No-one picked up on this, so I should point out that this is not quite as “serious” as people imagine.
There are already a number of Jewish courts in the UK.
Essentially they act as a mutually-respected authority in situations such as divorce. All parties must voluntarily agree to arbitration via this court.
Their rulings are legally binding, but the powers of such courts, and the kinds of cases they can rule on, are very limited.
If some of the Muslims in that poll were advocating a similar set up for Sharia law, I certainly wouldn’t consider that an extremist position.
(That said I would agree with your view that british muslims tend to be much more religious than british christians (if we define christian/muslim as someone that ticks that box in a poll)).
It’s a hijack but I don’t for one second believe respondents had anything soft and fluffy in mind. Even if they had - thin end of an unpleasant wedge.
Nor do I agree that any religion should get a say in justice dispensation. Especially one with inbuilt biases against one sex and a hatred of non-heterosexuals.
I’d rather the Blasphemy Laws were abolished totally, all funding ended for religious schools and all religious based justice systems stopped.
You know while reading this thread I realised I don’t know anyone who actually goes to Church or ever actually says anything about their beliefs ( I am from the UK by the way to clarify). I used to work with a born again Christian about 15 years ago but that is the last person I could really say I sort of knew that was obviously Christian.
Of course it’s possible someone I know is religious it’s just not something that would ever really come up. I guess this is why these boards seem a little weird to me sometimes as there seem to be so many threads on the subject of religion.
I think with the UK it is just religion has become really unimportant in most people’s lives to the extent they just don’t think about it rather than being activity atheist.
Actually I should add really most of the above is related to Christians. I do work with some Muslims and due to them not drinking alcohol and some of their festivals they are fairly obviously religious.
I suppose I didn’t personally notice C of E being treated as a “club” the way some people say. I mean of course I’m aware that a lot of people are christened and have C of E weddings etc. but I didn’t think those people would actually call themselves Christians without believing it. I must just be wrong on that point.
Maybe we should just become an officially secular country.
I’d support that, Trouble is, the religious seem to have difficulty understanding what secular actually means. It means equality for all and an end to privilege…hmmm, actually perhaps they understand just fine.
Religions have defined meanings and doctrines, as anyone who has studied them in depth will be aware of. How someone chooses to identify themselves, despite their beliefs, doesn’t change that.
More to the point, with your incredibly wide interpretation of Christianity then all Muslims are Christians too. They believe that Allah and the Jewish/Christian god are the same, that previous revelations are valid but became corrupted, that Jesus was a prophet also and was indeed born of a virginal conception, but they don’t believe he’s the son of god because god is indivisible and cannot have a child. So, as I said, using your logic they’re Christian too, even if they don’t call themselves that and their religion goes beyond that. Modify the theological issues in this paragraph and you have a similar situation with Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, so unless you want to call Muslims Christians then I think your argument fails.This is why I’m saying such an ill-defined classification is pretty unhelpful, not because I’m playing one true Scotsman. Want to mix something up from the buffet of religious belief in a way that doesn’t sit with doctrine and existing orthodoxy? Go for it, found a new religion, it’s easy and you get a tax break from the US government. Call yourself Jews for Jesus or something… oh wait, been done.
As for one sect of Christianity calling another “not Christians”, that really isn’t the same thing, that’s just plain old denominationalism which happens in lots of religions. If you’re an atheist and/or see religions as social constructs only then there is no merit in considering one interpretation better than another. By all means look at this diagram and please tell me which Christianity is correct. I’m extremely interested in religions not because I think they’re true, or because they have anything to teach us about how to live our lives, but because they represent billions of man hours of human thought, practice and labour and can’t be dismissed as irrelevant (I’m also a big fan of history for the same reason).
I could have made a similar point to this but I’m kind of sick of refuting this ridiculous story for the umpteenth time, so thanks for doing it for me. Although…
Sigh
Fine, but you can’t allow religiously based civil arbitration for one religion and not for another, particularly when one religion has been doing it for about a century already without the whole of society collapsing into a theocracy. Unless you want to argue that Muslims are, as a class of people, more prone to attempting to subvert the law and impose their own beliefs on others through the legal system, of course. If you do please provide some evidence for this. Yes this question could be considered as leading and somewhat inflammatory, but I think it kind of sucks that Muslims are being treated like modern day conversos. I despise their religious beliefs on the whole, but I don’t think they should all automatically be a suspect class because of it. Again, let’s have religious pluralism or let’s not, and if you’re voting for not then you’ve just essentially sanctioned the USSR’s policy on religious freedom (and I tend to find the USSR provides few solutions for a society in which I’d ever choose to live, this one included).
If you have the money to fund a compulsory purchase order for all the land owned by the Catholic or Anglican Church on which over 7000 schools sit (34% of all 22,500 English schools), please feel free to put it towards this cause. As long as the Churches have that leverage over the school system we ain’t going nowhere on this issue. I sympathise with your perspective, but that’s the realpolitik I’m afraid.
Well, no. Because they don’t identify themselves as such. But if you call yourself a Christian and profess to live your life according to the teachings of Jesus Christ then, in my book, you deserve to be taken at your word regardless of your particular metaphysical or eschatological beliefs.
