But that’s just the thing. How do you decide these things are good and proper? If you just know it, then the religious aspect of the moral has no value (and btw, where was “Thou Shalt not kill” during the rapacious spread of Christianity?). If the religion, in its books and its teachings, does tell you something which your (and your community’s) innate sense of right and wrong does not tell you, then, as DT pointed out, logically you’re no different from the fundamentalists. All you’re doing by being a good human being but also moderately religious, is giving religion a veneer of respectability that it does not deserve and should not possess.
As I noted above, in the early 19th century there was a lot of confidence that scientific discoveries would support the Bible. The age of the earth was no big deal back then. Not only were science and religion seen as compatible, religious people did an awful lot of the science.
That was why Darwin had such a bit impact. Instead of supporting the Bible he knocked the legs right out of “God made man in his own image.” You didn’t have to be a fundamentalist or a literalist to support special creation back then.
The result of Darwin was that the scientist-ministers got discredited and the fundamentalists, who were always suspicious of this effort, gained dominance.
My source is a fascinating dissertation about this subject, which I read a long time ago from the library.
Not really. The first homosexual Church marriages around here were in the 60s. At a time where homosexuality was still illegal per secular law.
Dunno. I recon the different churches have different ways to read the Bible. Don’t really give a shit either way.
In Iraq and Syria the Muslims are finding inspiration from their holy books to crucify the shit out of their neighbours when they’re not busy marring off nine year old girls, and Jews are bombing the shit out of their neighbours. But never mind all that, lets go with the really evil stuff. Like somebody wanting to put Ten Commandments in front of some court house somewhere or other in hickbilly America.
I don’t think any book anywhere is pointless, but yes as a Christian you’re quite free to disagree with all the ten thousand of books and call them rubbish.
And when Israel bombs Gaza is that because Jews are promoting Judaic love to the Palestinians – or is it because people are people, and people sometimes do shitty things iregardless of their religion?
Anyway, being Jewish you are per definition not worthy of respect per this thread. In addition to the Old Testament which Jews shares with Christians – you know the place where you find all the silly stuff about homosexuals and shell fish and raping your daughters or whatever – I’ve been reading up a bit on some other Jewish texts. Quite vile in general. The things they say about women is particular obnoxious – if it wasn’t so laughable.
Why? It is perfectly possible to be a Jewish atheist, as I believe Voyager is. I’m an atheist Hindu. Pleased to meet you.
No, religion was rarely mentioned when I was growing up. I first put my faith in the certainty of mathematics, but that never gave answers to life’s day-to-day social interactions. Alan Watts had the first really profound impact on me-as-spirit. Zen Buddhism gives little credit to knowledge, and even less credit to my pride at being knowledgeable.
Then a Rasta Man told me that knowledge is a gift from God, and He wants me to use what knowledge I have to do His work. From the looks of the line of elderly widow women at my door looking for safe affordable housing, I’d say I found my calling. Doesn’t pay very well, but I have a lot of free time.
Do I deserve the ill treatment from the OP?
As others have pointed out…it’s easy. People choose the parts that make the most sense to them, and set aside the nasty bits.
The Bible is an anthology. Some of it is intended as allegory. (The Book of Daniel is entirely fictional; it was written long after the time it portrays.) Psalms is poetry. Job is poetry, a fable with a moral, and low comedy! Samuel is history.
It’s also a “free market” approach; those Rabbis who attract the most approval from their peers are the ones we remember today: Maimonides and Hillel and so on. The divergent ideas are a form of exploration, and this, in turn, helps build real consensus in the long run. It’s part of the same exploration of ideas that gave us Democritus and Heraclitus.
Actually, we learned a hell of a lot from the Romans, lessons that are still of value today. Between Greek abstraction, and the bluntly practical applications of the Romans, pretty much all of modern political science is covered.
(Among the really practical lessons…don’t just pass along the leadership to the oldest kid of the last guy to hold the throne.)
