to bring up until there's a conversation specifically about them.
Cultural Christianity versus theistic Christianity in action. Anecdotal, but many, many more people had to go to church as kids than actively believe today.
The problem is that this leads to people who feel entitled to a space in the conversation (because it was part of their upbringing), but bring very little love or understanding to it.
(And I say this as someone who was raised in the Church and left it pretty early on).
In my opinion the main problem for religion right now is the failure to explain their arguments at the highest intellectual level, publicly, consistently.
Once I was exposed to better theology and philosophy of Christianity I was blown away. Edward Feser’s ‘The Last Superstition’ helped open this up.
I have no idea why the level of discourse is on average so primitive, I think church leaders have been systematically underestimating the populace.
I thought I knew what Christianity was, growing up in church. After I attended a theological seminary, I realized I knew nothing. Also I stopped debating religion with people online because I realized majority of religion debates are extremely shallow, yes even those with popular sciences like Richard Dawkins are shallow.
On the other hand, being just a regular member of my church, I also don't want to bring my background when I talk with my church community. Majority of people don't have the education that I had, and to explain half-assedly will just confuse them more.
I've come to a similar place after doing graduate work in Christian theology. The theology, philosophy, and literature of the Bible is the most-studied of any book in the last two millennia and pretty much any question or objection that can be raised about it has been addressed by some of the greatest minds in history. You might not find their conclusions satisfactory, but a serious criticism of Christianity must at least acknowledge and engage with that work.
I haven't read Feser, but I do agree there is a huge gap between, say, the theology and level of discourse of C.S.Lewis and Tolkein and popular megachurch pastors. Culturally it's interesting to me - all but the most die-hard atheist will likely see some value and truth in Tolkein's work even if they disagree with his theology and choice of church. They may not agree, but would respect him. Where are today's Inklings?
Speaking of CS Lewis, everyone should read his cosmic trilogy. It’s so astounding that I’m surprised it didn’t get the attention that the Narnia books did, and the third book is on par with 1984 and Brave New World, written as a modern fairy tale yet also as a sci-fi in the tradition of HG Wells.
It’s such a good series and probably paints a better understanding of what a fallen world means and what a proper relationship with God is like, yet using sci-fi literalism instead of religious dogma.
As someone who has read and studied the Inklings extensively, I think the fact that these few misfit professors had such an impact is astounding in that they were able to do it.
To be clear - their level of thought and depth was immense and powerful. All impact is merited. I think these sorts of collections of intellectual individuals are not as rare as we might think; they just don't break out into wider society in the way (in particular) Lewis and Tolkien did.
The average person of today (anecdotal citation here) is less read, less cultured, less knowledgeable of language, history, religion, philopsophy, and literature than the average person of yesteryear. Maybe this has something to do with it.
The Inklings were overall extremely well-read and literate. Literally professors on mythology, linguistics/etc. Not necessarily fair to compare the general population to them. ;)
> I have no idea why the level of discourse is on average so primitive, I think church leaders have been systematically underestimating the populace.
They're not underestimating the populace. They're catering to them in a desperate attempt to stay economically viable. The big beautiful building, supporting staff, production equipment, etc doesn't pay for itself.
Many churches are operated as businesses - ones which have realized that the easiest, most profitable mode of operation is to refrain from teaching/challenging your supporters as much as possible. Mix in a sense of tradition, some political activism, and a touch of self-righteousness and you've got yourself a recipe for a successful organization. At least until your congregation passes away and their children realize they have no use for you.
There are still a few churches out there which use the hellfire-and-brimstone approach, but it's not very effective on Gen X and younger. Nowadays, I'm certain it drives more people away from Christianity than it brings in.
I grew up Protestant but have considered myself Agnostic for a while.
However, lately I've been having the urge to dig into spirituality more, as I'm starting to suspect there can be something there, it's just that, except for a single sermon I sat in about people destroying natural rock formations that have been around for millions of years on a whim (yeah the pastor actually said millions of years), I haven't found anything that seemed worth reflecting on in church services I've attended in a very long time.
The book you posted seems interesting, I'll give that a read. I also found Tolstoy's 'A Confession' very interesting back in the day. Do you have other resources you would recommend I check out?
"There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be."
In this case, I would include the majority of Catholics who are oblivious today about the very basics of what the Church believes, much less why, and practice it seldomly on one hand or cliquishly on the other. When the culture becomes hostile to the faith, it is little wonder that many fall away if all that kept them there was vacuous habit and social inertia. Obviously, if your ideas are primitive and stupid, and the culture within the Church enters a malaise, and the promised rewards of defecting and joining the popular chorus seem so enticing, then you will experience defections and apostasy. The intellectual mediocrity of people like Dawkins impresses only the uneducated or the mis-educated.
But frankly, the kinds of apostasies we're seeing in the US are mostly a formality. Those defecting are effectively apostates already. They're just not going through the motions anymore, either because they're tired of faking it, or because the social incentives of putting on appearances no longer seem to exist. You might even fear being seen as a "weirdo", though you will find that most people will admire, even feel intimidated by, a well-informed and educated Catholic who unapologetically and without a feeling of shame or cowardice is frank about his beliefs.
Of course, FWIW, the Church itself is growing in numbers. It is growing rapidly in Africa and in Asia, though Catholics, and more broadly, Christians are the most persecuted group in the world (persecution also tends to produce more conversions). The West is undergoing a period of cultural decadence. Whether it will survive or whether the carcass will rot out completely, I don't know. At the moment, it looks like the future of the Church is on those continents.
Feser has written a few other books that others might also find useful. I have greatly enjoyed his writing. Some find Peter Kreeft, himself a convert, a good introduction (his "Apologetics" for instance), and I've heard some good things about Scott Hahn. These are probably good entry points before venturing into the vast literature of the last few millennia.
"There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be."
Oh, that's crap. There are more than 100 victims of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy where the Church itself covered up the crime. You can play with definitions however you want, but that is not a misperception of the Church, but a realistic view of the actions of the Church.
I've been Catholic, and the Church exists to extend the existence of the Church. Any other action is in service to that goal.
Catholic priests are less likely than the general population to be predators. You only hear about it because the media Is hostile to the church. School districts across the country have done similar things in terms of cover ups but I don't hear the outage there.
So the Church, an organization that sets itself up as the moral arbiter between God and man, doesn't have more of a moral responsibility than school districts across the country?
And there is plenty of moral outrage for coverups, no matter the source.
Please. People hate the Church because it says it is one thing and is another. The media is critical of the Church because the Church has tried to make itself the authority on people's behavior, yet itself behaves in a reprehensible manner. Maybe it should just go back to being the Mafia's bank and just obliquely supporting drug cartels and human rights abuses via loans?
Your whole comment is just whataboutism. You've an opportunity to refute the assertion that the Church knowingly covered up abuse of children, and you've decided that if others have done it, it can't be that bad.
The Church only claims that it is a hospital for sinners. It doesn't claim that it is a country club for saints relaxing on earth for a vacation. The surprise that such a hospital should be full of those who need its cures is not Biblical. The sadness that it is so, on the other hand, is, so thank you for your moral outrage!
And no one is claiming that there aren't sinners in the Church, and no one is outraged that there are. The problem is that the "hospital" was moving abusers around from floor to floor to avoid responsibility.
Heck, if the Church defrocked the abusers (those in need of its "cures") when they were reported, and took actions to keep them from abusing and answer for their crimes to the legal authorities, no one would have this (particular) problem. But the Church didn't, because it was protecting itself. The Church is more important to the Church than the victims of those crimes.
Hence, the Church exists to ensure the existent of itself, and all it's actions are in service of that singular goal.
Frankly, moral outrage at child sexual abuse and the systematic cover up of the abuse and protection of the abusers is justified. If the Bible is written in such a way that such moral outrage is a sickness, then it is truly awful foundation to base your morality upon.
But thank _you_ for minimizing the responsibility of those covering up the crimes and ensuring that they could continue.
My point is that the Church is not the churchmen and that those who cover up others crimes, like those who commit them are all in the beds. You do not see the Divine Physician and so conflate those under judgment with the One Who judges the living and the dead.
Moral outrage is not a sickness - moral outrage is thinking God's thoughts after Him and so is to be commended!
The Church is composed of the people in it. And should be judged by the actions of those that comprise it, otherwise you are abandoning all agency, and it may as well be dismantled as it could not be responsible for anything it does.
Also, no evidence of any god exists, but that is another argument. Let's stick with arguments that postulates the existence of a God in the Catholic tradition.
First, according to the Bible, papal infallibility has whatever the Church does held as law in Heaven. Stupid rule, but there you are. Therefore, if we judge that covering up and enabling child abuse is immoral, then the Church is by its own rule, immoral. Well, that doesn't work out so well for the Church. So let's leave that aside.
The Catholic Church (and other denominations) tries explain evil (and thus side step the "All Good, All Power, and All Knowing -- pick two problem of God), but claiming that it is all part of God's greater plan. The difficulty here is that it doesn't side step the problem, but tried to solve it by adding a layer of abstraction to it. What you end up with is that God's plan has to be definitionally immoral because it came from the mind of God.
The answer is, of course, who can know the mind of God? It sort of kicks the can down the road much the way the Millerites (now Seventh Day Adventists) do on the end of the world and QAnon does with Trump coming back (was it January 20th? Or March 6th? Or March 20th?). Evil exists because God's plan demands it, but somehow removes the responsibility of God's plan from God.
So, the children were abused by the men acting in God's name because God's plan demanded their suffering, but God owns none of the responsibility because you can't possibly understand the reason that God required the suffering of those children. Nice work, if you can get it.
Free will (in the Catholic tradition) allows the ability to see the harm that actions do upon others, but somehow we are supposed to turn a blind eye to that done under the protection of God. Because those children were clearly not under the protection of God.
I guess there’s someone willing to defend anything.
I don’t see anything about the general population, but to bring up schools is whataboutism. Unfortunately predators seek out jobs that will put them close to children. The Catholic Church coverups go up to the chain of command and they continue to let pedophile priests serve. These issues were well known to the church but they let abuse continue and did not turn priests over to the police. Are you not outraged by this? If your son or daughter was abused by a priest who has been abusing others for decades would you not blame the church?
lol. you really fail to understand why everything is dumbed down? it’s because 1) people don’t have a lot of time 2) a lot of people don’t need or can’t understand the arguments. why bother?
Reading dostoesvsky brought my back to the church on a spiritual and emotional level, and the Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity bt CS Lewis brought me back on an emotional level.
I grew up in a conservative congregation with a difficult-to-understand theology. I went through some dark and nihilistic points in my life but after being exposed to Jordan Peterson's study of Christianity as the mythology that underpins the culture of the west I developed a deep appreciation for these ideas and now consider myself a Christ follower.
The same can be said of science in that science can't explain the supernatural or the after-life. Science was never meant to explain those things but we have tried to make it a replacement by trying to naturalize everything. Things that go beyond this realm of understanding and reason.
The whole point of science is to explain "the supernatural". Lightning was once considered "supernatural". Now it isn't. Science did that. Science does not acknowledge the existence of an afterlife because there is no evidence to support such a conclusion.
In my opinion it explains both perfectly well: The human mind is not perfect and sometimes it gets confused, believing that the supernatural is real and that there is life after death even though time and again these phenomena turn out to have completely naturalistic explanations. If you want to go one level deeper I encourage you to read Darwin’s Cathedral where you’ll learn this tendency to believe in the supernatural is not a bug but a feature.
There's a lot of conceit in this notion that just because _you_ can't understand or explain something means that it goes beyond understanding and explanation.
Religion exists because of that conceit, that notion that either something is immediately explainable or that it is supernatural. Science exists because the idea that something isn't understood now doesn't mean that we (as a species) won't ever understand it.
We stand on the shoulders who have come before us, and not one of them was a god.
> Science was never meant to explain those things but we have tried to make it a replacement by trying to naturalize everything. Things that go beyond this realm of understanding and reason.
Criticizing a flashlight for being a poor saw is a flaw in the criticizer, not the flashlight.
Fanny Holmes (wife of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) once said, when asked why she belonged to the Unitarian Church,
"In Boston one has to be something, and Unitarian is the least you can be."
Unitarianism by the 20th century didn't have any dogma, even atheists and agnostics could be members, and accepted that all religious traditions had spiritual wisdom to offer. But because it had evolved from Christianity it had institutional legitimacy, in a world where church membership was a social requirement.
People's beliefs might have changed less than we think over time, despite the common perception that nearly everyone in the US was hyper-religious until the last few decades.
There might be other factors around the decline in church membership -- perhaps related to the decline in participation in secular community groups as well.
Superb point. To quote Holmes, ‘Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.’
My great Aunt who is 95 belongs to a UU church, and remembers when the Universalists merged with the Unitarians. She says "The Universalist brought too much God stuff into church and wrecked it"
> In the early 19th century there was considerable theological debate in the “churches of the standing order” in New England. Many churches actually split over this debate, the traditionalists becoming Congregationalists and the liberals becoming Unitarians.
Americans' religious affiliations and degree of religious adherence tend to follow a generational step-down pattern.
For instance, in my grandparents' day, both religious affiliation and religious adherence were relatively high. In Philly, where my mom grew up, Catholic schools were practically overflowing, and parents expected that the school would supplement and support the religious upbringing they were receiving at home.
Then in the next generation, there was a shift. Religious affiliation remained relatively high, but religious adherence and attendance began to decrease. Those Catholic schools continued to bring in students, but there was a marked difference; parents who were not particular devout themselves expected that the school would replace and make up for the religious instruction that many of the kids were not receiving at home. These people might still have identified themselves as Catholic, but they weren't really actively practicing their faith.
Nowadays, Catholic schools are largely on life support, because the decrease in religious affiliation that was precipitated by the decrease in adherence/attendance has now cut down enrollment to a much smaller number of families who either have high devotion or who have low devotion but see the schools as better than the public alternatives. Parents who in the previous generation might have sent their kids to Catholic school to replace the religious instruction they weren't getting at home have instead decided to disaffiliate and not give their kids outsourced religious instruction. Whereas in previous generations, they might have continued to identify as Catholic even though they were inactive, in this generation it's much more common to just shed the identity.
Obviously, I'm just painting a small part of the picture, of Catholicism in the mid-Atlantic region. Many other parts of the country with other religious makeups have followed different patterns. But I think we can basically predict what the religious landscape is going to be like over the next generation or two by following this step-down pattern. (This assumes that religiosity will continue getting weaker, which is not necessarily a sure thing. Religious revivals have been relatively common throughout history.)
Even though I'm an atheist this concerns me since Church is one of the last remaining civic organizations.
People need to be apart of an community. In the before times that's how you made friends and meet partners. Now every single indicator of courtship is at all time lows , mental illness is off the charts and we're all miserable.
I don't have a solution but I'm afraid of the future we're entering.
Religion isn't the point, you need to be a part of a community to meet people. It's very rare for you to be able to make real friends, or find a mate by staring at a screen all day. Church provides one mechanism, but in the old times you could also join a bowling league or an elks club.
Now instead of being a member of a community where your actions are held to account, you can hop on Twitter and call all types of people names. And for what, just so you can spread your anger to other people ?
I think you're missing my point, church is one of a multitude of ways to be involved in your community, and being involved in your community is the best way to meet a partner. Aside from that, being a part of a community is a fundamental part of mental health. Lost connections is a great book on this topic.
And come on, you couldn't find a better source than an online dating site when coming up with courtship statistics ? Overall marriage rates are at all time lows. Strange how this coincides with the advent of online dating.
I am agnostic, but, I don’t necessarily see this as a good thing.
I was raised Jewish and as a kid we would go to the reform synagogue on and off throughout the year. My parents are completely secular (atheist and agnostic), and yet that did not stop my mom from becoming President of the local reform synagogue, so at least for a period it was a big part of my life.
The main benefit of the synagogue, and I assume it is the same one you get from being involved in your local church, is the community that is built around it.
