Does Religion Perpetuate and Promote a Regressive Worldview?
Does religion perpetuate and promote a regressive worldview?
Definition:
I define a regressive person as someone who is uneducated, superstitious, gullible, fearful, and angry. The amygdala is the part of the brain which experiences emotions, in particular, fear and anger. Its responsible for the fight or flight response. The cerebral cortex supports higher-level reasoning and intelligence. It has been speculated that the regressive has an overactive amygdala and an underdeveloped cerebral cortex, while the progressive has a better developed cerebral cortex. Relative to their overall size, humans have the largest cerebral cortex of all mammals. So, it might be argued that people with an overdeveloped amygdala and an underdeveloped cerebral cortex are people who are failing to realize their human potential. Thus, the label regressive is appropriate.
Origin:
The worlds major religions all originated when the populace was generally uneducated, superstitious, and gullible. For instance, in ancient Rome, for every philosopher emperor like Marcus Aurelius, there were hundreds of uneducated, simple people and slaves. For a religion to survive and thrive among a largely regressive people, it would of necessity incorporate much of the prevailing regressive worldview.
Way of Knowing:
The worlds major religions all have a primitive way of know: i.e., they use scripture and authority to decide what is and is not true. In Christianity, if the Bible says it, especially if Jesus says it, then it must be true. The way is essentially what a young child uses; something is true if mommy or daddy says it is. (In contrast, sciences way of knowing allows beliefs to be corrected and improved. Newton was one of the worlds top scientists, but science takes nothing as true merely because Newton said so. When Einstein proved Newton wrong, science accepted the result, rather than burning Einstein at the stake as a heretic.)
Origin + Way of Knowing = Perpetuate and Promote a Regressive Worldview:
So, we have religion in its origin accepting regressive views, views which find their way into scripture. Scripture cannot be changed and is described as the very Word of God. Thus, we have people today whose Christianity teaches them that the Earth is about 10,000 years old (Young Earth Creationists) and who deny evolution, all because they take a book as the Word of God which has a talking serpent (Genesis) and a talking donkey (Numbers).
Evidence:
Christianity teaches believing in authority over what your eyes and ears tell you. The Bible, supposedly Gods very own Holy Word, has the word serpent in Genesis. Preachers say God really means to say Satan and people in the pews say Amen. Is it any wonder when the preacher says Trump won the 2020 election, the people in the pews also say Amen? Theyve been taught to believe in authority, not evidence or critical reasoning. Belief in authority is so important, they are told, that a God who loves them will torture them forever if they dont believe. And they say Amen.
Thus, we have a Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who believes the Bible over science. Thus, we have QAnon people who believe that Deep State officials practice cannibalistic satanic rites involving pedophilia. I read recently a Christian minister preached that autism is actually demon possession. Imagine living in a small Christian town and having a child that other children are taught is possessed by a demon. And then theres the Jan 6 insurrectionist, many of whom sincerely believed Trumps lies.
Fundamentalist Christianitys threat to democracy (and reason) is not new. In 2008, the Republican Party ran with John McCain and Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin believes in witchcraft (search YouTube for Sarah Palin witchcraft to see a video of Sarah allowing herself to be blessed against all forms of witchcraft). It 2008, it shocked me that the United States of America might easily have had a president who believes in witchcraft if the McCain/Palin ticket won and then if the elderly McCain became incapacitated. Palin probably got her belief in witchcraft from Christianity. Christianity took witchcraft seriously for a few centuries in Europe, when it hung or burned an untold number of women for the imaginary crime of witchcraft. Christianitys belief in witchcraft derives from the Bible, specifically Exodus 22:18, Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.
Fundamentalist Christianity does not value higher education (Too many teens go to college and lose their faith), promotes gullibility (It openly admits it depends on faith, not evidence), promotes superstition (Witchcraft and demons? Really? In 2023??). Fundamentalists Christians are often fearful and angry.
Scripture promotes a regressive worldview, a worldview formed when the cause of disease was believed to be sin and demons. More liberal Christians dont take the sin and demon explanation of disease seriously, but some fundamentalist Christians do. Search the Internet for Christian parent deny medical treatment child dies. Christianity promotes a regressive theory of disease, formed over a thousand years ago when lightning was thought to be a bolt from God, a theory of disease that kills children even today.
In conclusion, my answer to the question Does religion perpetuate and promote a regressive worldview? is Yes.
Definition:
I define a regressive person as someone who is uneducated, superstitious, gullible, fearful, and angry. The amygdala is the part of the brain which experiences emotions, in particular, fear and anger. Its responsible for the fight or flight response. The cerebral cortex supports higher-level reasoning and intelligence. It has been speculated that the regressive has an overactive amygdala and an underdeveloped cerebral cortex, while the progressive has a better developed cerebral cortex. Relative to their overall size, humans have the largest cerebral cortex of all mammals. So, it might be argued that people with an overdeveloped amygdala and an underdeveloped cerebral cortex are people who are failing to realize their human potential. Thus, the label regressive is appropriate.
Origin:
The worlds major religions all originated when the populace was generally uneducated, superstitious, and gullible. For instance, in ancient Rome, for every philosopher emperor like Marcus Aurelius, there were hundreds of uneducated, simple people and slaves. For a religion to survive and thrive among a largely regressive people, it would of necessity incorporate much of the prevailing regressive worldview.
Way of Knowing:
The worlds major religions all have a primitive way of know: i.e., they use scripture and authority to decide what is and is not true. In Christianity, if the Bible says it, especially if Jesus says it, then it must be true. The way is essentially what a young child uses; something is true if mommy or daddy says it is. (In contrast, sciences way of knowing allows beliefs to be corrected and improved. Newton was one of the worlds top scientists, but science takes nothing as true merely because Newton said so. When Einstein proved Newton wrong, science accepted the result, rather than burning Einstein at the stake as a heretic.)
Origin + Way of Knowing = Perpetuate and Promote a Regressive Worldview:
So, we have religion in its origin accepting regressive views, views which find their way into scripture. Scripture cannot be changed and is described as the very Word of God. Thus, we have people today whose Christianity teaches them that the Earth is about 10,000 years old (Young Earth Creationists) and who deny evolution, all because they take a book as the Word of God which has a talking serpent (Genesis) and a talking donkey (Numbers).
Evidence:
Christianity teaches believing in authority over what your eyes and ears tell you. The Bible, supposedly Gods very own Holy Word, has the word serpent in Genesis. Preachers say God really means to say Satan and people in the pews say Amen. Is it any wonder when the preacher says Trump won the 2020 election, the people in the pews also say Amen? Theyve been taught to believe in authority, not evidence or critical reasoning. Belief in authority is so important, they are told, that a God who loves them will torture them forever if they dont believe. And they say Amen.
Thus, we have a Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who believes the Bible over science. Thus, we have QAnon people who believe that Deep State officials practice cannibalistic satanic rites involving pedophilia. I read recently a Christian minister preached that autism is actually demon possession. Imagine living in a small Christian town and having a child that other children are taught is possessed by a demon. And then theres the Jan 6 insurrectionist, many of whom sincerely believed Trumps lies.
Fundamentalist Christianitys threat to democracy (and reason) is not new. In 2008, the Republican Party ran with John McCain and Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin believes in witchcraft (search YouTube for Sarah Palin witchcraft to see a video of Sarah allowing herself to be blessed against all forms of witchcraft). It 2008, it shocked me that the United States of America might easily have had a president who believes in witchcraft if the McCain/Palin ticket won and then if the elderly McCain became incapacitated. Palin probably got her belief in witchcraft from Christianity. Christianity took witchcraft seriously for a few centuries in Europe, when it hung or burned an untold number of women for the imaginary crime of witchcraft. Christianitys belief in witchcraft derives from the Bible, specifically Exodus 22:18, Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.
Fundamentalist Christianity does not value higher education (Too many teens go to college and lose their faith), promotes gullibility (It openly admits it depends on faith, not evidence), promotes superstition (Witchcraft and demons? Really? In 2023??). Fundamentalists Christians are often fearful and angry.
Scripture promotes a regressive worldview, a worldview formed when the cause of disease was believed to be sin and demons. More liberal Christians dont take the sin and demon explanation of disease seriously, but some fundamentalist Christians do. Search the Internet for Christian parent deny medical treatment child dies. Christianity promotes a regressive theory of disease, formed over a thousand years ago when lightning was thought to be a bolt from God, a theory of disease that kills children even today.
In conclusion, my answer to the question Does religion perpetuate and promote a regressive worldview? is Yes.
Comments (173)
Obviously entities invented by Iron age (or earlier) inventors are going to be geared towards an Iron age customer. Of course ancient processes can and have been updated to take into account Modern ethical standards to try to stay relevant though I agree with you that dogma is especially appealing to those who find critical thinking difficult or otherwise unappealing.
Yes, well said. :up:
To put it somewhat humorously: Breaking news, this just in it seems that there are different religions than Christianity even in the USA. And shockingly there is new evidence that some forms of Christianity actually ARE NOT fundamentalist, outdated, intolerant and determined to make their beliefs into law for everyone! News at eleven oclock. :razz:
(Could be an interesting and fruitful thread though).
If someone is a fundamentalist Christian then their religion MUST accept a worldwide flood. Etc.
Do you suppose there might also be educated Christians and uneducated atheists?
If indeed you hold to a stereotyped view of religion and of what the word means. Of course, you wont have any trouble identifying many examples which confirm your [s]prejudices[/s] pre-existing beliefs, but there are examples which will contradict it.
Tell that to These people.
FWIW To paraphrase J.S. Mill's quip about "conservatives" The religious aren't necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are religious. :smirk:
This is an interesting theory of class, where the only participants of "religion" are powerless. That idea needs more development before making it part and parcel to some historical judgement.
I do.
Religions maybe concerned with the conservation of a kind of being in the world over knowing truth (in a scientific sense) that constitutes a unique culture/perspective/ideology. Beliefs in this case would just be means toward that end, whether or not they are really true.
We could imagine a religious culture as a species of being, or just a way of being in the world.
Ideally, individuals should be able to pick and choose their religion/culture/job on the basis of education/exploration rather than indoctrination but maybe I've just been trained to say and believe this.
I've been brainwashed by the cult I was born into.
Quoting Art48
Josh, you seem to have some objection. Can you put it in your own words?
If youre going to reject religion, dont do it on the basis of rationality vs emotion, because the science of emotion no longer justifies that dichotomy. Emotion isnt at odds with treason, it is its compass. Just say you prefer an atheistic value system.
Religious institutions generally struggle to reconcile facts with beliefs unless it suits their worldview. This is clearly dangerous and regressive.
Note: I would say pretty much the same thing in terms of Patriotism.
Can you say some more on this and the role of emotion in reason?
Quoting Joshs
'Prefer' something seems a curious or 'cold' word to choose, given the subject matter; it makes theism versus atheism sound like selecting a pair of pants.
I've often held (perhaps wrongly) that (along with socialisation and enculturation) belief in deities is often arrived at aesthetically or emotionally, perhaps along the line of one's sexual preference. In my case, I never felt a jones for theism and no amount of argument is able to make it exciting or meaningful.
Yes. And since humanity is making speedy progress towards environmental catastrophe and self-destruction, a bit of regression might be prudent.
Quoting Tom Storm
Think of emotion in terms of habits of thoughts, ways of being attuned to the world, of letting ourselves be affected, of how things matter to us, their salience and value for us.The rationality of correctness, of what is true and false, is ensconced within and oriented by the valuative salience contributed by affect. Rationality asks What is the case?, bit underneath it emotion asks a more fundamentalset of questions: what is the valuative significance and meaning of what is the case? Why do we care about it? What the sense of it? What pattern of thinking makes the rationality of what is the case intelligible?
Quoting Tom Storm
Arent scientific theories of what is the case also arrived at and overthrown based on aesthetic considerations? That is, by a shift of what matters to us rather than always sticking within the same affectively grounded frame of rationality that dictates the sense of what we deem true and false? Isnt the history of scientific progress akin to (and running parallel with) historical shifts in artistic movements? Isnt the historical progression of science, art and other cultural domains bound together via enculturation and socialization?
:100: :clap: Thanks for posting this. Quite an important point and distinction, with many ramifications/consequences.
Are there false religions out there? Yes, there most certainly are. If your faith promotes the killing and imprisonment of people because they think differently (Wahhabism/Salafism) or structures you into the sham of "Just believe and you'll be saved" (the prosperity gospel) then these religions are clearly false.