They also gave us the U.S. Constitution. Darn good track record!
That’s a great analogy, and let me try to use it to explain why I think (belief in) moderate religion is flawed. In the free market of ideas, if you subscribe to a religion, then you’re enabling and furthering the kind of crony capitalism that has given the free market a bad name in today’s world. Religions end up with power and use that power to influence the free market negatively. Everybody suffers.
That’s roughly my understanding. It was difficult to be an intellectually serious atheist prior to Darwin. I part company with the last part though. Wiki: “Mainline Protestants were a majority of all churchgoers (including non-Protestants) in the United States until the mid-20th century, but now constitute a minority among Protestants.” Mainliners don’t have much problem with evolution. So the dominance of fundamentalist Christianity is a late 20th century development.
Are you going to quibble that “almost certainly does not exist” is substantially different than the claim “does not exist”? My point is that the very fact that there is a tremendous scope for defining what “God” is makes Dawkins’ statement completely meaningless and pointless either way. Yet he’s devoted an entire provocatively-titled book to it, along with the same claims repeated again and again in most of his other books:
And Lawrence Krauss is no better. As a bright physicist and writer he had an opportunity to objectively explain to the lay reader phenomena like quantum fluctuations in empty space creating virtual particles. Instead, he turned it into atheist proselytizing about how it “proves” that you don’t need God to have Creation, via a book and lecture series on the theme of “A Universe from Nothing”. In fact, it not only fails to prove any such thing, it’s not even a scientifically accurate description. Quantum fluctuations are simply a property of space, an entity which itself has been and continues to be created as the universe expands. Empty space is not “nothing”, it has a whole host of definable properties and obeys scientific laws including the uncertainty principle governing its energy state.
Unlike religious people though, Dawkins does define his terms. He lays out what he means when he uses the word “God” and takes pains to repeat it several times. He says he means a supernatural creator that watches what we do, takes an interest in our lives, and affects the world around us. That you are not acquainted with this because it cannot be laid out in bus ads and the sub-title of a book is not his fault.
So, if a free market of (religious) ideas doesn’t quite do it for you, what model would you prefer?
A free market of ideas does do it for me. And my pitch is that in a world where religious ideas are given special reverence over and above just ‘ideas’, as they are in our world, that market does not remain free. It becomes a market where special interest carve out exemptions for themselves, claim immunity from criticism, and bully those who do criticise them.
I’m trying to convince otherwise good, sane people that by identifying themselves as religious, and telling themselves that it’s ok because they’re moderates, they lend power to religious ideas. A power which those ideas have never shown themselves deserving of.
That is a feature, not a bug. People, both as individuals and as groups, change. Religion, like any other collection of cultural artifacts and customs, is not monolithic. There is no reason to accept it all or reject it all. The fact that religious customs and beliefs evolve is simply a result of people, individuals and groups, making choices about their beliefs.
For example, I am a “liberal” Christian. My beliefs have developed over my life, based on my life experiences (mundane and spiritual), my studies (secular and religious), and my interactions within my church communities. The Bible is only ancillary to my religion. The primary focus is on doing good in one’s life.
Quibbling over details in the Bible is missing the point of Christianity. It’s like arguing about sod maintenance during a football game instead of how many yards a runner has advanced.
And by the way, comments like your last sentence “moderate religion is a complete mess of doublethink, question-begging and intellectual cowardice” is poisoning the well and not conducive to an honest discussion.
Not exactly correct. I have in fact at least skimmed some of his books and am generally familiar with the general thrust of his arguments. It’s true that in much of The God Delusion he quite properly attacks Creationism and ID and the idea that the anthropic principle is incorrectly used as a justification for the existence of God. He also claims at one point that he is explicitly refuting the existence of an anthropomorphic God – the God of the Old Testament who watches over us and knows all our actions and desires – and that’s all well and good. But he also claims that the God alluded to by Einstein and many great cosmologists is purely a metaphor … “Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor.”
