You’re new around here, right?
Huh? You said “It’s a fairly logical assertion that most people practice their particular form of religion because they were raised to”. I challenged you to defend this statement, which it seems that you can’t do. It seems you acknowledge that your statement flatly contradicts what the vast majority of people say, but then you imply that the vast majority of people are wrong and you just happen to be right. On what conceivable grounds could you possibly claim to know why billions of people all over the world chose their particular religion better than all of those billions of people themselves? Are you claiming to be a mind-reader?
Please provide a citation for there being “a tiny number of conversions”.
Says you.
Cite, please?
Cite, please?
So, seeing technology as an application of science, how can anybody really refute the effectiveness, and therefore the reliability and profound importance of the scientific method?
Also, science is unequivocally not a religion or anything like it. It’s the antithesis of religion.
Religion sees a phenomenon and shoehorns it into some already preconceived notion. The more new discoveries and phenomenon, the more and more religion has to retcon it into their canon.
Science is merely a very well established method to explain an observed phenomenon using the most objective and controlled ways available. Predicting and experimenting is necessary in order to support your hypothesis. Trial and error. Corroboration by anyone who might have the same wherewithall. The point of science is to accept, with giant open arms any new piece of verifiable evidence which can clarify existing theories or even upend our entire world view.
—Religion starts with the unknown, and contrives an entirely baseless reality from it. When forced to confront new, irrefutable evidence as it comes to light, either it’s ignored, attacked with vehemence, or attempts are made to hammer that square peg into their round hole of circular logic and murmurs of contempt echo inside their closed off, ever more convoluted world view.
—Science starts with reality, and contrives ideas that might explain the reality they see (direct or indirect). When a scientist comes forth with new, irrefutable evidence that has come to light, it’s cross-examined, attacked with counter theories, or ultimately rejected if it doesn’t align with another part of reality, or science amends its world-view with great excitement as reality becomes ever clearer.
Which one of those two methods would you apply to determine how diseases proliferate?
Well, since there are no actual supernatural or magical experiences, indoctrination is the most logical assumption.
You don’t have to be a mind reader to know that people told that their religion is real as children are likely to keep to that belief later in life.
Obviously, among protestant sects there is a lot of shift, since most of them are very similar and most Christians don’t understand the details of their faith in any case.
Actually, it’s up to you to prove him wrong. You state that you have factual proof for your faith. I say you’re laughably mistaken and self-deluded. Why not shut me up and make me look really, really silly by rubbing that proof in my face?
Your denial of that is absurd.
How do you know there are no actual supernatural or magical experiences? And even if you did, how would that make “indoctrination the most logical assumption”? You’ve made this claim in many threads, but never been able to back it up with a citation to a reliable source.
You link to an anonymous internet post which says that over one third of people convert to a different religion from that of their parents. If the number is valid for the USA, that’s over 100,000,000 people. If the number is valid worldwide, that’s over 2,000,000,000 people. That certainly disproves the claim that the number of conversions is tiny, assuming that the numbers in the post were correct.
Cite, please? Is this more mind-reading?
I’ve never stated any such thing. I said “I found all the facts pointing to the conclusion that Christian doctrine is true”, which is obviously not the same thing as saying that I have factual proof for my faith.
In previous threads where we’ve had this same discussion, I’ve listed books which contain the facts that I’m referring to. You’ve never been willing to read even one of those books. If you’ve changed your mind and decided that you are now willing to read those books, then go right ahead. If you remain too afraid to read anything that can challenge your beliefs, then there’s nothing more I can say to you.
Why is it absurd? Can you provide a citation–preferably something better than an anonymous internet post this time–to demonstrate that it’s absurd?
:dubious: Who’s saying that nurture plays absolutely no part? It’s logically absurd to assume that there’s no middle ground in the formation of religious belief between “all nurture” and “no nurture”.
Moreover, it’s factually baseless to assume that the number of people who change their religious beliefs is “tiny”. From a Pew poll:
If you’re observing that people in general tend to retain cultural practices that they were raised with, well yeah, that’s true, if not a particularly original observation.
If, on the other hand, you’re just witnessing to your conviction that non-atheists are teh STUPID and couldn’t possibly persist in theistic convictions for any more valid motives than delusion/irrationality/stubbornness/fear, that’s even less original.
Personally, speaking as a lifelong atheist, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with believing in a supernatural power whose existence and nature are outside the scope of human logic and material empiricism. As long as we can establish a pragmatic consensus about what kinds of questions are to be resolved by what kinds of evidence and assuming what kinds of axioms for reasoning, I don’t really give a rat’s ass if our underlying personal beliefs about the essential nature of reality are different.
Fretting that other people might be sinning in thought against rationality, in ways that don’t actually cause you any harm, is not really more constructive or sensible than fretting that other people might be sinning in thought against God’s law or whatever, in ways that don’t actually cause you any harm.
