I said love, not sex. Big difference.
If I may pitch two pennies on the table here…
Take any three religions, widely separated by time and/or distance. I like to use Christianity, the human sacrifices of the Aztecs and the Greek or Norse pantheon. You can substitute as desired.
Analyze them from a social and historical perspective and answer these questions:
- What are the common goals of the religions?
- What are the common means used by the religions to accomplish these goals?
After you have come up with the answer, do the same for any other religion. The answers will be the same.
That strikes me as a rather broad claim to make. Because it’s so broad, I daresay that most careful thinkers wouldn’t accept it at face value.
Have you ever actually applied this technique in a rigorous fashion, and if so, can you demonstrate it to be true?
That’s how I came up with the questions in the first place.
You have described the nature of mankind, not religion.
All of the scholarship that I’ve read is not in agreement with this claim. The very oldest writing in the New Testament, the creed in 1 Cor 15, testifies to a miracle. If you have some reliable source which argues otherwise, I’d be happy to look into it.
A creed is not testimony.
In 1 Corinthians, Paul claims that Jesus “appeared” to people after his death. He does not actually say that Jesus crawled physically out of a grave, only that he “appeared” to the apostles, then the “500” (whoever the hell they wrere. The Gospels don’t mention them), and then to Paul himself. Paul does not make a claim of a physical resurrection, makes no distinction between Jesus’ alleged “appearances” to the apostles and his own visonary experiences, was no witness to anything Jesus did during his life and makes no claim that Jesus performed any miracles before the crucifixion.
The earliest layers of Christian literature do not contain claims of miracles. Those are indeed, later accretions, none of which are based on any eyewitness testimony.
And seriously, the claim that “my miracle stories are true, but everone else’s miracle stories are false,” sounds just a little bit childish.
Another post I appreciate. Thanks for your input.
If you can demonstrate the existence of religion independent of mankind, we’d like to see it.
Well if a guy 2000 years ago in a primitive, unscientific time wrote something about a miracle decades after it supposedly happened… well I guess that’s good enough for me. :dubious:
Oh, and thirty years ago a guy I know named Larry saved your life with a magic spell. It was a big deal at the time and hundreds of thousands of people witnessed it. Only I could be bothered to write it down though. You should be thankful to Larry and join his fan club. It’s a known fact that members of Larry’s fan club continue to be conscious after they’re dead, thanks to a magic spell Larry cast.
You should renounce that fraud Christ and join Larry’s fan club. I mean there is far more evidence for Larry’s magic than Jesus’ supposed miracles. Larry’s miracles were witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people!
I went to an American public school. They offered no courses in philosophy, or comparative religion, or anything remotely related. The only social studies courses were Civics, American History, European History, Political Science, and maybe one or two others. The only social studies requirements were Civics and American History. This school was among the largest and best-performing in the state, so it’s likely that other public schools had even more meager offerings.
I just checked the webpage for the local Catholic school. As you can see, they offer both philosophy and comparative religion, and a much richer array of social studies classes overall. You’ll also note that their biology curriculum lists evolution, so you’re wrong about that as well. As for why the Christian school offer a broader and deeper curriculum than the public school, I’d guess it results from the fact that Christians are more open to considering a broad array of viewpoints than secular people are. Of course you’re free to offer alternate explanations.
(On a sidenote I checked my school’s webpage to see if their courses had changed since I graduated. It turns out that the webpage hasn’t been updated since 1999. Good old public schools.)
It’s because private schools have better budgets.
The “comparative religion” classes also tend to be seminars on why Christianity is true and all other religions are false. Those classes aren’t educational, they’re indoctrinal.
Anyway, there actually are a lot of public schools which do have ccompartive religion classes, sp your sample size of one is not exactly representative.
Ummm, what the heck? This is supposed to be an argument?
The flaw in T1 is that you’ve never done such an experiment, nor could you. (Also how do you define “acting naturally”? Your natural is somebody else’s unnatural.) The flaw in R1 is that such a result only happened in your head. And the flaws in the whole thing are that you’re not responding to my arguments, but are just responding to inane arguments that you’re making up.
If your only proof that Christians are rejecting alternate sources of information is the imaginary results of an imaginary experiment, that’s just not good enough. An imaginary study could show that chain smoking extends the human lifespan by twenty years. That’s why I prefer reality.
Which is rather Clothahump’s point; religion is a human artifact, which reflects human nature - and nothing else. Not a revelation from a higher power.
And because they can be more selective in their students; public schools can’t refuse to teach the difficult kids.
Speaking as a physics teacher myself, that’s not true.
How exactly am I proposing this?
Nope. Catholic schools spend less per pupil than public schools. For Fayette County is appears to be about $10,500 per pupil in public school versus $8,200 at the Catholic school. Even if it were true, why should that stop public schools from offering a philosophy class? Such a class wouldn’t cost any more than any other class. Less, presumably, since philosophy doesn’t require any materials.
I don’t suppose you’d care to offer a cite to back this up.
How many is “a lot”?
Even if this is true, why would it stop public schools from teaching philosophy or religion?
. . . Say what, now? Perhaps not external conquest, but Norway and Sweden sure as hell didn’t embrace Christianity without a fight. (Though to the majority of the population, it was irrelevant since religion was trickle-down from the Lord of the land and they mostly just went through the motions)
Hell, several major and minor wars in between Scandinavian countries were fought over Christianity. They were - eventually - settled peacefully, but that was mostly because the crown contenders all adopted the White Christ around the end of the first millennium. (And the Church unabashedly supported whomever who looked like winning it, even though that balance swung twice a year)
On what grounds do you think that? Many of your thoughts in this thread have turned out to be flat wrong. Doesn’t that suggest that maybe your total reliance on what your own thoughts ought to be tempered with a little outside information?
This is so completely and utterly wrong that it’s hard to know where to begin. Consider the Prayer of Saint Francis:
Where in there is the demand for personal health, life satisfaction (whatever that is), and wealth? It sure looks to me like a prayer for the opposite.
Further, your methodology in comparing nations is flawed. You say that a comparison of Sweden to Congo shows that atheist tops Christian. I could as easily pick out North Korea and Italy and show that Christian tops atheist. Moreover, you would have to agree that Sweden has been a Christian nation for a long time and the main institutions come from the Christian period.
Who said it did ? As said, public schools avoid religion because Christians won’t allow it. It’s Christian indoctrination or nothing, so they choose nothing.