Of course, but that’s because it’s generally not actually charity. It’s using people’s desperation to attempt to convert them; to draw them in and demand they listen as a captive audience.
Since I gave two cites perhaps you could do half as well and provide one.
I know backing up your random attacks is not your style so I doubt you have one. I just thought I’d give you the opportunity to provide a cite for your claims or one more demonstration of how ludicrous they are. Which shall it be?
If we’re talking about people converting to a “new” religion, that rather implies there’s an “old” religion. So unless you’re arguing that the book means something different from “your parents religion” as “your old religion”, this whole tangent is pointless. True, the key sentence doesn’t specifically define what “old” means, but do you have any other suggestions than what their parents’ believed?
The book I cited doesn’t have any methodology. Theirs was the same as mine: Find cites and refer to them.
The problem is that you’re approaching this with the idea that I’m using “99%” as a pejorative. You think I’m saying that religion is evil, nasty, and mean and indoctrinates poor defenseless little children. And if that’s what my intent was, then yeah, the higher that number is the better.
But that’s not what I’m saying. I couldn’t care less whether the number was 99% or 10%. The question is whether it appears that people take on their religion via non-divine methods. So unless you can provide evidence that any significant number of people already knew about Christianity without having ever even heard of it–i.e. to the point where they would look at the Bible and go “Oh my! That’s exactly right!”–then the evidence is still on my side.
I’m chronicling what appears to be the method by which, sociologically, religion carries on in the world. Off the cuff, basing my statement solely on a single cite, I’d venture to say that it’s taught to young children and they stay with it most of the time. If I had reason to believe that there was a different method for transferal, having been shown to have more evidence with better methodology behind it, then I’d swap my description to whatever that is. So like I said, I don’t care whether the number is 99% or 10%. The question is whether the passing on of religion appears to be due to human or divine intervention.
If you want to make the case that South America was really all Christian previous to the white man coming, I’ll be glad to look over your evidence.
Possibly, but what could happen (and in many instances, I’m sure, already has) is someone will embrace something that seems more exotic and “real” than the perceived phoniness and hypocrisy of their parents’ traditions, and get it completely wrong. Picture some suburban kid who thinks it’s cool to declare themselves Buddhist, even though their simplistic and superficial understanding would make anyone more familiar with Buddhist traditions roll their eyes. The person can get swept up in the more extreme elements of the exotic faith (because these are the most visible and romantic) with no understanding of how to integrate them into a comfortable day-to-day existence, whence the John Walker Lindhs of the world.
Well yeah but I’ll betcha mine is more common than yours. An I’ve got a shiny nickel to back it up.
I’ve seen your scenario happen. What I’ve seen more often is kids raised in a church going family who go through a period of revolt and rejecting their parents values but later go back to some form of the same religion. Keep in mind that plenty of Christian parents are good people so their character gets tied to their faith. It’s a “Since Mom and Dad were good people and they believed , there must be something to it” kinda thing.
Okay, let me make one last attempt on this issue. Your line of argument appears to be that if you can prove that most people adopt a religion for “sociological” reasons rather than divine reasons, you’ve somehow provided evidence against religion. As far as the basic fact that many people learn about their religion from other people, particularly their parents, nobody denies that. The actual numbers appear to be somewhat lower than what you first claimed, but that’s a minor point.
The major point is really the same for this piece of evidence as with most of the pieces of evidence you gave. You are arguing against an opposing position that you made up, not against the actual doctrine of Christianity or any other major religion.
Look at the Bible. Does it say that God provides a direct, divine revelation to every single person? It does not. Does it say that the followers of God all followed because of divine intervention? It does not. Does it say that no one every became a believer because of what other people say? It does not.
In fact, the Bible says the opposite of all those things. In the Old Testament direct divine revelations are extremely rare. Out of millions of Jews there were only about a dozen prophets, weren’t there? In the New Testament, you case gets even worse. Doesn’t Jesus specifically instruct his disciples to spread his word? Doesn’t he specifically say that others will believe because of what they hear?
