Eh I don’t really see a problem here.
One can practice a religion without necessarily studying that religion.
For your entertainment, this clueless European will now attempt an American-style analogy:
“One can play baseball without having studied the diaries of Joe DeMaggio.”
(How did I do!?)
I know the point wasn’t to take the test. But I couldn’t resist.
Got them.
I got four out of five. I forgot Leviticus. I was asking myself “Is Kings one of the first five books?”
Got it.
Nine out of ten. I forgot taking the Lord’s name in vain.
A complete miss. I was thinking about the eightfold way and got totally lost.
Six out of seven. I forgot confession.
Got it.
I don’t feel that analogy works. I see a distinction between knowing the history of an activity and knowing the rules of that activity.
Trying to be a Christian without knowing even the basics of what’s in the Bible is like trying to play baseball without knowing how many strikes make an out.
I’m not entirely sure what a “gospel” is.
It’s a recounting of the life and teachings of Jesus. Traditionally, there are four of them which are considered to be canonical. They’re named after their supposed authors; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These four gospels are the first four books of the New Testament.
It’s not a problem so much as making a point. You can practice a religion without studying religion, yes. The point being made here is that many (probably most) people that practice religion aren’t actually practicing their religion so much as they’re practicing their priest’s and their teacher’s interpretation of that religion.
That analogy doesn’t work. The reason being is that you first said “once can practice religion without necessarily studying that religion”. But then, in your analogy you said “One can play baseball without having studied the diaries of Joe DeMaggio.”. For your analogy to be a good comparison it should have been “one can play baseball without studying baseball”.
When looked at like that, it does work. Without studying baseball, you can certainly still play but you’ll never get past little league or maybe even high school baseball without learning the rules, the culture, watching others that are good at baseball and following their examples etc.
From that, you can draw comparisons to a religious person that only knows what they hear in church vs a religious person that does more to really learn what the religion is about when you dig a bit deeper into it. The analogy starts to fall apart eventually, however, since religion isn’t really a competitive team sport.
Well, not really. In the All Are Welcome modern churches, all you have to do is show up. A great deal of Christian practice is entirely passive once that is accomplished. Listen to a sermon, appear to be singing, etc.
Generally Christian practice is a social event with spiritual and charitable activities attached. The fact that it purports to be based on a five thousand year old tome is for most church goers pretty irrelevant practically speaking.
Come to think of it this may be why so many atheists on this board get so exercised about religious people “believing in nonsense!!!” and why this is such a useless argument. Going to church fulfills a lot of social and cultural needs for many people, for which there is no real substitute. What is ‘believed’ is beside the point for a whole lot of them.
Thanks. I knew the Bible had books, but didn’t know there was a subset with a special name. To complete my education, isn’t all of the New Testament about Jesus?
To go back to the baseball analogy. If being a Christian is mostly just about showing up and listening to a sermon, then being a baseball player is little more than putting on a baseball uniform and hanging around the stadium during games.
It doesn’t purport to be, it is. Ask a religious person any number of questions and see how often they’ll fall back on ‘the bible says…’. If it was just about being social, it wouldn’t revolve around going to church and listening to the priest talk about the bible.
Do you honestly think that’s limited to just this website? The discussion/argument of ‘why don’t you believe in god?’/“why do you believe in nonsense?” has been ongoing pretty much since forever. Probably even before the internet.
What is believed isn’t ‘beside the point’, it’s literally THE point. Religion focuses around faith, period. Everything else that comes with faith, be it helping others, go to a luncheons, attending mass etc, is secondary. It happens because of your beliefs.
There’s a million substitutes for the social and cultural aspects of going to church. If you take everything about religion out of it, it’s just a large group of people that agree to hangout for an hour once a week. Join a bowling club, get a bunch of friends and go to lectures, do volunteer work.
I have no problem with people being religious, but to deny it has anything to do with faith is…odd.
I get that you’re speaking about ‘all are welcome’ which I assume is a way for churches to attempt to bring in people from other religions and/or people that aren’t religious. But the fact of the matter is, it’s still church, it’s still about faith. I can’t imagine it’s going to bring in any real number of atheists.
Also, ask yourself why are all welcome? Who decided that all are welcome? Who’s example are they following?
You don’t need to know all the rules, or even most of them, to start playing baseball. Parents and coaches can tell their kids to hit the ball; run to first base. You could stay at this level.
But if you tell everyone you are a baseball player, they would probably assume you know most of the rules. These are the basics, and if it is your thing you might know most of the players so you can do well in a fantasy baseball pool, know how to do different pitches, and enjoy documentaries about the game.
Multiple subsets. For example, the first five books are called the Torah by Jews and the Pentateuch by Christians; there are Old and New Testaments. The New Testament comprises the four Gospels (recounting the life, death and resurrection of Jesus), the Deeds of the Apostles (recounting a bunch of stuff that happened in the Church during its first few years), a bunch of Letters written to different local churches by different authors (the traditional attributions do not match actual literary analysis), and the book of Revelations (which may be the largest source of psychodelic and surrealist imagery in all of Western culture).
Yes in a sense, but the Gospels are the only books that are about what Jesus said and did during his earthly life.
Other parts of the New Testament:
The Acts of the Apostles (aka the book of Acts): About the early Church: what happened in the first few years after Jesus’s life.
The Epistles: Letters, written by various people (Paul, among others) to various individuals and groups, about various matters of concern to those early Christians, both theological and practical.
Revelation: The weird one. The Apocalypse. A symbolic (maybe?) depiction of the end of the world (maybe? or maybe veiled references to things that were going on at the time it was written? or some of each?).
