I don’t think we read the same OP. The first post wasn’t complaining about them being douchebags or vilifying them, just trying to point out an inconsistency in their worldview. In short, the OP can be summarized as:
“Resolved: Belief in the Abrahamic God requires one to rejection modern scientific knowledge and evolving social mores.”
This is an interesting discussion to have. I agree with the OP that moderate religious folks always struck me as silly. But the point isn’t that they should be pressured into fundamentalism–the point is that moderates who for all intents and purposes are areligious and atheist shouldn’t convince themselves to believe in a vague, irrelevant god just to fit in with the theistic majority.
I would agree that you do not seem to have read the same OP. You certainly did not read the OP of this thread that sets up a binary claim that one must either be a Fundamentalist or one must fail to actually be a Christian, (implying either hypocrisy or mental failure). The OP, having perceived Christianity only through the Fundamentalist view of Scripture, goes on to claim that people who do not share that limited view are not worthy of respect.
The OP did not merely say that a belief in the Abrahamic God requires a rejection of science, (which is clearly false), but went further to say that anyone who was not a Fundamentalist is not really a Christian.
That is why I rarely post in threads such as this one. The fundy Christians and the fundy atheists share a world view that precludes their recognition of their own errors. They have fun bashing each other, (and bashing anyone who is not a fundy), but they bring nothing to the discussion but their contempt and ignorance from which they will not be moved.
That of course i your own translation of it’s meaning and you have every right to believe it.
I would imagine Jesus helped her because he was a human man with a kind heart for all people, but it wasn’t his intention to save the world. A supreme being would have known all before he even created Satan. He is said to know all things ahead of time, and why he felt it necessary to kill Job’s family to satisfy a monster he created does not make sense to me. A supreme being would have to be kinder than me, I would not conceive any child that I knew ahead of time would harm others.
Again, too easy. You separate out society from Christian thought when for most of US history they are basically the same, since most US citizens were believers. Even today the share of believers appears to top 90%.
Furthermore, NT teachings are both straightforward and adaptable to historic change: and that’s a good thing, right? Right? Specifically we are commanded to love God and His creation, love thy neighbor as thyself, but please don’t be a sanctimonious prick about the preceding. Red letter scripture. Nothing in the gospels about abortion, gay sex or prayer in schools. And to justify slavery you have to reach back to Genesis and pull out some squirrelly interpretation of reports regarding the Abrahamic family tree. The core teachings of the NT advocate human progress.
The OP faces a rather steep burden of proof. It’s not sufficient to show that moderate Christianity is wrong. It has to be demonstrated that moderate Christianity is unreasonable. It’s not sufficient to show that moderate Christianity is unreasonable. It has to be shown that it is unreasonable and less reasonable than fundamentalist Christianity.
The OP is pretty easy to dispense with. What divides fundamentalist Christianity from traditional Christians of the 19th century and earlier and mainline Christians today is that mainstream approaches join old principles with contemporary facts and circumstance, while fundamentalists shut off and shut down facts that they deem to unpleasant to believe.
I say it’s unreasonable to deny scientific evidence. Mainline Christians agree and have a workable framework just as their ancestors did. The modern presentation is called Non-overlapping magisteria. Science and religion simply focus on different aspects of the human experience.
I disagree that faith = willful ignorence. I submit that faith is an inevitable part of human existance/ We all believe in things we have not independently verified as true.
Whatever path one chooses through life what ultimately matters is their choices , actions and how those affect themselves and the people they interact with and affect directly or otherwise. Compassion and charity is not morally or intellectually superior from an atheist or believer when it comes to helping our fellow humans.
If someone is a smug self righteous jerk as a believer or non believer one is not superior to the other.
However, one must be aware of a huge spectrum of kinds of faith.
In practice, I have to take the existence of New York City on faith, as I’ve never seen it myself. I have to have faith in the entire system of knowledge that brings me information about the world. I even have to have faith in the ordinary laws of cause and effect.