When someone was sick, someone died or someone needed help, people from the community were always the first ones to help. They would took care of the poor, help the weak and also the elderly. They would lead food drives and volunteer efforts.
I have yet to find any community that is as strong and as helpful as the one that was built around the local synagogue. There is something unique about places of warship that drives people to be more generous and helping. My only assumption is the communities they build are passed down from generation to generation with their own traditions which makes them stronger.
As an adult, I don’t go to synagogue at all. The weird thing is I miss it even though I hated it as a kid.
One last thing. I see a lot of hatred for religion in the comments and as of late in general.
Please don’t hate! Understand that extreme anti-religion is no better and no less dangerous than people that take religion to the extreme. Yes, religion has caused or been excuse for a lot of bad and intolerant behavior. You aren’t going to end intolerance by being intolerant yourself. Assume best attentions, judge people by how they act and help through education to change their misconceptions.
Speaking as a person of faith, religion has been largely obsoleted by social media and political tribalism. Most people get their moral compass from Instagram or Twitter or whatever. Celebrities, op-end writers, talk show hosts, and corporations have become the bishops of the new American moral universe.
The comedian Emo Philips has a well-known joke about religion that may explain some of the decline in membership...
"Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over."
Emo Philips has another joke which I think was voted somewhere as funniest joke ever, and is a great take on western religion :
“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.”
Rarely does anyone ever ask my religion but when people do i tell them Hellenism (Belief in the greek gods). People often give me a quizzical look - but when you study the 'religion' you find interesting beliefs that help you in modern day.
For instance, claiming you don't have 100% complete faith in the myths and gods wasn't a heretic offense. Everyone respected the fact that the stories were arch-types that displayed courage, anger, revenge, ect.
Also, if someone else came up to you from Egypt and believed in an entirely different pantheon you respected their opinion and could see similarities in your own religion.
Christianity from the very early days (The skims' under Constantine) was a very absolute one. There was a right and wrong. There was only one god and you are wrong and a heretic for believing in another.
That's why Hellenism works so well for me. I do not claim to be a moral precept but i do offer you this; A peace treaty. You can believe what you want to believe as long as you respect my own moral reasoning. In the grand scheme of things as long as there is no direct harm to you for my actions you must accept and respect them but i do not have to bow to them. It cannot be a suicidal pact, meaning if i do not believe in YOUR GOD, slip up and don't call you a 'They' or say somethings 'Gay'.
I truly believe one of the biggest problems with current society is everyone believes they are a moral precept and have all the answers. Love your neighbor.
>Also, if someone else came up to you from Egypt and believed in an entirely different pantheon you respected their opinion and could see similarities in your own religion.
More than that, they believed each others gods were cultural representations of the same actual gods. After all there is only one sky. It doesn't make any sense to think that our sky god is different from their sky god, or our sun god is different from their sun god, though being gods they can manifest in different forms.
But then it's shocking how many people seem to think that Christians, Jews and Muslims worship different gods. There's only one god of Abraham, which arguably Hindus call Brahman. They're all just names and stories, there's only one reality*.
>More than that, they believed each others gods were cultural representations of the same actual gods.
Ironically, Christianity kind of did the same thing, rather believing everyone else's gods were just demons or sorcerers in league with Satan. In further irony, this led to a lot of syncretism of pagan beliefs and rituals into Christianity.
Note that they understood the myths to be archetypes, but outright atheism was a charge punishable by death. That's what they got Socrates on.
Also note that they were pretty limited in their tolerance. If people got pissed at you, they wrote your name on a piece of pottery (ostrakon). If enough names were gathered, you were banished -- the root of the word "ostracized".
On the upside, they were very tolerant of transgender and intersex individuals. Note in particular the case of Callo/Callon, who changed their sex and pronouns.
I'm certainly not a religious expert, but from my understanding Christianity's main innovations were not monotheism or absolute morality. Those concepts had been around for a very long time and Christianity adopted those ideas that from others and then added their own innovations on top of that.
It's weird how many Americans are completely unaware of the second largest branch of Christianity (or better call it "the trunk" and everything else - "a branch") - the Eastern Orthodox Church, which is the original Christianity without a pope, indulgences, inquisition, and other things, which have nothing to do with the early Christianity.
Prior to the East-West Schism, and from the beginnings of organized Christianity, the entities which became the Eastern Orthodox Churches after the schism had the same Pope, with a somewhat different role, as Western Christianity.
Some of them also have had things not unlike the inquisition, though they don't call it that.
And, of course, outside of the Eastern Orthodox and maybe the “Old Catholics”, even those Christians who disagree with the Roman Catholic position don't see the Eastern Orthodox as having a particular claim to original Christianity.
EDIT: for example, the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Church of the East are, in their current form, older than the Eastern Orthodox, and from their perspective the branch containing both sides of the 1054 Schism is a divergence from “original Christianity” in the same way that Western Christianity is viewed by the Eastern Orthodox.,,
I can understand the belief that Eastern Orthodoxy is more of a "trunk" than more recent "branches", but what about core ideas that predate Jesus? e.g. the immortality of the soul was reasoned by Plato (Republic, circa 350BC); heaven and hell have been portrayed by Virgil (Aeneid, circa 19BC). Aren't these the "trunk", and the Hebrew Bible and Jesus another branch?
I'm a Lutheran and I've studied the works of Luther. When I learned about the Orthodox church as an adult, I really liked what I saw. If Luther had been an Orthodox priest, I wonder if he would have launched his gentle rebellion (and, later, his not-so-gentle rebellion).
This is a somewhat funny joke but it doesn't actually map to reality. Inter-Christian conflict is almost nonexistent in 2021 and has been so for probably a generation.
Edit: by “conflict” I mean actual real violent conflict. Not people arguing on Reddit. People literally killing each other (or pushing them off bridges) because they are “heretics.” This doesn’t happen much at all anymore in the Christian world. Even the edge cases like Northern Ireland have little to do with actual religious differences. That issue is mostly political in nature and revolves around the relationship of Ireland to Great Britain, not the intricacies of the Christian religion.
It’s easy to observe the difference when you look at the Muslim world, where there still is a lot of violent conflict and people being persecuted or killed because they are “heretics.”
As an atheist apostate who was raised in a fundamentalist, Baptist, Christian church in the Great Lakes region, it hits pretty close to home.
I was last in church a couple weeks ago for a funeral; it was a little weird hearing about the ways people from various highly-similar churches talked about Grandma's spiritual history as she was enlightened from her Christian Reformed early childhood to know a living and true God. Did she know the theological differences at age 10? We talked about the effect she had as the matriarch of our extended family bringing everyone together for decades by sponsoring an annual summer trip to a nearby Bible conference ground, and about how she justifiably ended that when the Bible conference lost their way and endorsed some speakers with relatively minor theological differences.
It's not "conflict" in the sense of the Spanish Inquisition - no one, as far as I know, would genuinely push someone off a bridge for being in a different sect - but around here they'd pray for the person to accept the truth, call for church discipline/excommunication/speaking bans if in a position of power, or they'd leave the church and find a slightly different sect that didn't make the wrong call on whatever issue was brought up by the council of 1912.
There's a paradox of intolerance at play: A group that aims to be universally tolerant cannot actually tolerate intolerance, and fundamentalist Christianity advocates a singular, accurately understood, unique truth at its core. You can and tolerate love those who hold different theologies all you want, but if you believe in one absolute universal truth as a lot of Christian culture does, then anyone who believes even a little bit differently is not right, which is to say, by definition, they're wrong.
Karl Popper was a moron. You can tolerate intolerance just fine by assuming there will be someone equally intolerant of such intolerance.
I wish people would stop quoting that denthead. It’s as silly as people claiming the Qu’ran has passages specifically commanding them to blow people up.
Your conclusion is definitionally the same as Popper's? Intolerance of intolerance is the solution. It is only a "paradox" in that unlimited tolerance leads to this seemingly backwards outcome of the triumph of intolerance.
The difference is that Popper thinks you yourself must be the intolerant one. I'm saying that if intolerance exists, then someone else will take care of it because they too must surely exist.
The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland may be over but there is still tension and violence in Northern Ireland between a subset of Catholics and Protestants. The sectarian violence still happens but does not get reported internationally because the scale is so much lower than it was up to 2010, but to say Inter-Christian conflict has been non-existent for a generation (25 years?) is wishful thinking at best.
Idk, man... about two years ago, I heard an evangelical dude say Catholics aren’t even Christians. As a Catholic, I found it a bit startling to learn that I am - by default - going to hell.
Pop by r/catholic and you'll come across some people's hush-hush Catholic views that Martin Luther was evil by leading away millions to eternal damnation because there's no salvation outside The Catholic Church.
Was it because the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon from Revelations, or because it's secretly a pagan religion that worships Saints and the Virgin Mary as gods? I love the rationales people put forward for that kind of stuff.
For a Guy purportedly trying to bring salvation to humanity, some Jesus's followers do seem to relish opportunities to keep the everyone they can out of the Kingdom.
> a pagan religion that worships Saints and the Virgin Mary as gods
Sometimes I put on my 2edgy4u atheist cap and needle my lapsed-Catholic wife with that notion. It looks like a duck and a quacks like a duck, call it veneration if you like -- it's still a duck. And I do point out that there's nothing wrong with that. Given the choices I'd rather worship a once-mortal mother goddess than a tripartite sky-father who spends most of the book being terrible.
You don't know, they might be of the opinion that a good life dedicated to Jesus may be enough, regardless of how you dress it up.
But, from outside, they appear to be at least half right.
The catholic church seems to be less CHRISTian and more ... Trinity-ian. I assume it's a fairly large difference on the ground as one is all about a single person, born a regular man, who brings forgiveness for unintentional sins. The other, a story about a much more conscious god who manifests himself in a young body and proceeds to lecture on morality and the afterlife.
To be a little more precise, Catholicism teaches that every person in Heaven is a Catholic (even if they weren't necessarily a Catholic on earth.) It admits baptism by desire and the possibility of salvation of those who are invincibly ignorant.
But, at the same time, Catholic tradition has always maintained that even most Catholics end up in Hell. There's even biblical support for the idea in the "wide"/"narrow gate" language of the Gospels.
So, if Catholicism is the one true Faith, and even most Catholics end up in Hell, why would anyone reason that those outside of the one true Faith have good odds?
This says non-Catholics who have not committed a mortal sin can go to heaven, which includes "have no other God before me." Further, I'm pretty sure they consider the sacrament of baptism necessary to go to heaven, defacto ruling out every non-catholic.
edit I'm apparently somewhat misremembering things, and any non-catholic without a mortal sin has a supposed chance, but I still would say that rules out all non-catholics.
Maybe you need to clarify by what you mean by conflict -- do you mean violent conflict? Because ideological conflict and schism seems quite high between denominations, christian branches, and even within congregations. E.g Rob Bell vs Francis Chan / Tim Keller on whether hell is real and if Rob Bell is going there. A lot of evangelical groups today are "non-denominational" meaning they face these ideological clashes within their congregations.
I mean, as an atheist it seems obvious that they're all facing the problem of ill-defined views causing confusion. There's no ground truth so everyone's just interpreting it how they feel is right, whether that's by focusing on literal biblicisms or focusing on real world feedback / interpersonal relationships, and the lines are drawn around litmus test issues across the spectrum of christian beliefs.
The violence is just the punchline that makes it a joke. The point is how ludicrous it is that people take these minuscule differences in dogma seriously, and just how seriously they do take it. That's what maps to reality.
This is only true as far as how most Christians and churches are so casual in their beliefs, there's no meaningful difference in their lifestyle vs a non-believer's.
In the us it's conservative christians against everyone else (mostly evangelicals but multiple other groups too, and they also fight among themselves).
The group that isn't fighting much is liberal christians (I try to define them as accepting homosexuality) and non believers. Those are the groups not fighting.
And yet our society is more polarized than ever. From your anecdote, one would think that declining religion would result in peace and love overflowing in society, but we see the opposite. Public morality cannot be maintained without religion; we will sadly see the end result of that in coming years.
I'd argue that the polarization is a direct result of the rise of evangelical Christianity. And as church membership decreases, their perceived persecution will fan the flames of their crusade against soft drugs, LGBTQ+, and trans rights to name a few.
>crusade against soft drugs, LGBTQ+, and trans rights to name a few.
So then why have those crusades all but evaporated?
Weed is on its way to being federally legal. Hard drugs are becoming legal or decriminalized in some jurisdictions. Trans people are pretty much universally accepted/tolerated as being a thing that isn't going away with the remaining conflict more or less related to all the gender based stuff that's been codified in law over the years.
Just in the last few weeks, three states have passed new laws targeting the healthcare of transgender people and twenty five other state legislatures are considering them. It’s unfortunately not going away. [1] It’s not one of the issues you mentioned, but another similar crusade is abortion rights. It’s looking like the Supreme Court will have hearings potentially leading to the end of Roe v Wade, and a number of states have enacted laws limiting abortions, though some of them were struck down by previous Supreme Court rulings.
I mean no offense by this, but this opinion seems to be colored by your direct experience. There's is still A LOT of intolerance to these things to be found in the world. You're just not being exposed to it, most likely.
> Public morality cannot be maintained without religion
Do you have evidence or arguments for this, or is this just a feeling? I can see an argument for the statement "religion can be and has been used to maintain public morality" but that's not what you said, so I'm curious about your reasoning.
What is morality? It is not a physical material phenomenon and it is not scientific, so if it exists it is by definition supernatural or its synonym metaphysical
Once you are discussing the supernatural, you are discussing religion.
Since the topic of this thread is about church membership, I would assume religion in this context refers to organized religion, rather than such an abstract definition, in which case someone can believe in the supernatural without being religious.
But in either case, I'm a little confused. Wouldn't this line of reasoning apply to laws as well? They aren't physical or (necessarily) scientific. And are you saying that any study of metaphysics is necessarily religious in nature? Perhaps we are using different definitions of religion.
If you are making an argument that notions of morality do not (or did not) arise from science, or that morality arose from religion, I think that would have weight to it. But that also doesn't imply that morality cannot continue to exist without religion.
For example, it's plausible to me that a sense of shared community is something that can "maintain morality" in a society. We may have lost a sense of community in part due to the decline of churches, but I don't see why it would require them to exist.
I have not heard a convincing argument that true right or wrong can exists outside of a universe with a monotheistic God.
Do you believe you morality is more right than a Nazis or a pedophiles?
If so, you need a justification of why your morality is more ultimately correct and truly "good and better." I have not heard a convincing one that ultimately doesn't end in a monotheistic God.
And if not, what are we even doing in this conversation? There can be no moral progress without an objectively better standard that we are attempting to discover.
The two most destructive regimes of the twentieth century were explicitly secular. The stability of modern Western Europe is more of a historical consequence of Pax Americana and the Cold War than secularism.
Not sure whether you intended this or not, but your statement could be extended to imply that secular societies become destructive ones? Which would be quite a stretch - there are many secular stable countries and many unstable, highly religious ones as well.
Do I really need to point that out? Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
If one wants to play "edgy contrarian" and argue that the United States was somehow worse than either of those, well...the U.S. is technically secular too.
Believing that the communist countries were not religious countries is a common fallacy of the Westerners.
In reality communism was a religion and more precisely a variant of the Christian religion, but this fact was disguised by changing the names of all things related to the Christian religion.
Just a few of the correspondences between Christianity and Communism (shown as traditional word => communist word for the same concept):
Christian => atheist
Pagan => Christian
Prophets => Marx, Engels & Lenin
Holy Scriptures => the published works of Marx, Engels & Lenin
Christian martyrs => communist illegalists
Pope => general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Cardinals/patriarchs => general secretaries of communist parties
Priests => members of the communist parties having functions in the party hierarchy
Religious teaching in schools => Political teaching in schools
Priest of a military unit => Political second-in-command of a military unit
Heretics => oppositionists to the party leadership
Happy life in the afterlife => happy life in the future truly communist society
Holy Inquisition => Committee for State Security
... and so on.