So what is true, authentic, "progressive" religion? Being heavily influenced by Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Russian religious philosophy, and ancient thought (Greek and Chinese) I think that genuine religion is between you and whatever sort of god you believe in; That's it. I think if the popular religions understood this there would be a lot less religious infighting in the world. You shouldn't worry about the person next to you and what they believe. The Confucian idea of jen and the Christian idea of agape, unconditional love for our fellow man, is what we should practice irrespective of what we believe. In short, true religion is a force for ethical self-cultivation and not a subjective series of propositions.
Well, sure the more extreme members of ANY group can be shown to be... extreme. But your OP attempted to describe a whole group.
Don't get me wrong, I get what you're saying and I completely agree that was the situation before Humanism. That is, the role of religion before the Enlightenment is very different than the role of the identical religions today.
I think of it this way: emotions are the tl;dr of reason. Or, more nicely: an emotion is a summary of a thought-through stance.
When you think about or study through a topic, you then summarize it, and this summary is then captured in a particular emotion. Later on, you don't revisit your thoughts or your study notes on the topic, you just have an emotion about it.
Of course. But the greatest trick that religion ever pulled was making the non-religious believe that the religious actually believe all that they openly profess to believe.
In other words, it's quite naive and wrong to take religious claims at face value. By this it is not meant that they are to be taken "metaphorically". It's that one needs to rethink whether one correctly understood the purpose with with those religious claims were made to begin with.
One might ask, regressive as opposed to what exactly?
Weekly religious attendance is a curb on criminal behavior, child abuse, drug abuse, and divorce unrivaled by any welfare program or pilot program. Per Gallup, a whopping 92% of people who attend religious services at least once a week are "satisfied with their lives," a dramatic advantage over the general populace. A 9.1% increase in income in time series analysis also recommends it. Charitable contributions, even to non-religious organizations (on top of religious donations) are higher.
A technocrat could be tempted into prescribing religious attendance as a go to policy based on the data. But of course, the question of causal direction here is tricky.
In any event though, it seems hard to justify the idea that religion makes people particularly more regressive. We've seen attempts to remove religion, and Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, or the Paris of the Terror don't exactly scream "progress," any more than the Thirty Years War or the Crusades.
Seems to me like a case of the fundemental attribution error of social psychology. "I see people of group X doing bad things, so it must be because of the type of people that group X are. I see people I identify with doing bad things, it must be because of their circumstances."
Quoting Joshs
Yep, I can see this.
Quoting baker
:up:
Quoting Joshs
Maybe. I can't say I know if this is accurate.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
To make such a claim, you'll need to, at least, leave out the Catholic church and its international legacy of systematic child abuse and continuing criminal cover ups.
That's the case currently ie in the Humanist era. But back when religion was invented it occupied the space currently filled by science.
It seems obvious to me that for many believers, believing in witchcraft and demons, and denying evolution and geology (Young Earth Creationism) derive from Christian belief. Not for liberal Christians. But for Christians who take the Bible literally, i.e., fundamentalists. For example, Sarah Palin and Mike Johnson are fundamentalist Christian lunatics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Quite a list but not to the point.
Plato was not Christian
Plotinius, Porphyry and Proclus were Neoplatontic philosophers.
Ibn Sina, al-Ghazai, Rumi, Al-Farabi, and Ibn Kaldun were Islamic
Some of the Christians you mention were not fundamentalists.
The statement was about "religion" generally. Neoplatonism is religious.
Belief in ridiculous New Age hokum is plenty strong with people who hardly ever step inside a house of worship. The odds that someone believes that "US Democrats are involved in an international pedophile ring and sacrifice children to Moloch," Q Anon, is actually associated with people dropping out of church attendence. Secular madness seems plenty potent as well, from street gangs to "the world is ruled by reptiles," to modern Neo Nazism, to the millenarian Marxism of prior generations. The whole nuRight is strongly areligious, yet they're even more noxious than Mike Pence, with their calls for global race war, etc.
During the French Revolution, the guillotine wasn't fast enough to dispatch all the priests and nuns they wanted to do away with, so they had to resort to building boats with removable panels so they could chain people inside and drown them by the boatload. The comparison case then, doesn't seem particularly strong to me.
I'm just talking numbers from the social sciences. "Religions organizations have done bad things," is obviously very true. We can look to plenty of sectarian wars and the horrors the wrought, etc.
However, teachers have been implicated in plenty of child abuse cases, and school districts regularly try to cover up and settle these cases. Are public schools are force for regression? Daycares? Summer camps? What is the comparison case here?
Because for religion to be regressive, it would seem to imply that irreligion promotes progress, and that doesn't seem particularly easy to justify.
Rank amateurs against the Catholic church. And are you committing an equivocation fallacy? So what if others were/are also abusers? Your original point was that Religion curbes child abuse. This does not appear to be the case. As our Hillsong (Protestant) Church in Australia has also recently discovered.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Not really the point. Some secular culture may also be regressive, which does not let religion off the hook. IMO that's not the salient argument. The point is there is nothing special about religion, no appalling crime or regression going that it hasn't enthusiastically supported.
Look, I don't think we can say that the percentage of religious people with regressive ideas are the majority of all believers on earth. It may only be 30% of them. That's roughly the percentage of fundamentalists in the Christian world, according to Pew Research. Islam? Who knows? I won't even hold Trump (and his regressive, nascent fascism) against all those evangelicals who form the bulk of his base. But I can say that it is far from clear how progressive religions are around the world. And we can see very clearly the mess many of them are making in god's name.
Indeed. Global warming denial tends to be big among the religious.
:100: "Amen!" (says this raised, observant & educated ex-Catholic).
:up:
I fully agree.
But... Quoting Vaskane
I don't get your point here. What do you mean 'regressive' when you compare existentialism with religion? You want to mean that nihilism or existentialism are just a deconstruction of ourselves, or what exactly?
I don't want to criticise your opinion, but just to understand it, because I got surprised after reading it.
On the other hand, I guess we can't consider Kierkegaard as a 'regressive' towards religion when he clearly suffered 'humanisation' in the interpretation of the Gospels...
I don't want to get sidetracked. My point was merely that, according to peer reviewed findings in the social sciences, the gold standard of evidence in the scientist framework, religion seems to be more a progressive force, at least within wealthy countries. Of course, this analysis is extremely complicated, because one might assume that only certain kinds of people have the wherewithal to get up early on weekend mornings to hear what, in most traditions, is going amount to a moralizing lecture. That said, time series data also shows a marked improvement in the behaviors we tend to take an interest in (namely crime) with increased religious attendance.
So, my point would be,by what standard do we say religion is regressive if this is what our gold standard is telling us? Our feelings? Our anger that people deny what we think is solid, blatant evidence for the way the world is? The fact that we can anecdotally point to "some people of group x" are terrible? But if our data tells us that religious attendance will tend to make them better, couldn't we suppose they would be even worse if they didn't go to religious services?
And indeed, that's what the research on the plunge in evangelical church attendance and its ties to radical right-wing beliefs and support for violence seems to suggest. People already in the "far-right" space don't tend to "get better" when they leave church. They tend to get more paranoid, more supportive of violence, etc.
Because in general, throwing out anger-laced anecdotes, appeals to "the lower intelligence of that whole group," etc., the stuff of PF's threads on religion, is generally not taken as sound reasoning.
Let me try again with a simple example.
2,000 years ago, many people believed sin and demons cause disease.
This belief found its way into stories about a certain miracle worker, Jesus.
By one count, Jesus performed 34 miracles and 23 of them concern healing.
How did Jesus heal?
By forgiving sin and casting out demons (although once he used some supernatural spittle to cure a blind man.)
Since then, we've learned that bacteria and viruses cause disease.
But the false teachings of Jesus are enshrined in scripture.
The result? Google Christian parent deny medical treatment child dies"
Old beliefs (which may have seemed rational at the time) find their way into scripture where they are preserved and propagated even today. Some results: disbelief in evolution; belief in an young Earth; and children dying of curable disease because their deluded religious parents deny them medical treatment.
To cite another example, a Jehovah Witnesses may refuse a blood transfusion even at the cost of their own life due to words written in a book that has a talking serpent, a mythological worldwide flood, and a flight of Jews from Egypt that even Israeli archeologists say never happened.
There are some good teachings enshrined in scripture. And there are some very bad teachings, as well. The enshrining occurs because of religion's childish epistemology where because some book or alleged prophet or god-man said something, it must be true.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Abandoning ties to institutions such as churches has been a symptom of the descent into dysfunction of many rural communities around the world due to economic decline , as books like Hillbilly Elegy have documented. This social dysfunction is especially true among men, reflected in higher rates of suicide, depression, addiction and violence.
Does this signal a loss of religious faith, or a loss of institutional connection? For conservative writers like David Brooks it doesnt matter. His argument is that severing the social ties that bind us together in mutual obligation and moral commitment is what leads to violence and despair. I disagree with him. I do agree that religiosity is about ties that bind us to something larger than ourselves, but this doesnt have to correlate with church attendance. I suggest that dysfunctional right wing rural residents who are not connected to any institutions are very much driven by ties that bind them to something transcendent.
What I mean by this is faith in something that remains absolutely immutable and self-present, something pure that we can depend on to ground all of the relative, contingent changing phenomena of experience. Purity, persistent self-identity and self-presence are all tropes of what certain philosophers call a metaphysics of presence. We see a metaphysical of presence not only in fundamentalist religions with absolutist views about morality and truth, but also in modern science and humanism. When God was jettisoned in favor of the human subject, we exchanged a divine self-presence for the self-presence of subjective human consciousness and its ability to represent within itself empirically objective truth.
So why do I have problems with the idea of binding ourselves to a pure something outside ourselves (God, nirvana, antinatalist nothingness, objective truth) or within ourselves ( consciousness, self-actualization, authenticity)?
Its just this: The more pure, the more fixedly absolute the ground, the more polarizing and violent is its relation to what it grounds. For instance, the religious or traditionalist belief in the free will of the autonomous, morally responsible subject implies a harsher and more blameful' view of justice than deterministic-based modernist approaches and postmodern accounts, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent's control.
If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a modernist deterministic or postmodern relativist world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the natural or discursive order in situating the causes of behavior. In other words, the more we are able to decenter the purity of our grounding of moral and empirical truth, the more we can see our relation to each other on dimensions of connection, similarity and belonging rather than opposition and blameful justice. To the extent that religiosity ( or a certain modernist view of science) is regressive , it is in the extent to which it gives us over to notions of the pure, the true , the absolute which cannot help but alienate and blame in the same gesture in which it binds.
Can you cite any articles in scientific journals saying anything like that?
If by "a regressive worldview" you mean consisting of evidence-free, miraculous, death-denial stories (in contrast to secular evidence-based, dialectical, this life-affirming stories), then I agree that "religion" is guilty as charged.
:100:
Yes, all preachers, including Christian evangelists and proselytes, are liars. :clap:
The Apophatics are right!
I agree with what you're saying, although I don't think religion has a straightforward relationship to the promotion of a libertarian and voluntarist conception of free will and responsibility. It's quite the opposite in Calvinism. Man is "totally depraved," and he does only evil, [I]but for the workings of God[/I]. Actions are predestined and subject to divine foreknowledge, leading to fatalism or compatibilism (Romans 8, etc.) People cannot boast in their moral actions or in their salvation, for these are "through grace alone," in the form of "unconditional election." That is, nothing about us, as individuals, determines that we shall be moral, only God's free choice.
What you're describing sounds more like the Pelagian position, which, while common in Christianity through the ages, was also considered a heresy even by the early church. Bonaventure might talk about the world as a "ladder up to God," but it is a ladder only given and climbed by "grace," a free gift from the divine.
Yet is religious grounding always bad? I would say no. The thing we are grounded to in Platonism and the panentheistic vision of God displayed in Patristic theologians is transcendence, knowledge, freedom, and goodness itself. We are always drawn on to "go beyond" our initial desires, drives, instincts, biases, and beliefs. Christianity was, in this form, a much more universal religion. Johannine Logos Theology claims the intellectual insights of Plato and Aristotle (and in modern forms Zen, etc.) as its own, since all human knowledge springs from the same source, man's desire for "what is truly good," not what merely "appears to be good and brings pleasure."
Building on the vision of reflexive freedom freedom as rational, unified self-determination laid out in Romans 7, the idea was that we are free to the extent that understand our motivations and the world. We are free to the extent that we transcend our initial finiteness in reaching outwards, beyond our limits, in knowledge and self-identifying love. Or, "we are free to the extent that we are 'in' God, who is in 'all things'" since we then identify with the totality of the self-determining whole. But this idea, less clearly articulated but still present in Plato, developed by the early Patristics, and then re-paganized by folks like Plotinus, who drew on orthodox, Jewish, and Gnostic thinking, was first challenged by Islam, wounding the tendency towards universalism, and later shattered in the Reformation. You see a similar thing in Islam, where violent struggles against Pagan steppe nomads and crusading Christians caused the religion to become less universal and less focused on the role of knowledge, gnosis, in morality, or the identification of the self in "other" of love.
