So the holy spirit follows the poll numbers? Where was it 40 years ago? And why doesn’t the spiritual path of all people head in more or less the same direction?
Maybe the holy spirit could bonk the head of the Pope more than it has been doing.
Sorry, you can explain what has been happening just fine without supernatural intervention.
:smack: Yes, that’s why it’s called “faith” and not “science”.
I’m not sure why you keep objecting. We know you’re not convinced, and we’re not asking you to be, but we’re answering questions about how we approach things. As mentioned earlier, this thread is about why Christians believe what they do, not why atheists do not belief those things.
It’s like a teetotaler asking a wine connoisseur about describing the notes of different vintages, but then responding to each description with a complaint that wine tasting involves drinking alcohol.
This has nothing to do with science. The question was about ethical and moral growth in a person. Does it come from new experiences, reading, meditation, or does it come from a holy spirit on your shoulder whispering what you should do?
Surely you agree that people can morally evolve without supernatural intervention? If so, why do we need to bring in the supernatural?
H3: Religion encourages sanctimoniousness, which can psychologically paper over and even justify all manner of misdeeds. Superior religions have anti-bodies against such tendencies. The anti-bodies don’t work, since the clerics are in a business as well.
It’s just an hypothesis. Empirical evaluation is necessary.
Think about what a strong claim that is.
Of course there’s also the related but weaker claim, “The supernatural adds no explanatory power to the discussion.”
It can come from both. Of course people can morally evolve without the supernatural. We don’t need to bring the supernatural, but we do because our faith informs us that it’s involved.
The ability to explain without the supernatural is not a claim that the supernatural is ruled out, just like the ability to explain the development of species through evolution does not totally rule out intelligent design.
We just need to be shown evidence of the supernatural, or at least a case where the natural cannot explain what we’ve seen.
So my claim is no stronger than yours.
It appears (though I don’t know of any formal studies) that acceptance of SSM increases once people know gay people.
I can’t prove that Jiminy Cricket is not sitting on someone’s shoulder and telling them to be accepting, but I wonder what took so long.
I accept that some people might find it easier to listen to their inner voice telling them to be more accepting if they are convinced it is supernatural, which keeps them from having to admit that they should have reached a different conclusion based on the available information.
I can think of several ways in which evidence of supernatural intervention could be discerned. But I don’t see any.
Er, but as I understood it you were saying this was fully explained:
Our grasp of history/sociology is nowhere near as strong as our grasp of the process of natural selection. The former is a lot broader than the latter.
While biology isn’t fully explained, I agree aspects of it are. Sociological development OTOH is far too broad a phenomenon to be said to be fully grasped at the moment.
…and it’s easy to demonstrate the unexplained. R2<1.
ETA: Please note that I’m not inferring God from anything in this post though. This isn’t a God of the gaps argument: it’s merely a “Look at the gaps” observation. Not especially controversial.
Fully explained does not rule out other explanations. That we can explain how we evolved without supernatural intervention does not fully rule out theistic evolution. But until we see data that shows non-supernatural explanations can’t explain something, they rule. Which is what I think you said.
I’m quite familiar with regressions, I have an intern working on some right now. I don’t see how they apply to this kind of situation. I think there are so many parameters that you couldn’t really do a regression on support for SSM versus other things.
I was thinking more of stories. Given events like Stonewall, acceptance in the media, and that I suspect it is easier to come out if those around you have, the change in perceptions is not surprising. I’d like to hear a similar story about why the holy spirit chose now to encourage tolerance. Not from you, from the people proposing it.
So the Bible is just a bunch of suggestions, to be overruled by what humans think at any given point in time?
I agree completely with the OP, BTW. Being religious is like being pregnant. You either are or you aren’t. It’s not a buffet. If you believe in God, then you take God as he says he is, not as you would like him to be. When you decide that God is okay with things he said were a sin, it’s known as “making things up”. And when you make up your own God, that’s known as idolatry. Sophisticated idolatry, as you didn’t build your God with your own hands, but you did build him with your own mind. It’s really the same thing in the end. You didn’t like the God as written in the Bible, or Koran, so you made one you liked better.
And here’s why this line of thinking is not actually helpful. Sure, in modern times, religious people are a pain in the ass, trying to hold us back on being more tolerant of this or that thing. But in other times and other places, they also went against societal norms to call for more human rights, for more equality, for refraining from harmful activities that society at the time endorsed. Religious people, not atheists, were at the forefront of many of the West’s most important social movements, like the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-communist movement, the anti-Nazi movement, Prohibition, and even inequality issues. Society is not guaranteed to always progress the way us secular-minded folks would like. Sometimes we go badly wrong, and when that day comes you’ll be glad of religious people who see those ancient morals as better than the new ones.
Like stoning a man to death for gathering firewood.
Your line of reasoning just pushes me farther toward Der Trihs’s viewpoint. If religion must be absolutist and extremist, then it is the enemy of humanity.
If, on the other hand, it can be moderate, peaceful, ecumenical, and humane, then I’m very happy to welcome it as a neighbor.
I’m pretty sure God explicitly condoned slavery in a number of places…
Actually, Scripture simply accepted that slavery happened, then set rules to make it less inhumane. I really doubt that you are going to find a passage in the Jewish or Christian Scriptures that has God saying, “Look on slavery; I bless it.”
