Okay I won’t vote for any laws that force teaching Darwin in church. Can you get all your religious buddies to agree to a reciprocal arrangement regarding science classes?
Agreed. For years, whenever I hear someone like Jesse post mega-religion slobberings, I ask them to please show proof of the existence of a god of any kind.
This usually degenerates into my being told that I’m going to burn in hell, etc., whereupon I ask them for proof of the existence of a hell of any kind. Instead of proof, all I get in response is religion, which is a lie from start to finish.
That’s all we want from the supernatural folks. Like Glee said - give us a sign. Show us you are real. Come into my house, sit on the couch, drink a beer with me (well, a Coke) and let’s talk about stuff. When you do, I’ll worship you if that is required.
Hmm sorry I didn’t see this sooner.
I guess some ignorance has been faught and I’ll concede that point.
I narrowed it down to Jesus because many Christians seem to take him has a reboot where everything was kind of redefined. Anything before really didn’t matter so much otherwise pork and polyester-cotton blends would be causing them criseses of faith.
It’s perhaps not completely unreasonable for Xtians to see Jesus as rebooting the explanation of God’s ways to man. But if they’re going to do that, they lose out on the “God is the same yesterday, today, & forever” line.
I disagree. But then again, reasonable people can do that without being dicks about it.
So modern Christians are likely rapists? (Catholic clergy aside)
I know you seem to have some major issues with Christian beliefs but other people apparently don’t. Some good, some not so good. They’re just people with a right to an opinion the same as you. You may not agree with it and they may not agree with you, but we have one freaken planet so we’re gonna all have to co-exist.
I don’t make friends with the kind of people who’d try to force their opinion on someone else, so sure.
I never said Christian beliefs were always logical. My grandfather likes to listen to this “creation moment thing”. It makes me want to destroy something. The horrid things that program does to logic and the way it misrepresents facts make my head hurt.
Ever hear a sentence so wrong it’s wrongness feeds back on it’s self into metawrongness? Imagine being in a car for a couple hours randomly hearing those sentences.
Moral of story co-existence = headphones + muse cranked up.
Nope. And I wouldn’t call Catholic clergy likely rapists either; of the two clergy I wrote about upthread whom I like know personally and consider friends, one’s a priest.
My point was to respond to your claim that I was Godwinizng and engaging in hyperbole when I compared the role of evolutionary psychology in religious belief to its role in rape. I’ll concede it was an emotionally charged comparision, and perhaps it’s unfair of me to think you’re being disingenuous in being vexed by it. But the Bible DOES sanction rape, and genocide, and endless atrocities, and anyone who says otherwise is at best unread in the Christian holy book and at worst a deliberate liar.
There’s tons of worthwhile stuff in the Bible–beautiful poetry, wise advise, stirring adventure stories. There is also tons of hateful and primitive crap which I have no trouble indicting for contributiing to many atrocities today and which have the potential to contribute to further atrocities in the present and future.
No worries, thanks for that. So many want to hear the nice bits without the bad. I was lucky to have NT prof that made you hear all of it, not just the bits that sound nice.
For what it’s worth, I get that following the teachings of Jesus is a lot easier, but even though he ‘came to fulfil the law’ it seems to me that doesn’t negate the OT.
One of my own internal WTF moments that led me (thankfully) out of Christianity.
The hateful crap was what convinced me the Christian bible wasn’t it truth wise even though I’d been raised into it. The old testament is a catalog of horrors. You’ll find no disagreement about that. When I tried reading it when I was younger I was shocked, about Acts I think it was. The Hebrews where heading toward the promised land and God told them to kill off this and that group so casually.
The disillusionment was great but I didn’t know what to think of it, but as I became an adult I started to see more and more how wrong that was. The things some people preach are awful. “You’ll burn in hell for xyz unless you listen to me” they say. I ended up rejecting it all. When your conscience tells you something is wrong you gotta listen.
However I’ve also seen people do amazing acts of compassion, charity, and humility for their beliefs. I’ve seen it make differences in people’s lives for the better, and known some very good people who are religious.
It all made me realize it’s just an ink blot test. Bunch of vague symbolism, super natural stories, some regular stories and you see what you wanna see in all that noise. There’s alot of good people who see something meaningful to them in it, but it re-enforces what’s already there.
I won’t argue religion doesn’t cause alot of problems, but I will argue most of those problems and many more can be solved when people stop trying to demonize each other for what they think and start treating each other compassionately as people with rights to think different things. Atheist and theist alike.
If you take religion out people will find other things to cluster behind and justify themselves good or bad. You want to solve the problems of the bad you need to teach more empathy.
NP 
I never had a a NT prof but I did have plenty of WTF moments too as my above post shows.
It did lead to lead to an interest in mythology though. People believe in and have believed in some wild things. Stories better then you’ll ever see on tv.
There’s no reason why something can’t be a religion and a political system at the same time; theocracies aren’t a new thing.
I think that part of the problem many people have with saying that Communism is a religion is that in the West, religion is usually theistic. But you can have religion without gods. And another is that the Communists decried religion it so often and loudly that people bought into the idea that they are anti religion - and not just anti-OTHER religions, like Christianity or Islam. And of course, believers love to equate Communism and atheism; they wouldn’t want to lose their propaganda tool.
That’s pretty much my impression of every religion that has ever existed.
I look at them and say ‘Damn, people believe some pretty wild shit.’
AFAIK, Theravada Buddhism is the only one. By and large, religion involves God(s).
I think a better word for it is totalism. Some religions are totalist, but not all totalism is religious. Saying something as overtly anti-religious as Communism is a religion is like saying you’re really a Christian.
You could use the same argument to claim that Christianity isn’t really a religion, given how anti-religion it is. Specifically, OTHER religions - just as Communism is vehemently against other religions. The relevant difference between the two is that Communism refuses to call itself one; but that doesn’t make it true any more than Christianity calling itself peaceful is true just because it says so.
And if Communism isn’t a religion, it’s certainly a close relative.
Christianity covers a lot of ground. The Inquisition and soup kitchens are both Christianity.
Sure, if by “religion” you mean “dogmatic, irrational, and hurtful.” What I mean by it is “deals with God(s) and/or religious/mystical experiences.” Communism doesn’t deal with those, doesn’t claim to be a religion, doesn’t want to be a religion, so I’m inclined to take it at its word.
I think DT is not talking about formal religion like strains of Buddhism, but about the belief structures of some social institutions. Basically, an institution that follows an unchanging dogma, and has no real feedback mechanism to adjust the dogma based on real world outcomes.
I would say that extreme promotors of free-market capitalism are essentially practising a religion. Or Libertarians. Possibly even democrats – I’ll have to give that one some thought before I’ll defend that idea.
That’s not the way the word is normally used.
Well, capitalism at least has a working demonstrable theory behind it - supply and demand and all that, and price fluctuations are somewhat predictable. Communism depends on humans acting in ways that are somewhat contrary to human nature, in adherence to some idealized theory. Christianity, ditto. Of course, you said “extreme promoters.” I figure roughly among nutcase fringe elements:
One devout communist in four is potentially homicidal in defending their cause.
One devout Christian in a hundred is potentially homicidal in defending their cause.
One devout capitalist in a thousand is potentially homicidal in defending their cause.
This claim has not been verified by the FDA.
So? It is a valid definition, and I think what DT was trying to get at, aside from whether you agree that my particular examples are good or poor choices.