Languish's church attendence

[Valmy]

Religious people will shamelessly impose their morality on others given half a chance. That's reason enough.

While I certainly oppose this sort of thing there are lots of people wanting to impose things on others.  What about religious people who do not want to imposed morality on others?  Guilt by association?

[Viking]

Leaving aside the Lincoln/Jefferson troll bait, if I were an atheist I'd probably have nothing to do with religious discussions, as they wouldn't interest me in the slightest.  I'm curious to know where certain atheists' hostility towards religion comes from.  Did religion cause harm to you in some significant manner, to where you think you have to fight back against it?

I care about religion for the same reason I care about politics; because it affects me too. I prefer truth to fantasy and I prefer to live in a society where others prefer truth to fantasy. Your religion does affect me when it flies planes into buildings, sabotages stemm cell research, takes my tax kroner and convinces people that morality can be found in a book.

Religion is an untruth that affects me. If it didn't affect me then I wouldn't care. I am militant on the issue for the simple reason that religious demand that I do not challenge their dogma when they advocate for it. The religion spat here started when AmScip called soviet communism a form of secular humanism. That's not me attacking religion, that the religious attacking dogma free government.

[Razgovory]

That doesn't answer my question.  How did they come to this conclusion?

Because religion got the answer wrong every time when they finally found the answer. To paraphrase Laplace, they no longer needed god as a hypothesis, they had found real answers to how the heavens work, where lightning comes from and what causes storms.

I don't recall the bible saying that much about where lighting comes from.

[Razgovory]

Leaving aside the Lincoln/Jefferson troll bait, if I were an atheist I'd probably have nothing to do with religious discussions, as they wouldn't interest me in the slightest.  I'm curious to know where certain atheists' hostility towards religion comes from.  Did religion cause harm to you in some significant manner, to where you think you have to fight back against it?

I care about religion for the same reason I care about politics; because it affects me too. I prefer truth to fantasy and I prefer to live in a society where others prefer truth to fantasy. Your religion does affect me when it flies planes into buildings, sabotages stemm cell research, takes my tax kroner and convinces people that morality can be found in a book.

Religion is an untruth that affects me. If it didn't affect me then I wouldn't care. I am militant on the issue for the simple reason that religious demand that I do not challenge their dogma when they advocate for it. The religion spat here started when AmScip called soviet communism a form of secular humanism. That's not me attacking religion, that the religious attacking dogma free government.

Wait, Derspeiss's religion taxes your kroners and fly planes into buildings?  Also who has a "Dogma" free government?

[Barrister]

Leaving aside the Lincoln/Jefferson troll bait, if I were an atheist I'd probably have nothing to do with religious discussions, as they wouldn't interest me in the slightest.  I'm curious to know where certain atheists' hostility towards religion comes from.  Did religion cause harm to you in some significant manner, to where you think you have to fight back against it?

I care about religion for the same reason I care about politics; because it affects me too. I prefer truth to fantasy and I prefer to live in a society where others prefer truth to fantasy. Your religion does affect me when it flies planes into buildings, sabotages stemm cell research, takes my tax kroner and convinces people that morality can be found in a book.

Religion is an untruth that affects me. If it didn't affect me then I wouldn't care. I am militant on the issue for the simple reason that religious demand that I do not challenge their dogma when they advocate for it. The religion spat here started when AmScip called soviet communism a form of secular humanism. That's not me attacking religion, that the religious attacking dogma free government.

Communist governments were a form of secular humanism.  But there are other forms as well.  Much like there are multiple forms of religions.

[Viking]

  Well I didn't think you'd actually admit it.

I do carry the courage of my convictions.

You remind me of a friend of mine from university.  He was an evangelical, but he also loved a good rip-roaring debate where he'd refuse to give an inch.  Which meant he loved to argue why evolution was wrong.

At the time I was studying geology.  So a couple of times I wanted to argue how zircon dating had pretty conclusively shown the world was a hell of a lot older than 5000 years.  But do you think I could get him to debate zircon dating?  Of course not - he'd always go back to what he knew, which was evolution.

It's not about preferring to argue with fundamentalists over liberals, but rather the fundamentalists are honest. They stand their intellectual ground and argue with conviction for what they believe to be true.

You don't know what the arguments against more liberal christian theology are, so you just call us "intellectually dishonest" because you'd prefer to argue about biblical literalism.   

I called the act of ignoring the death penalty for shrimp cocktails intellectually dishonest. The act is intellectually dishonest not the person. The person might be doing it honestly. The liberal christian theologian that preaches the virtue of crab sticks is intellectually dishonest.

The podcast "The history of philosophy without any gaps" just had an episode on Philo of Alexandria who was the first liberal (albeit jewish) theologian for anybody interested in the topic. I highly recommend it.

The issue with the liberal theologians is that when confronted with an obvious untruth or immorality in the bible they call it allegorical or symbolic or spiritual asserting that what the bible says is not what it means. Then the make their own assertions, usually using som monstrously convoluted logic, that could have been cut and pasted from the relevant branch of philosophy.

What I don't understand is how the liberal theolgian knows which passages are true and which ones are allegorical. I don't understand how he can assert that he who belives in him shall be granted everlasting life is true but the shellfish bit isn't.

