Shouldn’t be confined to one area. Stupid ideas cost wealth, opportunities, and lives.
Making your own rules for a forum you just stepped into isn’t going to end well. There’s nothing more we like than a civil, reasoned debate, backed up by the best facts you can muster. Got any?
Well. This should be relatively violent for the short period it lasts…
I think John has pretty much nailed a lot of it. Here we shop for religions just like everything else. Don’t like Baptists? Try the Methodists, they’re right next door. Still not happy? Presbyterians (that’s a hard word to spell) around the corner.
In many European countries, finding something other than the “state” religion is not quite as easy.
All the more reason to argue your point without it being riddled with basic errors.
Bring reasonably cited facts
Avoid basic rhetorical fallacies
Avoid basic logical fallacies
Making shit up, insulting your potential opposition right in your OP and attributing positions to people that haven’t even shown up yet is typically considered childish.
Please, please, tell us more about how you think we should run this board. I’m fascinated.
I don’t know if we were less religious but in many ways it was less a part of the public discourse. Everybody knew people like Eisenhower, MacArthur and Truman believed in God (insofar as they went to church, etc., etc.) but there wasn’t a lot of time spent deciphering their personal relationship with God.
You can isue that sort of advisory. But on this board, it carries little weight and will be ignored.
As to the question at hand, there have been many threads in the past discussing this matter and it has generally been inconclusive. Mostly it has leaned in the direction of the argument about the US having had an open, dynamic “Religion Market” as opposed to a static establishmentarian environment. While at any given time the elites would tend to drift into mostly nominal, merely ritual externals of religion while living de-facto secularist lives, as they have in most civilizations, the general populace had an active open market of various flavors of piety.
Add to that how during the successive migratory waves, minority religions (specially the Catholic - Irish, Italians, Poles, Hispanics - and Jewish groups) were a powerful element of stability for the immigrants to feel they were integrating without losing their identities altogether. Without an established church, much of the population did not get to experience *religion itself as the enemy of their liberty, and even for instance in the case of African Americans the Black Christian Churches and the northern Congregationalists were seen as advocates for liberty – at most they’d associate, say Southern Baptists with their oppressors, but not Theism * itself.
And this extends to others in the population through a history influenced by the long time that the US had an “open frontier” – which meant if you did not like how things were going where you were, you had the choice to just get up and head out to somewhere where you could do things your way. This attitude became quickly extended to the notion that if your birth church disappoints you, then shop around for one who fits you or even start your own! The USA is a veritable hothouse of New Religious Movements ever since its founding. Be they homegrown or imported the US has been fertile grounds for Shakers, Mormons, Millerites (and their 7th Day Adventist and Jehovah’s Witness offshoots), Christian Scientists, Snake Handlers, Branham Ministries, Nation of Islam, Moonies, Church of Satan, Scientology, Wicca, you name it. Again, the reaction is to the established churches, not to the notion of belief itself.
Essentially Americans just can’t see where is the great threat from BELIEF ITSEF – just that there are Churches That Do Bad Things and you gotta avoid those. A lot of people live de-facto secularist lives showing up at their place of worship only for High Holidays, Weddings and Funerals for the community togetherness thing; or claiming that they’re not in an organized religion but are “spritual” in some fuzzily-defined manner.
False.
You made a point to be insulting of other’s beliefs. Anyone entering the discussion from the perspective of a believer, therefore, has already been branded as not possessing a valid perspective. This is not a “tired trope,” it is simply a recognition that the internet is filled with people who prefer to dominate discussions by defining the terms in way that will exclude anyone who opposes their position.
A discussion regarding why the U.S. continues to be a very religious nation at a time when similar societies in Europe have become secular or non-religious could be a good discussion. Limiting the discussion to only people who are themselves secular is simply a way for someone to post silly nonsense about the limited intelligence or poor reasoning skills of religious people. Had you really wanted to discuss the point that you claim to, you would have posted without the insults.
The real “tired trope” is the OP that seems unable to discuss the topic without resorting to insults. Typical anonymous, juvenile intarweb trope, indeed.
Particularly because the idea that it’s no longer said in schools is 100% false. Religious objectors just have the right to not say it, or to just leave out the part they don’t want to say. You simply can’t be compelled to say it.
It’s honestly the most sane way of dealing with religion that I’ve seen regarding public schools.
There were no “basic errors” in my post. I didn’t “make shit up.” I said that America was highly religious. Oh wait, if you say that isn’t true, it must not be.
I didn’t bother to click on your links, nor do I need to: I am aware of what such fallacies are. The definitions are irrelevant because I committed none of those fallacies. Oh wait, if you say that I did, I must have.
I find it risible that you are doing many of the things in your post that you accuse me of doing. I’ve found, though, that on the internet, people have one set of rules for others’ behavior and another set for their own.
