I’m not sure baseball is a great analogy, though. What we are talking about is, as you say, a very personal thing, and what works for one person may not work for someone else. On that we’re in agreement.
But let’s take the example I gave. Someone professes to be Catholic, goes to Mass, takes communion, goes to confession, and most importantly really resonates with the Catholic theology, what with the Trinity and all of that. But this person likes having premarital sex or likes a nice steak every Friday (assuming that was still against the rules). Is that person no longer Catholic? Must every rule be followed to the letter? If that’s the case, then I’d argue that most religious people would have to check the “None of the above” box on the religion questionaire, because nobody can be 100% compliant with their religion.
A couple of months ago I went to a funeral – in a church! I sang hymns. I prayed. Does that make me a hypocrite as an atheist? Do I have to turn in my atheist membership card?
I think that determining someone’s religion is mostly a matter of how they self-identify and how they view the universe, rather than if they follow a strict set of rules.
But this way you have landed squarely on the slippery-slope. What rules/things are ok to eschew? How many of them? Who decides? How far from the ideal are you allowed to be and still claim membership?
I agree no one is likely to be 100% in getting all the rules and notions right but I think no one expects that…not even God. I think the important part is you are supposed to try and not willfully buck the system.
And going to another religious ceremony doesn’t mean anything. You are there to pay respect to someone you knew (or support someone who knew the person). Following the ceremony of other people is not at all like saying you are all of a sudden a member of that religion.
And 'lo, He said to His favorite disciple “Thou *so *didnst touch base before the ball in my hand reached thy body, and for that offense I cast thee out from my Father’s diamond”. And there was much booing from the crowd, for they didn’t believe Him, and calledeth him a faggot, and the Yankeans they denied him too for they had watched the replay in slow motion.
The problem with cherry-pickers (pholosophically speaking) is not that they throw some of the crap out, but rather that they still keep some of the crap afterwards, typically with the view that it retains the legitimacy of being from a holy or inspired source. This is equivalent to placing two bottles on a table, and then removing the table because you want one of the bottles to fall - and then declaring that the other bottle is still somehow supported. Presuming a non-hypocritical rational perspective, once you remove the table all bottles fall together - if you can find reasons to dismiss or warp or alter or ‘interpret’ away some parts of a holy text (or any text), then rationally speaking the entire text is thrown into equal doubt - forcing you to find external justifications for anything in the text you wish to retain, and basing the retention of the material on those external reasons and not on the (discredited) legitimacy of the original text.
Obviously, the most people who cherry-pick a scriptural work like the bible don’t go looking elsewhere for reasons to justify the parts they retain - they bits they like are from god, and the bits they don’t like just sort of vanish. This is obviously an intellectually bankrupt position, and in my opinion a morally bankrupt position too, since they are toggling the strength of their source just for their own convenience.
There is a teeny tiny subset of people who dig deep into things like original translations and historical context and so forth to actually justify their nuanced interpretations of the text. In my experience fewer of these people claim that the text also has divine legitimacy; and I’d have to say that to the degree they do and use that legitimacy to give weight to their opinions they they may, or may not, be cherry-picking which parts get to retain the holy legitimacy and which don’t. I’d have to consider those types of people on a case by case basis, really.
That said, it’s still the case that most people who selectively interpret or otherwise exclude or discard the statements they don’t like from scriptures are cherry-picking and intellectually bankrupt. Just like how most Catholics seem to be against unmarried sex.
(By the way, your explosive friend was an idiot to No True Scotsman your promiscuous(?) Catholic friend - the proper response would have been to be taking a ‘most’ and not ‘all’ standpoint, and to respond “anecdotes are not data”. Your one counterexample certainly doesn’t refute the clearly stated and amply-demonstrated perspectives of the vast majority of Catholics, after all.)
That’s between you and your conscience, your god, and possibly your priest.
In the case of the Catholic woman who had premarital sex, she also didn’t go to church, didn’t go to confession, and ate meat on Fridays. I’m sure that there are some who would go so far as having her excommunicated for that. But she self-identified as Catholic and believed the theology, so as far as I was concerned, she was whatever it was that she believed herself to be. Who was she to rewrite the rules? The more important question is - who am I to judge her and put her into some arbitrary category?
To me she wasn’t Catholic/Not Catholic. She was Laura. That’s all I cared about.
That’s not a moderate religious position though; most Americans think that atheists are evil; we are pretty much at the top in distrusted groups. The moderate religious position is that we are evil, but shouldn’t actually be rounded up and shot.
Indeed that is my point. The priest/cleric/minister/whatever run the club and tell others what the membership requirements are. My point is how many of the rules can you buck and still be considered a member? Like it or not it is their club and their rules. If you do not like it you can leave and go somewhere else or start your own club.
Personally I am all for telling the lot of them to piss off. Faith is personal, not for them to dictate.
I don’t know that distrust translantes into thinking atheists are evil. The distrust is caused by lies on the part of fundamentalists, but it’s also caused by ignorance and sometimes by hostility from atheists. In any case I think it would do atheists more good to engage with the moderate and the ignorant instead of butting heads with fundamenalists, which tends to push both sides to extreme positions.
Do you have a cite for that? I think it’s what you’d like to believe but, as a moderate Christian, I find it difficult to believe. I don’t think you’re evil.
irritating, and irrationally angry at believers, sure, but not evil
From a strictly intellectually rigorous point of view, sure, I can see that. Also from a church-as-moral-authority point of view. But from a personal standpoint, which is what I’m arguing, cherry picking is far more moral than following the rules blindly.
I see religion as more of a list of ideas than a set of rules. Go through the Bible and you’ll see some pretty good ideas as well as some really bad ones. Don’t kill? I can live with that. Honor my parents? Absolutely. They’re really good people. Don’t eat shellfish? Screw that. Sell my daughters into slavery? Doesn’t apply to me.
You probably have a similar, if not identical, moral code concerning the above items. So does the Catholic Church. This doesn’t mean that cherry picking is either a good or a bad thing, it means that you, me, and the Catholic Church have cherry picked wisely. The three of us may not see eye to eye on every matter, but I think we can all agree that selling our daughters into slavery is one hugely dumb rule and it has to go.
It would be bad form of me to call her promiscuous if the guy she was sleeping with was me.
There was this little group of ethical philosophical movements called Hellenism, you may have heard of it? Maybe not by that name, but somehow, I’m sure you’ve heard its teachings. I just … know it.