That said, such sentiment still stuck around, and you can still see it in modern settings. But this gets back to the "No True Scotsmanesque" problem of "you shall know them by their fruit." Do you take the legalism, the focus on the letter of the law versus the spirit of it to be primarily a historical narration of what happened during Christ's earthly ministry, or do you take it as a warning to all believers. What is meant by "I desire mercy not sacrifice?"
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Lets try a deconstrucrive exercise:
By deconstructive I mean locating two hidden gestures operating together within the terms of a discourse. First, whenever a discourse makes claims for a boundary of opposition between two meanings, such as rational and irrational, love and hate, true and false, knowledge and ignorance, or good and evil, based on the assumption of a true quality intrinsic to each term, one can reveal that the sense of goodness and evil are themselves contingent, changeable and relative. The second deconstructive gesture is parasitic on the first. If supposedly reliably true, self-consistently grounded senses of terms like good and evil are themselves multiple and various, then the strict opposition between good and evil can no longer be justified. That is, dissolving the purity of categorical meanings ( or better yet, showing how they already dissolve themselves in practice) dissolves the violent sharpness of the oppositions they supposedly justify.
How does your notion of the good exclude those who you deem bad, how does your idea of the true banish those you deem false, how does your conception of the moral exclude those who appear to you as immoral? The religious gesture of grounding and binding always presents the danger of erasing the differences within its categorical terms, and as a result creating and hypostesizing oppositions that harmfully separate off groups of people from one another.
I think I agree, if I'm understanding you correctly. The term "good," taken alone, without the possibility of anything being "bad," is contentless. Our understanding of the terms advances, but this in no way makes the term contentless in all contexts. On the contrary, it's the dialectical advance that gives the terms content in the first place.
But, without answering questions about the relationship between the universal and the particular, the many and the one, I don't know how well we can pronounce judgement on the opposition between such apparent opposites, except that such opposition cannot be "strict" or "absolute," in a naive sense.
Returning to the topic on hand, where exactly did this sort of idea come from? As best I can trace it, it seems first to spring from Eriugena, a monk writing theology, at least in terms of the dialectical aspects of change. And then Hegel, following similar ideas (probably through Boheme and Eckhart) popularizes a move towards a less naive analysis that navigates the gap between the Scylla of naive Platonism and the Charybdis of strict nominalism. This is, to my mind, a great example of religious thought being progressive.
Of course, religion is highly regressive in many contexts (in the sense the term is used in the OP.) My point would be that "the general principles by which theologies, philosophies, and ideologies become either progressive or regressive seems to transcend the secular/religious divide." You can compare on the one hand the old indulgence system, or Protestant justifications for African slavery in the United States, and on the other the centrality of churches to the Civil Rights Movement or religion's key role in promoting the first universal education systems and universal literacy (e.g. Puritans and the Massachusetts Bay Colony). Nor are individual groups always one or the other. The Puritans set up highly progressive educational and welfare systems, and were the first to ban slavery, but they also executed people for witchcraft and drove people into exile over theological differences.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree completely. If at a certain point in history the use of the term religious fades away it will be the result of a progressive impetus within, but not unique to, the history of religion itself.
This sounds like a rather modern phenomenon.
There are characteristic differences between Christians of the Old World and Christians of the New World.
Refusing medications, denial of evolution, and such on "religious grounds" are unheard of in Europe, until very recently.
It's in the Americas that Christians can be extremely strict in following religious rules.
In Europe, if a Catholic priest has a girlfriend and children (even though he is supposed to be celibate), nobody bats an eyelid; or at least until very recently it's been like that. If a Catholic woman uses contraceptives or has an abortion, nothing happens, even though those are grounds for excommunication. In the US, however, they seem to actually follow the rules, though, and they excommunicate people for such things.
Because of these differences, I wouldn't blame religion itself like the OP; something else is going on. I don't know what exactly that is, but something needs to account for the way religiosity is practiced "the old way" vs. "the new way".
No. The point we were exploring was the point you made about religion curbing child abuse. Which seems somewhat risible given church history.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Isn't this an easy one? And I think we agree on these, Religions regularly provide strong opposition to progressive ideas like women's rights, environmentalism, euthanasia, gay and trans rights, drug law reform, teaching science (evolution) in the classroom, stem cell research, contraception, is an advocate of capital punishment and against gun law reform. That's enough to be getting on with.
I think this is accurate. And I wouldnt argue that religion is the only source of regressive or bad ideas on Earth.
I like it. But this is hard to put into practice. Particularly if the world largely rejects this. Speaking personally, I like to blame and judge (to some extent) and the way I make sense of the world has been shaped irrevocably by concepts I can't transcend. How could one escape? Because even in recognizing the accuracy of your account, the temptation to stick with familiar patterns is irresistible. I wonder how one can be a human being and not be bound by a bunch of contingent and culturally constructed bullshit?
Why should it be otherwise?
What is the ideal you're trying to live up to?
And why?
Progressive toward what?
What are those ideas (that religions tend to oppose) progressing to, leading to?
An untreated disease can also be said to "progress", as in 'worsen the person's health status' but we don't view that "progress" positively.
I provided a list of examples of traditionally held progressive issues. I wasnt aware progress was a journey. Is that how you see it? If we hold women's rights or gay rights up as progressive issues we support, I don't think the next question should be, 'But where will that lead us?'
In many ancient and non-Western cultures, the concept of time and progress was by contrast often cyclical or regressive, focusing on a lost era of perfection. The idea of a Golden Age in the past, from which humanity has declined, is found in various cultures, including Greek, Roman, and Hindu mythologies.
The Christian eschatological view, in contrast, introduces a linear conception of time, which has a definitive beginning and an end. This view posits that history moves towards a specific goal, the Second Coming of Christ, where a new, idealized state of the world will be established. This forward-looking perspective has contributed to a cultural and philosophical environment in the West that favors progress and continual improvement in contrast to the cyclical or regressive views of time and history found in other cultures. This left its mark even when secular culture abandoned the original impetus.
Not by any means the only factor in the debate, but one worth mentioning. Another re-framing is provided by David Bentley Hart in his book Atheist Delusions. He highlights the significant impact of Christianity on social reforms and cultural transformations throughout history. His argument is that many social norms and values now taken for granted in the modern world, particularly in Western societies, have roots in Christian principles that were quite radical compared to the prevailing norms of the culture into which they were introduced.
Some of these included:
1. Value of the Individual: Christianity emphasized the intrinsic worth of every individual, which was a departure from the class-based or hierarchical value systems prevalent in many ancient cultures.
2. Charity and Care for the Needy: The Christian emphasis on charity and caring for the poor, sick, and marginalized was a notable shift from the more limited forms of social welfare that existed in the pagan world.
3. Concepts of Forgiveness and Redemption: These were also relatively novel in a world where honor cultures often demanded retribution and where a concept of personal redemption was not as developed.
4. Transformation of Family and Sexual Ethics: Christianity brought new ideas about marriage, chastity, and family life, often challenging existing practices and norms.
5. Universalism: The Christian message was universal, aimed at all of humanity, transcending ethnic, national, and social boundaries, which contrasted with the more localized religious practices of the time.
Much of this has been absorbed into the rubric of Western culture in such a way that their specifically Christian origins are obscured or forgotten, but for an example of a culture that developed without them, consider the Peoples Republic of China, where the idea of the sovereignty of individual rights is completely absent, with often dire political consequences.
Deleted previous somewhat ruder answer. I'm asking Joshs a hypothetical question, not subscribing to any ideal or suggesting it need be otherwise.
One of the problems with the idea of progress is that some people (often secular types) consider it an inevitability, a kind of historical process, leading to a brave new world - almost as if progress is a transcendent phenomenon. I don't know what you think about that, but I consider progress to be the word we use to describe a preferred personal or social change. Such a change has to be understood subject to some criteria of value. No doubt Trump being elected in 2024 will be seen as progress by the 81% of evangelicals who support him.
That aside - there are some traditional progressive causes I listed earlier which I believe represent his matter reasonably well.
Not all religious cultures gave rise to the idea of progress, and considering the title of the OP I thought it significant.
Quoting Wayfarer
Agree. But there's a lot of sublimation going around, right? Some forms of extreme woke thinking seem to me to be what happens when religion is replaced by culture. But don't tell anyone...
This gets to an interesting question: by progress do we mean the metrics that technocrats tend to use: self reported well being, income, educational attainment, crime rates, etc. or do we mean subscribing to a specific set of beliefs and policy positions? Further, we might ask, is democratic participation a good in and of itself, even if it leads to regressive policies, or is democratic process only a means to progress?
This comes up in the real world, as when ballot measures to recognize gay marriage (a progressive good) were hurt by higher turn out among low income and minority voters (generally taken to be another progressive good). And it comes up when "progressive ends," are sought using highly regressive means.
Just to take one of your examples; isn't gun control simply a means to an end, fewer murders and assaults? We have plenty of areas of the US where gun ownership is extremely high and gun violence is extremely low. If religious observance reduces violent crime, isn't it already achieving the good we want (to some degree at least). I generally think the problem people have in accepting gun control is in being unable to generalize and identify with others. They are unable to see the negative effects of gun sales outside their lived context. That and they get too focused on liberal absolutes, the idea that, as a rule, freedoms shouldn't be taken away from the responsible due to other's responsibility.
I think this is a flawed way of looking at things; it fails to account for the way society functions as a whole, not a collection of individuals.
But my point here would be that various goods seem to cut against each other. In general, when progressives claim that low income individuals "vote against their own interests," the claim is that they are mislead, lacking in knowledge about what the "good is." Yet it is still assumed that they are seeking the good.
However, when the focus turns to outgroups, this assumption tends to go out the window. The pursuit of "bad policies" becomes tied to intrinsic qualities related to the outgroup (just see prior replies). The problem is then framed as [I]intrinsic[/I] lack of intelligence, as opposed to [I]contingent[/I] lack of knowledge or manipulation. The problem is wickedness, as opposed to differing opinions of the good.
But I'd tend to say that religion is regressive to the extent that it constrains knowledge or allows for manipulation, but can also be quite progressive to the extent that it leads to identification with others and a focus on rationally seeking the "good" and putting efforts towards that end.
Further, we could question how contingent the political-religous divide is. Religion has historically been a driving force on more "left-wing," political movements, and the current alignment in the West seems partly contingent to me. For example, early Christianity was unique in the roles it created for women. Saint Paul mentions female deacons, bishops, and apostles, and female prophets were a major part of early controversies in the Church. A return to the gender norms of the era only occured over future centuries of pushback.
Likewise, while many churches today are a force for enforcing traditional gender roles, they are also almost certainly the most common place where people go to hear women lecture on philosophical, spiritual, and moral issues. Philosophy as an academic discipline has a huge gender imbalance, whereas even denominations that don't allow for female head ministers (Baptists, etc.) frequently allow women to preach and lecture, and women are the decided majority in modern church life.[/b]
Hence, it is a blend in terms of influence. While churches may tend towards regression in political views, you're also far more likely to see women speaking than in academic settings. I don't think this is simply because the gender slant is reversed. Churches also speak much more often to classically defined "women's issues," than secular outlets for discussing philosophy. Not to mention that universities aren't called "ivory towers," without cause. You need a credential to speak in most cases, a credential largely awarded to males. Meanwhile, women from all walks of life might speak at a church, and often do. (And even in the academy, theology/divinity has a far more equal gender distribution than philosophy).
It's pretty much what the word means.
Why not??
Can you explain?
I think there are many unsaids here.
Qidquid agis, prudenter agas et respice finem.
I personally don't see progress as a journey since improvements in politics, environment, safety, rights, etc can be reversed just as quickly as they are initiated and there is no particular end point in mind. I have generally used the word to describe positive enhancements to equity and social justice. But this can be unpacked until the cows come home.
Quoting baker
One might also say, Fiat justitia ruat caelum
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
People's values vary, which I have already stated. No doubt many Saudi Muslims would consider giving women more rights and autonomy to be a mistake and some may argue very reasonably for why this is the case. So?
For me progress is like morality. We might base it on presuppositions around notions of the flourishing or wellbeing of conscious creatures (as I do) but not everyone will agree on values. If you wish to defend, (for instance) that dictatorship is better than democracy then let's hear the argument.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
How many churches will let trans women speak? Again, no one is arguing that the academy is progressive. Academic circles are notoriously restrictive and sexist and regressive (perhaps because they grew out of the churches) - but it depends on the institution, the department and the personalities. It doesn't let religion off the hook to argue that there are other institutions who are also regressive.