But all of this is very different from people going to a faith healer who will purport to cure cancer by “therapeutic touch.” For people to believe in that sort of thing…well, it may not be “willful ignorance,” but it seems horribly misguided, at very least.
To me, this is key. I just don’t get how difficult it is for nearly all religious folks to acknowledge the historical contingency, the chance occurrence, behind their “decision” to follow one sect of another.
My parents-in-law were raised Catholic, yet are Malaysian citizens of Indian Subcontinent descent. Before I met them, I told my then-fiancée (now wife) that I looked forward to talking with them about the interesting and unexpected (to me) historical reasons why Tamil speakers in Malaysia would profess “belief” in a set of writings and practices developed in Palestine several millennia ago. (I guessed that Portuguese traders had a key role in this). My wife asked me NOT to bring this up with them. (We all get along great, BTW – they are VERY lapsed Catholics, in most respects).
(Thinking about this did reveal some of my own biases, though, such as: why don’t I feel the same kind of “how did THAT happen” curiosity regarding Palestinian belief systems taking root in equally far-off Ireland, say? Or Buddhist ideas, nurtured long ago in northern India, becoming important in, say, northern California?)
To bring this back to the OP, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Christianity is a recently emerged philosophy. Throughout history, there have been many people who’ve called themselves Christian - but who owned, or were accepting of the ownership of, slaves, to use one of your examples.
In that scenario they might just be desperate and not acting on faith but I catch your drift.
When Sam Harris suggested we look at religious beliefs in the same way we look at others rather than give them some special protected status I agreed and took it quite literally. We all have belief systems that are made up of intellect and emotion. Our experiences , our cultural background, our education, all come into play in forming and updating our personal belief system. IMO, people hold beliefs out of religious tradition that are clearly contradicted by ample evidence are , in general, willfully ignorent. Many have little to no reason to seriously question their beliefs for similar reasons to your believing in NYC. They trust their sources.
Well, yeah. Neither utilitarianism nor Christianity has been especially effective in eradicating immorality: there’s no known moral system that does that. Whether Christianity has even moved the ball forward is by no means clear, though I believe it has. (During the early era, it advanced literacy and established a few primitive safety nets).
One would think that threats of hell and brimstone would have a perceivable effect on total human behavior. But societies with less of that (eg Europe) have generally lower violent crime and less sanctimoniousness than the US Bible Belt. Atheism has no so far measured impact on morality, which surprises me but not most atheists. (They generally reply by inquiring how many people would I murder if I found there was no God. But I’m not referring to dramatic effects: I’m expressing surprise that there are no measurable incremental effects at all. Or maybe I just haven’t come across the proper study.)
If atheism were a moral system, then, yeah, it would seem to be a failure.
But it isn’t. Atheism isn’t really anything. A guy over here says, “God is named Miltgang, and demands you sacrifice a sheep to him on Thursdays.” The atheist says, “Nope.”
That’s all there is to it. Atheism is “not-religion.” It doesn’t have a “right and wrong.” It doesn’t promise anything. It doesn’t threaten anything. You might as well say that artificial sweetener hasn’t had any impact on morality. Of course it hasn’t; that isn’t what it’s for.
I’d love it if atheists were, on the average, more moral than religious believers. I’d also love it if we were richer, healthier, lived longer, and had more impressive secondary sexual characteristics. That just isn’t what it’s really about.
(I’m pleased – and astonished – and a bit puzzled – that atheists seem to have a slightly better knowledge of theology than believers do. I’ve read the Bible…and a fair number of my Christian friends admit that they haven’t.)
That’s not faith at all, that’s trust. Those are all things for which there is a great deal of evidence; therefore, they aren’t matters of faith. Faith is believing something there is no evidence or against the evidence. Believers themselves bring this up when they defend God not showing himself by arguing that if their god provided evidence he existed then belief in their god wouldn’t be a matter of faith.