[Sheilbh]

It is a copout for the simple reason that the idiocy of the incomprahensability argument necessitates the end of inquiry. Inquiry itself becomes impious. It is the little brat claiming that the majesty of his calculations are such that they are incomprehensible to the teacher so the teacher must just accept his answer to be true.

I'd say it's the intellectual equivalent of 'render unto Caesar'.  Inquiring greatly into the nature of God isn't terribly helpful, or plausible because of the incomprehensibility of God as a concept.  I think this is one of the very attractive features of Islam.  With Christianity there is Christ who is God that we can grasp towards comprehending because he's fully man, but beyond that saying you can comprehend God is like saying you can comprehend infinity.

So incomprehensibility is an end to inquiry into the nature of God and replaces it with, as I say, a sort of humble wonder.  But it doesn't end inquiry into anything else.

Furthermore the religious actually do believe that he is good and omnipotent, without those beliefs their faith is pointless. Claiming that god is neither good and/or ominpotent contradicts all abrahamic religions.

That's not what I'm claiming.  What I said was that good and omnipotent are human terms.  If they are true of God then they are on such a cosmic scale that we cannot comprehend them.  What can 'good' mean when discussing God.  Therefore the only way to appropriately use those terms is to use them in such a way that distances us from them, that makes us aware of how alien they are when applied to God.  Thus God is not not good.  This isn't contradictory to Abrahamic faith, it's an argument and phrases from early Greek Orthodox theologians and has been used by others.

[grumbler]

Yeah, that one and the one where Frodo travels all the way to the Crack of Doom and then doesn't throw the ring in.  I didn't get that one, either.

Again, probably a plot necessity.

What do you mean?  That was obvious.  His personal will was overwhelmed by the power of the Ring.

Jesus, or Frodo?

[Iormlund]

Religious people will shamelessly impose their morality on others given half a chance. That's reason enough.

While I certainly oppose this sort of thing there are lots of people wanting to impose things on others.  What about religious people who do not want to imposed morality on others?  Guilt by association?

Religious folks who don't vote for candidates who include a return to "family values" and won't indoctrinate their children are rare enough for me to have met any in real life. But I guess they might exist.

[Valmy]

Jesus, or Frodo?

Frodo.  Jesus was overcome with being tempted by Martin Scorsese.

[grumbler]

Well, that's not really much of a sacrifice then?

Well no...that is where the whole Nestorian-Monophysite-Orthodox controversy came from right?  The less human Jesus is the less the sacrifice appears to be much of a sacrifice but on the other hand if he is too human how is he giving us all eternal life?  Sounds like a good reason to break up the Byzantine Empire.

[Viking]

Religious people will shamelessly impose their morality on others given half a chance. That's reason enough.

While I certainly oppose this sort of thing there are lots of people wanting to impose things on others.  What about religious people who do not want to imposed morality on others?  Guilt by association?

Moderates serve to perpetuate and protect the religious whackjobs out there. It's guilt by association because you choose to associate with the nutjobs and you act to protect them from righteous criticism. Sam Harris says it better than I do (the link is not too long)

http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Secular-Philosophies/The-Problem-With-Religious-Moderates.aspx

Moderates are the levees in their own self declared defensive war on religion when the nutjobs are under attack.

[Sheilbh]

And I think when we talk about incomprehensibility it's worth remembering the etymology of comprehend.  It's from the Latin and means to seize or to grasp - mentally be able to circumscribe and lay hold on an argument is to comprehend it.  Comprehension of divinity is impossible precisely because it is limitless in every way we can imagine.

[Scipio]

The simplest answer is that Scip is a much better Christian than I am.

Orthos like to think that.  It's their schtick.

If your church ain't apostolic, it ain't a church.  Or, as I told my friend the Methodist minister: you may have a church, but you have no ecclesia.

He was not amused.

But it's not about being a better Christian.  It's about a non-juridical perspective on salvation.  God is not some accountant tabulating our sins on some arcane abacus to determine whether we are worthy of salvation, and it is not my place to opine on someone else's salvation (as opposed to being obligated to correct wrong behaviour).  As I've gotten older and learned more about Christianity and humanity, I have strived to become less and less judgmental.  Being married to someone who is as low-church Protestant as you can get also helps.

Even if you merely consider religion as an FAQ for dealing with reality, I could do much worse than the Orthodox Church in America.  As Enoch Root said in Cryptonomicon, Churches used to be the retail outlet of philosophy.  There is a great deal of intellectual depth to a large number of Christian teachings, and considering them as a moral philosophy as part of the Christian life should not be derided as a bad thing.  Some of us are Nietzschean supermen, creating our own moral universes.  I am not.

[derspiess]

Religious people will shamelessly impose their morality on others given half a chance. That's reason enough.

While I certainly oppose this sort of thing there are lots of people wanting to impose things on others.  What about religious people who do not want to imposed morality on others?  Guilt by association?

Religious folks who don't vote for candidates who include a return to "family values" and won't indoctrinate their children are rare enough for me to have met any in real life. But I guess they might exist.

Is it the indoctrination itself that bothers you, or are you just concerned over the values with which they happen to be indoctrinating their kids?