Fewer than those who would kiss the pope’s ring and peddle the Watch Tower door to door, but more than those who follow the preachings of snake handlers and other fraud artists.
I’m sorry about your unfortunate upbringing, but it displays ignorance to persistently pretend that most Christians are literalists.
You’re focused too much on the literal interpretation. Is literary analysis such a lost art? A good story gets its point across by engaging its listener and being simple enough to sink in. The real world is complicated and has few clear cut answers, so a well crafted story can be much better as a teaching tool.
Teaching physics is all about creating a simple tale: a point mass on an inelastic massless string to illustrate pendulums. But it’s a lie! The mass has volume, and thus can spin and experience tidal forces. The string has mass and elasticity and so perturbs the motion. The air and the pivot have friction. The earth rotates so the plane of motion apparently does. How many things can our story get wrong and still be useful for teaching?
Or teaching morality with World War 2. The Allies are the good guys and the Axis are the bad guys. Well, except for Finland. And Russia wasn’t really good, just not as bad. Etc, etc.
Religion is a cultural tradition that tries to answer some questions. You’re free to reject it, but many people over many years have found it useful. Trying to read the Bible like a newspaper instead of an oral history or a morality tale or a law code is doing a disservice to it.
The fact that some people ignorantly use a literal interpretation is not an excuse for educated people to do so as well.
A scientist has multiple hypotheses to explain a phenomenom. There is no data supporting any of them. But from their experience, they think Hypothesis A is very likely, Hyp. B is somewhat likely, Hyp. C is extremely unlikely. Should they not form beliefs as to how likely each hypothesis is? How else should they decide what to test?
Religious beliefs can be evaluated the same way. There is no data supporting them, yet given their life’s experiences, people can still decide how true they are. In fact I’m sure you’ve done that and decided they aren’t true.
(Be careful about using the word “literally”, as many people use it to mean “really” or “very” rather than “following the letter”.)
Your point is correct–most Christians believe something that is unsupportable. That is what is meant by “faith”. And considering faith to be a virtue is a subjective value.
A lot of people will say that they are Young Earth Creationists (or will answer “yes” to a question that’s equivalent to such a position) and will also say that they think that dinosaurs are really neat and they like to read about them, see movies about them, or see their bones in museums. When they are questioned about the contradiction in this, they will say, “Huh, contradiction, I don’t understand.” (They will also generally seldom actually go to church, although they claim to be Christians.) The problem is not that there are hordes of people who have rigorously argued out positions that show the Bible should be taken rigorously. The problem is that there are hordes of people who don’t know much about either the Bible or evolution or geology who will take a position on evolution and creationism because they have been told it’s a necessary part of their political stance. People don’t generally take positions on most subjects because they’ve thought out their position. They do it because they want to stay within the ideas of the political/religious/social/economic/geographic groups that they already are a part of. Cognitive dissonance explains a lot more than you would think.
Quite significant overlap in those sets of followers, I think.
They all seem pretty literalist about a dead man coming back to life. Regarding young earth creationism it’s only about half though. It displays ignorance to persistently pretend that literalists make up only a small minority of Christians.
This smacks of goalpost moving. Pleonast has merely stated it was an error to pretend that most Christians are literalist (or 100% literalist at any rate) and to equate Christian theology with literalism.
Well that smacks of a strawman. Who claimed that most or 100% of Christians were literalists?
I thought the question was about the percentage of Christians who follow Benny Hinn, not the percentage of Americans who say the Bible is literally true.
Ninja’d. What I am saying is that the minority that are literalists isn’t quite as small as some would have us believe, and the Gallup poll linked to shows that people are more likely to be literalists if they go to church on a regular basis.
In post #165 Pleonast claimed that “Most Christian traditions have never used a literal interpretation” whatever he meant by that. The Bible does say the faithful can heal the sick just like Hinn does.
My apologies - when you said “It’s really not that small a minority.”, I thought you were responding to me.
If the Bible says that it is absolutely true. The faithful have the same ability to heal the sick that Benny Hinn does.
Absolutely none at all.
The paper you linked to does not says that’s “the answer”, but rather that it’s a hypothetical answer. One would think that an advocate of science would know better than to present a hypothetical explanation as if it were a proven fact.
Well IQ does not seem to be a factor favoring the religious:
I wouldn’t expect it to be, since scores on IQ exams are not meaningful measures of intelligence.
And what would be?
And why are the latter fraud artists and the former aren’t? It’s all equally baseless after all; the Pope has just as much evidence for his beliefs as snake handlers do, or for that matter as much evidence as the homeless guy screaming on the street corner about a Martian invasion does. The only real difference is popularity.
But as stated, it’s a fairly recent (19th century) movement. Once you get out of the Bible Belt, and a few other small areas in the U.S., it’s defintely not that common. It’s also mainly an American tradition. It’s definitely NOT the majority view, as fundamentalist Protestants are not the largest denominations of Christians, not by a long shot.
So, a scientist has to walk around with a lit Bunsen burner in a back pocket and wear a particle accelerator, like a halo.
Not necessarily, but a scientist should as a matter of occupation be the person discovering or inventing, not just using the tools that resulted from other people’s discoveries or inventions.