Part of the problem is that religion makes special pleading for itself - its values are founded on what god wants and are transcendent. It's close to impossible to argue with someone who thinks gays should be jailed because homosexuality is against god.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't know the ins and outs of the guns debate other than the fact that when large groups of people own guns there's a good chance they will be used on innocents. Fewer guns and more restrictions will always be progress to me. But that is an entire debate on its own.
Quoting Wayfarer
That sublimated drive for immortality you mention is almost nothing in comparison to whats been coined singularitarianism transhumanism 101 on steroids (probably nothing new here). I wont bother with what I find to be the many unaddressed metaphysical underpinnings of scientism that are here taken on faith to be blatant truths. Ill just say that if its metaphysically absurd to presume an Abrahamic Heaven wherein all immortal psyches forever therein interact with lack of any suffering on anyones part at any point in time (or else some eternal Hell wherein there is only dolor without any vacillations toward some states of happiness or pleasure, such as that of momentarily reduced dolor), then so too is absurd the notion of uploading our consciousnesses into some AI assisted cosmic mainframeor some suchso as to obtain a blissful immortality (explicitly stated, this regarding the personal self as we empirically know it).
Here speaking in Eastern semantics, if there is ego, I-ness, then there will be samsara, necessitating both pleasures and pains of various degrees: same conflicts but in different, nonbiological makeup. No transcendent bliss to speak of. And Ive yet to understand why, for example, one hard AI program could not lie to, steal from, or kill another hard AI program. So much for immortality. Yet the same underpinnings that drive some people toward the spiritual immortality supposed to occur in Heaven now drives many mostly secular folk toward this future state of immortal being via unification with machines. This being the exact same underlying drive toward immortality as end to progress toward that is expressed in different ways via different metaphysics.
In one possible contrast, there is no immortality of the ego to be had in the goal of actualizing whats supposed to be the absolute bliss of Nirvana, else the absolute bliss entailed in the Western notion of henosisthese as only two examples from human history of a drive toward egoless beingfor these states are deemed perfectly devoid of I-ness and, thus, of ego. This then being an utterly different goal-directed drive: one oriented at becoming selfless, this in contrast to the, well, selfish drive to hold on to the cherished aspects of ones own empirically known self eternally.
Yet Ive heard respectable scientists speak of such upcoming future transhumanist state when morning the natural death of their loved ones. Well, more precisely, one: a friend of the familys relative, this when I when to the funeral.
Religion or no religion, the same underlying human drives toward future ends remaintoward which we either progress or dont. And the end we individually pursue typically has a way of dictating the means we utilize in our want to get there. For one example, the want to never ever die as the ego one is aware of will often stand in the way of societal givens, such as that of altruism when looking death in the face (as a simplification of the issue: no soldiers going to war to defend ones nation, no firefighters running into houses on fire to save others, no police chasing after bad guys with guns, etc.). Whereas the want for selflessness facilitates the altruism just mentioned.
I take it that most would deem selflessness to be a virtue and selfishness a vice.
So when we talk about progressiveness (progressives and the like) I tend to believe were generally thinking along the lines of progress toward a state of being that exhibits less selfishness and more selflessness. To me, theres a lot to unpack here. Still, doesnt secular notions of humanism and humanitarianism consist of drives such as those of greater compassion and less sectarian hatred, thereby being driven by an intended progression toward states of lesser ego?
[edited the first paragraph for better clarity, and added a bit more info to it]
Right, this is exactly my point re religious attendance. Based a wealth of research in the social sciences, religious attendance seems to boost the metrics we use to measure flourishing. And religious attendance also seems to boost a number of prosocial behaviors, like volunteering and charitable giving. Given its effect size, it's the sort of thing we would expect social scientists and policy folks to advocate in favor of, but for all its historical and political baggage.
And yet, as you rightly point out, religious attendance also tracks with a number of regressive attitudes. So it seems to me like it is a mixed bag, strongly progressive in some ways, and strongly regressive in others, and the principles that determine how strongly each factor presents itself transcends "religion" as a category.
Many. You see rainbow and pink and blue trans flags on churches all the time. I would even wager they are the most common place to find such symbols on display. But this in no way contradicts the fact that most churches/mosques, etc. aren't open to trans individuals speaking.
It's a mix. The academy is extremely vocal in its efforts to promote diversity and equality. What broad industry puts more of a focus on diversity? In California, there were questions over whether an opening for a physics professor should have "track record of efforts to promote minority inclusion in the field," as a criteria for assessment alongside their ability to contribute to new research in the field, but the very fact that these are equal criteria speaks to the heavy focus on "inclusion."
And yet where is one more likely to find ethnic minorities and low income individuals, in the academy or in a Catholic church or mosque?
This is sort of like how progressives were angry that support was thrown behind Joe Biden in 2020, allowing him to defeat the more progressive Bernie Sanders. On the one hand, the administration would now be less progressive. On the other, the choice of Biden above Sanders reflected minorities' pick for the candidate more than white voters. Particularly, Biden was significantly more popular with African Americans, while Sanders won with white voters.
And this is where I think it gets tricky. Because self determination itself seems like a progressive good, and yet in many contexts it can also lead to regressive policy. Mosques in the West seem like a powerful progressive force in uniting the advocacy and political efforts of a minority group, and yet this advocacy can often lead to more regressive policy preferences. But religious institutions also motivate progressive reforms themselves (civil rights, the expansion of social welfare programs, universal education) and in this way the relationship doesn't seem straightforward to me.
This is true for less obviously political settings too. Without the YMCA and YWCA, or JCCs, some areas would have significantly less access to subsidized or free child care, enrichment programs, and women's shelters. The Catholic Church can push its followers to advocate for regressive policies on the one hand, and use donations to support refugee settlement on the other, settlement that people who see themselves as "highly progressive," often fight on account of Not In My Backyard sentiment ("yes, the Church settling refugees is fine, but not in my school district please. Low income housing? No thanks, put it down in the inner city.")
As a side note, there is some good evidence that refugee settlement works better in rural areas (Kentucky, Bosnians, Maine, Somalians), despite these places being more insular and conservative. It's an interesting phenomena.
My understanding of such studies are that it is community and being with people for a common cause promotes flourishing. I dont think this is deniable. The theistic part of it is likely to be moot, but in todays atomised culture, it is generally only sporting clubs or religious groups that still encourage and build community and no doubt people benefit. Has nothing to say about the truth of those beliefs - its likely more about the power of conformity (shared values) and tribalism.
But I think you could also say that being a Nazi in Germany in the 1930s seemed to boost metrics of flourishing (for most) too. All that community building, sport, collaboration, infrastructure. Shared values and the promotion of a strong culture certainly seemed to benefit most of the citizens.
Religion being a "way (or structure) of life perpetuated" the answer would be: depends on the religion.
If, like most people by "religion" you mean a simple compare and contrast of those who believe in creationism/intelligent design vs. evolution/haphazard intelligence then that's a bit different. But not by very much.
I'd delve into this topic in much greater detail but seeing as I'm short on time at the moment I want to pose a question or set of questions to you and anyone who happens to be reading. If religion (believing in God or a set of societal rules, codes, or covenants that absolutely must be followed lest one or one's society become destroyed) limits one's desire for scientific advancement, "advancement" that leads to the point our five human senses are just short of literally glued to inhuman devices and social communication becomes an unwanted chore (sound familiar?) ... by what measure do we judge if something is "regressive" or "progressive". I'll substitute these words with negative and positive, respectfully. You could take a snapshot of a situation, say a sports game and conclude, Team A is losing. This may be true, however in real life unlike sports games, there is no timer. As much as some people like to insist. Perhaps if you took a snapshot at a later time Team B would be losing, and never recover from this position (ie. Team A won despite appearing the opposite due to the limitations of human observation).
In short, I don't happen to find anything particularly "progressive" or "positive" about a society that results in true Nuclear holocaust where the entire planet becomes incapable of sustaining life, even if we do get to watch it all on our little iPhones or smartwatches before we succumb to radiation sickness. Do you? I'd much prefer the steady, predictable, and nuanced old world society where, sure things were simple - if not outright grueling at times - but at least humanity lived on whilst retaining the social communication skills that allowed society to progress in the first place. Wouldn't you? Seems like a reasonable opinion to hold but to each their own..
Humanity can become plenty neurotic contemplating the pains, struggles, and chasms of existence itself, no matter who or what you deem responsible or no matter how long you believe it lasts or continues.
:100: Like I said, I'm sure much of the imagery in sci-fi and super-hero movies is grounded in the longing for immortality. In traditional culture, the folk stories imparted such wisdom against a religous background where there was a tacit acceptance of spiritual immortality, but with its rejection, all such grounding is lost and the stories become complete fantasy (except that now with the advent of technological transhumanism, people are beginning to believe that they might be real!)
I moved my question and your response about correlation of gun ownership and homicide to The American Gun Control Debate.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There's a recent story about a Muslim city council in Hamtramck Michigan which banned pride flags. There's definitely a tension between Islam and gay rights, it has also surfaced here in Australia from time to time. It's discomfiting to progressives, who often champion both refugee rights and LGBTQ rights, to discover that re-settled Muslims will often denounce gay rights in strident terms.
Quoting Outlander
:clap:
Most scientific and technical innovations until the scientific revolution were achieved by societies organized by religious traditions. Ancient pagan, Islamic, and Christian scholars pioneered individual elements of the scientific method.
And back in the goodol days when things were simpler, you may not have had the convenience of recording your neighbor being burned at the stake for witchcraft (whatever the orthodoxy found disagreeable) on an iPhone but you could could still enjoy the spectacle.
There are some truly remarkable works in philosophy of religion (especially Christianity). One of my current favorites is William Lane Craig, who is best know for his popularization of the Kalam cosmological argument, writes on the question "What is the bare minimum we need to believe in Christianity?" This does not mean that we discard what is improbable, rather, we should interpret it in a way that is meaningful and in alignment with necessary doctrines.
To answer your question as to whether religion perpetuates regression, it depends. I think the question that should be asked is "Which religions are perpetuating regression?" It is clear that there are religions that do not allow for certain freedoms regardless of their morality. It is not a religions job to keep us from performing actions, its job is to show us that we ought to keep from performing those certain actions. From my perspective I don't know if I can answer yes or no. I really think it depends on the religion in question and if it is willing to adhere to what we know to be real.
Have you spent any time on WLC's forum? You might find WLC's arguments don't stand up so well.
In any case, what is the relevance of "the bare minimum we need to believe in Christianity"? That sounds like a criteria that someone who wants to cling to a belief would be concerned with.
Id love to hear your thought on how his arguments dont hold up!
To answer your other statement:
The Bible itself is a compilation of many books, from many author, in many periods of time and with many genres. Am I expected to take an aesthetic poem literally? I dont think so, nor do a major population of christianity seem to think either. My point in my comment was to stress that a synthesis of what we know to be true (by i.e. science) and what God reveals is what should be sought after.
More at ProgressiveRegressive_Excerpt.docx
Check YouTube for multiple criticisms of Craig's Kalam Argument.
(The Kalam is a Kalam-ity of an argument.)
Indeed. The Kalam doesn't support any particular brand of religion. Or religion at all for that matter.
Quoting T4YLOR
Yep. As allegorical stories, one of our Baptist preachers used to say - 'I am insulted that anyone who would take the Bible stories literally.'
Quoting T4YLOR
The problem here is the old; how do we demonstrate that there are gods and how do we know what gods reveal? On this the believers only have subjective interpretations.
I'm afraid I'm not that interested in the topic these days, but you can find plenty of people to discuss WLC's arguments with at:
https://knowwhyyoubelieve.org/groups/reasonable-faith-forum/
I think that's a caricature. It would take a bit to unpack it all.
You keep bringing this up. To no avail.
That's like saying, "I totally refuse to obtain a degree in X, but I still feel entitled to get a job for which a degree in X is necessary."
You won't be able to see "a demonstration of proof of God" unless you qualify yourself for it.
With so many things in life, people are okay with this scenario: "In order to get X, you need to qualify yourself for it." Whether it's about education and employment, or romantic partners, credit from a bank, doing anything successfully, really.
But not whern it comes to religion/spirituality. This is where most people demand that no qualification is necessary or no qualification should be necessary. What one currently has should suffice to get a definitive judgment on a religious/spiritual matter. Period.
I understand all that and my point is polemical. I still ask it because I like a world where demonstrations are provided. What is interesting however are the amount of formerly religious people who lose their faith when they begin reading the Bible or Koran in earnest. I've met quite a few former ministers, priests, and believers who came to atheism simply by asking the question, why do I believe in this?