So in short, your argument simply isn’t the devastating demolition of Christianity that you imagine it to be. Rather, it meshes perfectly well with the gospel message.
Now let me repeat a question that I asked earlier. In all fields, all or nearly all of what human beings know comes from other human beings. Does this make almost all of what human beings know false?
Wikipedia is wrong, as usual. The term “the physical world” means something very specific to us. We know there’s a physical universe, with the same fundamental particles everywhere within it, all operating under the same physical laws.
In medieval times, the view of the cosmos was the one inherited from Aristotle. He famously had four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Earth was the lowest element, water second, air third, and fire the highest. “Natural motion” guided each element to its proper place, making earth sink below water, for instance. That was the physical world that made up the daily reality of humanity, and Aristotleans believed that everything could be explained that way.
In addition, there were Heaven or the Heavens, which was a different realm in every respect. In Heaven everything was made of ether rather than earth, air, fire, and water. The physical laws of natural motion did not exist. So in every sense, Heaven was not part of the physical world. In fact, the word “ethereal” derives from ether, and of course means something without physical construction.
Now it may be true that some medieval Christians believed that the Heavens were up there somewhere or that the stars were lights shining through from Heaven. Nonetheless the fact remains that Heaven and Earth were thought of as completely separate realms. You could not get there from here by physical means. God was always an ethereal being in an alternate plain of existence. That doctrine has not changed at all in all of Christian history.
I assumed you were talking about Christianity because you know I’m a Christian and because Christianity was the dominant religion in our culture a thousand years ago.
If I could break in: we could start with the RED Cross, in our Area Senior Services,The Lions club, and others. And in many case’s if some religions allowed birth control there would be less poor to worry about, such as in South America, Africa etc. Most poverty is caused by people having more children than they can afford. Some religions talk about the poor with out realizing that they are the cause in many cases.
Monavis
Oh, come on. We both know that you’ve been trying to bluster your way around this issue.
The book that you cited talked about converting to an ENTIRELY new religion. You can change your religious beliefs without converting to an ENTIRELY new system of belief. Many Christians change their viewpoints on exegetical matters in the course of their lifetimes, for example. Interestingly enough, in your sarcastic rebuttal, you studiously dropped that adverb.
Heck, one person might consisder Catholicism and Episcopalianism to be entirely different religions, whereas others (especially skeptics) might choose to lump them together. This is just one reason why it’s important to consider the methodology used by these supposed researchers. Did they use surveys and statistical methods to arrive at their 1% figure? Or did they pull that number out of the atmosphere? And how do they define an “entirely new” religion?
All the more reason to be skeptical of their conclusion, then. Without having any way to evaluate their methodology, we cannot logically determine if their figure is reasonable.
Indeed, I’m not saying anything that isn’t obvious, which is that there is no evidence of miracles, of divine intervention, of magic, of deities, or any of this. This lack on all fronts, allowing there to be the creation of religion by humans, the spread and the continuation, coupled with the lack of any sort of logic behind most of the philosophies and no apparent bonus or change by being religious is all evidence against.
Nope, and it doesn’t make any of it be created by a deity.
Math was created by humans, biology was created by humans, tools were created by humans, all of those were passed on and taught from human to human, and nary a deity in sight. Nor is one necessary.
Like I said to JThunder, I’m not saying Christianity or any other religion is wrong or evil or anything, I’m saying that they’re human inventions and there’s no evidence otherwise.
Nonsense. You’ve done none of the three. All you’ve done is taken tangible observations by humans (and a lot of your postings are factually wobbly, BTW) and mistaken them as being able to support intangible theories and theocracy.
You are essentially trying to take Cogito Ergo Sum (“I think, therefore I am”) and twist it into *Cogito Ergo Haud Deus Futurus *(“I think, therefore no deity exists”).
It’s the same mistake as if you were to go the opposite way and say “Cogito Ergo Sum Deus” (“I think, therefore I am God”).
And just as you correctly point out that not everything humans come up with is true, I will turn it around right back to you and tell you that not everything humans come up with is false, either.