Of course I defended it. It qualifies as common knowledge that the vast majority of religious adherents practice the religion they were raised with. But, it you need statistics:
http://www.pewforum.org/Faith-in-Flux.aspx
In a nutshell, this will show that plenty of Christians have changed denominations (Baptists to Methodists, Catholics to Protestants), but this hardly qualifies as changing religions in the context of this debate. They’re all still Christians. I suppose I could find similar facts for Islam and Judaism, but it would be ridiculous for you to need it. In fact, I’d bet a paycheck that conversion away from Islam is even rarer than with Christianity. Do you really not see how a correlation this strong demonstrates in every reasonable sense that nurture is the primary factor in religious choice? Of course adherents are going to say they came to the religion on their own… they were RAISED to.
You challenge my contention that there’s not a single fact that logically supports Christian doctrine as true. Well, I invite you to present those facts. You claimed they exist. Let’s see them.
You need a citation for my contention that “the faithful have also been raised with the threat of Hell if they don’t believe”? My citation is The Bible.
You need a cite for the fact that the major religions spread by force? Are you unfamiliar with the fact that Christianity was a small, relatively insignificant sect until Constantine had a battlefield epiphany and made it the religion of the Holy Roman Empire, converting by pain of death a huge swath of the ancient western world? How about Cortez, Pizarro and conquistadors waging religious war on the native Central and South American empires? How did heathens and heretics fare under Torquemada or the religious authority in Salem, Massachusetts?
Because nothing supernatural has ever been reliably recorded since we invented recording devices.
Because people mostly are the same religion as their parents. You think that’s random? Is asking silly questions a defense mechanism?
Here is the paper: http://publicdata.norc.org:41000/gss/DOCUMENTS/REPORTS/Social_Change_Reports/SC26.pdf <– PDF, obviously.
That probably includes atheists, who thankfully are becoming more common.
You know this, of course, but you have to ask nonsense questions in an attempt to deflect everyone from seeing how utterly without merit your arguments are. http://www.pewforum.org/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey-Who-Knows-What-About-Religion.aspx
There are no such facts.
No, stop. You may not issue a book-tax to argue with you.
If you understand the book’s argument, you should be able to paraphrase it for me. Show me that you have this basic level of understanding, please.
Again, you are deflecting. Are you asserting that there isn’t a widespread belief in Hell in America?
Allow me to amend slightly, then, to say that nurture is easily the primary reason.
You should re-examine your source. What consitutes conversion here, for the vast majority, is changing denominations within Christianity. That’s not the kind of conversion relevant to this debate. They’re all still Christians.
I make no accusation that the faithful are stupid. I don’t doubt that many come to a genuine conviction about their faith. But that conviction is certainly based on irrationality, because basic facts and logic demonstrate their beliefs are irrational. Additionally, a huge number are indoctrinated at a young age through fear. What exactly do you think “God fearing” means?
I happen to agree that we will never understand the face of whatever force put us here. But that’s a far cry from those who profess a factual understanding with specific details about that creator’s behavior and expectations.
But, you see, that belief HAS caused an immense amount of destruction and suffering. Even for those who don’t resort to violence in the spread or defense of their faith, they instill in generations a degree of irrationality that takes us further from understanding the truth of our natural history. That lack in critical thinking ability manifests itself in many other ways, as well. Faith may make millions feel better, but it also makes too many of them more ignorant.
:dubious: It seems kind of arbitrary to decide that “the context of this debate” defines “religion” as “major religion” rather than “particular denomination”. I’m not sure I see why a change from, say, Christianity to Hinduism should count as a “conversion” while a change from, say, strict Seventh-Day Adventist to Quaker should not.
:dubious: again. You’re eliding the extremely sweeping claim “the major religions spread by force” into certain specific events in the history of Christianity. This does not a valid argument make.
AFAICT, if you look at the total accumulation of adherents in almost any religion, the vast majority of adherents during its history were acquired by being born into the faith or by voluntary conversion, not by forced conversion. Specific instances of religious oppression and violence, no matter how horrific and loathsome, don’t have that much impact on the total number of adherents acquired over the whole course of a religion’s history.
(And your whiskered old legends about Constantine spreading Christianity by fire and sword are simply embarrassing, especially the anachronistic reference to the “Holy Roman Empire”, which didn’t come into being until the tenth century, more than half a millennium after Constantine. If you really want to impress theists with the superior rationality and factual accuracy of atheist perspectives, you’re going to have to do better than this.)
You’re going to have to do a lot better than that. I am one of the faithful and I was not raised with the threat of Hell if I don’t believe. Therefore your statement is factually untrue in my case. It is also factually untrue in countless other cases. Perhaps you should think a little bit before you make blanket statements about every single religious believer on earth.
Yes. I’m aware that Islam did so, but unaware that any of the others did so. If you want me to believe your claim that Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, etc… all spread by force, you’ll have to provide reliable citations to back up that claim. If you don’t have any such citations, you should probably retract the claim.
Yes, I’m unfamiliar with that “fact” for several reasons.
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“Small” and “relatively insignificant” are relative terms, but there’s no basis for the claim that Christianity was either prior to Constantine. While we don’t have poll numbers from ancient times, the evidence we do have suggests that Christianity grew quickly and that the Roman Emperors prior to Constantine often persecuted Christians aggressively.
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It would be impressive if Constantine did anything regarding the Holy Roman Empire, since he died centuries before the Holy Roman Empire existed.