And since by necessity they’ve decided faith is a good thing, that makes their god showing himself a bad thing. It makes evidence in general a bad thing.
In the few studies I’ve heard of being done, atheism correlates with more moral behavior. That’s probably why such studies are almost never done.
How much that is a matter of atheism making people more moral or moral people being more attracted to atheism in the first place I don’t know.
I don’t see what’s so odd about it. Religion is wrong, and the more you know about it the more obviously wrong it is. It’s like how I’ve heard various ex-Catholics give credit to the quality of the Catholic school system as to why they are ex-Catholics.
If one grants that religion is wrong, then it just makes sense that a greater knowledge of religion would tend to lead to atheism.
I suppose that’s one possibility. I’d also guess that many moderate Christians see the Bible as a book that is intended to be interpreted and that life’s journey is meant to further our understanding of our relationship with God. That being the case an individual’s interpretation of Biblical verses naturally changes as life’s experiences lead them to a fuller understanding.
Um, actually the implications are a little different as I see it. Call atheism the control. Call theism the treatment. You would expect that a little more fear of hell and brimstone would increment morality upwards. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. So I wouldn’t call atheism a failure by that criteria, quite the contrary.
Cite? Or at least a hint?
More generally, in the US, the historic sample sizes are probably not large enough to draw solid conclusions about atheism, though the set of nonreligious/agnostic/atheist believers would probably be ok. As a first cut, I’d use prison data, taking care to control for education and education of parent. The next step would be think harder about causality, but you have to walk before you can run.
IIRC, most of the alleged positive benefits of theism have related to church attendance, not opinion.
Ah! I was reading your post the other way around, as if you were suggesting that atheism was somehow a failure because it didn’t improve the moral behavior of people who hold atheist views. My apology.
If there really isn’t any difference between the populations, and if religion is held to be a great moralizing force…then it would seem that religion has failed.
Really, though, I think it’s just a matter of human nature. In any large population, the proportion of nice guys will be the same. Ditto for the proportion of stinkers. It’s like we’re hard-wired to bring forth 5% sweethearts, 5% assholes, and 90% everybody else.
(May 15% sweethearts. I’m an optimist, and a humanist. Civilization is possible because there are more heroes than villains.)
The passages you believe in, and what they mean, change not based on any religious truth or divine input but on your situation. Other works of literature work the same way.
In my case the NT had zero influence, because even when I believed in God I did not accept it. Also cultural.
I can think of two reasons for that. First, Christianity offers a get out of hell card, so if our bad guy goes to church every Sunday he might think he’s home free.
Second, people are less willing to pay to put off a penalty far in the future than one that is coming soon. Going to hell is way far in the future for people in their prime crime years.
For a moderate Christian, insight, inspiration , and new {better} interpretations may be a result of being led by the Holy Spirit. The spiritual journey is a lifelong process and learning and growing. Changes in interpretations and religious beliefs are not intellectual or religious dishonesty , but the natural process of being led into truth by the HS as the NT indicates.
for example; someone might have believed homosexuality was a sin, but as this issue is thrust more and more into public awareness they read the studies {seeking truth} and believe that sexual preference is innate rather than a choice. In their mind, that change is guided by the HS as part of the spiritual journey.
To address this more directly, IMO, moderate and/or liberal Christians see their relationship with God and Jesus as an internal introspective process. Rather than a set in stone set of rules and beliefs you have to embrace to please an angry God, they seek spiritual truth and are led by thyeir relationship with God, Jesus and the HS. It is nuanced, subtle , and ongoing. They may worship in a Christian format but don’t see God as a “Christian” God but simply the God of all creation.
Men are imperfect and in that sense any scripture must be interpreted through that imperfect lens. There’s no other option. People who accept that are not being intellectualy dishonest. As the lens is refined the interpretation will change. Also, since men are imperfect, all relgion is made up. Those who understand that and don’t insist their set of rules are the only ones are being more honest not less.