Tongue in cheek: Gospel is derived from “Goy Spiel”. 
Because their religion, at least as practiced in the US does not seem to promote such thing. Or at least I have never heard such a thing promoted by various Christian religions.
That doesn’t mean that their sacred texts can’t be interpreted that way, but that does not mean that is the accepted interpreted for a religion of today, nor does it mean those things are practiced. It would seem more like your belief as to how it should be interpreted (and perhaps your wish that people stay away from religions), but in practice your statement is simply not true from what I have experienced. And there is a good reason why, scripturally that would seem to be in conflict with ‘God is Love’ and ‘scriptures can not be broken’. Meaning that topic must have a loving God who will save the people oppressed and discipline those who have harmed them.
We all know that those things have been practiced by religious authorities in the past, but then again so those have been practiced by state authority as well. It is authorities, not religion that has done these things, ‘authorities’ as in world powers that we see talked about in Eph 6:12, aka powers of Satan operating in this world which is to blame.
Anyone who has seen Blazzing Saddles knows that the 4 books of the Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke and Duck.
But religions, with their dogma and their holy texts, claim to be the ultimate authority, and where it seems to conflict with basic human decency or even its own message in places, the usual cop out, at least among Christians, seems to be “God’s ways are mysterious.”
So mysterious I don’t see any good evidence to support belief at all. So why believe it? Why let this book, or its cult of followers, guide your beliefs or your actions at all? You can use scripture to support just about any world view, which makes it little better than a Rorschach test for the reader or listener to take out of it what they will, and then point to their book or dogma as “justification” when they get called on it.
What I admire most are not religious adherents who quote biblical passages to justify one thing or another, but atheists (and some theists) who possess thorough religious literacy to provide context where it is incorrectly understood or used to mislead.
To that extent, there is utility in having religious literacy. I just wish I had the capacity and patience to wade through it without the irresistible urge to throw the book through the window at the end of every passage.
Sure, but your knitting club or concert series is not going to assure you of what is the purpose to the universe, is it? ISTM one of the factors involved here is that of religious practice as not so much a social activity but a marker of sociocultural identity. A commonality of belief and worldview to make sense of life and the universe, that is reinforced in the fellowship of your co-congregants and by the preacher/teacher’s guidance or inspiration.
IMO one thing that strengthens the “religiosity” of the USA is that in this country traditionally what happened when someone became disillusioned with an established church was s/he would set off down the trail outside the town limits, pitch a tent and found their *own *congregation to worship the way they felt right. They were not faced with “Choose only one: Catholic/Lutheran/Calvinist/Anabaptist (and only the official version thereof)”. This also means that for a lot of churches in the USA the preachers and teachers are not exactly experts in critical scholarship – the culture of popular democracy encourages the amateur.
And don’t discount the cultural inertia of religion having been the source of both social identity and community fellowship for umpthy-thousand years, and the apparent behavioral predisposition of humans to seek cosmic expanations – another thing that happens a lot in the USA (and much of the West FWIW) is the “spiritual but not religious” thing. You leave the established church but still affirm that you still believe in Something Greater, just not sure what.
Though ISTM for most humans there is no other way to practice it. Can’t exactly ring up Paul of Tarsus or Qohelet and ask “exactly what did you mean here?”, even in ostensibly “literalist” sects people have to depend on what some scholar determined was the right text, and take it on faith he did so accurately.
But more to the point to me is, that going back to my earlier comment about sociocultural marker, a lot of the people “regularly practicing” are regularly practicing by rote and rite based, unironically, on faith that the preacher/teacher did the studying() and knows what s/he’s doing*, and feel the important thing is to follow the rules/teachings and perform the rites. Say Jesus is Lord, accept him as personal Savior, go to church every sabbath day. Say there is but One God and Muhammad spoke for him, pray, fast and give alms. Never mind academics, the point is to be part of the congregation of believers, do what it takes to atone for sin, etc. – the what not the why.
(*or has been directly enlightened by God)
This leads, yes, to “Christians” not knowing at least a couple of the Gospels or commandments or thinking some particular aphorism is bibilical when it’s not. But ISTM it is not that different from Americans given a test of what appears in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution getting it backwards or imagining things that are not there – and those are much shorter documents.
Religion is obviously a marker of sociocultural identity. The book mentions ritual literacy, confessional literacy, denominational literacy and narrative literacy. For example:
Rituals: Crossing, Ablutions
Confessional: Apostles Creed, Shahadah
Denominational: difference btw. Episcopalians and Catholics, or Reform and Conservative Jews
Narrative: What happened on roads to Jericho or Damascus; why Buddha left his palace
But for a lot of people, religion seems to be almost entirely about group identity. This might mean a great lack of curiosity, or that the surveys on belief are quite inaccurate if people are reluctant to state or don’t know their beliefs.
Does memorizing the Koran in Arabic when you know only Farsi or Swahili or English qualify as religious literacy? Are we better off not knowing what our scriptures say?
Are believers justified to cherry-pick religious principles, like ignoring biblical support of infanticide, genocide, and slavery, while focusing on prosperity, compassion, and sexual restrictions?
Is too much religious literacy self-defeating? I’ve read of seminaries with high dropout rates because serious biblical study leads to atheism.
NOTE: There’s no such thing as “The Bible”, no one set of texts that all claiming to be Christians consider canonical. One cleric’s canons are another’s apocrypha. Rather, see I scads of inconsistent texts rendered in varied languages. And much biblical narrative lacks external corroboration or contradicts known history.
Gods, angels, demons, and wizards must be fun; we’ve so many of them.