It really shouldn’t. The wishy-washy people usually don’t want to kill you and they usually pay more attention to scientific and social progress. These are people who are willing to live and let live. Save your scorn for people who deserve it.
Not really. Fundamentalism and literalism are pretty recent developments and the idea that they’re more consistent and more authentic than other beliefs is just marketing by the fundamentalists.
First off, why would you insist they stick to rules that are outdated and which you don’t believe anyway? And second, how do you think the 2,000-year-old rules came into being? They were written and rewritten constantly for centuries or millennia. What’s the difference if someone does it now?
As a Christian myself, Billy is always one evangelist who didn’t embarrass me. He’s opposed to gay marriage but as far as I know he is not hateful of gay people. Many of his views on race and ecumenism have been downright progressive in the church, and he has touched hundreds of millions of lives. The conversation about “the Jews” was unfortunate, but I really think he was just trying not to contradict the President of the United States to his face.
Also, a lot of folks in this thread have called him a fundy, but he’s really not a fundamentalist. “Evangelical” is more accurate.
Since I am an athiest, by definition he is defrauding his followers. 25 million dollars for preaching? :rolleyes: If the money comes from other places other than his followers I might cut him some slack.
Since when is it a christian value to become rich at the expense of others? He certainly doesn’t need that much money to preach the gospel.
If the best that can be said of him is he is not as bad as some other famous preachers, that is very faint praise indeed.
Yeah, but he’s not directly soliciting money from followers. He’s doing what Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh do, for example, and that’s selling content to radio, television, newspapers, magazines, etc. Sure he could perhaps be distributing more of his wealth, but he earned it the good old-fashioned American way, all by himself.
I don’t know how far to trust the cite for the $25million net worth, and even if it is completely accurate, it leaves me with all sorts of questions, such as How exactly did/does he earn that money? and What does he do with it?
I tried a bit of googling to see if I could find any answers on-line. Here, FWIW, is what I came up with:
Until at least the Age of Enlightenment or probably even the late 19th Century, most religious people were by default a fundamentalist and a literalist (with occasional exceptions like Giordono Bruno).
No, not really. Catholicism hasn’t really ever pushed for literalism, or fundamentalism. The Bible was never seen as taken “literally”. The Age of Enlightenment, I’ll grant you. But after that? Not really.
He was an avowed anti Semite proven by his own words in his own voice on the Nixon tapes. He tells lies to children and weak gullible adults about the nature of reality. He believes in vicarious redemption as a moral strong point. For those who don’t know what that is, it is also called scapegoating. Like all religious leaders he wishes damnation and hellfire upon those who do not agree with his personal brand of insanity. Nice guy? I don’t think so.
Not true, and certainly not true of all denominations of Christianity. The largest denomination of Christianity, the Catholic church, does not teach this.
Only because they’ve discovered it’s politically expedient to make ecumenical noises and watch out for Ratzinger. His noises are becoming less and less ecumenical as the days go by.
The RCC used to condemn non-catholics to hell. They no longer do this. Is it because:
A) They received a divine revelation that said dogma was wrong. (Note: this answer disqualifies them from being a moral authority as what prevents a future church from finding current dogma wrong? Either you have a pipeline to god or you don’t but you can’t claim patchy reception without losing your authority.)
B) They lied before and are telling the truth now.
C) They were telling the truth before and are lying now.
D) It doesn’t matter because it’s all made up nonsense and they’re simply trying to find the most palatable load for people to swallow.
I wasn’t claiming to speak for the RC. I was correcting a poster who said that all Christianity teaches non-Christians go to Hell. Which isn’t true. I’m not a Catholic scholar, nor do I claim to be one. I’m only repeating their position. Hell, I’m not even a practicing Catholic anymore.
How about E) They realized that there was an inconsistency in the idea of a just and loving god condemning all non-Catholics to hell, and their emotional and philosophical commitment to the idea of a just and loving god was greater than their commitment to the idea that non-Catholics go to hell.
Look, I’m an atheist and a rationalist and I think there’s a lot of truth to item D, but I used to consider myself a liberal Christian and studied for the ministry and I wasn’t evil or cynical or fraudulent or stupid. I was wrong , and my error was a relatively simple one to explain, though not one people tend to think of. I honestly and reasonably believed at the time that my participation in the church helped me to be a better person, I believed that accepting the doctrines of the church in the manner most compatible with reason and empiricism (and doing the mental gymnastics necessary to accomplish this) was part of what helped me to be better, and I believed, naively, that I could believe something to be true because it was morally beneficial. When I examined this thought process in detail I quickly realized its fallaciousness, but I managed to maintain it for quite some time and with quite a deal of fervency without examining it closely. Whatever you may think about that temporary but long-term failure and the intellectual dishonesty it exemplified, I hope you can see that it was a particular kind of failure, and not a general one exemplifying an overall lack of morals, intelligence, or sanity. I also hope you believe me when I tell you that over the course of many, many long and deep conversations with believers of various types, I have been convinced that many believers including many in high institutional positions in various churches are guilty of similar failures and that nothing more is necessary to explain their behavior or the behavior of most churches at a denominational level.
