Hey, now, I said “maybe inadvertently”. 
There are thoughts and there are “back of your mind” thoughts, or the unconscious ones. Somewhere in there might be the thought of, “If this ‘evidence’ strays my faith when I read it, I could be entirely wrong! I’ll lose my job, my life, my respect…”
By not acknowledging new evidence and consciously saying, “Nope. Can’t be. God Promised,” isn’t that deceiving unintentionally?
How would you categorize people who avoid things because they are worried the things would “damage their faith”? They’re consciously engaging in a campaign of self-misinformation based on a subconscious belief that their conscious belief is incorrect.
Nah, It’s a “no real scotsman” technique. ITR will no Doubt assert that no one who truly follows christ can be in it for the money etc.
I don’t really worry about categorizing them. Certainly what they’re doing doesn’t qualify as fraud, though–they’re not intending to deceive themselves (since they believe they’re correct), and they’re not intending to gain material advantage by their actions in any case.
Again, to extend “fraud” to cover these people makes reasonable debate impossible. I remember a communist I worked with when I was a teenager who used this technique, constantly telling me that I knew he was right and just refused to confront the evidence; I also knew a sedevacantist Catholic who told me precisely the same thing. Debate with both parties was utterly futile. It’s almost always used as an ad hominem that prevents real discourse.
It is a tough debate. For me, the term “fraud” is a legal, business term. I think that religion is definitely a business and historically incorrect. But many of these businessmen really do believe their “idea” is true. So to say religion is fraudulent… It’s almost as if we need to analyze every single preacher/church and their finances in order to come up with an answer.
I do agree with Acid Lamp that someone who truly follows Jesus CAN NOT be fraudulent, though I doubt I’ll ever meet such a person.
It sounds like the only fraud you’ll accept is the meeting of leaders in Lenny Bruce’s *Religion, Incorporated *. Would you be happy if I admit that kind of fraud is pretty rare.
But to continue on the point of fraud by omission, how about a stock broker who has been recommending a stock, let’s call it Benron, to his clients. They keep on buying and he makes money. He hears some rumors about it, but never finds time to check them out, because he’s sure that the stock is good and in any case reversing course would hurt his credibility. When a client asks, he says he has read no bad things about the stock.
Or, we could bring up WMDs - but we had better not. :dubious:
Are you kidding? It is one of the strongest types of power. If someone is successful because of your advice you can claim it was because of you that they were successful. If they failed you can claim they failed because they didn’t follow your advice correctly. You can’t lose unless you’re stupid. You’re like a puppeteer if you do this well.
48 Laws of Power
I don’t have the actual book in front of me, but here are a few of them that seem to apply to using advice as a power tactic.
Law 7 Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit
Law 11 Learn to Keep People Dependent on You
Law 12 Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim
Law 27 Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following (especially pertinent in this discussion)
Law 32 Play to People’s Fantasies
Law 43 Work on the Hearts and Minds of Others
Don’t confuse using power with being evil. They aren’t the same thing.
Look, I’m really not interested in all these hypotheticals. Check out your Benron worker’s Bconviction Brecord: any good Beconomic Bhistory will have it.
I’m unfamiliar with the Lenny Bruce work. To the best of my knowledge, Scientology started off as a fraud, and certain new-age movements can also be classified as a fraud. Some televangelists have a strongly fraudulent element in how they promise that good things will happen in your life if you give them money; it seems very likely to me that they don’t believe their claims. Of course there are frauds with religious components; it’d be totally weird if there weren’t.
The vast majority of religious folks, however, appear to be sincere in their beliefs, and this includes the vast majority of religious leaders. Therefore, it’s inaccurate to characterize religion as a whole as a fraudulent money-making scheme.
True, and i’m unaware how much (if at all) that’s a part of Protestant theology, as **Shodan **brings up; but the heartfelt deathbed repentance requires honesty and and a desire to do good in order to be true, as I understand it. The “heartfelt” bit is important.
Hmm, entirely separate from my earlier suggestion, I’m not sure this is correct, at least by my defintion of the word “fraudulent”. Per merriam-webster, fraudulent means “characterized by, based on, or done by fraud”, and fraud means:
1 a: deceit, trickery ; specifically : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right b: an act of deceiving or misrepresenting : trick
2 a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be : impostor ; also : one who defrauds : cheat b: one that is not what it seems or is represented to be
Bolding mine. Acknowleging that the direct read of the given definition of “fraudulent” seems to referring to the ‘act’ sort of fraud and not the ‘thing’ sort of fraud, I personally think that a thing that can be classified as a fraud can also be classified as a fraudulent thing. And, since any untrue religion is “not what it seems or is represented to be”, any untrue religion is, by definition, fraudulent.