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Constantine did not “convert by pain of death a huge swath of the ancient western world”. That’s pure fiction on your part.
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During the 4th and 5th centuries the Roman Empire was conquered by Germanic tribes. If the lands of the empire had adopted the religion of the Germanic tribes, then it might conceivably have been spread by the sword. But if the Germanic tribes adopted religion found in the Roman Empire, then obviously it wasn’t spread by the sword.
I’m not aware that either Cortes or Pizarro ever waged a religious war. I am aware that both men were under the command of the Spanish monarchy, not any religious organization, and that the goal of their conquests was wealth, not anything to do with religion.
Well, there’s fascinating reading on that topic, but neither case has anything to do with the spread of Christianity.
Two obvious problems there. First, if conversion from one denomination to another denomination of Christianity is still conversion, and it still disproves your thesis that people choose their religious position based on that of their parents. Second, that report also documents tens of millions of conversions besides those between denominations of Christianity in the USA alone, further disproving your claim.
All natural human impulses have caused an immense amount of destruction and suffering over the course of human history. There is no valid reason AFAICT to single out the human impulse toward belief in the supernatural as a specially chosen whipping boy in this case.
Now, I certainly don’t approve or condone indiscriminate irrationality or stubborn dogmatism in all situations. As I noted above, people of different faiths have to be able to come to a pragmatic compromise about how to resolve practical questions successfully. When dogmatism prevents such a compromise, that’s a catastrophe.
But it’s not the religious impulse per se that’s the problem, as we see from the example of the hundreds of millions of people who have theistic convictions but nonetheless manage to live in mutual toleration and peace with people whose convictions differ from theirs in some way.
Likewise, religious belief self-evidently doesn’t prevent the growth of scientific understanding, as we see from the fact that until the past century, the vast majority of scientists (including the most illustrious ones) held religious beliefs of some form or other.
Religion and religious fanaticism are not the same thing, and conflating the two doesn’t really conduce to enlightening debate.
Technically, it seems to be pure fiction on the part of the ancient chronicler Theophanes. But moderns with a regard for truth, especially around here where we’re supposed to be fighting ignorance, should not just accept such old legends at face value.
The history of the growth of Christianity (and of Islam too, BTW) is a very complicated subject that can’t be reduced to a sweeping generalization like “it spread by force”, any more than it can be reduced to a simplistic narrative of “bringing the heathen to God” or something like that.
No, I don’t. First of all, the correlation is not terribly strong. Consider, for instance, the example of Christianity in China. For the past 64 years, China has been ruled by atheists, and followers of all religions have been violently persecuted. Yet during that time, the number of Christians in China has grown from about one million to at least one hundred million. If the religion one is raised in is the primary factor in one’s own religion, than those million original Chinese Christians must have been remarkably fecund. This is unlikely, especially when considering the One-Child Policy. The only other explanation that I’ve ever heard from an atheist for the growth of Christianity in China is that all Chinese Christians are mentally ill, but he couldn’t provide a cite to back up that claim.
Second, there’s no logical basis for what you’re arguing. Suppose we took a poll asking people what color bananas are and what color their parents thought bananas are. If we found that most people have the same beliefs on the topic as their parents, does that mean that nurture is the primary factor driving this illogical belief that bananas are yellow? (And at least one of your fellow atheists has used logic to determine that bananas are not yellow.)
The One-Child policy wasn’t enacted until 1979 and may have slowed growth but by no means came close to stopping it. China’s population has increased by 800 million since the '50s. Since many of those Christians reproducers are still alive today, that means their numbers would’ve grown rapidly as well, more so that the rate of overall population growth. And while there’s no doubt many have converted, there are 2 billion Christians in the world, making the Chinese contribution a drop in the bucket. If you’re going to try to deny that the vast majority of current Christians were raised to be Christians then you’re beyond help.
That is an absurd obfuscation. The color of a banana is an observable fact. All someone would have to know is what yellow looks like to know their parents were quacks or ignorant to think they’re any other color. Religion is, by definition, faith-based and not subject to logic or reasoning. It is PRECISELY the kind of thing that would be spread through parenting.
If you wanted to be honest, you’d stop using shit like this. At least one of your fellow Christians thinks diseases are caused by curses. (see above)
My best guess:
If I were raised to believe disease was caused by curses, I’d probably believe that some diseases are caused by curses even if most aren’t.
At least, that’s sort of what my wife feels about Chinese medicine: She agrees that most diseases are caused by bacteria or viruses, but she still believes that eating food with too much “heat” can cause disease as well.
Huh, I’m an atheist who can think up one or two plausible reasons for the rapid spread of Christianity in China that don’t use mental illness as a cite.
Evolutionary psychology, sure.
Yeah, it doesn’t take people being insane. It could easily be people in tough conditions that are told a lie by a confident speaker.
If you’re living in abject poverty and someone tells of a magic sky kingdom where you get to live in luxury, that’s an easy sell.
Well, even if you’re not living in poverty, but have a desire to belong to a social group, find comfort in rituals, have some fear of death… I can see why these were all useful in human evolution, and they comprise a working explanation of how religion in general manages to persist.