Writing a complete dictionary about all the words used by Christianity with their replacements in Communism would take a very long time.
While the communist vocabulary looks very different, the meanings are exactly the same as in Christianity.
All the communist countries were not countries free of religion, but on the contrary, they were countries were a monotheistic-like religion was intermingled with all the administrative & government institutions and where all the other religions were aggressively persecuted, including the true atheists or agnostics (i.e. not the communist atheists, which was the code name for the believers in the communist religion).
The claim that the communist countries were not religious was just propaganda, they were countries where there was no separation between the religion and the state.
Likewise false was the claim that the communist countries had a different economic system, in reality their economic system was an extreme form of capitalism, where everything was dominated by monopolies.
It's not that you are wrong, per se, because communism is indeed descended from a Christian culture and full of many Christian ideas. Overall, it functioned as a quasi-religious system.
However, the Soviets actively rooted every religion during their rule, especially Orthodox Christianity. So if we are to consider Soviet communism a form of Christianity, it's unclear how useful this actually is.
Your counter-argument does not work.
It actually provides one more similarity between Communism and the various variants of Christianity and it makes stronger my analogy.
Yes the communists persecuted the other religions, inclusive by imprisoning and/or killing many Catholic priests and many Orthodox priests.
However, this is exactly what was previously done by some kinds of Christians against other kinds of Christians, e.g. during the many conflicts between Protestants and Catholics and between Catholics and Orthodox Christians.
Some people downvoted me, but this also just validates my affirmation that most Westerners are not aware of these facts and they do not understand Communism.
I have grown in a country occupied by communists, so I know from direct experience how Communism works, not from the fantastic depictions typical for the Western movies or novels.
When I was in school, there was nothing that I hated more than the mandatory classes of communist religion, the so-called Political teachings.
Also, due to the stupidity of one of my colleagues, a teacher discovered that I had a Bible and, because of that, I was almost expelled from High School a short time before the final exam, but I was very lucky due to some special circumstances and I could avoid the expulsion.
Many years later, after communism failed, I believed that the new generations of students will escape my fate and they will no longer waste time with the mandatory religion classes.
Unfortunately, my hope was wrong, because the mandatory Political teachings classes were not deleted from the curriculum, but they were replaced by mandatory Christian religion classes.
So nothing has changed, when the Communist religion was mandatory, I had almost lost my career because it was supposed that I might be Christian, but if I were a student today, I would have similar problems if I would attempt to criticize in school the Christian religion, for exactly the same reasons that were applicable to Communism.
But again the thing is, if you're going to take this line of thought, then secularism itself is really just a variation of Christianity. And at that point, of what use are the distinctions we are making? If Soviet communism is a kind of Christianity, it's certainly a kind significantly different enough to notice and bracket off. Certainly it has little use for say, The Bible, or priest-like figures, or various other things that do tie together the different branches of Christianity.
No, there are tremendous differences between secularism and Christianity, while Christianity and Communism have identical consequences for the life of a typical citizen.
Communism, Christianity, and also the other monotheist religions, are extremely intolerant against the believers of any other religion.
Secularism is the opposite, at most you could say that secularism is like many polytheistic religions, where it was considered normal that everyone believes in their own gods and for the other people it does not matter which are those gods.
The life of a normal citizen of a communist country was very similar, for example, to the life in Italy or Spain 600 years ago, when the Church was more powerful. It might have actually been worse, because the Communist Party might have been more powerful than the Catholic Church ever was.
Permanently you had to be very careful with everything you said, because if you ever contradicted some dogma written in the Holy Communist Scriptures or some interpretation given by a High Communist Priest, you could be singled out as an heretic and be excommunicated, with very bad consequences.
Regarding the Communist dogmas, everything was based on "have faith and do not doubt". It was absolutely impossible to have any discussion about communism based on rational arguments or on experiment results.
Like Christianity, Communism blocked any kind of scientific research that could contradict in any way its Holy Scriptures. To make progress in any career, you had to either be or simulate that you are a true believer and you had to display frequently your faith in the Communist religion.
It does not matter what words are used by Christianity or Communism, wherever any of them succeeded to control the state institutions, the consequences were the same for the citizens, no freedom of speech and severe discrimination between believers and non-believers.
Secularism was precisely the reaction against this, having the purpose of allowing the freedom of speech and religion.
Depends on how you define secular. Most secular states are simply neutral and promote plurality of culture and religion, i.e. allowing choice. The other type of secular state is one which is openly hostile to religion.
The US is becoming openly hostile to religion, as many of the comments in this thread evidence, which is distinct from neutrality. I agree with religious freedom as such, with everyone being on equal standing.
If you define secularism as the USSR or China, I would disagree with their long term stability, or even with liking their regimes.
Their crime and imprisonment rates are far below those of the US. Even on an individual level, the presence of non-religious individuals is assocated with a series of positive societal effects: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227616923_Atheism_S...
Religion isn't necessary for public morality, and as America has shown, is often actively harmful. America is full of people who assume that they are good people BECAUSE they go to church rather than because of their acts. By and large, these are generally not good people. Instead, they're among the most judgmental and least helpful members of society.
To paraphrase Gandhi, "I like your Christ, not your Christians". The religious in modern society can't even be bothered to read the Cliff Notes of their own book, otherwise they'd be focused on helping the poor and remembering that rich people have trouble getting to heaven rather than going around promoting guns, no taxes, and slashing social safety nets.
I am trying to avoid a flaming discussion here but am also trying to moderate your comment. I am trying to promote guns, no taxes, and slashing social safety nets but am also spending much time, talent, treasure on helping of those needy. I am disagreeing with state force but am also disagreeing with selfishing. I hope that the comment here is clarifying your view on the generalised population.
Same here. Frankly if the GP's "Cliff Notes" version tells them that the Bible says to agitate politically for taking away other people's means of self-defense, or for seizing other people's property by force to be redistributed to the GP's preferred causes, then the GP really needs to put down the abridged version and read the original. Pacifism and charity are portrayed as virtues, to be sure, but it says nothing about forcing those virtues on others, and doing so strays about as far from the core message as it's possible to get.
Yes, these quotes are indeed very well known. Thank you for reinforcing my point.
Matthew 5:38 — He advises his followers not to retaliate when attacked. He does not tell them to go out and disarm anyone else, or petition the Roman government to hypocritically do so on their behalf.
Mark 12:17 — When the Pharisees attempted to entrap Him with a question when could not be answered either "yes" or "no" without enraging either the Romans or the religious leaders, He evades the original question and turns it into an admonition to give people (and God) what they are due. Note that he never actual said that the coin was owed to Caesar, though many people seem to assume so. He only asked whose face was on the coin. The idea that not just the tax being demanded but all coins actually belonged to Caesar just because his face was stamped on them would rightly have been considered ludicrous. And no matter how you take that conversation, the fact remains that he never made any comment on the merit of the taxes themselves. There aren't any statements in support of the practice of taxation, and all the points about providing for others, supporting the poor, etc. involve personal contributions, not political action.
Jesus teach importance of forgivenes but also realise there exist bad people. Luke 22:36 "Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one."
On tax, Jesus was giving that response to an entraping question from Pharisees they asked because He had in past criticised of harsh tax policy. Force tithing is not a thing of New Testament but old.
I think the argument could be made that most of the top countries you mentioned are linguistically and racially homogenous. I don't really have a conclusion on whether religion helps or hurts a more racially diverse population but just something worth pointing out.
A Gallop poll serves as your evidence for religion's impact on stability and peace? This is pie-in-the-sky cherry picked data, stylized as a scientific inquiry.
Funnily enough, one of the most secular countries, Sweden, has a 50%+ church membership. But it's an anomaly; church membership is still a good litmus test for secularity everywhere else.
It's an interesting argument that you lay out, and as agnostic that came from a religious family, it's something that I've personally grappled with. In the absence of religion, where do people find their moral and ethical compass? I wasn't raised atheist, and when I ask atheists this question they often dismiss it as not important or obvious. I feel like that's half the reason religion persists, because they actually attempt to answer such questions with respect.
Have you considered that it is not important, that it is obvious?
As a person that wasn't raised religious, the concept that you need religion to find a moral and ethical compass seems weird to me. My parents taught me values, I learned them, society reinforced them. They made sense to me, and I feel bad when I don't follow them. The mechanics of it are pretty simple.
Your line of reasoning is similar to "where does food come from? The grocery store, obviously!"
The underlying question is not how YOU got your moral compass but where do the people who taught you yours - and eventually society as a whole - get theirs.
If it's a set of principles that civil society generally agrees upon, then the rest are implementation details that will vary from situation to situation.
If it's a set of whims of the people in power and will vary regularly and constantly, then "damnation" comes from breaking today's rules.. maybe without even knowing what they are.
Your line of reasoning is similar to "Food comes from animals and plants. But where does animals and plants' food comes from?". Do you want to go all the way up to the Big Bang?
You learn your ethics from a combination of your parents and society, and you update your beliefs during your life, you share them to a younger generation. Repeat since humans acquired a conscience until humans cease to exist. That's all there is to it.
I think having a moral compass is important, because a lot of people will optimize for themselves in the short term, and screw up society in the long term. But I don't think this is obvious at all to people unless they're taught, or if they are really good at learning from their own mistakes.
I think others have pointed this out to you, but there is a high dependence on people learning this through good parenting, good teachers, and being around the right people, all while having security for things like food, shelter, etc.
Some of those things get wrapped up in the over-arching term called "privilege" but I think there is something to be said for the fact that you can't assume most people are securing these things. But you can assume that in the absence of this kind of security, many people (maybe even most) will lose their moral compass.
This seems to be a very privileged position to have. That if you were taught strong ethics by parents and the right social network, then everyone can obviously/simply have the same?
> In the absence of religion, where do people find their moral and ethical compass?
You do all the same things, except: (1) you can make your own choices depending on your own reasoning (e.g. you can independently decide whether circumcision/being gay is good or bad, independent of what any religion says), and (2) you’re doing things to be good, not to please god.
In fact, I consider people who are “moral” just because god says so / you fear the consequences / you want to go to heaven to actually be immoral. It’s akin to only helping in an accident if the person is rich - you’re not doing it because it’s the right thing to do, you’re just doing it to get something in return.
Edit: you can also pick any number of philosophical frameworks of morality. Personally I oscillate between golden and silver rules.
1. This view also takes the idea that morality can be reached by reason on faith I am not saying I fully disagree, but even the concept of morality at its core is not rational.
2. It is possible to be religious and do good for the sake of good. Most religious people I know do. I would hope that even if I knew I was going to hell, I would still live the rest of my life on accordance with God's will as it is the right thing to do.
Yeah, this is the fundamental disagreement. When discussing morality, I'm not talking about what you are. It is a law that overrides all of us, with true right and true wrong. Without a monotheistic God, these don't exist and morality doesn't either.
The morality your discussing is completely different.
I think nowadays they can come from other people. Pretty much anyone/everyone (so maybe "society" is a good stand-in?) But, originally, perhaps when times were a lot different, the word of the Lord, whichever is your flavor, was more useful in keeping people on a more-fulfilling track. People with strong family ties likely didn't need to be as devout and so the church provided a good net for those alienated from society for many reasons. These days we're a lot more likely to have support and a lot less likely to be outcast (or at least not so severely) for being different.
I am also agnostic-raised-Catholic and this type of question is posed a lot. I don't struggle with it since I feel like I know the answer...BUT A) It's difficult to articulate, B) I can't really prove it, and C) it's also that I just know "the Bible" is very likely NOT the answer which just crosses one possibility off a list.
compassion and empathy shouldn't come from believing in God. It should come from believing that humans are all the same, meaning that you shouldn't do to others what you wouldn't want to be done to yourself because otherwise how could you expect other people to treat you fairly if you yourself don't do it? At least that's where I stand and I attribute this feeling of compassion a lot more to cartoons of the 80s and 90s than I do to what I learned in the church.
I'm not in the church anymore because I don't believe in God. But I believe in values and if being in church helps to give you good values then church is worth it for society. I see this pragmatically.
> Where do people find their moral and ethical compass?
I agree that atheists cannot point to a single book that everyone should use to define their moral and ethical compass, but I do think that utilitarianism (either act-based: "we should act always so as to produce the greatest good for the greatest number" or rule based: "we ought to live by rules that, in general, are likely to lead to the greatest good for the greatest number") provides a healthy starting framework.
so depending on how you phrase that question, it can be perceived as an insult. it almost implies that, by default, an atheist wouldn't have a moral compass. I'm not saying you think that, just that it's a plausible interpretation for someone who's already feeling a bit defensive. also some atheists are just obnoxious.
but maybe I can answer your question. I think of morality as a way to rationalize the emotions I feel when someone treats me a certain way or I treat someone else a certain way. my morals are rules I can feel good about following.
I don't feel very defensive about it, but it is definitely insulting to me because to be an insult is about their intent. As far as my dad knew, I was Catholic until 3 months ago (when in reality I've been off that for 20 years) and suddenly I don't have a moral compass. He'll attribute what I have to my upbringing despite him being in absentia for nearly all of it. Cue eye rolling.
I'm atheist, and my answer is simply empathy I guess? I just try to treat others in the same way I want to be treated.
People who say that morality can't exist without religion are scary. If they suddenly lose their faith, are they going to start hurting others? What if their religion has blind spots that doesn't tell them how to behave in a specific situation, or tells them that groups like gays and non-believers are fair game?
> Public morality cannot be maintained without religion
This tired, offensive and a thousand time debunked old trope requires imo a little more argumentation than the "it is thus" justification you just provided.
I'd recommend reading Hitchens, specifically [1] where he addresses that lame claim at length.
Subjective morality is ultimately simple preferance and ultimately just a battle of wills. I, and most other religious people, do not consider such a "moral order" to be morality at all.
Objective morality, with a judge above all judges who is justice itself, is the only way "justice" and morality mean anything at all.
“Objective” morality is a misnomer for religious morality, it's just subjective morality ascribed to some mythical authority figure (and, even if that figure actually exists, for most religions, given the diversity of different moral systems ascribed to the divine judge, those are clearly misascriptions, largely reflecting the personal subjective morality of the people doing the ascribing.)
I'm personally religious, but the myth of objectivity is a very, very dangerous thing; in masks the ways that man creates God in his own image.
I am not claiming to have perfect vision of this order, but I am asserting that it exists and we have no choice but to sit in it's judgment. We can argue and and discuss about the specifics, but when I and other religious people are discussing morality, that is what we are trying to do. To make our morals and actions more in line with the ultimate objective morality.
I do not mean this as a flame, but I honestly do not understand why a person who believes in subjective morality would even discuss morality at all. If all morality is simply in the eye of the beholder, moral progress is impossible and it is not possible for one view to be superior to another.
As opposed to the actual battles engaged in by the various religious groups over morality.
To which I say: have at it. I'll get some popcorn. Too bad about all the bystanders. But I'm sure they'll be happy knowing that they died in the service of objective morality.
>Hitchens' knowledge of religion and philosophy borders on 0%
A rather bold claim, backed by little evidence and easily debunked by a metric ton of counter-evidence.
As example of counter-evidence, I offer:
- The man spent a large fraction of his life studying religions of all ilks
- He wrote a number of carefully researched books on the topic of religion.
- From his quoting the bible, the coran, jewish sacred texts on the fly in the middle of debates with random religious folks (and usually tearing them a new one in the process), I feel confident he had at least skimmed most of those.
- No one can accuse Hitchens of being dumb, I very much doubt he'd get into high visibility, in-depth public debate about a topic without having researched it thoroughly.
Given the above, I would say the claim that "his knowledge of religion borders on 0%" is - to remain unsarcastic, however hard that is - highly unlikely to be correct.
Anyone with a modicum of knowledge on religious studies finds his, and all of the other books by the "New Atheists" (with the possible exception of Dennett) to be laughable. I'm sorry, they simply don't have much of an intellectual foundation in anything.