I can’t say what was in the minds of any of these specific individuals, but I think Dawkins is extremely short-sighted in his contemptuous dismissal of the sort of pantheistic cosmological God that many cosmologists have been inspired to think about (and if anything, Krauss is even worse, arguing in one Atlantic article that modern physics has now rendered religion “obsolete”). It’s much more than mere metaphor. It’s a spiritual and boundlessly profound inquiry into the nature of the universe that transcends science.
They are absolutely different things, as anyone who has taken Theory of Knowledge knows. His position leaves him open to evaluating evidence for a god. No one seems to have any that is convincing.
Sorry you don’t like the term delusion (but it sells books) but if you talk to a tree, or a stuffed animal, or a pooka, and expect an answer people look askance at you. Talk to god and you are pious. It is cute when children talk to their stuffed animals and god before going to bed. Adults no longer talk to their stuffed animals. Not so cute.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Krauss knows that. Surely you’ve seen first cause arguments for God? I have not read the book, just read some of the controversy, but it seems clear to me that his point is that you don’t need a first cause. If virtual particles emerge without a cause, why can’t the universe, especially if it has zero net energy? That doesn’t prove that there is no God, but it does prove that god is not necessary.
Hi there. Atheist Christian here. And while we’re on the religion loving wagon: Hinduism another bullshit religion full of vile things. I take it you’re not too fond of all the caste bits and the women stuff.
“Oh, the book it will perish and the steeple will fall,
but the light will be shining at the end of it all.”
“Will you swear on the Bible?” “I will not!” said he,
“For the truth is more holy than the book, to me.”
I forgot you come from a more civilized place than I do - and that is an actual compliment. Still, 30 years faster is not much compared to 1500 years.
Oddly different universities don’t have different ways of reading math and physics books They do have different ways of reading novels. That should tell you something.
Your insult to the great state of Alabama acknowledged - and deeply deserved. Religious fanaticism is hardly confined to Christians. My point was that Christians in America are quite as smitten with the Ten Commandments as everyone else.
Never read Pel Torro I take it. But you acknowledge the books were written. Which contradicts your statement that there were no rules. There were plenty of rules.
You might have missed the part about me not believing in the Bible any more. And even when I did my Temple didn’t follow all the oppressive stuff. Others do, and you can ask the Orthodox on the SDMB about it. I couldn’t even start to justify it. BTW the Reform movement is now acknowledging that there was no Davidic Empire, following the findings of archeology.
It is far from rare for politicians to use the religious fanaticism of their followers (on all sides of the God question) to justify all that they wanted to do. Hardly new. Are you saying that religious fanaticism is justification of religion.
Or are you saying that the Cossacks were justified in oppressing my great-grandparents because 60 years in the future Jews would be nasty to Mpslems and vice versa?
It doesn’t prove squat. What is the universe, exactly? What about the “imaginary time” model of the universe where the Big Bang is just a coordinate on the Euclidian space-time of a finite but unbounded universe? What about the hypothesis of an infinity of multiverses? The phenomenon of quantum fluctuations is mind-bogglingly profound, but we don’t know nuthin’ yet!
No one has any evidence for the preposterous notion of an Old Testament anthropomorphic God in a white robe talking out of a burning bush in a rumbling deeply resonant voice. But more philosophically developed concepts of God are not amenable to proof or disproof one way or another. My problem with both Dawkins and Krauss is that the only God they seem to worship is science, and that’s a very very limiting one. (I admit that I’m being driven a bit to a devil’s advocate position here just because these guys, and some other atheists, proselytize so much.)
I don’t follow you, I stated that some things have been true for a very long time. You answer with complaints about man’s foolishness. I’m shocked you would hold me personally responsible for any and all imagined or real sins that every human being has ever committed.
Ease up a little … why is it so important for you to condemn my choice … when I acknowledge yours?