We could argue forever, each of us cherry picking whatever quotes shore up our position. I tend to go more for the “do unto others”, and “thou shalt not kill” and “judge not” and “whatsoever you do for the least” etc.
- Absolutely not. Dobzhansky, who pretty much created Neo-Darwinism was a devout Christian. de Chardin, (who was an odd duck, but clearly supported evolutionary theory) was a devout Christian. There are many other examples.
- Not sure of the question. The largest group of people who adhere to biblcal literalism happen to be in the U.S., but the U.S. is also home to many Christians and Jews who are not literalists.
- I know of no group of religious people who have “discarded” portions of the bible, but there are certainly large numbers of Christians and some number of Jews who no longer hold to a literalist interpretation.
- You’d have to ask a Unitarian, but I see no reason to doubt any person’s claim to be devout.
- The largest number of (conservative) Muslims posting on the internet in English appear to be opposed to evolutionary theory, but that is a self-selecting group that cannot be shown to be a statistically valid sampling. I have never seen a world-wide survey of Muslim belief regarding creation or evolution, and I suspect that there may not be one available.
Actually, I think you just countered your own argument.
The world’s holy books teach nice stuff; they also teach bad stuff. Like you just said, you can cherry pick what you want from them, which means there is no “real” Christianity/whatever for people to follow. A Pat Robertson or Fred Phelps is just as much a “Real Christian” as anybody else; the difference is, they just cherry picked different aspects of Christianity than nicer people cherry pick.
Thank you. With #4 I meant from the PoV of a devout Christian/Jew/Muslem creationist. Not well written, I apologize.
I don’t think so. Phelps and Robertson (and some others) are just hucksters, liars and scumbags who thrive on misery and use it to line their pockets. They deliberately pull things out of context, and when they can’t do that, they pull it out of their asses. They are false prophets, charlatans, and a boil on the ass lips of humanity. They don’t represent anyone but themselves.
There are plenty of christians out there who can’t stomach them and would resent any association with them.
Barry Goldwater once recommended that all good christians should kick Falwell’s ass. It sounds like a great plan.
Your are argueing from the assumption that nice = Christian; there is no evidence of that. Plenty of Christian leaders ( and followers for that matter ) have been as bad or worse than those two; I can’t see how you can plausibly claim they represent the Christian religion any better than some nice guy who happens to be Christian.
And they do represent other people than themselves; Pat Robertson especially represents a good chunk of American Christiandom.
You are arguing from the assumption that bad=christian. I can’t say there have never been some really lousy “representers”. There have been, and they should have never existed. The Inquisition, Crusades, the “burning times”, witch trials. I am aware of these things. Still, you can’t paint everyone with the same brush. It would be like me saying all atheists suck because of Joe Stalin and Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot. They were pretty fucked up, and I am not aware of religion being part of it. But I know more atheists who are good people. The psychos I mentioned do not represent them.
It would be like saying all America sucks because of Joe McCarthy or Richard Speck or saying all of France sucks because of the Robespiere and the Reign of Terror.
I’m not religious. I am what you would rightly call a backslider. However, to blame all the country’s ills on religion is false. Our ills are due to selfishness, greed, ambition, and the desire for “something for nothing”. We want it all and we want it now. We want it cheap, and we want it to be easy. We are lazy and spoiled. Even without any religion at all, we would still be our own worst enemies. We would just find something else to blame, because nothing is ever our fault.
People in other countries aren’t selfish, greedy, or ambitious? They don’t want things to be cheap or easy? Seems to me like you’re just describing human nature.
What? Why isn’t support for evolution Darwinism (or, if you want to be persnickety, neo-Darwinism)?
Also, I.D. is extremely rare in Britain. What makes you think they are winning anything there?
Kindly explain your comments, which I find cryptic.
Look at the title of the journal! It’s The Journal of Religion and Society, not The Journal of Difference In Governments!
What possible difference could that make on this issue? He’s not speaking of governments, he’s speaking of the relative devoutness of the citizens.
Holy Bob, man, the journal he did his research for is dedicated to studying the effect of religion on society! That’s his job! That’s what this is all about! If he had studied something else, it would not be published by The Journal of Religion and Society!
I see no evidence for that. The Times article simply said:
He bever claimed to make any such correlation. You’re spinning wildly. According to the Times article, he established a correlation between the general level of devoutness of a country’s citizens and the murder and syphilis rate, not something so broad as “belief in a creator”
Perhaps. Do your own study and find out.
I may have missed it, but I saw no evidence for a decline in religion in the US in that article. Where might it be?
Yes, thank you!
How does A take the place of B without B being displaced?