Here's an example:
Chapter eleven discusses how religions form, and claims that most religions are founded by corrupt, immoral individuals. The chapter specifically discusses cargo cults, Pentecostal minister Marjoe Gortner, and Mormonism. Hitchens discusses Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, citing a March 1826 Bainbridge, New York court examination accusing him of being a "disorderly person and impostor" who Hitchens claims admitted there that he had supernatural powers and was "defrauding citizens".[31][32] Four years later Smith claimed to obtain gold tablets containing the Book of Mormon. When the neighbor's skeptical wife buried 116 pages of the translation and challenged Smith to reproduce it, Smith claimed God, knowing this would happen, told him to instead translate a different section of the same plates.
And where does our concept of corruption or immorality come from? Hitchens just lacks basic knowledge of meta-ethics. He doesn't seem to realize that modern democratic rationalist values are themselves descendants of Christian ideas.
This is the foundational problem of the New Atheists and of the "rational" set in general. They either don't know or don't understand the foundations of modern ethics, all of which has roots in religion.
> This is not really surprising coming from a religious person, dogma being after all the intellectual foundation of religion.
First off, I'm not religious. Second off, this kind of personal attack is not welcome here.
As I already said, every scholar of religious studies finds the books by Hitchens, Dawkins, etc. to be amusing at best. I can't educate you on the academic study of religion in a HN comment. If you are actually interested in reading criticism of such people and not just bashing non-atheistic people, I suggest looking into comparative religion and religious studies.
> his kind of personal attack is not welcome here.
This is not a personal attack.
You stated facts without backing them up. Twice. This is being dogmatic. My apologies for assuming you were religious given the fact you're defending religion, it was a fairly reasonable assumption to make
> As I already said, every scholar of religious studies
You are now moving from being dogmatic to using "appeal to authority" [1], another well known logical fallacy [2]
I'm still waiting for a properly argumented backing of the various statements you made above.
Read the criticism section of the Wikipedia article you posted yourself. There are more than enough intelligent criticisms written of the book.
If you think that my not writing you a lengthy essay explaining why Hitchens is uninformed is somehow indicative that he isn't, I'm not sure what to tell you. Religion is a complicated topic. Pretending that we can solve it in a paragraph is naive at best.
As I already said, if this interests you, read more about religious studies. I am simply saying that "the educated opinion on this topic is that Hitchens is just a popular writer, not a serious thinker on religion." If you disagree with that, well, take it up with the academic community?
> If you think that my not writing you a lengthy essay explaining why Hitchens is uninformed is somehow indicative that he isn't, I'm not sure what to tell you.
I'm simply saying that since the beginning of this conversation, you're stating facts without providing a shred of evidence, other than "go educate yourself on the subject".
This is how conversations usually go in my experience: when you state a fact, you back them up by - at least - a modicum of evidence instead of dropping them as self-evident and walking away.
But given your last answer, one thing you definitely cannot be accused of is lack of consistency.
Are you claiming that marginally declining religiosity is the dominant factor to be considered in the breakdown of "public morality"? Among such factors as 50 years of stagnant wages and the rise of social media?
There is a decline in Christianity but there is not a decline in religion. The religions many preach today are non-theistic and secular but they are religions nonetheless and they don't tolerate heretics.
What US society is struggling with is what to replace church with. It provided community and mutual support, but combined it with a myth that many could not accept any longer. The big question is what can provide the community and mutual support without the binding myth. There hasn't been a replacement thus far that has taken hold.
Also, the combination of online life and recently the pandemic has weakened what local community life still exists.
You know, it makes me think of William Gibson's idea of Slitscan:
“[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”
I don’t think generic education / knowledge completely fixes it. Without level-headed critical thinking of all knowledge and teachings, there will always be “sacred” ideas that are culturally off-limits of criticism.
Also, “wokespeak” (to the extent that it is a new thing) seems remarkably similar to older concepts of tribe signaling and religions (where members use common terminology and symbols to define in-groups and to declare out groups heretics).
I’m happy that the big legacy religions are losing mindshare, but pretending like pure abstract intelligent discussion is a direct replacement confuses why people return to church, temple, etc. Humans seem to crave tradition of conventions, emotional connection with their community, and a reason to bind together for assistance. I haven’t heard a proposal which replaces the church community without reproducing the worst aspects of legacy religions.
The spread of information has allowed people to form their own moralistic code and spiritual journey that doesn't rely on having an institutional infrastructure. They are choosing religions that reject elite priesthoods, a trend now going back for thousands of years starting with Zarathustra. I consider this progress.
I think there's a rhetoric out there, that "everybody needs a religion," and that identifies any vehemently held ideology or close-knit social group as a religion. It's tautological. This is exacerbated by the difficulty of forming a general definition of "religion" that isn't riddled with exceptions. Defining "religion" broadly enough to include all religions makes it end up including everything else too.
But "your group is a religion too" seems like a combination of confirmation bias and tu quoque fallacy.
because people don't care about philosophy, but they care about religion - either being for or against their or others' religions. Mainly because many religious people don't think of it as philosophy, and atheists think of it as worthless.
This avenue of thinking are messing with language. And language is what we organize and coordinate with as human beings. So stop this!
Religion is a very precise definition. By which your comment is not only technically wrong but also practically harmful.
Definition of the religion according to dictionary is:
"the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods."
So no, they are not choosing new religions. And their "priests" do not claim to be shadow of the divine, and certainly do not threaten them with afterlife.
> And their "priests" do not claim to be shadow of the divine, and certainly do not threaten them with afterlife.
Oh yes, if you look at the peddlers of righteous outrage we have today, and their continuous infighting, there's no difference. Dare to deviate from the line? Wrongthink! Cancelled! Even their own people fall pray to this as they get accused of not being outraged enough by their comrades.
Hmm...not the definition I found. Relativism abounds but it can't be "it depends" all the way down. We at least need to agree on definitions before we start arguing.
Perhaps that's for the better. I didn't "choose" the religion thrust upon me as a kid. Somewhere around the age of 10 though, the inconsistencies were too many to ignore and I "lost" my faith. I spent many years wrestling with that and the contradictions between what I was being told and what I was witnessing, even in my own family. The damage it did to me has never really been undone. There are things in this world that I recoil from because of dogma that I don't even believe. I became and actual good person, without being shackled to some deity or set of books, later in my life. I pushed everything away because of distrust and anger when I was younger. I can't begin to imagine the good I could have done, had not been stunted early on.
We don't need religion and shame on any parents that push it on their kids. They don't know better and they can't consent.
The sad thing is how many people think deepity nonsense like what you sarcastically posted here is worth consideration, as opposed to being not-even-wrong level laughably bad philosophy.
There's probably an appreciable percentage (I have no source for this) of people who leave organized religion because of the gaudiness of megachurches and grand gilded cathedrals. Materialism is not unique to the modern era or secularism.
I can understand that viewpoint (e.g. avid sports fans are a prime example), but it always seems to be a talking point of religious institutions themselves, with the goal of people thinking "oh, I'm bound to have some form of religion anyway, so I'll just stay with my current one".
Having a religion may be a way of life but not every way of life is a religion. At least as long as we are not stretching the definition of religion into meaninglessness.
A, not the. I don't think you can argue with any sort of coherency that rejecting religion is a religion, unless you reduce the concept of religion down to a belief, in which case some people's religion is "bigfoot".
QAnon seems to have many parallels with "prophetic" religions where you don't have a priesthood class organizing specific groups of followers e.g. parishes, but you have a priesthood class interpreting the words of a prophet and popularizing these interpretations; in this case "priesthood" isn't a formal distinction, but de facto you tend to have specific minority of people fulfilling this role.
The Economist published article in this week's edition contrasting the rise of the current left/right fervor to relative decline of the religious fervor. The accompanying image captures this really well - https://www.economist.com/img/b/1000/563/90/sites/default/fi....
I'm not sure this is actually that good of an explanation. Europe has much lower levels of church attendance and doesn't have heavily partisan politics.
I am from Brazil... To be honest this would be a complete disaster here.
1. My city main hospital, belongs to Catholic Church, same applies to many other cities.
2. Many of our leading universities, doing research and important work, belong to Catholic Church, notably PUC-RIO, the creators of Lua language.
3. Protestant churches here are the major organizations driving away drug dealers, some took the donations to build better light system in public parks, provide free food, counseling, and so on.
4. We have an hospital considered one of the best of world for certain treatments, to the point people from first world countries sometimes come here for this hospital, and it belongs to a Jewish organization.
And the list goes and goes on... a lot of public infrastructure here belongs to religious organizations, if the government taxed them the result would be the government suddenly needing to spend a ton of their own money replacing what these organizations are doing, and I doubt it would work well, for example the government-owned hospital in my city killed people more than once for stupid reasons (including giving penicilin to a guy that warned them he was allergic!), so the population rely on the catholic hospital instead.
EDIT: reading a sibling comment made me remember another important one: the religious organizations here are major drivers for cultural education, for example our public-owned orchestras are often filled with church-trained people, ditto for audio engineering, theather and many other "art"-related professions.
But would it be a disaster. For a 'church' hospital, the money they take in then goes to fund the hospital. Largely expenses meet income so there is very little tax to pay assume they dont pay sales tax on medical good like many countries.
The churches that will pay high taxes are the ones that have the income but dont spend it and put it into investments to build their wealth.
So in this way, I think taxing churches and also charities makes sense. There will be some fringe cases but largely those that do things with their funds will not be effected and those that hoard funds or use it to circumvent taxes will be the ones paying.
Here in the US many major church organizations, including the Roman Catholic Church and mainline protestant groups (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran) used to invest seriously in the same kinds of things. I think they lost a lot of credibility to the extent that their conduct of those "public interest" activities were indistinguishable from their private sector competitors (e.g. in recovery of medical debt). Withdrawing from these activities (for whatever reason) only compounded that problem.
Bear in mind that the OP says US (not Brazil). I can't speak to conditions in Brazil, and don't intend to cast aspersions. When I say 'let's', the 'us' is Americans, specifically United States. Our experience isn't entirely the same as yours.
Given that corporations, which are taxed, have adopted totalizing ideologies that demand you "bring your whole self to work" and attend group therapy sessions, and that they are now ostentatiously "values-driven", I can see a point in not distinguishing between them and religions. Pretty soon they'll have us singing hymns and attending confession. I'd hate if, when they finally go all in on that, they get taxed less.
Ehhh Christian churches are some of the largest charitable donators in the world. Unless those taxes are going to the same places to help people I'd vote no. The government isn't going to spend it on things that help people and we know that.
Unsure exactly what you mean, church costs - donations = taxable "profits"?
Not sure I really agree with taxing donations - I do think that it would cut down on how much churches bring in (as in people would be less likely to donate), and are able to distribute as a commenter above said.
Now, I do believe that all other related income should be taxed by churches, whereas I think only "unrelated" income is taxable now. So for example:
Church makes original christian music and makes income from spotify (or other sources)
Church records their services and puts them on youtube (and monitizes them)
Church rents out building for weddings or other events.
etc
(some of these may or may not be currently taxable, I am not an expert but my quick search seems to think they may not be)
Why? What do we need that money for? If you don't like it then just don't go to church and the problem is solved. Obviously less people are attending so it sounds like it'll just solve itself in the future. No one is making anyone attend church and give offerings. It's just letting the government double dip on taxes at that point. Everything given to a church is essentially a donation to begin with and you want to have it taxed a second time after the church gets it?
It's a waste of time to tax them and it's not going to be used for anything helpful in this country. After seeing where the US government is blowing our tax money on these supposed "stimulus" bills I can't understand why anyone would support taxing more things in this country.
> It's a waste of time to tax them and it's not going to be used for anything helpful in this country
If this is the best argument for not taxing churches, then I switch positions and say tax them and reduce my taxes. (But do it properly, which likely requires some Constitutional hand wringing.)
That'll never happen and you know it. It'll be tax the church and your taxes will continue to rise. It's just as silly as the idea that taxing the rich more will reduce your tax.
How about you just leave the churches alone and admit you're being biased because you dislike religion? The burden is on you to prove we need that tax money for something since you're proposing a change to something that's been in place since the US's inception and is a main tenet of the constitution.
And there's also the MAIN reason which is the fact that it's expressly against the 1st amendment since it would give the government the free reign to tax any religion it dislikes out of existence and break church/state separation.
If we started taxing churches, what would kill them would be the property taxes. Some churches are sitting on immensely valuable property.
In my opinion we shouldn't be taxing church graveyards, we should give the buildings an exemption if they use the buildings for non-denominational community events like so many churches do, and we should definitely be taxing their paved parking lots.
Who is 'we'? Sounds like you are a strongly political church advocate making a political argument.
I don't grant you the unilateral right to decide what places 'help people': that is a political question, and I didn't vote for you. You may not be particularly representative. In fact, according to the OP, you're not a majority here, so your attitude is not democratic, though it is still political.
You live in this country and church taxation is expressly forbidden by the 1st amendment for obvious reasons. I also do not attend church so that argument is moot and you can stop trying to attack me on that basis.
Being a majority on an internet forum is obviously not representative of the entirety of the US and is a pretty silly argument for changing an amendment, as is assuming that because people don't attend church they want it taxed.
Maybe you should take some time actually understanding the constitution instead of dedicating your time to inane internet attacks?
Pro tip - stop trying to control things you dislike, it's extremely anti-progressive and reeks of the same sort of intolerance ultra conservative religious groups display. Ironic eh?
Lastly, this country is not a 100% democracy and it's a Republic for a reason. That reason is so that the minority get a say in what happens and don't get stomped out. This is a good thing and you'll realize it when you're not in the majority at some point.
"In high school or at some point in my high school years, I read Huck Finn. There was a part in the book where Huck has to save Jim and if he saves Jim, he knows the church has taught him that he will go Hell. Huck denies the teaching of the church and saves his friend."
The following is my recollection of the book, it might not be exactly accurate but it is the way I remember it and or want to remember. Keep in mind, I read this close 30 years ago, so I read it without our current revisionist/racists history perspective. Please try to take my comments and thoughts only in the light of religion.
I do remember that reading that passage or that part in the story, saying to myself. “FTS”! I can’t reconcile this in my conscience. Religion is definitely the opiate of the masses. Look no further than the last few US elections. At that point, I disavowed any organized religion and started listening to Bad Religion.
My Faith isn't based on rules--it's based on forgiveness. I believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins. Through that my past is washed clean and I'm able to directly communicate with my Heavenly Father and receive the gift of salvation. If you believe in Jesus Christ, it should change your behavior and you'll hopefully live with the fruits of the spirit: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Faithfulness, Meekness, and self-control. Religion is the various rules and bureaucracy that we put on ourselves. Churches that promote rules and not living out your faith shouldn't be supported. I don't participate in a religion, I try to live my Faith and love others. I choose to participate in a church that supports community and loving others. We aren't meant to go through life on our own, I firmly believe that we need community and spiritual support.
As someone who is trying to find their personal beliefs (who also doesn't like religion) I really appreciate your comment.
Whenever I used to complain to my dad about how much I disagreed with 'religion' and churches, he always mentioned how 'religion' came from man, and since man is flawed it will follow.
It helps to shift one's focus on these principles of living rather than the establishments.
I grew up in a fundamentalist christian church. I'm now an agnostic deist (I don't know if god exists, but if he does, there doesn't appear to be much evidence that he intervenes much in his creation). My moral code has evolved and simplified from biblical to 'if it doesn't hurt anybody, it's fine'.
Frankly, I can't be bothered with any belief system which relies exclusively on a 2000 year old book and isn't measured by real world effects today.
I am impressed that numbers are that high, looking from the outside the US doesn't look particularly religious. It might be lower still, I don't think young people answer cellphone surveys all that much.
>looking from the outside the US doesn't look particularly religious.
I am genuinely wondering how you can get to this feeling about the US where religion permeates a lot of the social and political spheres.
For a Western country, I am actually quite amazed at the prominence of religion in the US, and by religion, I mean Christianity and its various incarnations. Looking at it from the outside it's actually really weird.
That's the key. For a Western country, the US has a remarkable level of religious influence on social and political life. Many non-Western countries, on the other hand, are vastly more religious - the state is often officially aligned with a certain religion, and religion is permeates all parts of society.
I think it's because many deem compassion as one of the main religious messages, and that's not something a European would think it's much of in the US (based on media and the right leaning politics).
Surveys like that are often designed to get a representative group. It's not like they call thousand people on random and keep their responses outright.
After a while a certain demographic will be "full" and as such the effort will be to get responses for the groups not adequately represented yet.
Or another way is to weigh the answers. If you get 90% responses from elderly and 10% from young, you cannot just use the average. But can use models to apply those groups' answers to how big the group is in the demographic of the country.
you're probably thinking of the main metropolitan and coastal cities, which I also associate with atheism. The heartland and southern states on the other hand are more religious.
The notion that people have suddenly become smarter or more objective or more rational has been blasted tume and time again, both by uncovering new past instances of rationality and by new blunders reminding us that it is our reason that evolved to serve our intincts, and thinking our reason is actually in charge is thus delusional. When people's physical needs are being met well, they become less religious. Look at relgious growth in undeveloped countries as an example. Those people aren't less intelligent than us, and if we point to education, we have data indicating our quality of education is decreasing while religious affiliation falls as well.
Even with physical needs being met, people have certain needs that religons were meeting. We should be careful what part of aociety picks up meeting those needs. Politics? Yikes we know what happens when the passion and absolute certainty of religion gets infused into politics, we are seeing it now. Science? Belief harms science, science requires skepticism even of our best axioms to avoid dogma. Don't drown people who ask questions your theory can't answer.
If we dont find a safe outlet for those residual needs, we are better off keeping religion around to fill them without giving it any temporal power.
I used to think that the lower church membership went, the better off we'd be as a nation, because we'd be more rational on average. I still think so, but I'm less hopeful now. The events of the last few years have called that idea into question, as the rampant irrationality that I used to associate with fundamentalists seems to have moved from the pulpit to the airwaves and now to social media.
Sadly, fundamentalism does not limit itself to religion.
Yet no matter how much you draw the obvious parallels in the social/political sphere, the teams are decided and criticism of any kind labels you a heretic.
Edgy opinion: religion is useful for guiding the human inclination to look for causes and reasons. All people will believe all kinds of nonsense, some people fanatically, so it's useful to make sure these people have healthy outlets. Lower church membership may not be the atheist utopia one desires, especially in the west with our rampant and unapologetic individualism.
There's a big difference between church attendance and church membership... Unfortunately, the original linked article glosses over the difference, while the original Gallup study digs into it. According to Gallup, approximately half of the recent reduction in church membership can be attributed to people becoming less religious, while the other half is explained by people who still attend church regularly, but avoid formal "membership" in a congregation.
And, to your point, the historical data is very telling. My understanding is that the idea that basically everybody in the US used to be super religious and go to church all the time is largely a myth. In fact, I believe the high-water mark for US church attendance as a percentage of the population was actually around 1990. (Source: Sociologists of religion Rodney Stark / Roger Finke. Their book "The Churching of America" attempts to get historical stats on this question, and includes this graph: https://madeinamericathebook.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/fin...)
Take from these stats/trends what you will. Just adding some additional context to the discussion.
> while the other half is explained by people who still attend church regularly, but avoid formal "membership" in a congregation.
I wonder if this can be explained by an increase in people moving around compared to a hundred years ago. I am a member of the church I was raised in, but I am not local enough attend. I do visit when I am with my parents but otherwise it doesn't make sense. I wouldn't go join another church though - even though I do attend other services in my city, I am not a member at those churches
Yeah, likely part of it. I think there's also been a rise in non-denominational and "seeker-sensitive" churches that just don't have any concept of membership at all...
A post religious society might not be a better one.
Religious institutions bring a sense of community and belonging. They are a large powerhouse in many social programs. Heck most children likely are preschooled through religious institutions.
I fear that post religion we could very well end up worse off.
Hopefully the declines will continue so that we approach the levels in Scandinavia over the next few decades. Religion has been a force of oppression and division for far too long. It has negatively affected my life, to the point that I am nearly estranged from my parents due to religious conflict, so my loathing of it is perhaps more personal than most here.
400 years ago I would have been executed for my atheistic views. 200 years ago I would have been a social pariah. Today my views are largely accepted in silicon valley and among millenials and zoomers on the internet, though I still face discrimination in the bible belt where I happen to live. Progress is being made, however slowly it may seem at times.
I've never been religious but for 30+ years I always considered myself christian. If asked on such survey, I'd answer with the church I used to go twice a year for Christmas and Easter.
One day I watched Ricky Gervais give interview on Cobert show (who's religios). And geez those jokes made me realize I'm actually and atheist. Now I would answer with no affiliation.
From my friends observation, many are on the same edge, where practically they are gone from church, but may still show up on survey. In such cases those membership rates are going to drop a lot and fast.
I think astrology is the new religion taking over the world. So many people I know are into it right now, it's unbelievable. All explain-everything religions tend to end up incompatible with modern life if there isn't a nation state or compact community to support them. Astrology has less broad claims on explaining how the world works but seems to provide a lazy framework to think about people, to explain "Why are people doing what they do"? In this sense we really live in a post modern world : No grand narrative seems to be taking root any more.
I can only speak from experience about Christianity: I have found very few sects of christianity that don't have some mixture of 1. arbitrary claim to absolute certainty regarding the "Will of God" --Bible is inerrant, the denomination's understanding of it is inerrant, etc 2. Non-sensical "lesson-of-the-week" structure" where very few actually make any progress on any lesson 3. blind acceptance that the church has to be a functional business. the first one is the most hurtful -- the leaders offer certainty when certainty is far from possible. It amounts to "God gave you your brain, but it's mostly for decoration, you don't need to think when it comes to your faith, just accept what we tell you/is written." The business side can also be hurtful.
I was reading recently about scientists attempt to measure cognitive differences between the religious and non-religious -- by looking at things like math proficiency. I think that's really missing the impact of religion. Religion doesn't make you bad at math, but it likely makes you bad at 1. finances -- how much pct of your income are you regularly giving away? 2. philanthropy -- how much of that income really went to helping people vs church administration, continuing the Sunday lesson? 3. Political engagement -- i would hypothesize that being religious leads folks to more frequently vote against their own self-interests.
Great news. At some point, hopefully humanity will realize religions are the myths of our less enlightened ancestors and we can all move on to something more interesting and productive.
As a believer that Jesus is God and he controls the whole universe and the lives of all people, I am not too concerned about church membership percentages in a particular nation in history. Whoever God calls to be his children will follow him, and they will find each other. Jesus is the head of the church, and people who don't believe in him have no part in it. I would hope that unbelievers would hear the good news of Jesus and be drawn to him and have their hearts changed.
I’d like to see a comparison between synagogue membership over time.
My wife and I are not actively religious but think it’s definitely a great framework and moral code. Particularly, it creates a community one can choose to leave or join of good people, working together for the common good of each other.
I grew up Lutheran and don’t necessarily believe in god, but I believe in the value code. Which is really what’s important. I think that’s what’s lacking these days, tbh.
I enjoyed my pretty low key episcopal church upbringing. There was very little dogmatism, and mostly it created a framework for community activities and service. Many of my friends in youth group were agnostic or atheist. And the church felt welcoming to everyone.
I wish something could replace this in my life. Something that felt softly mandatory that brought people together in a spirit of togetherness and service.
Do you mind if I ask why you aren't going to a church now? I had a very similar experience growing up involved in an Episcopalian church. I met a lot of interesting people who really cared about the community. Not long after I graduated and moved away, the church split over the introduction of Young Life (and their associated fundamentalist beliefs) as a replacement for the home-grown youth group.
It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned about my church's past. The priest there in the 80's molested kids who were part of the Boy Scout troop that met in the church's basement. Some church members found out, they contacted the diocese, and he was shuffled away to another state.
I was horrified. Older church members, people I had a great deal of respect for and spent most of my life looking up to, let him get away with it. They didn't go to the police, they went to the church, which allowed him to keep abusing children.
Looking for that sense of togetherness and community service, I've tried going to other churches since then. But deep in my mind, I know that all of the true believers will look the other way. The church I grew up in was a good influence on me and I met a lot of great people, but now that I'm getting close to having children of my own, I don't think there's any church I'd feel was right to take them to. The odds of anything awful happening are low, but knowing that these communities would not help them has completely turned me away.
1. Loss of faith in the institutions behind church (for reasons you cite). Similar debate around having a gay bishop in the episcopal church
2. I personally don't hold christian beliefs
3. Local church politics: My family wasn't involved in running the church, so we rarely saw the "politics". But in one local unitarian church I started to go to, the hardcore churchgoers seemed to always have some controversy, usually around left-leaning ideals.
Like many things these days, it's hard to just be casually involved. Those casually involved get turned-off (like the same reason I rarely go on twitter). And the vocal, hardcore folks stay involved, creating various biases towards extremism or a certain point of view.
I'm not a church-goer and now in my late thirties have seen many, including myself, have significant crises ending up therapy of some kind. Thankfully, these crises have all had successful and revelationary outcomes. Crises such as financial, relationship, burn-out, questioning purpose, depression. In all cases it's been a revelation for the people involved because they were simply unequipped to deal with the situation; didn't have the tools in their toolkit.
It dawned on me that as a kid I did go to church as part of school, and there I would receive almost daily "counselling", or at least broaching life issues, challenges and philosophical concepts regularly.
When not a church-goer, where does one get this same level of regular counselling, self-improvement or self-analysis? I'm not advocating religion though I feel like the concept of meeting regularly and talking about big issues is very positive, and I feel overlooked.
For the life of me, I cannot remember his name and I cannot find a reference, but there is a post-war German theologian who celebrated the kind of personal Christianity that doesn't require a church hierarchy, arguing that acting independently with the values of the faith without being told what to do is the best outcome.
There is an idea of "God-shaped hole" that is an urge to have a belief in something transcendent or greater than oneself. As the organized religion is in decline, politics or activism seem to become a substitute that provides belief, sense of community, and a vision for improving the world. This also explains why there is so little rational discussion across the divide of the political spectrum in the US.
The same political views can come from observations and reasoning, or they can be ingrained as a belief and be a part of one's [group] identity. In the former case a rational discussion is possible. In the latter case it turns into a challenge of one's personal integrity and devolves into a fight of the righteous against the heretical other side.
Are there individual churches that are doing really well and bucking the trend?
Maybe an individual church can't tell us much about the broader trends, but it would be interesting to see if people are moving to more extreme churches, or more liberal, etc.
I grew up attending church weekly but never considering myself religious. As an adult I don't attend but it does leave a hole in my life. That hole is having forced social interactions with members of the community each week. Without church it's much harder to keep up with what everybody is doing, making connections, and networking.
It's very hard to organize and keep running secular social clubs. A lot of the infrastructure churches take for granted has to be managed manually and you're at the mercy of venue operators and have to do your own membership drives to get people to show up. It's a lot more work than most people expect.
It maybe that I'm in my own personal bubble but it strikes me that so many people still invest a significant time and effort into propagating a delusional interpretation of reality. On some level I bear them no ill will, they are free to lead their lives in whatever way it brings meaning and fulfillment. However many people attending a Christian church seem to have aggressive opinion on how others should live their lives.
The biggest flaw with religion is their story of an afterlife without any proof or evidence. The consequence is that billions of followers of this delusion devalue the importance of their current biological existence, and that of others. They are told they will have an infinite and wondrous existence in a made up paradise. When this shared delusion is the dominant world view it leads to easily excusable murder and abuse of human beings. For example the genocides of indigenous people by European colonizers or slavery.
I suspect our ancestors in a thousands of years will look at this early childhood stage of humanity in shame and contempt for what cruelty this insanity allows.
I think a lot of people have thrown the baby out with the bathwater so to speak. There’s so much value in being spiritual but we get offended by the extremes of religion and toss it all away.
Originally I am from Ohio and I've lived in SF for 12 years. I am not very religious. In college, I lived next door to a cult like "Young Life" Christian club.
I notice people with extreme left wing fervor in the Bay Area behave in a similar manner to the Young Life crew. My thesis is: Their political beliefs are an independent variable and are not important. Had they grown up in a red state, their personality type would have been selected for and they would have become religious young life members rather than left wing activists. People who are right wing in the bay area, have more in common with those who were not religious in the midwest, going against the grain of society.
In short politics has become a modern religion and is replacing religion. And your personality type is being selected for, in your proclivity to join a group; either religious or political.
So "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." They all want to lord over me, whether religious or political. The distinction isn't important to me as I'm forced to bear their crosses regardless.
People seek power, and God can be thought of as the highest form of power. Religion empowers some people by building a relationship between them and the supreme power of God. It also offers other empowering benefits like community, tradition and sense of purpose. But our will to power can be satisfied in many ways, and the opportunities for pursuing power have increased over time. Organized religion is being out-competed by alternative sources of satisfaction of the will to power.
As someone that grew up non religious I’m genuinely bewildered at the concept of (especially the Christian) God. I understand the sense of community and potential psychological benefits of “knowing”.
But in terms of truth seeking, how can something that has never been demonstrated and without any evidence be so widely believed? We have no evidence for the existence of any God, let alone any specific God. Yet so many people claim to know the will and desires of this being.
I had difficulties understanding religion, until I had few religious experiences in the span of few years. Looking back, it was most definitely some sort of brain chemistry.
As environment becomes more stable, brain probably has less chances to get into religious channnels.
Not only that, this is self-reported info from a poll.[1]
Self-reported church attendance in the US is about 2x higher than what churches report actually showing up. Adherents.com used to have statistics on this.
What will be interesting to observe is how the US adapts to the ongoing need for the dozens of community-gluing charity responsibilities churches have historically taken on in American towns and cities. As church membership diminishes, the resources to do those tasks also diminish.
They can certainly be taken on by other charities; I'm curious how frictionless that process will be.
Church membership i think ignores the fact about the explosion in alternative beliefs and practices.
For example, meditation, san pedro, ayahuasca use etc has exploded tremendously and I think there is a significant cross section of the former religious population that have found relief from daily hustle via these alternative non-denominational activities.
I see religion as being a useful counterbalance to government power. I'm a little concerned how cultish politics is getting in the US. Racism is the new original sin. You can just call anyone racist to publicly condemn them as unforgivable sinners. I was very concerned about Churches being burned down in last year's Riots, the cult of personality around Trump, and the new woke culture that sees individuals as only members of some oppressed/oppressive group.
Transhumanism which I feel started with the abuse of steroids, is already upon us, and soon tech will give us the power to change and manipulate human DNA. Turns out many people don't like their bodies and would like to change them on mass. Will the changes have unforeseen consequences? Seems to me like things could go horribly wrong. The ultimate irony would be that we would end up looking like the depicted deformed and grotesque biblical demons. The obesity pandemic is already pushing many people that way. And thats probably a consequence of injesting too much plastic, and damaging hormone levels and pure gluttony.
I think at its best, Religion abstracts some useful concepts like humility, guilt, responsibility, and so on, into stories and parables and makes the insignificant individual feel like their life is important and part of a grander story. It adds the practice of rituals, and adds more exposure to art, music and community and self reflection, and reduces death anxiety. And it marks significant life milestones with community celebrations.
Is it better to be a realist, or is it better to add a layer of mental abstraction around reality. And feel like you are part of a (Movie) script and act accordingly.
But that in itself is a value judgment. You go from an "is" to an "ought" on how humans should behave. There's no logical reason why we "ought" to do any of these things. These are just a reflection of your values, and what you perceive in your mind would make the world a better place.
This is the same type of religious "value" based thinking you are criticizing without realizing it.
