LA Times religion reporter ends up losing faith

Great Debates
81

Yet people have free will and, having free will, can affect their own behavior. Else nobody would become an atheist or leave the religion of their birth, I think.

It has also led to people giving food, clothing, shelter, and comfort to people they are not related to and have never met under the belief that a big beard in the sky looks favorably on that kind of thing. From my own personal favorite book in the New Testament, a quote I’m sure you have heard:

And within the religion of Islam, just as there are calls to go fight, there are also calls to bring no violence to innocents. There are those who make arguments that these innocents are in fact guilty of (I may have this wrong, I heard a very interesting story on it on NPR) oppressing the nation of all Muslims. I think we can easily agree that they are wrong to do this, that even their religion says they are wrong, but people who are angry and outraged and other people who are hungry for power and chaos tell them “It’s all right, God told you it’s all right” and they believe it.

And it’s terrible that men have the power to turn other men against their own consciences and what they know in their hearts to be right. I agree with you, but I do not take from that “so religion is evil”. I say the men who say these things and use religion for evil purposes commit evil acts.

Agreed. But to say that belief is therefore evil is incorrect. Or that belief in God is evil. Or that belief in daVinci is evil. Et cetera.

But some humans, being humans, need stories and justification for taking moral actions they do not wish to take. Not everyone gets to the point of doing things for the sake of being good people.

Well, I wouldn’t call Him that, but I see your point and I admit I don’t have much of an answer for it save that I’m not a biblical inerrantist or whatever you call people who take the book literally. I think there was a great deal of “GOD WANTS US TO HAVE THIS LAND” regardless of what Yahweh might actually have, well, wanted. If He wanted anything.

Why is it so important to you that these ethics are secular? They do show up in the holy books. It’s probably because they can also sprout up independently of religion. These ethics, just as religions, spring from humans attempting to create order in a chaotic universe. Self-sacrifice, for example, is not a survival trait for an individual. You need to do a lot of convincing to get someone to give up their own comfort to give it to others. I’m not saying religion is the only way or even the best way to convince someone of this, but it is a way.

Religion is a path that can lead to both good and evil. Other paths can lead to both good and evil. Religion is very good at leading people in both directions.

And again, this is a problem of worshiping the religion, of people twisting the words to make the world stable and unchanging

You know that’s not true. You know that’s a silly claim to make. I understand why you made it. I may be misunderstanding – it sounds like you’re saying there is nothing good in those books. Not that there’s nothing good in those books that isn’t in other books or couldn’t have been reached another way, that there’s nothing good in there at all.

You know better.

How, precisely, do you expect this to happen? You look at humanity like a priest: “here is how people are, how do we change them?” instead of “here is how people are, how do we deal with that?”

82

I can’t believe we are both His children. Damn.

83

Unless you consider non-believers to be guilty, there are multiple calls for the murder of innocent civilians. In fact, the murder of non-muslims seems to be one of the central tenets of Islam, if we are going strictly by the book and not by modern revisionist interpretations. Cite.

The call to fight western influence and tear down secular democracy and replace it with a disgusting tali ban -like theocracy is not just a case of a few corrupt politicians and religious leaders corrupting the “true message” of Islam. The Koran is unequivocally the most violent of the three faiths descending from Abraham.

What I find is a number of otherwise reasonable people whose brains shut down at the mention of “Allah.”

I agree they are men committing evil acts. But their acts are religious superstition carried out to the extreme and demanded by the text that is central to their respective religions. Where you find people who disregard the violent passages of the Bible and the Koran, the cause for their peacefulness is not religion but their own sense of right and wrong which has absolutely no basis in religion.

An idea itself is not evil in an absolutely literal sense. An idea does not function on its own entirely, it requires human action. I agree with you up to this point. But to say that the idea does not deserve our scorn because it requires people to carry out is to hide the fact that there are two things to blame.

The problem is not Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. The problem is faith. When we have people not applying their critical thinking skills to all areas of life and just shutting down once the word “god” is muttered, then the evil in men lies unchecked. Faith does not make men violent or intolerant, but it provides a justification that would not be acceptable to any person if they just used their brains a bit more.

There could be a case made that religion was an order-keeping device that could evolve faster than we could as our populations exploded. I could tentatively accept that religion had its roots in group cohesion and its success as a meme hinged on the “kill the unbelievers” theme while some of the crazier stuff clung on mostly unnoticed the way a useless string of DNA can get passed on.

I would have to see a lot of evidence to buy that, though. In the meantime, I’ll be a bit less cynical than you and say most people are decent.

When I mean when I say secular ethics and secular morality is morality and ethics don’t have their roots in religion. They’re not products of or intrinsically would up in religion and most people don’t accept religions moral claims because the book told them so but because their own internal moral compass already agrees with the statement.

I don’t want to hijack this thread too much, but that’s not entirely true. From a selfish gene perspective, self-sacrifice can be beneficial. I cite Dawkins’s “The Selfish Gene” and this website.