Not trying to be nasty, but I wouldn’t waste any more time on this thread.
In my lifetime I have never seen this happen. I have had people ask me to go to their church, but no one ever demanded I go. I think your post is off, way off.
Certainly. It is entirely plausible that there are deities, it’s plausible that there is one single Deity and that Christianity is the best and only accurate description of him.
But, what evidence is there for that position? It’s equally plausible that there the Flying Spaghetti Monster is real and not merely a human invention.
My data might not all be as accurate as one can make it, but I’m perfectly fine with that. At least I’m presenting some sort of chronology for how and why things might have gone to create and proliferate all the various deities of the world. But if you have an argument that explains all of the deities that have ever been invented, their geographicity, the need for their existence, and so on, like I said I’ll gladly listen to it.
When there’s someone on the religious side of things with such information as this, I’ll feel more like it’s worthwhile to get my figures and data to be more accurate. But with only one fighter in the field, I’m pretty fine if he’s not in the best armor.
Did you mean plausible or possible? I don’t think either of us see anything plausible about deities or a Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I could be wrong and you do or you’re going by a less accepted definition of plausible.
Figuring that religion will generally place itself one step beyond the boundaries of the known universe, it’s possible that when we expand our knowledge there will be a FSM or DoC or whatever hole handily sitting there.
Since it’s beyond the range of the knowable, it’s just as plausible as anything you could ever venture to make up.
Or to say it in another way, if I have a 80 googolplex sided die then it is entirely plausible for me to roll a 3 on my first try. But it’s no more likely than any other improbable result.
Thankfully, we’ve developed a pretty good way of differentiating the true stuff from the false stuff. When something defies rational explanation…when there’s no believable evidence to support its existence…chances are very, very good that it doesn’t exist. I see no more reason to believe in a supernatural god than bigfoot. Frankly…though there’s no good evidence in support of either, bigfoot is much more plausible.
Unfortunately, this is backwards. People choose to reduce the number of children they produce when their wealth and lifestyle reaches a point where they no longer need sufficient progeny to guarantee “carrying on the name” or caring for the elderly. Artificial reduction in births based on the efforts of an outside agency does not seem to have actually worked anywhere in the world. Some people would like to think that such has been the case in China, but China’s economic growth has not actually been the result of its draconian anti-birth policies, but by the move from a socialist to a capitalist economy. Similarly, portions of India have overcome the (claimed) traditional “they’re breeding themselves to ruin” philosophy. Those regions are the ones in which the introduction of automated manufacturing and investment in electronics development and software have raised the local standard of living.
Conversely, no country has been shown to fail to advance because it has a high birth rate. If a country is sufficiently retarded in development, high infant mortality keeps the population in check naturally.
Raise the standard of living and the birth rate drops automatically.
Both of those cites discuss the same ‘test’ performed on 20/20. So you only provided one cite, not two. Furthermore, I don’t think that comparing the amount of money deposited in one bucket in San Francisco versus another bucket in Sioux Falls is a methodologically sound way of studying charity rates between the religious and non-religious. Perhaps people from San Francisco are just assholes?
And JThunder, I wasn’t making a claim; or at least I didn’t intend to. lekatt claimed that religious people are more charitable than the non-religious, per capita. I’m just looking for evidence that he’s right, because frankly, I don’t believe him. The cites cosmosdan provided looked promising, but don’t stand up to scrutiny. I’m still willing to be persuaded.
Income and religiosity appear to be negatively associated.
http://benmuse.typepad.com/ben_muse/2008/01/wealth-and-reli.html
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/11/religiosity_and.html
Income and charitability is hard to establish though. If you look at the following link you’ll see that the more wealthy you are, the more money you will donate per year, but at the same time that amount will be a smaller percentage of your income (though it seems like there is possibly a small turnup at the tail end.)
So is that being more or less charitable?
Who can say.
Sorry, fella, but you said a great deal more than that. You specifically said,
Clearly, that goes far beyond merely asking lekatt to support his claim. It’s a positive and unambiguous assertion that religion does NOT motivate people to be charitable.