Note that this does not mean that its adherents are frauds - not unless they claim to have chatted with gods when they have, in fact, not done so. But by my understanding and use of the term, a thing that is fake can be fraudulent, even if it has no will and thus cannot possibly have the deceptive intent usually associated with term ‘fraud’ when used to describe an act.
This is the sort of statement that sounds great if you left it drift by, but which falls apart when you give it the least bit of thought. What types of power are there. Off the top of my head, I might list:
Physical force
Force of law
Money
Business or government hierarchy
Family structure
Advice
Think about the list for a moment and it becomes immediately obvious that advice is the weakest form of power. Advice is obviously weaker than physical force or force of law, since obedience to advice is voluntary while obedience to legal or physical force is not. Obedience to money is not mandatory, but its influence in society is so pervasive that it might as well be. As for business and government hierarchies and families, they are so important in the lives of an average person that they cannot be easily ignored. Advice, on the other hand, can always be easily ignored. Hence advice is the weakest form of power. Listing ways in which the power of advice can be leveraged doesn’t change the basic fact.
Even this hypothetical persuasive person has only power that is voluntarily given and can be terminated at any time. That, by definition, makes his power less than political, legal, or military power. Power is a measure of the extent to which a person can make others take action. An adviser to the President always has less power than the President, because the adviser cannot force the President to do anything.
It can’t be voluntarily terminated. You can’t decide that you don’t believe in advice anymore. A change in opinion has to be affected by outside events - perhaps the advice frequently doesn’t work, or the advice giver lowers themselves in your esteem in some way. The power of advice isn’t voluntarily given, either; attention is voluntarily given (in most cases) certainly, but as far as ministers go, that attention is (at least as far as a led service goes) voluntarily granted.
Advice can be as much as a force, a compulsion, as is an armed guard forcing you to do something. An advisor can have great power, because while an armed assault would certainly give some power, that power is granted grudgingly, unwillingly, and will be taken back at the first chance - and that armed person will likely never get another chance to have that power. An advisor can have continuing power, and what is more it can actually change a person’s mind - even when you are no longer giving advice, the effects of that advice remain. If you hold me up with a gun and force me to say that I am wrong on this subject, I will likely say it, but when you’re gone I won’t anymore (and i’ll probably avoid you). If you manage to convince me i’m wrong, not only will I believe it after you’ve gone off to something else, I might even try to convince others in turn.
And, of course, there’s the little matter that physical force to do something is often rather illegal.
The fact that an adviser and advisee both believe in an afterlife doesn’t mean that the excellence of the advise in question relies on the afterlife. That seems to be one of the most common misconceptions among atheists about Christianity: that Christians do because of what we hope or fear after death. Truth be told, if the afterlife were not there, the rest would still remain the same. The virtues would still be virtues, the sins would still be sins, the duties would still be duties, the counsels would still be counsels, and so forth.
I’ve not claimed that Christians do what they do because of what the hope for after death, though I suspect that it would be true of some people. If you’ve misread that of me, perhaps that particular misconception is not so common as you think. No, the afterlife as taking into account advice given is important not only because of the results for where the person will be off to, but because it shows the results of the advice given - has what you’ve done pleased God and the people you’ve known? Have the tenets you’ve lived by been accurate? What form does the “I” take, anyway? Plenty of advice upon which the answers require that stage in order for answers.
Virtues, sins, and some duties, as well as the forms they take, can only be fully known upon death. The afterlife will hold the results of all those innumerable religious questions that one might approach a minister with. If the answers were known to be different, then the counsel given - would be different.
This is really a stretch: when you have to cross-reference two different dictionary definitions, using a minor definition of one term that you acknowledge isn’t the one referenced in the other definition, you don’t exactly build a robust argument.
If you want to use “fraudulent” in such a manner, knock yourself out: that’s glory for you. Just make it clear to everyone that you’re using an idiosyncratic definition, one that doesn’t correspond to what most people do.
Hell, if you want to define “murder” as “an action that results in the death of a human being,” then I’ll agree with you that hospitals are murder factories. Stretch a definition enough, and anything becomes possible.