Quoting baker
This is largely true and this flaw is worth highlighting. Nevertheless, the secular community contains numerous members who were once devout. They found their way out.
It's certainly simplified but I don't think it's incorrect. An in-depth discussion might require an entire book of its own.
This is an excellent point. It used to be that people looking for spiritual truths would abandon everything they had to live with some great teacher. Rigorous study, ascetic practices, long periods of meditation these are the norm in the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions.
To be sure, these traditions allowed for other roads to enlightenment or spontaneous revelation. But in general, the truth required a great deal of study and praxis to ascertain.
But now the general take is: "beliefs about the most central questions if what being is and how we should live should be summarizable in five minutes."
Saint Augustine makes a related point, which is that we can never learn anything without trusting others. Our parents might not be our real parents. Our kids might not be our real kids, they could have been switched at birth. Anything we are taught could be bunk.
And yet, if you don't put effort in, assuming your physics textbook might be able to shed some light on the world for you, then you'll never get anywhere in understanding the subject. The same is true for theology, which is up with philosophy for most abstract disciplines.
I find the focus on fundamentalists very common in critiques of religion. They are, in ways, a ready built, real life strawman.
But Saint Aquinas was not a fundementalist just as Rumi was not a jihadi.
There is a common misconception that, because fundementalist believe in very simplistic, literalist interpretations of Scripture, they must be closest to what the faith was like in earlier centuries. This isn't true. There was, if anything, a much stronger tendency to read Scripture allegorically or analogically in the ancient Church, and really the Middle Ages as well.
Fundementalist, and the more literalist turns of more mainstream Evangelical churches is a modern phenomena. It certainly has echoes in prior eras, e.g. the fideists ("knowledge of God by faith alone") who Aquinas jousted with, but the juxtaposition of romantic, irrational faith and faith undermining reason definitely only comes into its own in the 19th century.
But this isn't a good generalization. Fundamentalists are vocal, but a slim minority. "Evangelicals" (in the sense used in the US today) are a very small minority in Christianity, and they aren't even a majority of Christians in the US (just a quarter). Catholics are actually now the plurality in the US, suprisingly enough (34%, vs 69% in 1950)
Partly, this has to do with self sorting effects. Religion now predicts income even better than race (shocking given the large differences in the US). It also predicts educational attainment quite a bit. It seems like a sort of "hollowing out," of your more educated population could lead to a sort of self fulfilling feedback cycle, whereby people less open to literalism (which education would tend to affect) end up being pushed out, leading to ever more "ideological purity," for lack of a better term.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/magazine/is-your-religion-your-financial-destiny.html#:~:text=Overall%2C%20Protestants%2C%20who%20together%20are,being%20richer%20than%20Catholic%20nations
Partly
They were probaly never insiders, never "in it" to begin with. I used to make a point of reading people's exit stories from religion/spirituality. And in all cases I have seen, they had a poor knowledge of the religion/spirituality of which they claim to have been members of. So many former Catholics with such a shoddy knowledge of Catholic doctrine! Former Hare Krishnas, former Buddhists, former Mormons, all with really odd ideas about what their former religion teaches. Even if some of them have attained some positions of power and influence in their respective religious/spiritual groups.
These people were probably "members" in the sense that they were physically there in their religion's church or temple etc. But mentally, it was like they were on another planet.
Quoting Tom Storm
Of course. If their initial "faith" didn't have much to do with the foundational texts of their proposed religion/spirituality to begin with, of course they will more likely experience those texts as alienating. (There are, of course, also those who buy a Bible and place it on a prominent spot in their home, and never read it.)
Well, how silly of the church hierarchy to assume that the "believers" actually should know why they're there ...
Going through the motions with religious/spiritual belief is actually a phenomenon that is criticized in religion/spirituality.
Of course. But when has spirituality been a factor in the mass support of religions?
Quoting baker
The point is it is only when they acquire such knowledge that many realize they can't believe it any more. I've often thought it is much easier to accept a religion if you don't know much about it, if it's just part of your wallpaper and quotidian experience.
I also think that saying to an apostate, 'you were never a true Muslim or Christian' is an obvious and often false accusation religions use to defend their own weaknesses.
Not to mention a no true Scotsman fallacy.
?
I think the distinction between religion and spirituality is mostly spurios, so I usually use a joint term.
It's the truth.
Some religious/spiritual people will actually say things to the effect "being born and raised into a religion only gives you a foot in the door, nothing more".
It would make little sense to tell children, "You're not really proper members of our religion yet". Have you ever noticed how in many religions, they talk about growing in faith, development, faith formation etc.?
The lines between insiders and outsiders, between members and non-members are sharp only for zealots, and, perhaps, secular religiologists, both of whom have characteristically low and abstract standards for what constitutes religious membership.
For those more serious, those lines are far less defined, certainly not defined in terms of "Tom Storm is not a member, but Nancy Crow is".
Perhaps 'should be' but you know as well as anyone that religion is often just a series of behaviours with no spirituality attached.
Quoting baker
We won't agree on this. I don't think anyone true Christian or true Muslim. Such categories are pointless. You might be an inadequate Muslim or Christian, but so what? Who decides what counts? Surely it is God?
People often call a NTS fallacy in situations where there is actually a genuine ambiguity at hand. As such, it's not a case of a fallacy at all.
Terms denoting religious, political, national, or racial identity are usually complex, multilayered, subject to debate. As such, it's no wonder different people can mean different things by the same word. This doesn't make anyone's input fallacious. But it does make those calling out a NTSF in such situations simpletons ...
You apparently decide what counts, by taking sides with those former Christians, former this or that.
How can someone even call themselves a "former Christian" or say they have "left Christianity", when, per you, it is up to God who decides whether someone was a Christian or not to begin with?
Quoting Tom Storm
Then how can you say that someone is a "former Christian" or a "former Muslim" or that they are "now an atheist"?
If terms denoting religious identity don't meaningfully apply, then how come you think they temporarily do apply?
This phenomena goes both ways. Plenty of people subscribe to some form of secular, atheist belief, having never really examined it or competing systems to any great degree. And many of these people, raised as atheists, come to join a religion as adults.
But in these cases, would we claim they weren't "really atheists," despite the fact that they denied the existence of God, because they never took any particularly close notice to how such a denial was traditionally justified?
I would think an atheist is simply anyone who denies the existence of God, regardless of whether they understand the God of theologians, what they are denying, or not.
How then do we classify "real" religious people?
I do see your point though. Most "apostates" tend to be people who were in x belief system by inertia from childhood and/or only at a surface level. That only makes sense. Those most motivated to embrace their faith and grow to understand it and it's history/philosophy are also those who are probably least likely to leave them for a whole host of reasons. Most important is likely the fact that, if you find something more convincing and meaningful, you tend to embrace it more and do more to learn about it. Those less convinced will be less motivated for this sort of effort.
But then again, you also often tend to find things more meaningful and convincing because you've taken time to understand it, so it seems the influence can go both ways. It's rarer to see historians of religion or theologians who radically depart from their faith, although it does happen. What you do see instead is a wider horizon from these folks, because most religions tend to have a universalist aspect, which makes it easier to assimilate and grow from other inputs. E.g., Thomas Merton, while a Christian monk, became a scholar of Sufi Islam and Zen in his quest to understand his own faith.
Did I say that? No. I said there is no true Christian or true Muslim. There are just Christians and Muslims. As I see it, rating them for purity or fidelity by attaching words like 'true' or 'proper' seems pointless to me.
Quoting baker
As per my above point.
Quoting baker
A person calls themselves a former Christian when they say they are a former Christian. I am happy to let people determine how they want to identify.
In relation to my reference to God - presumably if there is a god it decides who is appropriate and no one else, right? I'm just following the ostensible logic of belief.
I'm an atheist. Like many atheists I know, I don't deny the existence of god. I generally say I have no good reason for accepting the proposition that a god exists. I'm open to hearing arguments, but for me belief in god appears to be an aesthetic judgement informed by how we make sense of the world. Belief seems to me to be a bit like sexual preference. You can't help who you are attracted to.
There being a genuine ambiguity at hand, is rather key to a no true Scotsman fallacy being a fallacy.
That's like saying an asexual person is simply someone denies the existence of sex. :roll:
Can you name a mystical / supernatural religion that is either founded on or predominantly preaches
"Thou Shalt Not Believe Hearsay"?
or, better yet,
"Thou Shalt Believe In Only That Which Can Be Shown To Be The Case'?
or, at best, both?
[quote=Betrand Russell]So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.[/quote]
I.e. lucidly thinking for oneself ...
Excerpts from Kalama Sutta, wherein the Buddha addresses the people of Kalama village with respect to which teaching to reject and which to accept.
In a dialogue with the monk Sariputta we read the following (where 'the Deathless' is a synonym for 'nibbana'):
[quote=Pubbakotthaka Sutta: Eastern Gatehouse;https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn48/sn48.044.than.html]Sariputta, do you take it on conviction that the faculty of conviction, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation? Do you take it on conviction that the faculty of persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation?"
"Lord, it's not that I take it on conviction in the Blessed One that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction in others that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation; whereas those who have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment would have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation. And as for me, I have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment. I have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation."[/quote]
Sariputta is acknowleding that those who have 'not known, seen, penetrated, realised or attained it' would 'have to take it on conviction', whereas those (like himself) who have seen it, know 'without doubt or uncertainty'.
No it isn't. The first is a term about sexual attraction, the second is about belief in God. E.g., the Oxford definition:
What would your definition be?
IDK, that is the dictionary definition of the word "atheist." It doesn't mean you have to claim that God is metaphysically or logically impossible, but it's generally a claim about some level of certainty that God doesn't exist.
"Agnostic," is the term generally used for "undecided," or "the question is unanswerable."
I disagree with this entirely. If this was the case, and if you don't agree with the idea of "medical treatments to cure homosexuality," etc., wouldn't this imply that it is equally unwise to bother trying to change someone's beliefs? You can't "argue someone straight," but people change their beliefs based on arguments all the time. Imagine the bind we would be in if people changed their policy beliefs as rarely as their sexuality? What would be the point of antiracism and antisexism efforts then? Surely we convince people of the foolhardiness of racism more often than we "argue them gay/straight?"
I've heard plenty of people tell stories about leaving (or less often, joining) a faith after being exposed to arguments via books and videos. I do not know of a single person who ever claimed to have picked up a book and been convinced to turn straight or gay midway through their life because of it.
Side note: this is just one of the reasons why I think the Nietzschean argument, that "reason is just a desire," is incoherent. IMO, Nietzsche only seems to come up with this definition to avoid having to deal with Plato's arguments re reflexive freedom and freedom as self-control, since those crucially undermine Nietzsche's increasingly strong preference for the "Dionysian mode" over the "Apollonian" in his later work (Birth of Tragedy avoids this).
Neoplatonism?
Saint Aquinas has the model of the "two winged bird," faith and reason. The above holds for "that which is known through reason." This certainly doesn't support the whole of the Christian religion, and some of Aquinas' rationalist arguments are open to solid criticisms, but he gets a considerable amount of milage out of demonstrable deduction. This is also of true of Thomas's precursors, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Avarroese. Averroes in particular sets logical reasoning above revelation, having the latter interpreted in light of the former where contradiction is discovered.
We might say similar things about Aristotle's God, although that never got the widespread appeal that Thomism got.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A philosophical 'doctrine' coopted by early Church theologians but "Neoplatonism" was not itself ever a creedal or congregational religion, or religious practice. Doesn't meet my stated criteria (re: Pascal's distinction of the religious 'God of Abraham', not a conceptual 'god of philosophy').
I know very few atheists who would argue this. But some might. Atheism can take various forms - hard to soft.
Here's what American Atheists say. I have no connection to this group and I am not American.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Have some perspective. :wink: I didn't say it was identical, I said it was a bit like sexual preferences. And yes, I find this satisfactory. But I never said that's all there is to belief.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As I said, I'm not saying it's an exact match. I would not agree with medical treatments to cure religion either. But on the other hand, many people do start heterosexual, marry and have children with a partner, only to realize after a few years that they were following this conventional path because of expectations and socialization. On encountering the world, on further learning, they might 'come out' and change preferences. People's experiences with religion can be similar. They were never really comfortable with it, but had not yet encountered alternatives or learned that it was ok not to believe. Taboos against atheism and homosexuality have been powerful and still are in some countries. Education about both is important.
Quoting 180 Proof
:up: Well put.