Let me ask you this, and I’d like thoughtful, honest, noncritical answers (if you are capable at this point):
- Why should “beliefs” or any other ideas be immune from criticism?
- How does criticism of a belief equate to criticism of the persons who hold that belief?
I did say that I RECOMMENDED Believers not participate in the discussion, because I felt (based on past experience) that they could not do so without veering off into being defensive about their belief systems, i.e., they wouldn’t even try to answer my question. Look at the responses and you’ll see that my fears were justified. I do, in fact, believe that only non-Believers can have a rational discussion about religion, since having a religious belief is ipso facto proof of viewing the topic irrationally.
I didn’t, nor had I the power to, “exclude” Believers from the discussion, and your saying that I did is another tired internet trope: hyperbole.
You provide an excellent thesis in that in America, there has been less historical reason to avoid and limit church institutions, as they were always very distinct from government in our history. The evil that organized religion had historically done in Europe didn’t migrate across the Atlantic, witch-burning, etc. notwithstanding.
An interesting question that arises, then, is that in the absence of societal pressure, why would so many people be churchgoers and professed believers? One answer might be that such pressure did exist for quite some time in American history. People who didn’t attend church were sometimes fined, and often ostracized. Even now, to say that you’re an atheist is akin to saying that you cook and eat babies.
Richard Dawkins makes a compelling argument for the corrosive effect of what you call “belief itself.” In a nutshell, he argues that belief obscures reality, and amounts to a waste of humanity’s cognitive resources. It does make one wonder where a totally nonreligious humanity might have been by now in terms of social and technological development. Bruno at the stake, Galileo imprisoned, the Monkey Trial…
Opinions go in IMHO. If you are stating that as a fact, you need some evidence, and so far, you’ve declined to supply any, and you’ve arrogantly declined to read helpful links supplied by others, saying “I didn’t bother to click on your links, nor do I need to…”
Your OP is in the “Are you still beating your wife?” category. “Why do we continue to be religious” is a loaded question. Establish your premise first, then we’ll talk.
Actually, this part -
is a near-textbook example of poisoning the well.
How about if everyone participates in the discussion, and points out your errors, misstatements, and the generally poor quality of the OP?
That might be fun!
Maybe that is part of your problem. You appear to think that atheists on the SDMB share your disdain for FACTS. That is not my experience, at least not universally.
Regards,
Shodan
Are FACTS different from facts? Are they different from facts or f:Da:Dc:Dt:Ds? Because I understand your confusion if they are: I supplied many facts, but I admit, no “FACTS” at all (whatever they are, in that they are obviously distinct from “facts.”)
If you don’t accept “America is a highly religious nation” as an ingoing premise, then we can’t talk, as your perception of America must be fundamentally different from mine.
You can still honestly answer what you consider to be a “loaded question,” by the way (the responses this thread have dredged up pretty much prove that any question dealing with religion is a loaded one).
If you won’t defend your premise, why are we having this “debate”? You might prefer a diatribe in a different forum.
As far as religion being a loaded question, what did you expect? Everyone would agree with you? Ever notice how many religions there are in the world?
I have no idea what point you are attempting here. Fortunately, I doubt it matters.
Regards,
Shodan
This is not a criticism of a belief; it is a claim that the very holding of one set of beliefs, (often differing widely in their tenets) is a “disease” which, by any rational underrstanding means that the belivers are sick.
This might be considered as simply a criticism of religion, although having poisoned the well with the first clause, it smacks of condescension, further poisoning the well.
Referring to worship as believing in “The Man in the Sky” is insulting on several levels, although you do not seem to be able to understand how that would be true.
Proposing that anyone who actually holds a belief in a deity would be incapable of providing a legitimate answer is a direct insult and adding that anyone with such a belief could “probably” only provide an answer that would never be found on this mesage board is both insulting and a display of serious ignorance regarding this board’s membership.
Now, if you really want to discuss what you claimed that you wanted to discuss in the OP, I would be happy to close this thread and let you open a new OP without the well poisoning and insults and we can see where that thread goes. On the other hand, if you are simply here to rile folks up, I can let this thread play out in the direction that you set it with your poorly constructed OP.
When the premise is so obviously true it doesn’t need defending, then I tend not to bother even if I’m goaded to do so. In any event, other posters have validated my premise (though the poll results they report showed only 90-92% of the population professing religious belief, rather than the 96-97% I asserted, I think that does support the premise, “America is highly religious”).
I said that in response to another poster’s remark that I had asked a loaded question. My response to that was, in effect, “So what? Why not answer it anyway?” And as far as whether anyone would “agree” with me–did you notice I asked a QUESTION, and didn’t suggest an ANSWER? :rolleyes: