Religion

[chasfh]

3 hours ago, Motor City Sonics said:

Aye Aye !   Or is it Ayy Ayy 

Not saying there is or isn't a God, I don't know.  I just think organized religion may be good for some, but the people that are at the top are as corrupt as any other organization.   People get to the top of very large organization  usually by being sneaky, greedy, petty and vicious, but have a way of making it sound like they're doing you a favor. 

Trying to apply things that were written (by men - clearly men) 2,000 years ago to life today is absolute insanity.  

Religion is a way to keep people in check, and that works for a lot of people, but it also is used to be cruel, vindictive and it's used to cover up crimes, often against it's very followers.     

I think Organized Religion holds humanity back.   If you read about countries where religion isn't very influential, they tend to be more advanced, more tolerant, generally happier with lower crime and lower violence.   I think the lack of ORGANIZED religion has a lot to do with that, because a lot of people in these countries do believe in God, they just aren't using that belief like a weapon.    

I can see how organization of religious precepts into easy-to-understand and -follow pieces can be a helpful guide for the individual who works best within a predefined structure. That's kind of how I saw it back in the days I was practicing Catholic. They provided the structure and it worked for me.

Organized religion, as an incorporated body, strikes me as basically a bureaucracy mostly concerned with issues like rules and regulations and planning and growth and marketing and revenue and lobbying and damage control and all those other worldly concerns that incorporated bodies are created to deal with. That's also how I thought of the Catholic Church even at that time.

I was listening to a podcast discussing sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention and they pointed out how religion is especially ripe for predators, whether sexual or financial or whatever, in part because the structure of any church is most concerned with preserving the appearance of its moral authority as a force for good, which revelations of widespread predatory behavior would undermine. So accusations of abuse get swept aside, or worse, the accuser themself is accused of being the Satanic force in the story, for their efforts to, I guess, disrupt or upend or even destroy the church. Churches want nothing to do with confronting accusations of abuse within their ranks.

But another part, which I hadn't considered before and find fascinating, is the idea of what sexual predators understand about churches. They think of churches as being "soft targets", because they understand that there's a lot of focus in churches, evangelical churches especially, on repentance and forgiveness, and that, coupled with this loose structure that is at the core of the SBC, has really allowed a lot of these predators to abuse, repent, and then abuse again, sometimes at another church just down the street.

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by chasfh

[apabruce]

If you are among the faithful, what would it take to disbelieve in god?

If you are a non-believer, what would it take to make you flip.

For me, I don't understand why a god would make itself ambiguous  He could predict the exact high and low temperature for 30 days iand and in 40 cities. 30s.  I would find that convincing.  He could construct the prediction in such a way that the chances of being insurmountable of being faked.  Or clean out the children's hospital, by curing them all overnight.

 

[Motown Bombers]

I will become a believer if the Lions win the Super Bowl this year. 

[1984Echoes]

No such thing.

Man created god in his own image because he didn't know any of the answers and so... 50,000 years ago mankind created "the Happy Hunting Grounds"; and it evolved from there into what it is today. In all its various forms.

Everything else is pure coincidence or human creation through the gifts of curiosity and story-telling.

[chasfh]

14 hours ago, apabruce said:

If you are among the faithful, what would it take to disbelieve in god?

If you are a non-believer, what would it take to make you flip.

For me, I don't understand why a god would make itself ambiguous  He could predict the exact high and low temperature for 30 days iand and in 40 cities. 30s.  I would find that convincing.  He could construct the prediction in such a way that the chances of being insurmountable of being faked.  Or clean out the children's hospital, by curing them all overnight.

 

Like you say I think it would have to take an out-and-out revelation. Otherwise you have to have faith and nothing else, and with hundreds of thousands of gods that have served 100 or so billion people across the millennia, which one do you choose?

[chasfh]

I would clarify that I am not an atheist per se. That would suggest that I am certain these is no god. I am certain of nothing. We cannot know until there is either a revelation, or perhaps after we die we learn some truth, which I am holding out as a possibility, since there’s no way to know beforehand absent a revelation.

[Tiger337]

As a statistician, I never fully accept of reject anything.  Thus, I am an agnostic.  I agree with those who say that the strongest evidence woukd be a revelation.  What motivation would a god have to make belief be based only on faith?  

Edited June 29, 2022 by Tiger337

[oblong]

Personally I believe our minds and brains are configured to understand things here on Earth.  There's a limit.  I'm a space buff.  I've read a lot of books on the subject of exploration and it seems incredibly wasteful for the Christian notion of a God to just focus on Earth given the billions of other galaxies out there.  I also never got past the idea that someone who grew up in say, a Mayan civilization, was doomed to eternal damnation.... or a contemporary of us born in the jungles of South America or some tribe of Africa or a desert in the Middle East is doomed because they didn't have the good fortune to be exposed to Christianity.  