It is necessary the same with all religions. If religion was an open book as you say, and accessible to anyone, there would be no need for religious authorities and nothing *special* or sacred with which to bind a community. Faith in authority is essential in religion.
It is an open book to those who are able to read. Those who can't read need to be shown how to read. Same with any other higher skill - medicine, piano, science.
That doesnt appear to be true though. For instance, I could ask a dozen questions about rebirth that no one could answer. It would be the same for questions about God. All anyone could say is that the subject is imponderable or beyond human comprehension. Yet rebirth and God are held to be truths, and it is necessary to not oppose these truths in order to be considered part of the faith. Scientific theories, medical practices, and piano concertos dont need to be taken on faith in order to belong to those communities. Binding groups in a shared narrative, values, norms, etc is not the point in those disciplines. That is entirely the point in religion.
I agree that it lacked some common elements of organized religion. It did have a practical side focused on "inwards and upwards meditation/contemplation" that seems more religious though.
In any event, the direction of influence between Neoplatonism and orthodox Christianity, Gnosticism, and Jewish Platonists is probably one of the most common "large," mistakes I've seen in philosophical histories. This certainly stems from the fact that later Christians and Jews assumed that "Pagan = older," and tended to write the intellectual history that way.
In reality though, a young Plotinus is growing up at a time where Origen and Cyril are his city's most eminent Platonists and where conflict between orthodox Christians and their Gnostic brothers was at a fever pitch. Key "Neoplatonic" elements of Gnosticism show up first, then in Neoplatonism only later. The Platonist tradition in Alexandria's Abrahamic community goes back centuries earlier, back past Philo and co.
So, while we don't have all the intellectual history we'd like, it's more plausible that Neoplatonism is a sort of continued abstraction and re-paganization of Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic ideas.
Of course, the influence would later go both ways. Saint Augustine, the West's most influential theologian, would read the "Platonists" first (likely Porphyry and Proclus). And because Augustine does so much to try to make Neoplatonism consistent with orthodox Christianity, it was generally taken that this must be the primary direction of influence. But his success makes more sense when you consider where Plotinius was getting his ideas from.
I'd have to consider it more, but I don't think that sort of definition works for atheism in most forms. To be sure, one can lack belief in something without having a corollary belief that the thing in question does not exist. E.g., many people have never heard of a lepton. They don't believe leptons exist, but they also don't believe that they don't exist.
But is this the type of "lack of belief" that atheists are generally talking about? I would think not, because normally, they have heard about God and considered the evidence for God. Dawkins, for example, thinks there is strong evidence to think the teachings of traditional religions are false.
Now you can also lack a belief in something that you know "something" about and still not deny its existence. However, this seems to me to be the "agnostic" view point. E.g., you can read a book on string theory and remain unconvinced by it, lacking belief in the truth of the theory, but also lacking any strong belief that it is false.
Is this the sort of lack of belief the term "atheist" generally applies to? I don't think so. Think about one of the core policy demands of atheist groups: that students in public schools not be taught the positive claims of religions in class. Such a demand makes sense if you think said teachings are false or unlikely to be true. The demand makes no sense if you have no belief vis-á-vis the teachings being false.
If I have never been exposed to modern chemistry, I might very well "lack belief in," many of its theories. But my lack of belief in these theories gives me no good reason to demand that such theories not be taught, right? Indeed, if we demanded that things we didn't currently believe in not be taught at schools, we would essentially be setting our current beliefs as the limit for all education. It would be akin to demanding that subjects you had never studied not be taught.
The common atheist position is far more reasonable than this. The claim is generally that the teachings of religions are unlikely to be true (i.e., that they are likely false). And it makes perfect sense to advocate that things that are likely to be false are not taught to students.
The common agnostic position makes more sense too. It is that it is impossible to determine the truth or falsity of key religious beliefs, in which case it wouldn't make any sense to teach them as if they were true. Or we could say that, if side Y wants to teach X, we can allow that Y does not have good evidence to support X, and thus that we shouldn't teach it, without having to suppose that X is false. But this is generally the position labeled "agnostic," which the above definition folds into the lable "atheist."
But simple lack of positive belief is not a good reason to advocate against a position being taught.
Atheism is not a religion, but it's still a belief.
Sure. But this is true of embracing liberal/conservative policy positions in many enviornments as well. It's also true re idealism vs physicalism.
My point would be that the phenomenon of shifting religious beliefs shares much more in common with the phenomenon of shifts in other beliefs than in changes in sexual orientation, tastes for certain types of food, etc.
Beliefs are in some ways quite distinct from desires. Religion is about both belief and identity, so there is cross over, but the closer analogy IMO would be becoming a liberal/conservative later in life, or changing one's mind on some core philosophical issue.
I generally ignore the polemicists like Dawkins who is a type of fundamentalist.
Like many atheists, I generally call myself an agnostic atheist. This common description in freethinking circles says, essentially: 'I don't know if there is a god or not, but I lack belief in one. Atheism and agnosticism are doing different things. Agnosticism goes to knowledge, atheism goes to belief.
I don't think it is reasonable to say you know there is no god since this is a positive claim one can't demonstrate. I would prefer to go with the inferences and argue that there is no sufficient reason to accept the claim.
I have heard most of the theistic arguments - from Aquinas five ways, to the personal experiences of my local Evangelical. I spent many of my younger years in circles with theosophists and people from various religions and groups dedicated to higher awareness. I've read many books about god, from Paul Tillich to David Bentlay Hart. I have encountered nothing that makes me think there are good reasons to accept the claim.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm not arguing form desire, I'm arguing for preference. Possibly aesthetic preference. For some people the world makes more sense and is more beautiful if they have magic man in it. For others, there is no need for this. Any arguments tend to come later, when one is exploring or experimenting with one's preferences. I linked theism to sexual preference because I think it compares somewhat - we can't help who we are attracted to. This functions at a deeper level than a belief. I don't need to 'believe' I am attracted to certain people - I am just wired this way - it's how I navigate the world. Ditto my preference for theism. Anyway, I don't need you to agree with me, so we can move on. Thanks for the chat. :wink:
Gotcha, I see what you're saying now. That makes sense to me.
I certainly think you're on to something here. There is a sense in which "the type of person someone is," can lead them towards or away from any given religion. I think the same is true of political and philosophical leanings as well. Even among people with fairly liberal policy preferences, I think it's meaningful to talk about "conservative personalities," to some extent, etc.
However, I also don't think it completely reduces to these sorts of preferences. Your classic, more shocking conversion stories (in either direction) tend to be more based on evidence for some sort of position change (be that mystical/direct experiences, or the fruit of intellectual investigations).
To embrace the bolded explanation would seem to require discounting such narratives in place of a sort of psychoanalytical explanation about what is [I]really[/I] going on. Aside from not being a fan of such explanations, it also seems sort of condescending. It's the atheistic equivalent of the theists' explanation that: "people who don't believe in God do so because they are unable overcome their own ego's demand that they be in control and the standard of their own goodness."
Now might either of those have [I]some[/I] merit in some cases, sure. But it seems rather hand wavy given that all different sorts of people are atheists or religious. And of course, in both explanations its "the other side" who has some sort of intrinsic quality that leads them into their belief, which seems too simple.
Then off to Humpty Dumpty land it is, where words mean whatever one wants them to mean ...
Can't you see how biased you are in favor of those who have "left religion"?
I double dare you.
:100:
That's too abstract. Stick to the actual point. How do you determine who is a real Christian, exactly?
Gosh darn, why do scientists stick to the definitions of scientific terms as found in scientific textbooks?
I can't help it if you think it is condescending. It's not how I intend it since it goes both ways - the atheist and the theist are equals in preference land. Perhaps the use of the term 'magic man' made it feel more polemical. I guess I could have just said god/creator/ground of being.
And as I have said a few times - this is not intended as a totalizing account of all people's beliefs, it's an intuition I hold. And I'm learning more about my views as I write here.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think it is an equivalent to my point. That said - I don't hate this argument against atheism. I would certainly explore it with a theist if it was offered up. There are many reasons why people are theists and atheists - even if I think preferences and sense making are formative factors. This is all speculative so where's the harm?
The focus is on people who claim to have been (devoted) members of some religion (which they specifically name), who named themselves with the name for the members of said religion, who say that they have "left" said religion, and who exhibit a poor knowledge of said religion's doctrine.
You clearly have a favorable bias for those who "leave religion".
I'm skeptical about how someone can "leave a religion" of which they exhibit so little knowledge (as evidenced by the exit narratives of many people). If they have so little knowledge of it, how can they be counted as ever being in it to begin with?
What exactly has such a person "left" when they say they have "left the religion"?
If a person says they have "left Christianity", but it turns out they have a poor knowledge of Christianity, then what has such a person actually left? Half-baked ideas, misremembered slogans, false equivocations, hasty generalizations, superficial socializing, ... and not necessarily "Christianity".
It's past my bedtime! That's the harm!
If true, is that relevant?
Quoting baker
Are you saying that people are only real Christians or Muslims if they have a extensive knowledge of the religion's doctrine? I would think then that only a tiny percentage of believers qualify as 'real'.
Quoting baker
Then they have left a half-baked version of Christianity. So what? We are not the purity police. There are believers who hold better and worse, theorized and untheorized versions of any belief system.
Generally people leave religions because they don't believe in god. Knowledge of the religion may not be a factor.
Will you also argue, by extension, that one can't be a true atheist unless one has extensively studied the arguments for and against god? Can one believe in democracy unless someone has studied the history of democracy and has a working knowledge of political science and alternative governments?
I repeat my question - How do we determine if someone is a real Christian or not?
1. Karma and rebirth are supposedly based on cause & effect. If true, there's a mountain of causes that, at death, would logically result in rebirth that is practically indistinguishable from the previous life. Yet the story goes that if you do a lot of dirty deeds in your life you will be reborn as a dirty cockroach or something. That doesn't make sense if karma and rebirth are based on cause & effect. It would be like I'm a human being one instant and the next instant I spontaneously turn into a dirty cockroach, just because I stole a loaf of bread or whatever. I should be reborn the same human bread stealing dirty deed doer that I was the instant before death, if karma and rebirth are based on cause & effect.
If you ask a "book reader" about this they will say that such things are imponderable, or to put it another way, the book they read from is fiction.
Scientific textbooks and terms are not authorities.
See the definition of authority
Given that in life you also do a lot of other things, their effects mitigate eachother. If you once stole a loaf of bread, but you later regret it, work hard, earn money, and with it buy a hundred loaves of bread and give them to charity, then having stolen that one loaf once can be mitigated and then some.
What is said to be imponderable is knowing in advance what consequence some particular action you did now will have in the future, given that you will also do a lot of other things and their effects will mitigate eachother. But right now, we don't know what other things you'll also do, hence the imponderability.
What you describe above is more like the Jain doctrine, a type of karmic fatalism. Hindu or Buddhist doctrines of karma are different.
Instead of freestyling your ideas about karma and rebirth, why not read some standard texts about it?
No, people just treat them as such.
It is, because it means you're not open to discussion of this topic. And it's predictable that it probably won't go well.
The extent of a person's knowledge of their religion's doctrine only becomes relevant for other people when that person claims to be a representative of said religion or claims to have been such a representative in the past, and that as such, deserves special recognition and respect.
How can someone believe in God in any intelligible manner unless they have at least some knowledge of theistic religious doctrine??
If they don't have such knowledge, but still claim to "believe in God", then such a "belief in God" is likely wishful thinking, idiosyncratic. It's no surprise then if such a person "leaves the religion".
No. But one can't be an anti-theist unless one has extensively studied the arguments for and against god.
I expect that someone who claims to "believe in democracy" has at least studied up on what "democarcy" means, and related themes, and preferrably, can discuss the topic.
It's mostly irrelevant, until someone claims to be a representative of a religion or claims to have been such a representative in the past, and that as such, deserves special recognition and respect.
It's like with any other claim of proficiency in something. If, for example, someone claims to "speak French", and then it turns out that they know only a few phrases in French, it's only natural to be skeptical about whatever claims they make about French.
What a sneering and insinuating response. Thanks. How is my putative favourable judgment of people who leave a faith (which you have not demonstrated) connected to the argument about who is a real member of that faith?
Quoting baker
People also belong to religions to be part of a community and because they are socialised in the aesthetics and values of that religion. Of course they have 'some' knowledge, but the question remains - where does 'some' knowledge become sufficient for you to decide they are true Christians or true Muslims since this seems to be your concern?
Quoting baker
It's doubtful you can compare the claims of someone who speaks a language (which is an empirical claim) with someone who is a member of a religion (which might include much that is non-verbal, experiential, intuitive).
