Unfortunately, your response, in the context of “ignorance = not knowing,” demonstrates a certain level of ignorance.
Even before Christianity got started, Jewish scholars looked at the Ten Commandments and identified them as two sets of instructions, the first dealing with being right with God and the second set dealing with being right with one’s fellow man. That they were handed down in the form of prohibitions against specific acts was considered to be a function of the process in which they were created. They were a part of a package of laws and laws at that time were typically expressed as prohibitions. (A fact that has not significantly changed, today.) The prohibitions against idolatry and the vain use of the Lord’s name and the command to worship were the guidelines to know when one had failed to demonstrate love toward God. Similarly, the command to honor one’s parents and the prohibitions against inflicting various injuries on one’s fellow human were considered the guidelines to know when one had failed to display love toward one’s fellow human.
This was not even a radical idea in the first century and the fact that many Christians fall back on the shorthand of St, Paul instead of laboriously drawing all the points on the psychological chart and then connecting all the dots may be criticized as laziness or a lack of curiosity, but you are in error when you claim that Paul’s statement is incorrect simply because you have not shown the intellectual curtiosity to discover the relationship he identified.
I’m sorry that your interesting thread became such a trainwreck. I read through it to see if anyone had actually responded to you, no chance.
I don’t consider ignorance as having anything to do with behavior, but only knowledge. Someone having an anger management problem has nothing to do with his level of ignorance. Communication is a skill. I’ve taken classes, and conference feedback says I’m pretty good at speaking, but that is an inborn talent, and has nothing to do with knowledge.
You’re right that we’re all ignorant about most things. I think the problem shows up when we’re ignorant about something we express an opinion about, or about something important to us. I’m ignorant about football, but it doesn’t matter unless I injected myself into a football discussion.
Consider evolution. I don’t really care if Mr. Ditch Digger knows nothing about it - but if he starts going to school board meetings yelling about how it’s just a theory, he should educate himself. His ignorance matters more then.
Religious people need to educate themselves if they consider the Bible important. I went to 5 years of Hebrew school, but I only got a whitewashed version, that never covered the secular interpretation. I only stopped being ignorant when I read the entire Bible for myself, and books about it. If I believed I’d probably read it again, but once was enough to make me an atheist.
We need to distinguish ignorance from lying. Joe Baptist may be ignorant, but the creationist leaders almost certainly know what evolution says. They lie about it, and quote mine, so I consider them evil, not ignorant.
Hope this makes sense, and we can ignore the rest of the thread.
That is a misconception held by many who think that all Christians are fundamentalists or exclusive in their beliefs.
Many, many Christians have no problem with believing that there will be others beside Christians who will not be sent to hell. (Billy Graham is one of them.) And I think most Christians believe in a scientific explanation of creation as taught in classrooms.
I don’t believe that there is a hell and I do believe in evolution that has taken place over billions of years. I’ve not been considered a heretic by either of the denominations that I’ve belonged to.
Sir Oinksalot, there are two different versions of the Ten Commandments. Some groups use one and some the other. The basic wording is the same, but how they are combined is different.
Like the First and Second “Great Commandments” of the New Testament, the first half of the Commandments are about what we owe to God and the last half is about what is due to our fellow man.
Christians believe that the wages of sin are not death, but, with repentance (through Grace), forgiveness.
I can believe this, though I’d like to see some numbers. I’d like Biblical justification even more. But I freely admit that most Christians are more moral than the Bible.
I started a thread a while back showing that most Christians believe God created man in his current form. This number doesn’t count for those who believe in god-directed evolution, which is by definition indistinguishable from secular evolution.
The numbers are quite different for Christian Dopers, of course.
I know this thread is a bickering lost cause, but for the record I don’t see why laws of nature might not be different outside this universe, if such a place can be said to exist. And if a god is postulated as being the ‘first mover’, why does His origin need no further explanation? Rather convenient…
Because a postulate is something taken as true for the purpose of the matter at hand. This means that the entire God structure is erected on the assumption that God has always existed. Further assumption are that God is benificent, omnipotent and omniscient. The latter three seem to me to lead to all sorts of contradictions such as how does a God having those properties allow such evil things to happen to His children? This is usually answered by referring back to the original sin of Adam and Eve. In short God can really hold a grudge. Or else it is held that God is infinite and has reasons that we finite humans can’t possible fathom so it’s best not to even question.
The business of “free will” is sure to come up. But why should free will per se lead to bad choices?
Just to be sure, you’re not implying that I have already committed that fallacy, are you? Because I cannot agree that I have done so. As I understand it, the fallacy of composition does not occur unless an assertion from a sampling is claimed to describe the whole, which I have not done. I have written only of the majority rather than the entire population of either the United States or the world.