GOD DAMN YOU ARE BEING SO REASONABLE AND HARD TO HATE. GRRRRRRRR.

84

What organizations? All religious organizations? That is laughable! Some religious denominations can’t agree on civil policy among themselves!

Stem cell research has not been banned in the United States. Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research has been banned. I could be mistaken, but I believe that Congress supported federal funding, but the President did not. The ban has been due in part to religious interference, but also to moral objections.

Keep in mind that many Protestants support federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Not at all. Nothing undermines reason and logic. That’s why great scientists can also be religious.

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Many things may undermine reason and logic, including religion, among others. That’s why great scientists can also be religious - and why some scientists are not so great. You made a point in your post about generalising too far; I think you may have fallen foul of it yourself here.

86

I would look at your former life and realize that you are just a human,turning around your life is a good thing no matter what method you use.

If you made a car and it doesn’t run well because you the maker made it so bad, it wouldn’t be the car’s fault but yours, and since your God is all knowing and decided that you would do horrible things then he would be responsible for your being, because He knew a head of time you would do bad things, so If you were not perfect it isn’t only your fault so in such a case you should not be held responsible for your defects. It is sometimes harder to forgive our selves, it is when we acknowledge our faults and change bad behavior(try to make up for our failings) we can be at peace.

Monavis

87

Zoe

OK then, let me rephrase that. If you check here:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/5/2/155843/5848
You’ll see where an official in the Southern Baptist Convention endorses the murder of doctors performing abortions and his boss gets a bit wishy-washy about disavowing him.
Somewhere above I mentioned the problem of the Catholic Church trying to pressure legislators to vote their way on abortions. What else could you call this except trying to modify public policy? The Catholics try to change the law though underhanded means while the Baptists decide that murder really isn’t all that bad as long as it’s done in the name of a cause they agree with.

It wasn’t aimed at me, but I also disagree with your statement about stem cell research. No, it wasn’t banned. OTOH, fetal stem cell research in the US was deliberately crippled and impeded. This was done at the urging of the religious people in the country. Could you agree with that?

Regards

Testy

88

I love it that so many on the religious side are trying to dismiss the faith of the journalist in the OP by using such obvious, transparent instances of the True Scotsman fallacy: his faith wasn’t really strong because … he didn’t really believe because …

How about this? He was a particularly serious and devout religious believer who gained his atheism as a result of being forced to give a very hard examination to religious issues as part of his jobs.

89

The only moral objections that came were from blatantly ignorant misunderstandings of science. An embryo used for stem cells contains 50-100 cells and is not biologically distinct from any other bacteria. There is no neural net and no heartbeat, or any other sign of an ability to feel pain or be a sentient creature. Yet the religious right comes in with “every sperm is sacred” and ignorantly insists that a sperm is a baby and we just can’t use it to save lives.

This is a religious issue. The secular objections are demonstrably false.

Good for them. I never said there weren’t religious moderates. But religious moderation comes from secular roots in the first place.

Not true. Faith can and does often. From Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation”: Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution (and two-thirds of these believe evolution was “guided by God”). 53% are actually creationists.

“Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.”

90

Thanks to DtC for posting the thread and providing a link to a very moving thought provoking article.

I can identify with Lobdell in several ways. I am regularly dumbfounded, disappointed and sometimes deeply saddened and aghast by some of the things people do under the umbrella of religious faith and in the name of their particular deity.

I was equally offended by the so called “men of God” who covered for and protected pedophiles to protect the church as I was the pedophiles themselves. It’s inexcusable and morally reprehensible.

Living in the south for the past few years I’ve become more aware of what big business religion can be. In my store I’ve dealt with wonderful church representatives and also those who will lie just to save $20. I don’t get it. As said earlier in this thread by Cervaise **
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If faith in God doesn’t make the faithful better people, then what the hell’s the point?

I expect church goers to struggle with issues the same as others. We humans can find plenty of justifications for our transgression of choice. However, when the church leaders can’t seem to set a decent example how do we expect that to benefit anyone?

That being said, one of the things that struck me about the article was how Lobdell seemed to lose his faith in part because he was focused on the outside. He seemed to see God and even want to see God as some outside influence. A separate being out there somewhere that we supplicate to in order to have our problems solved. Someone else in the form of an all powerful supernatural being, to fix us as individuals and as a society. At least that’s how it seems to me sometimes.

Seeing God in that way it’s understandable that witnessing man’s cruelty to his fellow man, especially by this God’s self declared representative’s would play a role in a loss of faith.

I still count myself as a believer but my concept about the nature of what we call God has changed quite a bit from my days in Christianity.
I really appreciate this line by Little Plastic Ninja

IMHO the spiritual journey is about transforming ourselves. Maybe that’s trying to understand the intent behind our actions and then redirecting it into something more positive. Labels, doctrines and traditions can be vehicles through which our intent becomes our actions, but in the final analysis our intent, our actions and how they affect the lives we touch are all that matters.