I think your correlations are similar to those drawn by George Paul. You know, the sun is a lot like a tennis ball. Spherical in shape: check. Yellow in color: check. Susceptible to the laws of gravity: check.
And you coin the term “pseudo-atheism” why? Whose argument have you taken on?
I’m not sure why you think you can have it both ways. On the one hand, you seem to say, atheism cannot be blamed for the deeds of politicians like Stalin, Mao, and Pot Pot, but on the other hand, religion can be blamed for the deeds of politicians like Urban II. Why is that?
Sure, if we define religion to mean “everything under the sun”. And if we assign to religion a mystical power to bend the will of otherwise benevolent men. But I reject your premises. Amerigo Vespucci did not murder and enslave Indians as a means of giving all he had to the poor to follow Jesus; he did these things because he wanted power and wealth. But if you’re going to insist that religion motivated Hitler’s Holocaust, then you do not get the luxury of denying that atheism motivated Stalin’s Holocaust. It seems to me that a more reasonable view is that a lust for power motivated both.
If I understand your argument correctly, you’re saying that the reason Paul published his report in the JRS is because it had to do with religion and not, say, government or poverty. Why that is a rebutal of points I made, however, is unclear. I did not argue that Paul failed to find the proper journal for his report.
Actually, we’ve moved beyond the Times article, and are critiquing Paul’s actual report. The Times article clearly misunderstood the report, as Maeglin, Diogenes, and others have shown.
As I said, the Times article has already been thoroughly thumped and discredited. And that’s because of statements like this:
“It [Paul’s report] compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority **believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution **.”
Emphsis mine.
Frankly, I would settle for Paul doing a study which, as Maeglin has shown, has yet to happen.
It might be in the +6.6% increase in Atheism/Agnosticism between 1990 and 2001.
Well, since you made the allegation, I await your proof.
And just to forestall your usual response, yes you did say that.
Then why did you say it?
And the same can be said for the USA, so again, no real point has been made.
The title of the OP, as I mentioned. Try reading for comprehension.
Regards,
Shodan
Yea DTC, debate the inaccurate summation in a thread title, not the substantive content of the original paper. This is Great Debates you know. I mean. Sheesh. How long have you been here?
I’d love to think that the article was well written… I personally beleive religion gets in the way of having a better society. But the article’s arguments are terrible and badly founded.
The US shouldn’t be compared to Europe for starters straight out. Comparing European countries might make more sense… and we know that the poorer countries tend to be more religious… with the exception of the USA. American social statistics suck due to other factors in american way of thinking about poverty.
A few little remarks are all I have. I am constrained by my need for sleep, alas.
This just may indicate an increase in survey honesty or be attributable to random variation. Do you have a source for this statistic?
This is not really fair, and I think you know it. Religion and poverty both involve people, constrain behavior, and are commonly found in large groups of people. This is not the kind of correlation that Paul (or we) are talking about.
There are also tests that can be performed to determine whether or not the correlation is a product of random variation or an artifact of the data. The real problem with the article is not that Paul doesn’t push his analysis further but that he does not really report his actual findings. I find this sort of thing extremely frustrating.
I gave the source in the original post to which Ambushed responded. Just click that link.
Please restrain your remarks to what you know, and not what I know.
Or me either. That’s why I gave it as an illustration of a bad correlation. Why you are arguing with me, since it so happens that I have consistently agreed with you, is unclear.
What does that have to do with non-Communist, secular countries. I don’t think you’re getting what I’m saying at all. Just to be clear, I am not making any assertion or suggestion about the effects of religion at all. I am saying that this study refutes the popular meme that societies need religion to be healthy. I am also saying that the social problems in the Soviet Union were not caused by secularism because it wasn’t really secular and there were much more obvious problems than an artifically imposed godlessness. Countries like England are healthy and sincerely secular and there is absolutely nothing like
I DIDN’T say it.
But the US is religious. The study is trying to make a point about NON-religious countries. The study shows that non-religious countries can function as well or better than religious countries. It does not say that religion is bad, is says that secularism is NOT bad…or at least that the religiosity of the US cannot be demonstrated to give it an advantage over godlessness when it comes to social ills, and that it may- MAY- sometimes make things worse.
Who gives a shit about the OP title? I was commenting on the actual study. I said in my first post that the study did not prove or even allege anything causal about negative effects of religion on culture. I was under the impression that we had all moved past the misleading thread title a long time ago.
Interesting that you trimmed off, and did not respond to, those parts of my posts in which I debated the substantive content of the original paper.
Low on straw, yet?
Regards,
Shodan