And let’s please try to remember that the SDMB is not a scientific, religious, or philosophical journal. It’s silly to expect me to be authoritative and final here. The statistical findings of reputable pollsters are, I insist, more than adequate justification for the purposes of such a forum as this to allow us to make reasonably strong (though of course not infallable) arguments – surely at least in this instance.
So to answer your request, here are the rough steps I employed in my reasoning:
[list=I]
[li]I start from Prothero’s report that “According to recent polls, most American adults cannot name one of the four Gospels.”[/li]
[li]I gathered further from Prothero and others that most American non-adults (teens) are even more ignorant than the adults (as we would expect), although admittedly they did not ask the teens the exact same thing; i.e., to name at least one of the four Gospels. But what they did ask about the Bible seems suitable enough to me to draw reasonable, if tentative, conclusions, especially considering that, unlike the adults, the teens were given multiple-choice options which, I contend, would make them appear more literate than they would otherwise. Here is a sample of those questions:[/li]
[ul]
[li]“Who said, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’” – 66% of American teens could not answer correctly given 4 multiple choice options.[/li][li]“What happened on the road to Damascus?” – 66% of American teens could not answer correctly given 4 multiple choice options.[/li][li]“Which of the following quotes is from the Sermon on the Mount?”[/li][list]
[li]Physician, health thyself[/li][li]Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven[/li][li]My father’s house should be a house of prayer[/li][li]Fear not, I bring you tidings of great joy[/li][/ul]
– 63% of American teens could not answer correctly.
(On the plus side, while they were not asked to recite the Ten Commandments (an admittedly more difficult task) and were not asked to name any of the four Gospels (an extremely easy task), the majority were able to answer particularly easy questions, such as whether or not a Commandment against divorce was part of the Decalogue – but only when given 4 multiple-choice options.)
[/list]
Therefore, I submit it is safe to argue that American adults are less biblically ignorant than American teens and children, which buttresses of my argument rather than diminishes it. That deals with “American non-adults”.
[li]Next, I considered whether the polling of American adults would be suitably representative of Christians world-wide. And my analysis has led me to believe that adult American Christians would actually demonstrate higher biblical literacy (less biblical ignorance) than what we would expect a world-wide representative polling to show.[/li]
I reached that result when I took into account these distinctly probative data:
[ol]
[li]The United States is home to the overwhelming majority of Christians (see: Christian Statistics: The Largest Christian Populations.[/li]
[li]The United States is home to by far the world’s largest population of strongly Bible-centric (evangelicals (lower-case “e”) and other “born agains”, etc.) Christians, whom we would expect to be more literate concerning the Bible than non-American populations (I consider this to be common knowledge, but it is implied by the next point if nothing else).[/li]
[li]The rest of the world’s Christians consist overwhelmingly of Catholics (such as the Christians from Brazil, Mexico, Philippines, Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Colombia, Argentina, etc.), a sect whose adherents are at or near the bottom of what we can consider relative Bible-centricity. (I can attest to this as a former Catholic and student of 12 years of Catholic education, where none of my teachers or priests or nuns urged anyone to read the Bible, and when I did so on my own, I was considered “weird” by my peers).[/li]
[/ol]
[/list]
I contend that, from all of these points in combination, it is reasonable to draw the inference that a survey of adult Americans’ Bible literacy would very probably find better results than a world-wide poll of all Christians would find, and at the very least roughly equal. Almost certainly not the reverse. QED (sorta).
Now, please don’t lecture me regarding the fact that this is hypothetical and tentative; I know that perfectly well. And, Holy Bob, please stop the nit-pickery. I still believe that I have made my point.
Note that the current Pope’s proclamation make this an incorrect teaching for today’s Roman Catholics, who make up the vast majority of the world’s Christians.
Personally, I feel they most definitely chose the wrong Pope. Again. He’s pushing the Roman Catholic Church farther and farther from moderate into right-wing crazyland. And I thought the last Pope was bad!
The Pope can argue what the teaching will be, but he still can’t order what a person’s belief will be.
I keep waiting for another Pope John to come along. (sigh)
You were doing fine until you got to that part about not questioning. It’s human to question. I just think any God we could imagine would be too small.
Voyager, I regret that I’m just now finding your response to me.
About non-Christians not being turned away:
I’m not very happy quoting Scripture to back things up. The Bible is very contradictory when it’s taken apart verse by verse. I don’t pay that much attention to the Old Testament – I am finding that restudying it now is unsatisfactory just as it was when I was young.
There are parts of it that are beautiful literature – parts that ask questions of me rather than unloading on me. I do like that. But for the most part, I am a New Testament person.
I just wasn’t exposed to the idea of an angry God when I was growing up. The first time that the concept was even presented to me was in high school when we read the old Puritan sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In the 1950s rural South, we found this idea laughable. We felt sorry that people were exposed to the idea of a non-loving God. It never occured to us that anyone would try to pull that business on us!
And for the most part, it hasn’t been other Christians who have approached me about an angry God, it has been the militant branch of the atheists (a small but vocal minority) who continue to demand an explanation for the God portrayed in this part of the Scriptures. I don’t have any answers. I don’t know that God.
I’ve always seen God as a loving figure who loves his children far more than any earthy father can.
My Dad was one of the kindest men you could ever have hoped to meet. And I think that he loved me more than anyone else has ever loved me. He was very tender-hearted. That man would have done anything to keep me from suffering. I can’t imagine that God would do any less for any of his children. A God that would condemn his children to eternal suffering just doesn’t fit with what I have “experienced” of him.
And that experience had not come from within the pages of a Bible. And I can’t claim to “know” anything the way that we “know” scientific information.
If you have a talent for something, can you explain to someone how you have that talent?
I don’t know how I know where my fingers go next on a keyboard to get the sounds I want when I’m playing a piece. Sometimes it is like silk off a spool and sometimes I can hit really sour notes. But the music is there.
You’re still not showing logically valid steps. You cannot take a figure saying 66% of American teens (who may or may not be Christians) believe a certain thing, and draw any logically valid conclusion about any other group who is not an American teen. Now I agree if you throw in your own experience, intuition, and knowledge, and use that as Kentucky windage to interpret various studies, you can come up with a reasonable hypothesis that has a good chance of being proven true. And I happen to agree with that hypothesis. But it isn’t remotely a proof, and it isn’t nitpicking to point out the fallacy of composition where it exists. You’re in a hole, you need to stop digging.
Whatever. I just don’t get how you can take a tentative and hypothetical extrapolation of a not-apparently-relevant citation, then demand that I should be ashamed for being so intellectually dishonest as to question it. Sheesh. Try that in any other topic and you’d have your ass handed to you on a plate.
Why bother? Seriously, if someone debating as a theist had done something like that, it would immediately be pounced upon and labelled ‘mental gymnastics’ or ‘flight of fancy’ - if someone had tried to support an assertion on some other topic with a cite like that one, he’d be buried under a pile of scorn and derision, yet, here, everyone’s just twiddling their thumbs and saying nothing.
Your syntax in the first sentence is not particularly clear, but if you are claiming that Pope Benedict has made any claim that only Catholics are going to heaven (or avoiding hell), you are wrong and I would be curious to know what has led you to that erroneous conclusion.
If you were not saying that the pope has claimed that only Catholics will be saved, I wish you would clear up your syntax.
[ nitpick ]
The RCC is the largest single denomination within Christianity, but it just barely garners a majority of all Christians–not a “vast majority.” This chart gives Catholics 16.9% of the 33.7% of the world who are Christians. A 0.1% margin does not quite make any group into a vast majority.
[ /nitpick ]
So… are you saying that Theists are too ignorant to perform said ass-handing?
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read a theist crying out that the atheists are ganging up or atheists crying out that the theists are ganging up I could, likely, pay for everybody’s subscription here.
The odd thing is that though the god of the OT is angry, the impact of his anger is much less than that of the loving god who sends people to eternal torment. My religious education involved only the OT, of course, but it was filtered to not stress the angry god part, just as the training of “liberal” Christians no doubt downplays the hell aspect. I can assure you that I never quaked in my shoes when I went to shul.
Who knows if what you are doing is philosophy or theology?
I rather suspect you do. I’m not sure I consider a talent for believing an asset. I trust you don’t apply this talent to the emails you get from nice Nigerian widows.
I’m not saying anything against what you believe ethically - quite the opposite. I’m just confused how you come to these beliefs. How do you decide to toss out certain parts of the Bible? From what I see, it is because these parts offend you ethically, as well they should. This is exactly what I mean when I say that liberal Christians and others set their morals atheistically. Your ethics don’t come from the complete Bible, or from an direct or indirect experience of God. Instead of what is in the Bible controlling your ethics, your ethics control what you accept from the Bible. I’m not objecting to this in the least! Your God is a personal god, not personal in the usual sense that God talks to you, but personal in the sense that you define God.
I certainly understand your definition of God as being loving - but if God sets morals, I don’t see where this is coming from. Is this a morality that is higher than God, or does God just happen to practice it. (Then I get to ask you about the problem of natural evil.) If there is a logical argument for this type of morality, why do we need God at all for it?
Everything you say gives a lot of support for the moral righteousness of humans, but very little for the moral righteousness of deities.
You’d go short this time. I’m not here to defend theism, all I’ve been trying to do in this thread is address the factual question of whether or not a significant portion of a certain group are, or are not, aware of something and whether or not a provided citation actually supports the assertion for which it was given in any meaningful way.