Kindness, love, courage, honesty, compassion, are the same for the the churchgoer and the atheist. The same is true for our negative qualities. I have good friends and family on both sides of the issue. I love them for who they are as people not for how many religious beliefs we do or don’t share.

I don’t believe religious faith is a negative sum when it comes to it’s effect on mankind, or that we would be obviously better off without it.
Concerning this comment by Forumbot

I don’t believe the problem is faith. I think faith is a crucial part of human make up. We couldn’t get rid of it even if we wanted to. The question is what do we have faith in? IMHO part of the problem is people wanting to avoid taking personal responsibility for their lives and actions by looking to someone else to tell them what is right, what God thinks, what they should do, how they should live. So, when the particular group we belong to says X is true or right, we believe it.
When faith is tied to surrendering our own thinking, and our conscience to our desire to be accepted as part of a particular group it can have negative consequences. That group might be religious or secular. There are plenty of examples.

It isn’t just about using our brains, although that certainly helps. We are also emotional beings and to grow we have to learn to balance and direct with intent our brains and our emotions. Haven’t we all know incredibly intelligent people who are emotional wrecks? Haven’t we know uneducated people who are emotionally healthy in a common sense way and make positive contributions to those around them?
and finally this

I’d be interested in seeing where those statistics come from. There’s a difference between a general belief that God or some divine intelligence guided creation and being a literal creationist and thinking the earth and the universe are only 6000 years old.

It may be true given the number of churches and Christians around but I’m skeptical.

91

What do the other 19% believe?

92

Wrong. Faith and religion can and does undermine reason and logic by it’s nature. And fewer scientists are religious than the average person, and very few Nobel Prize winners are religous ( or they probably wouldn’t be one ); religion and science are hostile by nature. Science is about facts and reason and trying to understand the world, religion is about irrationality, willful ignorance and delusion. The mentality required for the two is the exact opposite, and compartmentalizing them is, at best, a handicap for a scientist.

93

Emotions come from the brain, too. And I don’t care how emotionally stable a person is so long as they’re not trying to undermine scientific fact with their ‘god did it’ mumbo jumbo or flying a plane into a building.

So far as uneducated people being productive, there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. I am very ignorant of a lot of things, but I am smart enough to generally tell what the correct viewpoint on any given subject is if there is one and when there is room for debate.

I got them from Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation.” The book is in storage right now, but any decent library will have a copy and you can check his bibliography. He cites every claim he makes.

Larry: Go check the bibliography for that book. Find out where the statistic came from, and find out for yourself. I checked a number of his other cites and found them to be pretty good, so I trust that he doesn’t use bullshit statistics.

94

The balance I spoke of means not closing our minds to science or other possibilities. We must take a stand against those who use religious belief to oppress and manipulate others, but that doesn’t mean their is no value or reality in the spiritual journey. The more negative human traits exist outside religion as well. The good and bad we see displayed within religious context is just part of mankind’s growing pains. You won’t get rid of it by dismissing religion.

Well that’s good. The examples I’ve seen both here on the boards and elsewhere demonstrate that both believers and non believers are subject to clinging to certain beliefs based on emotional attachment. Accepting things on faith without evidence is not just a religion thing.

I tend to take Mr. Harris a a pretty honest guy. Those may be accurate but statistics can be skewed by the nature of the questions asked.

Do you believe God created the world? is a different question when “in six days” is added.

Here’s another quote from that book

So although only 28% think the Bible is literally true, 53% believe the world is only 6000 years old? I’m not sure how those fit together.

btw, 28% is enough to scare the crap out of me.

95

Meh, I’d be scareder if I thought more people know what “literally” means.

96

A common assertion, but I see no evidence for it. People do evil and stupid things in the name of religion, they use religion to excuse those things, religion itself demands they do those things, and people say they are doing those things because of their religion. There’s no reason to assume that they are all lying, and there’s no reason to assume that removing a major source of bad motivations, bad judgement, divisiveness, excuses, and wilful ignorance wouldn’t improve people’s behavior. In fact, all over the world we see that the more religious a society is the worse off it is.

97

Granting all of this, it is also true that people do good and benevolent things in the name of religion, they use religion to explain those things, religion itself demands they do these things, and people say they are doing these things because of their religion.

What, then, justifies your 100% negative attitude toward religion? Why does the evil count against religion but the good doesn’t count in its favor?

98

The good does count. It’s just that the evil is so huge and the good so small, and there are other ways of accomplishing those goods that don’t require the evils of religion. And I regard the evils of religion as being so enormous that I can’t really imagine any plausible good it could begin to make up for it. I’m sure you could also find some good done in the name of racism as well; that doesn’t make up for it’s evil, or make it good either; the difference is that it’s acceptable to label racism as evil, but not to label religion as evil. Despite religion being at least as bad.

99

He is not the first minister to give up and quit, and he won’t be the last. On the other side atheists are being converted to theists in a like manner. So the world turns and drama plays out.

100

Any proof that it’s happening at all the same rate ? Religion is so stupid that very few people buy into it unless infected at an early age. Overall the historical trend is for religion to weaken, fortunately.