Why is "education" more important than a million other things. What if my son values playing sports more. He could easily make the argument that the world would be a better place if we played more sports. For one, less obesity. For two, more fun. We all be happier if we just played more sports. Why should I take your value judgments over my sons.
Human senses and feelings are easily fooled and influenced.
Scientific method have been established to overcome our personal selection, information and unconscious biases.
We need education to teach us how to learn, apply our knowledge and, most importantly, be aware of what we don't know when making decisions or forming opinions.
EDIT: I don't understand why one would have to choose between sports and education.
There's some interesting points made here. At the very least, I think there would be an immense value to society to add to our school curricula education about liking and taking care of our bodies.
I grew up going to a Christian church: Sunday school when I was younger, then youth choir on Wednesday nights, then regular church service for a couple of years in my early teens. I sort of grew out of it as I got older, because as I started thinking about it more, it made less and less sense.
For example, I distinctly remember our youth group leader, who was the wife of the minister, saying in one of our classes that we have to fear God. I didn't get it, and asked her "Why are we supposed to fear someone that loves us?" She didn't have a good answer, because there isn't one; it's another one of those things the Bible says that makes no sense. At some point, for me, there were too many of those and I could no longer pretend that Christianity made sense.
To me, the Bible is a major problem for Christianity. If you believe the whole thing, it makes no sense. If you don't believe the whole thing, then it becomes a fragmenting thing where some groups pick and choose these parts and other groups pick and choose different parts. But once you go down the road of "I only believe part of it, you can't take it literally, la la la", you're on a very slippery slope.
The Bible is a story book, written by man. It has some good stories, some good advice, and some bad advice. There is no hard scientific evidence that any of the miraculous things that supposedly occurred really did occur.
Religious people believe that the Bible is the "word of God". One of my big problems with the Bible is that if it truly was the word of God, doesn't it seem reasonable that he would give us some clues about how we fit into the universe? I mean, our whole planet is a spec of dust in the grand scheme of things. If God invented all this, and the Bible is a sort of road map, wouldn't it make sense to talk a little about the other parts of the universe - the overwhelmingly huge part - and not just our little planet?
You've accepted a literalist & inerrantist frame of the Bible, which is a very new way of reading the Bible. There are more sophisticated atheisms out there. :)
I went to a Protestant Christian school for 9 years and church until I was 16. As someone with learning disabilities, Tourette’s, and (at the time) gender identity issues; Christian’s made my life a living hell for things I had no control over.
I just came here to say that I really appreciate most of the civil discussion going on here on all sides. Doesn't seem entirely one-sided or extremely negative. Thanks everyone for keeping it that way!
I don't care about religions in general. It is not necessary to my daily operations, and I have no interests to have it intertwined with my life either.
Why would I assume there is some God anywhere anyway?
Science cannot explain love, nor why it is better to love than to be selfish. Science says survival of the fittest, so why aren't we all killing each other in a quest to stand atop the pile of bones?
There is more to the universe than what it observable. This in and of itself does not mean there is or is not a God. Spirituality provides us the motivation to be ethical and good instead of selfish and evil.
I’m not surprised and about time. Churches are taken over by the GOP propaganda and used as a blunt weapon to spread lies and false information by the GOP to steal their votes.
They also tend to be more conservative and I think that's starting to change their voting habits. A lot are leaving the left.
Edit: Ok just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not true. Minorities in this country are highly religious. Take a look at how many blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump this election.
You're being downvoted, but this can be true in the Hispanic community. One must realize that a third-generation Cuban American in Miami lives a totally different experience than a naturalized Colombian carpenter in East Boston, both of which might struggle to relate with the trials and tribulation of a Mexican or Guatemalan teenager who crossed the border alone during the past four years.
So yes: some fractions of the Hispanic community are highly conservative (the Cuban abuelitas and abuelitos playing dominos on Sundays LOVE to vote) and others are quite literally the opposite. One thing to note is that Spanish-language media leans conservative -- I think this is what you're talking about. Previously immobilized voting blocks in South Florida are leaning conservative partially because the news coverage of 2020 has been from a conservative angle.
They tend to be conservative on cultural issues, but "left" on economic issues and the true "triumph" of the hard right and the failure of the "left" has been that they tied these two things so closely together that people routinely vote against their own interests on economic issues because of how they feel about cultural issues.
You're not wrong, at least about hispanics. Many hispanics in the US come from failed socialist states, so they tend to come to the US looking for capitalism. And they tend to be religious and socially conservative.
Luckily for the democratic party, the republican party has doubled down on anything racist they can get their hands on, so many hispanic voters that would probably like to vote republican actually vote democrat.
Now if the republican party actually decided to reverse course on immigration issues and create a legal economic immigration regime with a statutory path to citizenship, they would probably lose a handful of trump supporters but they would likely gain a supermajority of the hispanic vote. And that could be an unstoppable political force for decades. Hell, I could probably be convinced to vote republican again.
TFA links to the Gallup site [0], which doesn't have as much about this as one would expect, but does say that "Non-Hispanic Black adults" are at 59% and Hispanic Americans are shockingly low at 37%.
Serious question, how does anyone reconcile the fact that if there's a God, he's a total narcissist? How can a perfect all-father creator be such a narcissist wouldn't that be the opposite of what you'd imagine a god-figure to be?
Worship me, come to me, I'm the one and only, no other gods but me... everything happens because of me... worship me or else you'll go to hell.
All things I swear a cult leader or Donald Trump or any other narcissist in history would say to their followers and they'd eat it up because they just want someone to tell them how to get through life.
It looks like the U.S. is running along a similar trend to the U.K. (and I'd guess many other countries, but I'm from the U.K.).
Church attendance falls, followed by membership, followed by people considering themselves "religious".
One of the tricky things in the UK over the last 3 censuses has been accurately capturing this, so that government funding and policy can be best targeted. People think "I celebrate Christmas so I'm a Christian", while never attending church, not identifying with any particular type of Christianity, not being able to talk about the content of the Bible even in a very general sense, and only generally thinking that there's probably some sort of god or something, and hopefully an afterlife.
This was so ingrained that the British Humanist Association (I believe humanism in the US is very different, here it's a secular belief system) had a big campaign during the previous census (2011) titled "If you're not religious, for God's sake say so!".
Despite not going to church or really taking part in any organised religion, people really don't want to be non-religious. I think we could better recognise this sort of generic "spiritualism".
Whether this is good or bad depends on what the substitute is.
Whatever it is, imo, intellectuals should be more involved in communities that cater to simpler folks. Otherwise, these often get co-opted by nefarious forces. See Qanon, Trumpism etc. Hopefully this is not people jumping to these.
But that IS intellectuals getting involved. QAnon is quite cleverly constructed. Just because it uses mechanisms similar to Nigerian email scams doesn't mean it's not intelligently constructed and administered. There are already intellectuals involved, they're just not pursuing disinterested goals.
I meant non evil intellectuals who oftentimes don't want to have anything to do with these communities which leaves them open to be manipulated by the evil ones.
So you've been burned by some folks at a church and you're struggling with the hypocrisy of the whole thing? A lot of us hear you, we’re sorry that happened to you, that stinks. Something inside you knows people aren't supposed to treat each other like that.
One thing to consider - the whole reason we have for knowing and understanding the person of Jesus Christ is because of those exact same types of people that hurt you. Jesus called out the leaders of the church in His time for doing all the kinds of things that are driving people like you away. In doing so, He made them so mad, they conspired with their sworn enemies to have Him killed.
"Well, anyway, I could never mindlessly worship someone who's so narcissistic he needs my uninterrupted attention."
Is that what God wants from you though? Repeated chants? Money? Have you considered a God that cares less about what you can do for Him and more about just being with you? Is it possible that someone who designed you knows what's best for your relationship - keeping you close to Him?
"Well, Christians believe in N and I'm !N, so no thanks."
Sure, I get it, we want a God that will love us for who we are - just the way we are. But sometimes we're more selective with our love without even asking the question "Yeah, God should love me, but do I love Him whatever way He is?" Are we willing to change any part of ourselves? The problem here is that if there is an intelligent God, He knows that anything we love more than Him becomes our god. Maybe that isn't the kind of relationship he's after. Maybe he wants our whole heart, not just a part.
And therein lies the issue, we aren't terribly loving to that kind of God, any of us. Most of us mess up constantly, and the most frequent way we do so is by hurting someone else He created and we elevate ourselves. That's the whole point. Look around, we're about 5 minutes from torching this whole thing to the ground. We blew it. And you know what? After all that, just like the day he was nailed to the cross - He forgives us, He still wants to give us a chance to make amends and draw near to Him.
Dear Internet stranger, shut down your IDE for 5 minutes and take some time this Easter to figure this out. Is it possible that God is near? That He wrote Himself into our story and happened to have the name Jesus? That He took the hit and died on a cross and He rose again to make your relationship with Him right? If God loves you, he's not going to drag you somewhere you don't want to go - that wouldn’t be love. Maybe forgiveness and a new start is holding out it's hand, but if it was, would you even be willing to consider it?
Late 30s here who was dragged to church by parents and grandparents but who isn't exposing our kids to religion.
It’s pretty straightforward for us: you don’t need fairy tales to be a good person and to come to terms with death (which comes for everyone). “Be happy, be kind.” If others choose to observe, that’s their choice.
I agree, but beware that many people end up filling a religion shaped hole with other things. look at how many of our fellow atheists have joined the church of social justice. adhering to a new kind of religion and dogma. things you can't say, heretics who must be cast out, good vs evil, original sin, preachers, zealots, self flagellation. it's all there, except for a path to redemption.
Your statement presumes that there is something innate about religion.
There are billions of people who live completely off the line of explicitly atheistic <-> avowedly devout. They are by their nature not generally considered in such discussions.
I think that at some level you need a belief system. There will always be things beyond us, so at some level the only thing we can do is guess. But we shouldn't let those guesses dominate our life and we should re-evaluate them completely, say, at least every decade.
> you don’t need fairy tails to be a good person and to come to terms with death
I don't think this is true in general. I have a pet theory that much of the conspiracy theory following we are seeing is actually a weakening of church. People need spirituality - it doesn't matter where that spirituality comes from (except for local social pressures - but those aren't relevant to this point). If they're not getting spirituality from church, it has to come from somewhere. So people latch on to conspiracy theories because it provides higher purpose in their lives.
If you are teaching your children to be good and to not fear death, you need some philosophical backbone with which to unify these ideas. You may well be able to provide that, but not everyone is. Religion serves as a common philosophical substrate for discussions that people don't know how to have. It is imperfect, and definitely not as good as thoughtful parenting in my opinion, but it fills some of the gaps.
I think you have a reasonable point embedded in a false dichotomy. People need to feel a sense of purpose, and that can come from spirituality, engagement with a community, service, fulfilling work, etc.
But what does it fill the gaps with? All monotheistic religions demand that you believe that an all powerful deity underlies and motivates everything in the universe. That's a pretty bold premise, especially since we're told that belief must be based not on evidence but solely on blind faith.
A 'gap filler' like that doesn't passively serve only to connect one social principle with others. In the case of Christianity, it compels you to believe that all of human existence arises from an invisible monarch who rules the universe and will damn you to eternal hell if you disobey Him.
If a 'gap filler' is what you seek to give life a bit more meaning and coherence, religion is a very inelegant way to do just that.
We raised our kids the same. Even allowing that they might want to go to church themselves. While I suggested it only once or twice they were not interested.
I think we all know what is right and wrong. And regarding death, none of us know anything at all.
Religion then might offer a sense of community and also solace for those times when there is nothing you can do but suffer. And for that I wish I could have found a religious community that I was comfortable with and could have shared with my children.
The closest I ever came was a Quaker Meeting my mother took my sibling and I too when we were young. Perhaps I should have tried harder to find another but it didn't seem as important as other aspects of raising children — finding as much time to do stuff with them, take them traveling, etc.
What is a "good person?" And do you really think people who believe in God are just listening to "fairy tails (sic)" so they can be face the reality of death? Is that really the best portrayal of Christians you can come up with?
Not OP, but yes, I think that any consumer of organized religion is doing it because fairy tales are easier than life and death is scary. That is all it really is, right?
IMO, that's the most insidious aspect of organized religion. Rather than acknowledging death as an engineering problem to be solved and overcome, it teaches people to embrace death and conditions followers to not even consider fighting back.
Exactly this. Humanity is reaching the point where we can truly transcend our biological limitations, yet many follow ideologies that tell them to not even consider this, and instead put their faith in some sort of magical after-death utopia obviously born our of generations of wishful thinking.
Though, I guess a meaningless death is scarier than death, and nearly all religions are attempts to form meaning in life when there's no empirically obvious meaning.
Christians base their belief system on a collection of stories from 2000+ years ago and the idea of a deity and other planes of existence (edit: “Heaven” and “Hell”) of which no proof exists. Please correct me if any of the above is inaccurate.
We base our beliefs in the teachings of Jesus, who was born as a human despite being divine; ministered to people he encountered, performed many signs, taught profound moral truths (e.g. through parables, small debates with the leaders of the time, or even breaking up angry lynch mobs), and then became a scapegoat who suffered, died, was buried and came back.
Everything else follows from that, at least in Christianity.
I suppose I believe in "other planes of existence" (is this supposed to be Heaven and Hell or something?), but those are contingent upon the truth of Jesus' suffering, death and resurrection. I guess I'd say I think we already exist in another "plane" which is immaterial and inaccessible in this life, but is nonetheless real.
I suppose I also "believe in a deity," but not with the connotations you seem to be suggesting. God is not some component of existence or reality or the universe, independent of other things; He is the only source of what it means to exist. I would say I don't even believe that God exists, but that He is below or outside of existence, as He caused everything else to exist that exists. If someone believes in God as a sort of Santa Claus or Jinn granting wishes, then no, I don't believe in that kind of "deity" either. That's just silly nonsense.
> If someone believes in God as a sort of Santa Claus or Jinn granting wishes, then no, I don't believe in that kind of "deity" either. That's just silly nonsense.
Isn't that a teaching of Jesus?
> 9 “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:9-11)
> He replied, "Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:20)
So why don't you believe in that?
I'm an atheist and can certainly see why it'd be silly to think that if you just pray hard enough god will grant your desire, but that's what the bible teaches. Otherwise, what's even the point of prayer?
And before you say "Oh, it was metaphorical" I'd point out the Lord's prayer where Jesus specifically prays for food. (Give us this day our daily bread). What is more good than for god to give a starving person food? Yet plenty of Christians starve, is it because they didn't believe enough?
If God is the source of all that exists, then wouldn't He be the source of "daily bread"? This doesn't imply that the bread magically appears (though admittedly the OT has manna in the desert), nor does it mean that sustenance doesn't derive from human labor. All it implies is that God is all-powerful, the creator of everything, and this is a request that He look after our material as well as spiritual well-being.
Also, I won't concede that things in the Bible are not often rhetorical or metaphorical when they in fact are. The Gospels themselves are full of the disciples having no friggin clue what Jesus is talking about, and asking him to "speak plainly." I think for maybe a child who can only interpret things literally, the concept of God as wish-granter might make sense.
Also, your own citation conditions the grant on "good" gifts. What are good gifts in God's eyes?
Ultimately, this is a matter of faith whether you believe this or not. But I only ask that you reconsider your juvenile straw-man of what we believe.
> though admittedly the OT has manna in the desert
Didn't Jesus split the loaves and the fish to feed thousands? Didn't Jesus turn water into wine? Or were those also metaphors? Why was manna in the desert literal while Jesus miracles metaphors?
The only reason you are saying "Oh, those were just metaphors" is because believing them literally is crazy. You have to insert meaning into Jesus's words because otherwise what he's told you is obviously false (and Jesus can't say something false, right?).
And yet the bible is filled with miracles both in the old and new testament. Miracles that directly contradict the notion that "Oh, they were speaking metaphorically when they said god would do miracles!"