Some textbooks may be authoritative in the sense that they're considered accurate or true. A textbook is not an authority in the sense that it doesn't have the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience.
This is irrelevant to the question.
Quoting baker
You're basically saying that it's impossible for me to make predictions. Okey dokey! :snicker:
Quoting baker
You're claiming that karma & rebirth in Buddhism are not based on cause & effect?
That's still a common conception at least. The power of Nazi propaganda and the need of the US to "build up" the myth of Nazi power to justify their alliance with the Soviets during the Cold War is probably the main culprit here. That and "building up images of Nazi competence and power," also helped to assuage critiques of the initial French and British performance in the war.
In reality, the Nazis trashed German standard of living. Even using the Nazis own cooked statistics, Richard Evan's "Third Reich Trilogy" and Tooze's "The Wages of Destruction," (just on the economy of the Third Reich) show German real wages crashing by about a third even before the war began. Rearmorment caused massive distortions in the economy, such that there were regular shortages of refined flour and animal fats, basic food stuffs, even before the invasion of Poland.
Nazi forced labor schemes turned out to be horribly inefficient, and the focus on making girls into "future mothers of the Reich," and regularly taking boys out of classes for indoctrination and military style training hurt educational attainment.
Germany's status as the center of physics and other scientific fields was already shattered before the war began by official harassment and discrimination on ethnic, political, and religious grounds, paired with political dogma being inserted into the sciences (e.g. quantum mechanics being branded "Jewish physics).
All this occured despite running absolutely massive deficits that would have caused a financial crisis if the war hadn't come. The Nazis certainly succeeded at building a very competent (if horribly under equipped relative to the US) military, and some impressive public works, but the rest of the "development" was more of a shell game. Even their military competence is sort of overblown. Once the Western Allies arrived in force large battles routinely had 4-8:1 casualty rates, not in the Wermacht's favor, and shifting veteran formations over from the Eastern Front didn't do much to make up for the Western Allies massive artillery, air, and mechanized transport superiority.
Having grown up in the Christian tradition and having spend time with those who found their way out of religion, by far the most common concern people have on leaving the church is losing their community. Losing god seems less of a problem. Perhaps it is because their life, relationships and friendships, along with many of their leisure and even work activities are predicated on belonging to a community of certainty and shared values. Once this goes, along with the presuppositions you have in common with those around you, you may end up disorientated, lost. For a time, anyway.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's all I was saying. Wellbeing is generally predicated on shared values and a supportive community. Naturally if you throw in a belief in an afterlife and a shared moral system, it's hard to see how that wouldn't promote additional cooperative contentment amongst true believers. Not so good for dissenters or certain identities and subcultures (if we are in Saudi Arabia or parts of the Bible Belt or Africa, for instance) and of course it says nothing about the truth of those beliefs. As an atheist I suspect that the world would be a better place if everyone was a Muslim like Irshad Manji or a Christian like Nadia Bolz-Weber. But again this doesn't attest to the truth of their beliefs. And they are often seen as heretical within their own faith traditions.
Quoting Art48
Yes, religions tend to perpetuate and promote 'communities' of magical thinkers who talk to placate ghosts. :sparkle: :eyes:.
Or with a lot of lipstick on that swine ...
[quote=Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel][i]It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats.
Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.
When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion its message becomes meaningless.[/i][/quote]
Oh Jesus. I have simply identified a boundary. Identifying a boundary is not "sneering and insinuating".
Where? In your mind, apparently obsessed with judgment and persecution.
Again:
It's mostly irrelevant, until someone claims to be a representative of a religion or claims to have been such a representative in the past, and that as such, deserves special recognition and respect.
It's in the nature of religiosity that different people will have varying degrees of knowledge of and involvement in their religion.
But the extent of their knowledge of and involvement in their religion becomes relevant if they claim to deserve some kind of special recognition and respect.
As in:
"I'm a superior [member of religion X], while you're only an inferior [member of religion X], therefore, you owe me credence and respect."
or
"I left [religion X], because I have supreme insight into its workings, I know the truth about it, and you must believe me."
In the former case, it's the standard internal hierarchy in religion, where it goes without saying that if one is newer, younger, or female, one automatically owes special credence and respect to the others who have been members longer, who are older, or male.
This is also the case in religious supremacism. Such as when the majority religion expects special respect from the minority religion or from those with no religious affiliation.
In the latter case, the often unstated assumption when someone leaves a religion is that they have superior insight into the workings of their now former religion, or that leaving religion was a good thing. Such as you here:
Quoting Tom Storm
It is in such cases that the person's actual knowledge of the religion becomes relevant for how one will interact with such a person.
Heaven knows I'm no fan of religion. But I think many atheists, agnostics, and humanists grossly understimate it. As far as I'm concerned, these atheists etc. have nothing helpful to offer me as far as dealing with a religious problem is concerned. There was a time when I sought help for my (meta)religious insecurity, and the atheists etc. had nothing to offer me. Other than displaying their massive ignorance of the religions they so eagerly denounced. Well, it's easy to dismiss something one barely knows!
That you're not satisfied with my reply is really neither here nor there, because I'm not trying to convince you. I can tell that you only have a cursory knowledge of karma doctrines, and I'm not going to ask you to commit to a serious study of them and wait for a reply. And I certainly don't have the time to go through them with you step by step.
Study up on karma doctrines, and then see what questions remain. I'm certainly not going to do your homework for you.
Yes. It's a trend toward infantilization and consumerism. And a victim mentality.
Of course. But it's not simply blind trust. If one is going to even have a conversation with another person, then one should be able to act in good faith to begin with. Otherwise, why even begin talking to them?
The following is not a boundary, it's a sneering jibe.
Quoting baker
======
Quoting baker
There's some merit in this argument as I see it. But when someone says I am a Muslim or I am a Christian - I don't get to say if they really are or not. They are not making a claim for special recognition or respect.
Quoting baker
That may well be true. But what are you counting as a religious problem?
What is the secular thinker underestimating - the emotional support; the explanatory power; the metaphysical explanation, the meaning of religon?
And you are the boss, you define all the terms, right.
Whatever my religious problem was at the time.
The cunning. The tenacity. The mental and physical toughness. The bad faith. The wealth. The socio-economic power.
Of course, you actually answered the question. Your answer is nonsensical though, regardless of any relation to karma and rebirth. You wrote:
As far as I'm aware, it's impossible to know something in advance of knowing something. That's nonsensical and has nothing to do with my question.
My question basically has to do with narrative. Buddhists claim that karma & rebirth act according to cause & effect despite being unable to provide a narrative that shows this structure in their narratives. Going back to my example, if I were to create a narrative where someone spontaneously turned into a dirty cockroach for no apparent reason I would be failing to provide a narrative that shows cause & effect relationships. When asked about it I could, like the Buddhists do, say that the spontaneous transformation is inexplicable, or rather, imponderable, and that you'll just have to have faith in my narrative that the structure of cause & effect is there.
Did I say I am the boss and define all the terms? Or even anything close to that?
But if that's your indirect way of saying it is not meant as an insult, ok.
lol, makes me think of the current thread on affectation. I don't think you could blame the monks who ended up beaten to death in fights over nominalism versus realism of being guilty of affectation. Even less the people who were tortured to death over questions surrounding transubstantiation. Given how academic philosophy is today, it's sort of comical to think of Pythagoras starving himself to death or Bruno and Polycarp accepting being burnt at the stake over the same ideas.
A Platonist until the end!
They are hard to find. Well, depends on one's standards.
For example, I know of even university professors of Buddhology who were also "practicing" Buddhists and who distanced themselves from Buddhism, but who nevertheless have holes in their knowledge of Buddhism that even I at my level can notice.
What I have noticed consistently is that the belief system of "unbelievers" or "former believers" tends to reflect first and foremost their relatively solid and secure (upper) middle class socio-economic status, rather than some profound insight into religions or life.
If I want to insult someone, I make that clear.
Of course, via the language you use. I have brought this up with you at least once before (as well as with some other posters). And I wouldn't bring it up, if this weren't a philosophy forum, and if you wouldn't work in some counselor capacity. I presume you had to be professionally trained in different styles of communication, and so you should know what I'm talking about.
In Theravada and Early Buddhism kamma is intention. Generally, only intentional actions have kammic consequences. This is why two people, externally acting the same way, could face very different kammic consequences if their intentions for doing the actions differ, respectively.
What you describe looks like Jainism, like I already said.
Quoting praxis
I think this has sometimes more to do with an unwillingness to engage in time-consuming explanations to people who seem hostile rather than anything else.
And the attitude you've been displaying here certainly doesn't suggest that you're interested in learning about the Buddhist concepts of kamma and rebirth. So why bother?
You should also know that in Buddhism, at least for monks, there are restrictions as to whom they can or should speak about Dhamma and to whom they shouldn't. Lay Buddhist people may also adopt those restrictions.
If you find that the Buddhists you're talking to don't seem all that open or willing to discuss things with you, then consider the possibility that you have ticked one or more boxes on that list of restriction criteria. (In my opinion, you have.) You can hardly blame people for setting boundaries on whom they spend their time on.
If they seem evasive to you, bear in mind that from their perspective, you're evasive too.
You're assuming that you are entirely in control of your communication style. I'm not sure we know that. About anyone here.
This has not been my experience.
But, nevermind. My "religious problem" has actually lost almost all the life there was to it, simply due to inertia. Over the years, I've somehow managed to endure it, and to focus on other, more practical things. Now, if I can't sleep, I think about how to build raised beds in our garden, or what can be learned from this year's tomato blight and corn smut, and such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-message
Can you formulate what you want to say in the form
"When Baker says [insert what you're referring to], I [Tom Storm] feel ____ / think ____ ."
Thats funny coming from someone who has a habit of interpreting things in the most sneering manner possible.
This is not relevant to the thread and an ongoing distraction. If you want to explore further via PMs fine, otherwise..
Thats how the law works too. If, for example, you unintentionally kill someone you may be off the hook, depending on the particulars (perhaps including such things as the color of your skin). If you intentionally kill someone youre going to be in hot water with the law, particularly if youre poor and cant afford good legal representation.
The practice of law follows a series of well established steps that take intention into account and is not imponderable.
Quoting baker
Yes, I remember you saying that.
Do you remember me asking you: You're claiming that karma & rebirth in Buddhism are not based on cause & effect?
Quoting baker
Sorry I upset you. Maybe try to focus on the anything else part and ignore the hostility, if youre capable. A few deep breaths might help.
Quoting baker
My mission is not necessarily to learn, though Im certainly open to the prospect. You responded to statements that I made, not questions.
Why bother? I dont know.
Quoting baker
Not sure why you mention this.
Quoting baker
Are you suggesting that some Buddhists may be able to answer imponderable questions about karma and rebirth but dont because theyre stingy with their time? I dont think so. I think they cant answer because they dont know. Just like no one can answer questions about God.
Quoting baker
That covers them and me to some degree, not that it is in any way relevant to our chat. I would ask why youre evasive, if I cared.
Unanswerable question #2:
What is it that travels from one body to the next body in Buddhist rebirth? They say its a soul in Hinduism.
I have a degree in Philosoophy and a post grad degree as well, Im not the least bit superstitious (way more interested in a scientific explanation for any phenomena than some deus ex machina storytelling), not gullible at all as any 55 year adult on this planet should not be anymore. Im really not as afraid as I probably should be, and Im definitely too angry, but I know it, and can control it if youd like.
And I go to Mass every Sunday.
Do I have to explain how your definition of regressive and your linking it to the essence of religion is really nothing more than an insult to religious people?
You have to really know religion, really study a life lived by one who knows and loves god, to build a convincing reduction of religion to ignorant fear, etc. Your sketches of the breadth and depth of religion seem narrow, shallow, and frankly old and tired.
But I am not going to judge some measure of your brain matter that led you to ask if religion promotes backwardness. Im sure its an honest question (if Im not being too gullible).
Religion, like anything else, must occupy my mind, my body, my desire, my whole human being. Like going to the movies. We all have to choose our content.
For no less than an hour a week, I watch and listen at church. At the movies, I get popcorn and hopefully something to think about, something awesome to see, something beautiful, something terrifying, and maybe something inspirational. I get all of these every week at church (well, bread and wine instead of popcorn).
I know why you look down so low on religion. Thats easy enough to see - all the stupid people who say Jesus. But you have to go way further back than the Romans or the Old Testament to find the really stupid, uneducated, fight or flight folks. The ancient Egyptians or Chinese or Sumerians - the slaves of Marcus Aurelius - they are your cousins and uncles and moms and dads, just a generation away, really like yesterday, or when you yourself were 14, no matter what university degree weve advanced and progressed to. Were no different, no better. Havent come very far at all.