And while it is true that a number of people pointed to those passages to argue against abolition, it is also true that the active people who actually lobbied Parliament and Congress, (and state legislatures before that), tended to be Christians acting in the name of their beliefs.
True, but God could have been as against slavery as he was against eating a cheeseburger or a BLT.
I get the impression that a lot of people view God as a harried mother with her children running around the house. As she tries to keep them from breaking the lamps she says “Kindele, kindele, what can I do? Oy!”
Inspired by god and written by man, I see no issues with this changing over time.
Sorry mate but if the only reason you go to church is so you don’t go to hell then alas you miss the whole point and probably wont end up going to heaven (not that I believe in a literal heaven and hell)
No I read the bible through my lenses, every person’s interpretation of the bible is their own based on their own story. It explains why I can say I don’t believe in heaven and hell, why the miracles are stories (c’mon how hard is it to understand that coming into god’s love allows the blind to “see” in a spiritual and not literal sense?) and why some do.
The ignorant statement that you have to believe everything as literal, well is ignorant. We all know it has gone through many hands and interpretations, we get it that is why we dislike fundys as much as the atheist although most of us have a live and let live policy (unless they try and teach religion and science then we tend to get shitty).
Maybe it’s because I live in Australia and not the USA which seems (although I didn’t see it there when I was there) to have a large amount of different fundy groups ranging from Westboro, Southern Baptist, Assemblies of God etc etc and often these guys don’t always agree.
Here’s a paper with logit regressions on the evolution of attitudes on same sex marriage in California: (PDF) Changing Public Opinion on Same Sex Marriage: The Case of California *
Exercises like that are done all the time. Ok, ok, logits don’t use R2s: my point was that few if any social or economic trends are explained 100% (30% is pretty good actually in a statistical context). There’s plenty of scope for a deity with His thumb on the scales. It would be difficult to find a researcher that could confirm that he or she had a comprehensive explanation for any social phenomenon. Again though, this doesn’t provide direct evidence for a deity: the working assumption is that unexplained variation is some sort of naturalistic random process. My point is fairly narrow.
- (Support rose 13 percentage points from ~1985-2006. Six of those points were due to net change in individual attitudes. The remaining 7 were due to cohort replacement. Cohort replacement: a fine piece of jargon. Unsurprisingly the pseudo R2s are in the .19 to .27 range – well under 1.00.)
Should it have been moderate and accomodating towards the Communists or Nazis? Should Christians have accomodated themselves to the reality of slavery? Sure, a lot of people opposed slavery(and later Jim Crow), but the people who put themselves out there to fight were religious folks.
I’m just saying that there are advantages to an ancient code of morals that doesn’t change, whether society becomes more enlightened, or whether society drifts into a dark period. Because when those dark periods come, religious people are the ones standing up for what’s right. The atheists at that point are either the monsters themselves, or hiding in their attics. Atheists are great for thinking. Historically they haven’t been much for doing.
Certainly a person can morally evolve without believing in God or the HS. That doesn’t prove it’s not there. I was just explaining what may be the thought process of liberal or moderate Christians and showing why it isn’t as messed up as the OP seems to think.
The Universe is what it is, and whatever exists is. It’s certainly possible and even likely that there may yet be things beyond our understanding and comprehension. Ultimately , what we now refer to as supernatural is actually natural if it exists at all.
You may believe that personal moral growth is acheived through introspection, a study of philosophy and meditation and that works for you. That’s great if it accomplishes something positive for you. A moderate or liberal Christian may believe those same tools helps him or her commune with the HS and that accomplishes something positive for them. What’s the problem?
Neither of you knows for sure if the other is right or wrong. You’ve each simply chosen a path that works for you.
I’m not sure exactly what qualifies as a moderate or liberal Christian but in general people seeing more options is an improvement IMO. Ultimately it’s however their chosen path reflects in their actions and attitudes toward others. I have a sister who is an atheist and she is one of the nicest most thoughtful people I know. If someone else professes Jesus and is equally thoughtful and considerate of their fellow humans I don’t hold one to be superior.
There are many things in the Bible that are subject to interpretation, and so there are times when you have to think. Other times, the Bible is crystal clear, and so reinterpretation isn’t actually occurring in the sense that you are interpreting an unclear passage in a way to make it clearer to you. Instead, you would be reinterpreting it to make it more palatable. Any document that is treated in this manner is worthless in any practical sense. It’s meant to comfort one spiritually but it cannot be claimed as a code to live by. And of course if you can reinterpret the prohibitions on fornication, you can reinterpet the prohibitions on murder.
If it’s not meant to be taken literally then it has as much value as the works of Tolkien. Actually, less, since Lord of the Rings fanboys take interpretations of what happened at what point in the story far more seriously.
We can disagree over what the forbidden fruit was. Some say it was an apple. Some say it was a fig. Others say the fruit only existed in the garden. Some even think it’s a parable for sex. What we cannot say is that the fruit was okay, because it doesn’t make sense to us that God would keep us away from something that tasted good, which is what many “moderate Christians” seem to argue. “There’s no harm in it, so we don’t need to worry about that anymore, and besides, it’s so divisive to call it sinful, it offends people.”