Ultimately, this is a matter of reality whether you accept it or not. I only ask that you reconsider your juvenile beliefs.
> You have to insert meaning into Jesus's words because otherwise what he's told you is obviously false
Jesus didn't describe the miracle of the loaves and fishes, he was described as having performed it. Even if one accepts the traditional authorship of the Gospels (which even modern Christian scholarship doesn't consistently), Christ isn't the traditional author, just the subject (a small percentage of each of the Gospels is words attributed by the author of the gospel to Christ, but that's not the description of any miracles, though it's often the takeaway message associated with a described miracle.)
> And yet the bible is filled with miracles both in the old and new testament. Miracles that directly contradict the notion that "Oh, they were speaking metaphorically when they said god would do miracles!"
This is really only a contradiction if you assume that nothing in Bible can itself be metaphorical.
Biblical authorship is a huge issue all unto itself. Particularly if you are someone that believes the new testament is the word of god. The only sources we have were written 90+ years after the events they describes. It's very likely that Jesus said and did nothing written in the bible. Hell, it's even possible he did not exist as a person (Though, I tend to believe he did, I don't think Christianity would have formed without Jesus existing).
> This is really only a contradiction if you assume that nothing in Bible can itself be metaphorical.
Christianity has this interesting trick where their sacred texts are metaphorical whenever they say something they don't like or impossible. What good is the bible if it's all metaphors yet nobody agrees on which parts are metaphors?
Do you believe god performs miracles based on prayer?
If you do, that's a "Jinn-granting-wishes interpretation of God". If you don't, why don't you? Given the scripture references I gave you (and there are plenty of others), NT and OT are all about performing magic based on spell casters saying the right magic words the right way.
Of course, in modern times there are plenty of examples of failed Jutsus. (Not enough faith! Not in God's plan!) And I'd contend that all the examples of successful spell incantations are no more convincing than a wiccan's spells. The success rate of Buddhism has curing cancer will exactly mirror the success rate of Christianity or the Roman parathion interfering with humanity.
The elders used this logic to mock Christ suffering on the cross for many hours: "He trusted in God; let him deliver him now".
And yes, Christ told us to ask for the things we need, including material things.
Other reasons for prayer: thanking God; glorifying God; offering things to God, like our happiness or our good works but also our misery and our flaws. Contemplation; meditation; or just being silent and inviting Him to do the talking.
> We base our beliefs in the teachings of Jesus, who was born as a human despite being divine
The teachings of Jesus are a collection of stories from ~2000 years ago. That Jesus is/was divine is something which there is very little evidence for. But even if he was, his teaching are a collection of stories from 2000 years ago.
I feel like the Bible constitutes some kind of evidence for the divinity of Jesus. Weak evidence for sure. But evidence none the less. As I see it, even "Jimmy down the bar told me..." constitutes evidence of some kind.
There is no evidence the guy existed, either. They are most likely just stories meant to motivate a movement — nothing wrong with that in principle. Especially given that a lot of the message is “be kind”.
If you really believe that there's no evidence Jesus the man existed, then I wonder what you would consider evidence of any ancient person existing, or even evidence of any fact in general. The evidence does exist, and it is in fact convincing evidence, at least of historicity (even the Gospels are evidence, though several extrabiblical sources mention the historical Jesus as well, including ones opposed to Christianity like Josephus). IMO, the evidence of divinity is fairly strong, too, but can only be resolved as a matter of faith and not solely empiricism.
Also, Jesus said quite a bit more, and quite a bit more often than "be kind," though admittedly that's sort of the Therapeutic Moral Deism version spewed out popularly and in a lot of churches today.
I'd agree that Jesus' ultimate vision is humanity living in harmony with one another, but that this requires living in harmony with God, too. We're pretty terrible when we try to lean on our own understanding.
> then I wonder what you would consider evidence of any ancient person existing, or even evidence of any fact in general.
Without opening up a broader epistemic discussion: the question of the existence of specific people is quite a reasonable question. Because Socrates rejected writing, there is some question as to whether he really existed or was a rhetorical invention of his student plato. On the other hand, say, Sophocles is described by various contemporaneous sources. Caesar, Augustus and Marc Antony pretty definitely existed -- there is a lot of surviving contemporaneous evidence.
On the other hand the existence of a much more recent figure, Shakespeare, as the author of a body of work is still hotly debated in some circles (there is evidence that someone by his name was alive at the same time, but was that the person in question?)
There are no contemporaneous accounts of the life or death of Jesus; even Josephus whom you mention was born after the events described in the gospels.
> I'd agree that Jesus' ultimate vision is humanity living in harmony with one another, but that this requires living in harmony with God, too. We're pretty terrible when we try to lean on our own understanding.
That's a particular stance that requires judging terrible people who claim to have religious backing to have not been in alignment with a god. Both sides in a war claim divine support, after all. It's quite possible to live in harmony without any gods.
> IMO, the evidence of divinity is fairly strong, too, but can only be resolved as a matter of faith and not solely empiricism
If the evidence of Jesus's divinity isn't empirical evidence, then what sort of evidence is it? I've always thought of faith as meaning "belief despite the lack of evidence".
> I'd agree that Jesus' ultimate vision is humanity living in harmony with one another, but that this requires living in harmony with God, too. We're pretty terrible when we try to lean on our own understanding.
In general people seem to be pretty terrible if they lean on religious understanding too. I don't see much evidence that religious people are more moral than others. Personally I'm a big fan of Jesus's vision of living in harmony with one another, but I don't see why this needs to have anything to do with a god.
I'd go as far as Jesus being a collection of stories himself along with his teachings. There's no good evidence he even existed. None of the authors of the bible was even alive when Jesus supposedly lived. The youngest of the authors(cant remember which one) was born a couple of years AFTER Jesus supposedly was killed. Not even 1 text from any historian at the time has any mention of Jesus Christ.
Beyond the narratives in the gospels, Jesus the man is attested to in several extrabiblical sources. See, for example, Eusebius and Josephus. We have more evidence that the historical Jesus was real than, say, Cicero. And of course the gospels themselves and the existence of the apostles (also real) who almost all went to their deaths proclaiming that this Jesus guy was real are in fact evidence that He was.
Very, very few serious Bible scholars, even the atheist "textual criticism" ones, deny that the man Jesus of Nazareth existed. And almost all of them will acknowledge that, for example, the creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3 dates to within a few years (possibly months) of Jesus death. The denial of the historical Jesus is more a meme in New Atheist Internet forums, rather than a serious examination. It's about as serious as Ancient Aliens.
The incompleteness theorem proves unequivocally that our formulations that describe the universe are either incomplete (aka wrong) or cannot be proven correct. The question of planes of existence or deities sits at least on equal footing.
The most fundamental question is where everything came from. Even the Big Bang theory requires starting materials. The more generic -1 + 1 = 0 is neither useful nor has any mechanism for initialization.
Is little wonder that so many scientists tend toward simulationism. This is just god(s) with different trappings where unprovable metaphysics are studied through modern math and curves instead of ancient math and geometry.
It seems observational true that humans have an innate desire for god that is not seen in other species.
As a final note, the Bible teaches a final end of the wicked along with the final destruction of Satan along with the wicked (this was the proclamation at the beginning of the Bible telling them that if they sinned, they would cease to exist, through the major prophets like Isaiah’s woes against “the king of Tyre” to the New Testament talking of a final destruction of the wicked. The current tales of hell entered into Christian theology in the 3-400s when the mainstream denomination mixed in ideas from the pagan Roman religion. For this reason, you won’t find eternal torment for a few years of sin anywhere in the Bible.
Likewise, Heaven is simply the place where God resides (being called New Jerusalem). It is told that the city will descend to earth after judgment is complete. People don’t go to Heaven after death as some other plane of existence in the Biblical text. Instead, we see the archangel contending with Satan to raise Moses from the dead. Likewise, we see people raised from the dead when Jesus is raised. This would be unnecessary if they were already in Heaven. In fact, the whole Second Coming would be unnecessary if that were what was actually taught. Once again we see this idea entering from the same pagan sources at the same time.
Putting aside whatever people have told you and reading the book yourself, you’ll find something much different than the interpretations and sophistries people layer on top. This remains true whether you read as a believer or a non-believer (myself having experienced both at different times in my life).
That was the premise that an investigative journalist had in mind when he started an investigation to demonstrate precisely what you said to the rest of the world. Rather than starting with his assumptions and arguing against a strawman, he went to verify every fact he could and went to talk to experts. Instead of proving Christianity is a sham, he ended up converting to Christianity and writing a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Case-Christ-Journalists-Personal-Inve... .
TL;DR: Christians wouldn't say that we base our beliefs on a collection of stories. We base our beliefs in the historical fact of the Resurrection. Perhaps we'll find out we're wrong some day, but having considered the best evidence we have (and the book I linked to walks through why that evidence is compelling), Christianity is a reasonable position to hold.
Just because something is unexplained currently does not give any weight to the idea that it was a miracle.
Millions of people saw David Copperfield vanish the Statue of Liberty as well... But I certainly wouldn't be tempted to pretend he actually made it vanish
The miracle was also seen by sailors on a British ship off the coast of Portugal. Foley recounts an experience in England. He gave a presentation on Fatima at a college in England and was told by one of the teachers that her grandfather saw the miracle from his ship and wrote about it to his wife — “without obviously understanding what it meant or its significance.”
And finally, what most convincingly shows that the miracle was not only in the minds and perception of the witnesses is the fact that the crowd at Fatima felt the heat of the sun as it approached them, and their clothes and the ground — which had been soaked by torrential rain — were dry at the end of the miracle.
How does one claim this is just some optical mirage?
One doesn't. At least not only an optical illusion. There is no consistent set of reports. Given that the reports are all wildly inconsistent and contradictory, and many reported seeing and feeling nothing at all, it's clear the reports can not be be taken at face value.
In addition, the default shouldn't be "therefore miracle".
The default assumption should be "humans are easy to trick".
My claim here, is that if we put our brightest minds on this, they will come back with a terrifically mundane explanation for it. In the same way that weeping statues are always just water from a pipe somewhere.
Thousands of people producing wildly inconsistent stories, including many who reported not seeing anything at all, and a wide range of photographers who all failed to get a picture of the purported "miracle".
Get a bunch of people convinced they'll see a miracle and make them stare at the sun, and sure, you'll be able to get a lot of people saying they've seen a lot of things.
I know why you are asking this, but honestly it's a silly question.
Most humans have empathy. Most humans know "things and people that hurt others are bad. Humans helping others are good". For the few that don't, we've got legal codes built on the same principles.
The bible has very little morality in it that's "good" and a lot of really questionable moral statements. For example, beating slaves is OK so long as they recover in a day or 2 (Exodus 21:20-21). These questionable moral passages have been used to make a lot of good people, bad people. From justifying slavery, anti-"race mixing", anti LGBT+ rights, etc. So why hold it up as a good moral code? Because Jesus said "love one another"? He also said "No, I have come to divide people against each other! 52 From now on families will be split apart, three in favor of me, and two against—or two in favor and three against." (Luke 12:49-56)
> And do you really think people who believe in God are just listening to "fairy tails (sic)" so they can be face the reality of death?
That's a large part of it. Most believe in god because their parents taught them to believe in god. They continue to believe in god usually because of the fear of what happens if that world view is challenged or changed. A lot take "Pascal's Wager" very seriously, the believe because "If I'm wrong, I'll go to hell". Many believe because they are constantly reinforcing that belief, they surround themselves with others that believe.
Unless you are a fundamentalist, you'll look at the bible and see it's mostly a bunch of impossible tales. Most people don't seriously believe that god decided to kill the population of the world in a great flood because they broke his rules, they try and make it an allegory (or fairy tale).
So, stripe out all the tales that are allegories and what are you left with?
> Is that really the best portrayal of Christians you can come up with?
It's a pretty charitable portrayal. A less than charitable one is one that sees them as trying to force everyone into christian law. It's watching as they constantly push hate filled rhetoric into the public space because "The bibles says this is a sin". A less than charitable view of Christianity is one that sees all the megachurch pastors preaching a prosperity gospel to bilk old women out of their retirement savings. Those of us outside of religion see the most popular religions as cons draining capital while providing little in return other than "feel good"s. For all the good you can point that a religion might do, the most successful religions have multimillion dollar buildings, large salaries for their preachers, and starving parishioners.
You opened asking what is a "good person". I'd say a good person is one that doesn't take money from the poor and give nothing in return. Most christian churches can't be called "good".
>No, I have come to divide people against each other! 52 From now on families will be split apart, three in favor of me, and two against—or two in favor and three against."
This is somewhat oblique to the point you're making, but I find a lot of bible passages totally incomprehensible. What is Jesus saying here? That families will likely be for or against him, and that families will consist of 5 members, and each family will have an uneven split? (2-3 vs 3-2) It seems like a very pedantic and odd way to make the point I believe the author is trying to make. Does this rely on an old colloquialism? Is there some reason it's phrased so strangely? Would it not have sounded strange to contemporary ears?
I actually had a bit of a shock when I finally read old Greek writing: Herodotus, Plato, etc. Everything they write is meant to be clearly an precisely understood. Depending on the translation, the writing feels simple and modern. I had naively expected all old writing to be like the bible: incomprehensible, metaphorical, nonsensical.
> 49 “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 But I have a baptism to undergo, and what constraint I am under until it is completed! 51 Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. 52 From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. 53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
To me it feels like this is encouraging cult like behaviours. Support Jesus even if it pits you against your family. Losing your family is bad, but not following Jesus sends you to hell.
Because you are comparing the best and most well known authors of the period to the writings of a crazy underground offshoot of a minority religion. Masters of the craft vs that guy that believes in lizard people.
If you want a fascinating case study, look at what happened with the "book of mormon". It's a hot mess of gobbledygook and plagiarized stories yet to mormons it's the best book ever written.
Meanwhile, you had literary giants like Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo writing time honored classics in the same time period which are still very readable and accessible today.
I’ve been listening to the “secret history of western esotericism” podcast, and some of the writings of those guys is just as incomprehensible as anything in the Bible.
> Exodus 21:16 KJV And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.
The only lawful way to enter slavery was debt. Jews were freed in seven years and non-Jews in at most 40 years. This would actually be indentured servitude. Barbaric by today’s standards, but eminently humane by all other standards until the last 100 years or so.
> Exodus 21:20-21 KJVS
[20] And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. [21] Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.
The punishment implied here is death (an eye for an eye).
Someone owes you a ton of money. How do you get it from them? Today, large scale professional lenders spread out risk, but that wasn’t always the case. Instead, historically, not paying meant selling them into slavery to recoup what loss you could. Now, how do you ensure you get your money through their labor?
The logic follows. Likewise, if killing your slave risks your own death, it’s not something you’ll take lightly. If you did give out such a beating, you’ll be praying they pull through and are likely to never do it again. This falls into a similar category:
> Exodus 21:18-19 KJVS
[18] And if men strive together, and one smite another with a stone, or with his fist, and he die not, but keepeth his bed: [19] If he rise again, and walk abroad upon his staff, then shall he that smote him be quit: only he shall pay for the loss of his time, and shall cause him to be thoroughly healed.
In fact, I don’t think there was a penalty if the slave fought back against such a beating.
Even so much as knocking out a tooth was reason to be forced to free your slave.
> Exodus 21:26-27 KJVS
[26] And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye's sake. [27] And if he smite out his manservant's tooth, or his maidservant's tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth's sake.
Once again, such severe restrictions did not exist anywhere else in all known history. Jesus said that some restrictions (he directly referenced divorce) were less that God really desired because of humanity’s stubbornness. Divinely inspired or not, they were still revolutionary in their morality.
>Barbaric by today’s standards, but eminently humane by all other standards until the last 100 years or so.
Why are we judging the laws of an omnipotent being by the standards of humans thousands of years ago? Why can't we judge his laws by the standards of today? Why can't he have made the societies he ruled better for the poor, women, slaves, etc... He could have told the Israelites that women should be equal to men, why didn't he?