I take it that your position, then, is that the majority of self-professed Christians in the UK are not actually Christians?
Absolutely not, I have no way of knowing that and it would take a lot more than one poll like this to convince me of anything like that. My point is not that they’re not Christians according to an arbitrary standard set by me, but it would appear there are a lot of people surveyed who profess to be Christians whose beliefs are at odds with the religion they are part of. If the people surveyed lived in, for example, a gnostic tradition country where belief in the divinity of Jesus was not the norm then saying they didn’t believe he was the son of god wouldn’t be at odds with their Christian identity, would it?
Take another example - if you did a survey of Catholics and asked them about their belief, and a sizeable number said they didn’t believe in transubstantiation, or papal infallibility, or in the concept of intercession, or any of the other core beliefs of Catholicism, on what basis would you classify them as Catholics? If you find a horse with black and white stripes that lives in Africa it’s not a horse, it’s a Zebra.
Regarding your point on Muslims not being Christian, I agree that how they identify themselves is a big part of it, but bear in mind for a long time Islam was considered a Christian heresy for the exact reasons I’ve given. You can find relatively modern books that discuss it in such terms, in fact. Ultimately I’m not arguing that they’re Christians, they’re not, the religions are too far apart. But I would apply the test to Mormons and JWs that I did in my previous paragraph and, on that basis, I can’t include them in the sphere of Christian sects. This is a matter of scholarly debate though, you could construct an argument that they are, and it’s not clear cut one way or the other. It’s only until relatively recently that Mormons publicly stated they were Christians though, when they had enough autonomy and physical/cultural isolation to do what they wanted they weren’t so fussed at being considered just another sect. It’s also for that reason that I’m not AS bothered by a group or individual’s self identification if their practices/beliefs vary too much from the defined doctrine of said religion.
Well, that’s sort of an interesting question, I think. If a huge percentage of the laity, to use a particularly relevant example, believes that using contraception is not sinful but the Catholic leadership avers that it is, which is more reflective of “Catholic belief regarding contraception”? I can see good arguments on both sides.
In fact, I would hazard that if you did a poll at a random mass, even in the relatively orthodox US, asking if the Eucharist literally turned into the body and blood of Jesus, a huge percentage would say “no”. That is, I’m not sure that the doctrine of transubstantiation is as critical to Catholicism as you (and, no doubt, the Pope) would like it to be.
Similarly, if everybody around me decides to call the horse with black and white stripes a horse, then who am I to say “no no no, that’s a zebra”.
You seem to be approaching this from a perspective of thinking what people believe first, and then what the agreed definitions of things are second. Fine if you want to do that, but I’d posit it’s not a good approach to take when trying to make meaningful statements about what religions are. YMMV.
Well, that’s rather the point Dawkins is making. They aren’t really Christians in belief, only in some hazy, lazy self-identification and therefore the militant religious minority should stop banging on about how we are a Christian country. We’re not.
Surely the fact that a sizeable number of (hypothetical) Catholics don’t believe in transubstantiation means it is definitively a Catholic belief? Religions grow, change and evolve - there isn’t a set of In Rules and Out Rules that stays the same forever (that doesn’t mean the rules don’t exist, but that they may not be the same as they were 50 years, 200 years, 2800 years ago). If, in your example, Catholicism has come to a point where a large chunk of Catholics don’t believe in transubstantiation, then that’s a statement about where Catholicism is as a movement, not who is and isn’t Catholic.
To join in the pile on, your mistake is thinking that you know what beliefs Christians hold better than Christians themselves. As far as I’m concerned, the beliefs of local Christians are by definition the tenets of the Christian religion. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Christians don’t believe in fairy stories, why would anyone ever assume that they did?
While I know that some foreign Christians have some very nasty views and practices, it has always been obvious to me, as an atheist living in Christian-majority Britain, that the local Christians are generally charming and likeable people whom it is a pleasure to live amongst. The only confusing things are how many of their bishops and similar religious leaders appear to share the ridiculous beliefs and despicable bigotries of foreign (typically non-European) Christians, and why Cameron and Warsi have recently started banging on about us being a Christian nation (which is bemusing to everyone I know).
Bolding mine. Lest anyone be unnecessarily alarmed, the odds are fairly good that the vicar was a believing (as well as a practising) Christian. Unless Mr Bobble went out of his way to find atheist vicars, which would have been a pointless hassle.
I really don’t think ‘christian’ is in the Top 5 of most people’s primary identities. It’s no more than a box they tick every few years. I bet for a lot of the nominal ‘christians’ Man Utd Supporter and Heat Magazine reader would rank higher as a compnent of their personal identities.
They don’t hold ‘beliefs’ so much as they ‘don’t know and don’t care’ about any of it.
Well, that’s true for most religions, but Catholics are much more hierarchical than most (all?) other religions. The rules and regs of Catholicism are set by the Vatican, not by the local priest.
You can be Christian and use birth control, for example, but it’s never made sense to me how you could consider yourself Catholic.