But under the conventional meaning of the word “fraudulent,” it’s not enough for something merely to be incorrect: it must be the result of intentional avaricious or malicious deception.
begbert, check out this clarification at Merriam-Webster:
(emphasis added)
Edit: also check out MW’s thesaurus entry. Their definition here is more expansive, and supports what I’m saying. Compare the near-antonyms to the antonyms.
When you have to characterize a definition that consists of nothing but referencing the other as “cross-referencing two different dictionary definitions” in order to pretend I’m incorrectly conflating different meanings, you don’t exactly build a robust argument.
Let’s be succinct - your bald assertion isn’t terribly convincing. I don’t think that my definition is idiosyncratic - if it was it would be impossible to refer to something that has no will as being fraudulent. If things without will can be fraudulent, then the ‘fraudulent’ label can be assigned without an intent to decieve. No doubt the term is pejorative - but that doesn’t mean it’s inapplicable.
So yeah. You’re wrong. Deal with it.
The section you emphasized includes “in act or practice”. For an act to be fraudulent, it must be carried out with deceptive intent. A religion is not an act - it’s a thing.
Yeah. Next note how when you apply the adjective to something without will like religion, aboveboard and honest honest become inapplicable and truthful becomes…true.
Good grief. Get those hackles down.
Religion isn’t a thing, of course. You can’t see it, weigh it, or punch it. Religion is a set of acts and beliefs. The OP is specifically questioning whether it’s a moneymaking scheme, and a scheme is a set of acts.
The intent that we examine when we decide whether an act is fraudulent is, of course, the intent of the actor. Nobody suggests that thunder is fraudulent (pretending to be a god’s hammer crashing down when it isn’t really), because there’s no intent involved in thunder. No act that lacks intent behind it is characterized as fraudulent.
A pyramid scheme can be fraudulent, even though the scheme lacks intent, because the actors, the schemers, have deceptive intent.
Again, you’re trying to make this more complicated than it is.
Rebutting implies hackles?
A religion isn’t a thing? What do you think it is, an adjective? :dubious: (Seriously, people still have trouble with the idea of intangible nouns, in this day and age?)
Nobody suggests that thunder is pretending to be a god’s hammer crashing down because there’s nothing particular about thunder that implies that it’s Thor’s hammer is smashing down. Religions, on the other hand, seems to implying pretty hard that they’re a way to establish a connection with a God, or to get in good with a God, or to get information about the intents of a God. If they are not in fact connected to a god, they’re fraudulent in terms of their explicit identity. Even if the human agents peddling the religion are perfectly sincere, the religion itself is lying about what it can offer.
This actually isn’t complicated. In simple terms, the word “fraudulent” has a common usage that has ‘leaked’ from being just about intentional and deliberate monetary fraud, to being a bit broader. (Possibly this happened because the structure of the word ‘fraudulent’ itself means “like fraud”, not “precisely fraud”). Trying to argue that it’s not a correct use of the word is like arguing that you can’t have a marriage of two corporations, in my opinion - it’s a restrictive literalist interpretation that fails to acnowledge common unregulated usage of the term.
But regardless, this isn’t that big of a deal. You want to argue that the word specifically only refers to deliberate deception by conscious agents for the specific purpose of extracting monetary gain or whatever, fine. I’ve merely explained to you why that argument isn’t likely to be persuasive to everyone, regardless of how often you repeat it or how strongly you believe in the narrower interpretation of the word.
Based upon risk vs. reward, advising people is a win for the advisor.
Regardless. the reason this came up was because of the claim that churches aren’t just about money, but about power. You are looking at this from your point of view. You don’t think that the power to give advice is worth anything. Yet, we disagree.
Ask yourself why a person want to give advice for a living? Now I grant you that they may be doing it from the goodness of their heart, but exercising power isn’t evil in itself. Does the minister derive satisfaction from giving advice and influencing behaviors? If he does, then he is exercising power, whether he is conscious of the fact, or not.
When I first came to Yemen, I looked at the culture. I looked at what they valued. I looked to see if I agreed with it. I did, so it was easier. I offered advice that coincided with what I had learned and what I observed. Over time I built up a reputation. Now I can leverage that reputation and implement ideas and plans that I would never have been able to before. I did this consciously. Most do this unconsciously with various degrees of success. The alternative was to use my position and dictate to my employees. It might have worked, but I realized that eventually I would be in a mentoring role where I wouldn’t have the authority of my position to force people to act. The only real authority I have now is based upon my reputation. I have not noticed a decrease in my ability to do the job.