The core tenet of the law as seen by Christians today is justice tempered with mercy because of love and the the death of Jesus in payment for that mercy. If you break a windows, society is out the cost of that window. Justice demands payment by the breaker are the expense of something else they could do with the money. Mercy is when the window owner takes that debt theirselves. The debtor walks away free, but the owner must now still pay the price.
“The borrower is slave to the lender.”
While modern societies hold this to be untrue in name, it is very true in principle. Countries that owe large debts do what they’re told. Companies do the same. Even on an individual level something like student loans follow you forever. Even sin is referred to as an unrepayable debt to God. To take debt without repaying would be theft.
Even today, direct theft or deprivation of property or life is grounds for enslaving people for decades in something called prisons. You’re only complaint here is about what debts to people and society are punishable by slavery.
It’s also worth noting that debtors prison and indentured servitude existed over a half century after slavery was ended and slavery as punishment is still explicitly allowed under the US constitution.
To reiterate, the slavery presented in the Bible as a means of repaying debt is actually what we’d call indentured servitude. In contrast, slavery as practiced in the US was absolutely indefensible according to the Bible. The Bible proclaimed the slave traders as worthy of death. All the massive abuses would have immediately led to slaves being released and more than a few slave owners being executed. Finally, with all slaves being freed every 40 years making multigenerational slavery impossible (don’t forget that freed slaves were also to be provided with a means to sustain themselves —- the oldest source of “40 acres and a mule“).
Has society actually improved on this point? At most we’ve replaced it by stealing from every individual and giving that to pay the debt of others, but a group buying a slave’s freedom also existed with the difference that the money was to be volunteered rather than taken by threat of force.
The Bible clearly says enslavement without cause is injustice worthy of death. Once debt is accrued, someone must pay. The old law gives justice at all costs (forgot to mention, but slavery was a court matter). Jesus differed in teaching that while justice was fair, mercy and the self sacrifice of forgiving debt was better. By the way, this argument is rather similar to the one given by the original abolitionists who were almost universally fundamentalist Christian sects.
Now, the burden of proof is on you. Prove without religion that slavery is immoral and indentured servitude is unjust.
> Divinely inspired or not, they were still revolutionary in their morality.
That's not a game you can play with an all knowing all powerful arbitrator of absolute truth.
It would have been so easy for god to say "Hey, slavery is absolutely wrong and immoral and I don't condone it". So why didn't god? Why didn't god speak out against rape (instead putting a price tag on it and selling the woman to the rapist)? Why did god command genocide? Why did god kill millions? Why didn't god give basic health and hygiene advice? "boil water before drinking it to avoid death"? Why did god mark animals as "unclean" rather than just saying "Hey, you need to cook pork more so you don't get sick".
See, that's the problem with an all knowing being. God can't be fallible or else it's not God. The fact that you and I can come up with what we'd both agree are moral rules not found in the bible is very problematic. Things like "Woman deserve to be treated equally", "Hitting your child is wrong", "It's ok for people of different races and nationalities to marry each other", "Inflicting pain on heretics is wrong". All problems of history easily addressed. Yet instead, god felt the need to talk about not eating shellfish and the right way to trim your beard.
Well yeah, that's the Münchhausen Trilemma. When looking for a final reason, if you don't want to make an axiomatic argument like "because God", you must end up either going in circles or down an infinitely deep rabbit hole. Since none of these options are satisfactory, the search for a final reason is doomed from the start (though it can still be fruitful).
I'm sorry to see the downvotes since this as an intelligent point. I'm not religious but one thing I do envy in my church-going friends is fellowship.
I'm a man in my 60's, and maybe all this is not applicable for the majority of folks here. But people don't have
groups like clubs or bowling leagues very much anymore. Watching TV at home is fine, but not enough. (I'm in a club that is now breaking up, as these things do, and I think there is a very good chance I will not see these friends regularly again, which is too bad.) Of course, I could volunteer at a food bank, etc., but people I know that are in a church seem to find it more natural.
In my experience nothing has been able to replicate what religion does for communities. Every Sunday hundreds of people get together and chat over coffee before service. This mass gathering offers the opportunity to find other people with similar interests which in turn leads to small groups. Some will say, "That's what meetup.com is for.". I agree, meetup.com is great, but it doesn't have that central core of hundreds of people before splitting up into smaller groups. Meetup.com cuts out the larger group entirely and pushes people into smaller groups automatically. That's an important thing that gets lost.
I meet like minded friends from the group classes at they gym, working at a homeless shelter, some conferences, being on the school board. “Like minded” means these aren’t folks with whom I only discuss things related to how we met.
That’s kind of how society works, right? If you go to some sort of religious festival it’s merely another form of this.
Much like claims about morality, the claim of the religious to be the only glue that can hold communities together is an obviously false claim that the religious get to make with a straight face because of the moment in history that we live in. In the United States, the primacy of Christianity over the last few hundred years has resulted in a culture that maintains nonsensical claims like these enshrined and untouchable.
Of course, this had to change eventually because the underlying supernatural theories are self-evidently false.
For minus the supernatural claims, religious is just another secular organization which fosters certain cultural and social beliefs, like many, many, many others. There is nothing special about religion and there never has been. Human beings do not require certain questions to be answered with recourse to magic in order to function. See the atomic theory for a counterexample.
I beg the moderates among us to agree that community is good, but to insist that it need not come with ridiculous magic strings attached.
While I agree that there is something important to be said for maintaining a sense of community, it obviously does not require any kind of supernatural belief to do so.
I would argue that the cost paid by society due to the institutionalized anti-intellectualism embodied by the church and largely embraced by the government far exceeds whatever communitarian benefits the church itself contributes to society.
But the thing is, these non-religious communities tend not to be stable long-term, they're not as well-coordinated, and don't seem to influence people's behavior all that much.
Abstracted from all particulars of a given belief system, religions seem to be a refined, hyperoptimized form of community building.
That's a lie that religions keep perpetuating. Many social groups exist that are just as fulfilling.
My gym for example is full of people who actively work in the community, help each other and gather multiple times per week to better themselves and encourage their community.
Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer.
Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer.
While this might be true in theory, I have not found it true in practice. I am no longer religious and I have not attended church for 20+ years, but despite trying many of these secular 'alternatives' to church I have yet to find anything as open, welcoming and socially supportive as I found church.
edit: Yes, I know this isn't everybody's experience, and yes some churches can be extremely bigoted, exclusionary and downright evil to people they perceive as 'others'.
What you say about churches being welcoming agrees with my experiences too, from what I've seen of others, given that I don't attend. But I think faith is only part of the reason for attending.
Essential in the choice to join a church is the desire to seek out a kind of 'marriage', where for better and worse, you promise to look out for others in an extended family and to help them when they need you. That sense of belonging is one of the big things that brings everyone in a church together -- the wish to be part of a community that regularly joins together and where you can share your life with others.
As someone who has been involved in both Churches, Church-associated social clubs, and no -Church social clubs, yes, it absolutely can; in fact, what you describe is explicitly part of the concept of many non-Church social clubs, some of which evolved from (or in the tradition of) organizations which started as sub-church organizations within churches by which this function was more tightly expressed for members than in the broader church.
But even where it isn't explicitly part of the deal, it's very common to evolve as an implicit part of a social club.
Do you imagine that one of the social groups you belong to would willingly play the role in your life that church members often do? Would someone from one of your groups:
- drive you to a doctor appointment?
- repair your house when you can't (perhaps due to injury)?
- take you in for a few days after a crisis at home?
- prepare a week of meals for you, if needed?
These are fairly commonplace roles that I've seen filled routinely by members of a church that I've seldom seen arise from other social networks. And never from a health club.
I don't attend church but I've regularly seen this kind of extended community in others who do. The role churches play of an extended family is incomparable to any other social network I know. This degree of compassion and service to non-family members seems to require a greater common bond than just sweating together.
> Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer.
Similar to ethnic nationalism, it can and
throughout history has provided the glue that holds groups together when they are in conflicts with other groups.
Unlike a secular club, religion cements this power inter-generationally by insinuating itself into the key human institutions of marriage, reproduction, child rearing, and membership in the religion. If you look at any ethno-religious state in the world (i.e. many middle eastern countries), they function this way.
The experiment of a secular national identity (based on shared beliefs about people's rights and dignity) is the only institution that can effectively fulfill this aspect of religion, but as we are now seeing, it can also stumble if it doesn't tend to the needs of its constituents well enough.
Yes, we’ve had to create our own social fabric that a church would’ve been, but as our loved ones and friends are spread across the country and world, a weekly gathering would do us little good.
The challenge is to build community without the judgement that comes along with the beliefs required to attend a church. We strongly support LGBTQ+ folks, the idea of ethical non monogamy, people who elect to be child free, etc, which through our travels and experiences with religious believers, we’ve found incompatible with any church social fabric.
You may find that you judge others, and others judge you, without the help of religions. Some would say that’s one theme of Christian belief, “judge not, lest we be judged ourselves.” You are ironically doing what you find fault in, judging others. “Christians are too judgmental.” Well, so are non-religious folks and they don’t have any scripture or religious leaders to remind them to be humble, not to cast stones, turn the other cheek, love thy neighbor. If nothing else look for counter examples, the many people of faith who do a lot of good in the world through charity and spiritual work. I assure you, these people exist. Don’t fall prey to confirmation bias and a culture that stigmatizes faith and spirituality as unsophisticated and oppressive, it’s literally the opposite of the truth if you look at it empirically.
> ...without the judgement that comes along with the beliefs required to attend a church.
You're responding to fundamentalism and certain non-fundamentalist denominations that take fundamentalist views on selected issues.
Look at recent denominational schisms: Episcopal Church (United States), the United Methodist Church (resolution is on the table but delayed due to the pandemic), etc. The people on the right side of history and the church are winning, and the bigots and fundamentalists are splitting off.
You don’t care about it’s positive influence on other people? I understand feeling like you are enlightened and psychologically adjusted such that you don’t need anything beyond science and your own intellect, but surely you see the positive effects it has on other people, and cultures? Do you really think a world without black churches is a better world?
If people need to fear a God or Hell to be a good person, there is value in the stability that generates. Plenty of people out there who do believe and still do terrible things to others.
If someone has a positive experience at church and it adds value to your life, I’m not judging nor do I have anything bad to say about the value it provides.
That’s a crazy leap to make from my statement which was that killing off black churches would not make the world better. That is the key counter factual for those who claim religion has no benefit to society, or even stronger claims that it retards our moral progress. I think the evidence is clear if you’re honest about the data. Faith helps people with life’s difficulties. I’m certainly not saying any one group needs faith more than any other group. No Christian person will ever make such a claim which is antithetical to the core premise of Christianity, universal brotherhood.
“Man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon. If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon he will be dragged by it, yet the choice remains his: to run or be dragged.”
We’re all default dead in the long run, make the most of what time you have with whatever brings you joy and happiness. Choose to run.
I guess that’s the thing - I do choose to run every day.
I love my wife, I generally enjoy my job. I literally run in the park everyday. I don’t sit around in a dark room despairing (at least not until I go to bed).
I do my absolute best to get the most out of life. But the feeling of dread stays with me no matter what I do. It taints every memory and every waking moment. I can’t run from my thoughts, try as I might.
It’s okay to be afraid, courage isn’t a lack of fear, but overcoming the fear you have. You have an entire life ahead of you to make peace with the cycle.
If you want to chat more, let me know how to get in touch.
Thank you, I really appreciate the offer. This feeling is definitely something I'd like to free myself from, and you seem to have figured out how to get a sense of peace. I'd love to chat.
My email is charliecollard0 at gmail dot com.
I feel like such a fool for going down this path, but I've recently been reading up on life extension, and Aubrey de Grey in particular. In fact, I did a Google search for his name on hacker news, and this thread came up and I recognised your handle in the discussion!
It's embarrassing how much relief even thinking about the possibility of having more time with the people I love gives me, compared to everything else I've tried. Do you think it's healthy to have this in the back of my mind as a possiblity? My rational side wants to dismiss it as just another religion of a different shade, and I feel it does set myself up for a lot of disappointment at an older age. After all, if it sounds too good to be true...
It's the other way around. The religion needs to be investigated to see if it provides proof of its correctness, and if it does, there really isn't reason not to accept it other than wanting to follow personal desires.
On the other hand, we are a people of stories. Stories help to explain abstract concepts and elucidate our values.
Everyone has a belief system, even if they are unaware of it.
I am interested in one more detail.
average family income for all church members.
I have observed hindus, muslims, christians, jains.
My observation so far is, religious fervor is directly to 2 factors.
1. is that religion a minority in a given state ?
2. whether you grew up in prosperity (not wealth, but above middle class)?
societies which are poor tend towards fundamentalism.
religion gives some sort of escape place where poor might forget their harsh reality and usually its provides some sort of alt-reality that their after life is going to be good.
rich people who already seen those comforts dont search for such answers.
Also, if that particular religion is minority in a country, the religion offers companionship and keep the group close. also, it forms the main identity of that group which is difficult to get away from.
for the above reasons, In india, there are a lot of atheist hindus, but not many athiest muslims or atheist christians.
I have the impression this does not necessarily apply to the US. There are plenty of examples of... vicious(?) fundamentalists that are rich and of the ethnic majority.
I think that the people about whom you're talking tend to use fundamentalist religion as means to enforce existing power structures from which they benefit; there's a reason that modern American conservatism is so inextricably tied to the evangelical churches, and why Southern Baptism was once used to justify the capture, sale, forced labor, and breeding of human beings with different skin colors.
I guess what I'm saying is that your point is not mutually exclusive with the comment to which you're replying, and that extreme religious values can have multiple "purposes," explicit or implicit.
ketzo is accurate.
if a rich person is supporting fundementalism, its mostly to consolidate their power and protect his/her wealth.
Rich hindus allways have means to do so with out resorting to fundementalism.
for example, ambani supported congress (which is anti-hindu), and when congress got weak, he started support BJP (which is pro-hindu).
In both cases it is to protect his own interests.
The Christian church has gone through an interesting time in 2020. Many churches have lost attendance as pastors closed their doors or tried to stay out of politics, while other stronger pastors who have kept their doors open despite lockdowns and are speaking up against the US government with respect to threats against religious freedom (eg see H.R. 5) -- those churches are stronger and more vibrant than ever.
I'm not 100% sure who and what you're referring to (having followed only my own church of late), but it's worth vaguely agreeing with the sentiment that successful religious establishments have some meaning — and moreover, a meaning that's materially different than what the secular world around them has to offer. If they're just an extension of whatever is popular these days, people will simply cut out the middleman.
Isn't everything a bias in some way? But point taken. I don't attend multiple churches, I attend one, and it, like others of its ilk, has been under attack, so observations are of course my own. But if you want to mute the language some, let's s/strong//, s/freedom/choice, and s/vibrant/well-attended.
I respect your opinion and sadly I think you misunderstood mine, but we definitely disagree on "hard thing" and "greater good" but you're right it's a much much longer conversation to go into those through comments.
Cultural politics has replaced religion. I'm sure if you did another poll, 90% of the US would say they are tightly aligned with a single political party and would not befriend/marry/hire someone of a different party. Tribalism and belief systems aren't going away, they're just changing the wallpaper.
As a practicing Catholic this is greatly troubling. I truly want all to be saved. I fear "progress" that so many non-religious people will tolerate and irreligious will promote. This is not new. Abortion has been pushed for decades and is the greatest sin of our age. Our generation will be looked back upon the same way we look back at slave holders/traders. Those who dehumanizing the vulnerable to the point were we can kill them because they are not persons. 60 million have been killed since legalization in the US.
But what are irreligious people supposed to do when multiple large groups of people want to "save" them in mutually incompatible ways? Seeing as the largest religious group accounts for something like 30% of the world's population, being religious means at least a 70% chance of being wrong even if there is something supernatural (100% if there isn't). That's a terrible stat figure for life- (and death-)changing decisions.