Nothings progressed to any degree worth bragging about, or worthy of looking so far down on superstition.
Everyone is still as full of shit as always.
To show me how religion essentially holds us back, you have to show me some great advanced place far from religion where we might go.
The progressive cerebral cortex gave us eugenics, and the nuclear bomb, and so many other highly educated developments, so high above superstition. Should I tie inhumanity to progressivism? Religion gave us the university and the hospital.
Religion can be a source of hope for progress, that there might be some value in progressing at all among you people, my fellow slaves, using that cerebral cortex to maybe find wisdom in love, goodness in the experience of beauty, and these words in any mouths of progressive man.
Because of these people we get ideas like: gender identity, going to Mars (for a need to 'get off the planet'), pointless wars(whereas religious wars were generally more meaningful), unfair trade, and much much more.
The pope doesn't seem like such a bad guy, he doesn't seem like the type to promote stupid policies, at least under his leadership our policies would be wise. It beats a quick look and moan about how confused you are.
They don't hate child abuse, they just hate Catholics, hate Europeans, especially Latin and Greek who they hold so much jealousy for, hate stable families and marriages, hate tradition, hate culture.
I was taught in Catholic school that an unforgiven, unrepented mortal sin at the time of death results in hell. Do you believe that? I was also taught that intentionally missing Sunday Mass without a good reason was a mortal sin. Suppose one Sunday you skipped Mass merely because you didnt feel like going. Do you believe that if you died unexpectedly later that day that youd go to hell forever? If you do, youre a faithful Catholic and IMHO gullible. If you dont, then you pick and choose like most self-identifying "Catholics". Which is it? Or is this a false dilemma?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Genuine religion can lead us to God. The idea of the perennial philosophy describes such religion. But religions of state are polluted religions perverted to serve the needs of nations. Christianity hit the big time when it was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire. Heres some references for further philosophical exploration, if youre interested.
78 - What Is God? https://youtu.be/8_vwtXMNj1M
79 - True God, False Gods https://youtu.be/gzFdC9fTJw0
Scripture teaches us that technological/social progress does not necessarily coincide with the elevation of humanity/spiritual progress (see the Tower of Babel). In other words, that these are two different things. Religion can be regressive, of course, since religion is much more than just Scripture -- religion is also extremely broad making it an easy target. But I think the fundamental scriptural lesson is sound -- a society can be very technologically advanced yet be essentially insane or operating from a very wicked morality. In modernity it is tempting to see progress purely in terms of technology.
"Unrepented mortal sin leads to hell" - Catholic tradition.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Unrepented - that is the key. Do we really need to blame God for hell?
You do something you know is wrong (regardless of whatever rule you think exists, be it go to Mass on Sunday, or eat meat on Friday, whatever), you yourself know it is wrong, and that it will hurt others, hurt God himself maybe, and you don't care, and you do it anyway, for spite, just because you want to. That's the mortal sin part. You have to knowingly do evil for evil's sake. Then, having consciously and proudly committed this sin, maybe those harmed ask for help because of their harm, or those wronged simply ask for some small notion of "I'm sorry", but no, the mortal sinner at that moment still could care less about the harm caused and still being caused, he still thinks the act that he himself said to himself was "wrong" and did it anyway, he says "I will not repent. I love my sins first and foremost."
Sounds like a hell of life to me. Sounds like Gaza right now, like Gaza when Jesus walked it. Like earth since humans have been in charge.
Are there sins we can commit that demand punishment? Satan is probably still bragging about his wonderful sins. "I tricked them into killing Jesus on a cross." Like we needed any help anyway - some of us today still want all of that credit.
But it's the unrepentance that is the key - all you have to do is say "whoops, sorry" and God will throw a banquet for you and sit you at his table in paradise.
So this frightening scenario of a mortal sin checklist is for children who need to learn to decide for themselves whether to go to church or not. I'm not saying there are not sins that land us in hell; I'm saying be an adult and that's nothing to fear at all. Once you are an adult, God is going to see your heart and see if you sinned mortally for sake of evil itself, or if you just made a mistake, and what's more, if you say "sorry" he will forgive you immediately even a "mortal" sin.
I know there is more to it all, and the church enforces the rules too, but it's better to understand Jesus whose rules were to love and to forgive others, and to serve. Break those commandments and rules before you fear Jesus.
Short answer to your question, yes, if you die with an unrepented mortal sin, you go to hell as you lived in hell. But that requires the sinner (who, remember, called something a sin, agreed it was a sin, and did it anyway, for spite, to harm, because the sin was what he wanted) - hell requires the sinner to say "I am not sorry."
You can't mortally sin if you don't agree your action is a sin. You have to know it is wrong and do it anyway. So many of us avoid mortal sin because we are ignorant, or we are 7 years old.
God didn't live as a poor beggar to be tortured and die on cross for us, only to later tell us "Well, it says on the checklist that you skipped church a few times, and you didn't honor your father as much as your mother, and you never asked for forgiveness, so, take the elevator to the basement - that's the rules. It's too late for you according to this checklist I have here; I loved you to the point of sacrificing my life on a cross, but the book says hell, so, looks like we are both sorry now."
I know all of that sounds like something a priest might say - but priests are sometimes just actually people, as ignorant as anyone else.
That doesn't sound anything like anything Jesus ever said. A grave sin that cannot be forgiven, I know it exists, but I hope I don't ever want such a thing.
To hell with all of the rules: simple solution to hell - forgive others who sin against you. Be a forgiver. God will throw away all of the rules for one who is merciful. Like Jesus was.
Of course not, because hell is a fairy tale to scare the gullible, so your mini-sermon that attempts to justify hell is moot.
Quoting Fire Ologist
It sounds as if you yourself disagree with some things the Catholic Church says in favor of your opinion of what Jesus taught. Here's Matthew 15:1-4 where Jesus is speaking. Can you justify that, too?
1 Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, 2 Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They dont wash their hands before they eat! 3 Jesus replied, And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? 4For God said, Honor your father and mother[a] and Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.
There's a lot to repentance both in Judaism and Catholicism. I'd like to believe it's that simple.
I believe the purpose of hell, Gehenna, is purification. There the full repentance takes place. Our sinful selves are very often not fit to be in God's presence immediately after death so we must undergo purification before reunion with God. I don't believe in eternal hell.
I don't know whether an internal apology truly covers everything. Murder a few hundred, apologize afterwards -- "we're in the clear!" The murderer won't see the true scope of what he did. That's what I like to think hell is -- the true realization/understanding of one's actions. God may be love, but he is also justice.
And absolutely repent here on Earth as well. Gehenna will be granted out of love. The truly irredeemable will be annihilated.
If we are talking fairy tales, we can say anything we want, so any attempt at a conversation about something real is moot.
Quoting Art48
But I'll take that as an honest question anyway, for sake of conversation.
Wasn't Jesus in your quote asking them to think again what the law is and who is breaking it? He wasn't telling them why they were wrong. He was asking them why they were happy to enforce the law against some for eating with dirty hands, while they were not enforcing the law against others who cursed their fathers and mothers. This quote doesn't talk about Jesus' relationship to the law, or what the law is, or how or when it should be enforced, or what the result of enforcement is.
He wasn't saying we should be lining people up for execution for cursing their dads and not waste time lining people up for execution for not washing their hands. He was saying the Pharisees were picking the wrong people to enforce the law against.
But back from the fairy tale as you call it, the authority to kill is in all of our hands. I mean, we see people authorizing, and, with their own hands, killing, everyday. If God is just a fairly tale, the authority to kill, or place someone in hell, already always is in our hands. This quote says, "you are not using your authority wisely."
One can also forgive despite authority to kill.
Do you really want to keep talking about all of the laws and commandments, and the complexity of understanding them, and the complexities of enforcing them, from a fairy tale?
Not to quibble on the details, I basically agree with you.
I think most of us won't be going right to any paradise or heaven. We wouldn't understand how to live there. We need a purification.
And I don't believe there are many in hell. Why would God go to all of the trouble that is saving any one of us, dying on a cross even, to leave any one in hell who simply cried for "God!" and meant it?
But I do believe there are those who are in hell for eternity. At least there may be. They must freely, and truly, see God's hand, slap it away, and run into hell. Such is the great power we've been given - we can earn hell; we can reject love from not just anyone, but love from God. Only such power makes us lovable, only in freedom can such power do good, and only by knowingly rejecting the good, can we seek out hell.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It's good to know there's a sacrament of Penance, an act, taking effort, to openly confess out loud, in front of another person, a priest, to whom you can show your understanding of your sin, and show you understand you need forgiveness now, and seek that forgiveness knowing that you do not have it yet while you seek it.
But ultimately, the internal confession is all that really matters, even during a sacrament. Internally, is where God sees the sin and grants the forgiveness, and internally is where the sin is committed and forgiveness received.
So, God "inspires" in two places in the OT the evil command to kill a child who curses a parent .
* Leviticus 20:9 says, If there is anyone who curses his father or his mother, he shall surely be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother, his blood guiltiness is upon him.
* Deuteronomy 21:1821 (verses omitted)
Jesus and his Father are one, so the OT commands are the commands of Jesus as much as his Father.
Then, God in the person of Jesus specifically cites the OT commands with approval.
And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? 4For God said, . . ..Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.
But some priest or preacher says when God writes "serpent" God "really means Satan" and when God says kill the child who curses a parent, God "really means don't." Which all goes to demonstrate that Christians follow their priests and preachers, NOT God and not even the (sometimes evil) Bible.
So if everything in the Bible was made consistent and syllogistic for you, would you still call it a fairy tale?
And you set the contradiction up with a bias. The evil command to kill a child..
What is a curse as you mean it as used in the Old Testament?
2. Do you think the command to kill a child who curses a parent is not evil?
3. The dictionary will tell you what "curse" means.
Or are you just trying convert me to atheism?
Again, Ill give my best answer (instead of pointing you to a dictionary), and hope these are your honest questions.
The flood is life in the universe. We all die, drowned by the next day, or the next. Were experiencing the flood right now. The Ark is open to all who seek hope in God.
No human being should be cursing any fellow human being. Cursing is using words and rituals to wish and invoke physical harm, spiritual harm, misfortune and death - its a cowardly way of attempting to torture and murder someone. Cursing is evil for selfish evils sake. The one who curses fully believes in some God, and then seeks that Gods power, to do evil for their own self-serving reasons. Cursing asks God to do evil for you. Now direct such a curse at ones own parents, who gave that person life in the first place. Its not an evil command to stop some one who curses others, let alone curses their own family, let alone their parents. Today we can stop them without killing, and today, so few believe in curses anyway. But if you believed in the power of cursing, directed it at your parents, in a small village circa 2000 plus BC, it could destroy many lives, many families, many generations, dissolving the whole village - like spiritual flood.
Call it Karma if it makes you feel better, but cursing leading to a death sentence need not be such a clear evil command, unless you dont believe in God or curses anyway. Then its killing some kid for nothing. But then, the kid isnt cursing either - just spinning yarns about some fairy tale.
Someone tells you thats a poison apple - anyone who eats it will die in minutes. And you think I hate my mom, so Im going to feed her this apple. And you give it her and watch her eat it. Turns out it was just an apple - but what have you done? Is there any punishment that might be due?
Great question. Yes, I do. I'll elaborate. There are (literally!) more stars in the known universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. Imagine a planet with intelligent rabbit-like beings who worship the Great Furry Mother Rabbit. And there's a special book! For me, the Christian God is too small. The Bible contains some wisdom, no doubt, but it also IMHO contains lots of nonsense and evil commands (e.g., Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.) The God I believe in is similar to Spinoza's God or to non-dual Vedanta's Brahman. It's The One. It has been claimed (for example, by Aldous Huxley in his Perennial Philosophy) that such The One is common to the experiences of mystics of all religions.And there's the idea that Gods who are Persons are personifications of The One. I could go on but I won't. If interested, here are two YouTube clips I made.
78 - What Is God?
79 - True God, False Gods
So you just think God is not fully or always accurately reflected in the Bible. Well I just say good for you! You have God too! You see the hugeness of it all and give it all back to God too.
Why do we need to see which God is bigger though? Doesnt God, to you, mean the one that by definition must be the biggest, must touch all things, must incorporate the All?
Means the same thing to me. I see him speaking directly to tiny grain of sand me, in the Bible, not because of the wisdom in it, but because He wants me to see it. You dont. You see God elsewhere. Show me what you see, not how what I see is wrong, because I see a God that belittles everything, including all of our philosophies and thoughts about what we think we know about God. A God for whom all the grains of sand and all the stars add up to a rain drop in his ocean.