It'll make sense to us at some point.  I do believe in a diety.  What we have today is too great to just be an accident.  But it's beyond our scope of the human brain to undestand.  That's ok.  

 

[Motown Bombers]

What if there isn't one God but instead multiple? What if all the religions are correct? Isn't possible Christianity could be Ford, Judaism is General Motors, and Islam is Chrysler? Maybe it originally started as a committee of Gods and they had a disagreement and broke off and formed their own sort of universe on different continents.  

[gehringer_2]

29 minutes ago, oblong said:

seems incredibly wasteful for the Christian notion of a God to just focus on Earth given the billions of other galaxies out there.

However you can also say that given a universe that began in a singularity, every point in the Universe, including ours, is also its center. 

A more metaphysical view would that in the end both Space and Time are illusory, so the apparent relative 'sizes' of things in the cosmos are illusory at a 'deeper' reality as well.

Edited June 29, 2022 by gehringer_2

[1984Echoes]

3 hours ago, chasfh said:

I would clarify that I am not an atheist per se. That would suggest that I am certain these is no god. I am certain of nothing. We cannot know until there is either a revelation, or perhaps after we die we learn some truth, which I am holding out as a possibility, since there’s no way to know beforehand absent a revelation.

That's called "Agnostic".

[1984Echoes]

Oops.

Lee already said that.

PS: I would also say that at the age of 11 I decided I was an atheist and that god did not exist. Except in mankind's imagination.

But prior to the age of 11 I was either a "Roman Catholic in Training" (obviously the training did not stick...) or an agnostic since I was too young to know anything and therefore I didn't know anything. But (also) whilst the training was going on, I was questioning everything... and came upon the correct answer.

[1984Echoes]

3 hours ago, oblong said:

... I do believe in a diety.  What we have today is too great to just be an accident...

It's not an accident.

It's called "Science".

No deity required.

 

3 hours ago, oblong said:

... But it's beyond our scope of the human brain to understand...

That's also called science. Some of which we have come to understand. And a much more that we're still working on.

[chasfh]

All that’s missing is “look into it.”

[Motown Bombers]

Religion is all hearsay. 

[Dan Gilmore]

I prefer the term Militant Agnostic: I Don’t Know, and Neither Do You

[Jim Cowan]

I saw a good RC priest try to merge Creation and Evoltution in a lighthearted way, he acknowledged the fossil record.  And then he said this - "you can fill a bowl with salt water and sterile rocks, leave it out in the sun and stare at it for 10 million years, and I guarantee you that nothing will come crawling out of there".  It was well done.

[gehringer_2]

2 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

I saw a good RC priest try to merge Creation and Evoltution in a lighthearted way, he acknowledged the fossil record.  And then he said this - "you can fill a bowl with salt water and sterile rocks, leave it out in the sun and stare at it for 10 million years, and I guarantee you that nothing will come crawling out of there".  It was well done.

the 10 million yr loses a little vigor when you extend it to a couple of billion yrs though. The human brain really can't adequately conceive of how steep the odds are against life spontaneously arising, nor how long 4 billion years is. Neither side of the argument is really accessible to a judgment of experience.

[lordstanley]

This topic is of interest to me.  I grew up religious (Catholic schools, Catholic sacraments/family milesones), drifted away like many do in their 20s, verged on hostile in my 30s (one priest-child sex abuse scandal hit pretty close to home, although not directly on me or immediate family), started finding myself drawn back in my 40s after my father died and our daughter hit school age and then... two years ago started grad school on a p/t basis. I'm currently halfway through a Master's degree in Theology, on pace to graduate June 2024. Whether you love religion, hate it, or are somewhere in between, hard to argue that religion hasn't been "important" throughout human history. I find it very interesting. In fact, have a term paper due tomorrow in which I pick apart the Vatican's deal with the Communist Party of China. Take one course at a time. Last term was a course focused only on the letters of St. Paul and my exigesis paper was a 10-pager on one sentence in 2 Corinthians.

[Jim Cowan]

13 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

the 10 million yr loses a little vigor when you extend it to a couple of billion yrs though. The human brain really can't adequately conceive of how steep the odds are against life spontaneously arising, nor how long 4 billion years is. Neither side of the argument is really accessible to a judgment of experience.

Yes but it was an amusing attempt, he wasn't too worried about the accuracy of the time interval.

[Jim Cowan]

2 minutes ago, lordstanley said:

This topic is of interest to me.  I grew up religious (Catholic schools, Catholic sacraments/family milesones), drifted away like many do in their 20s, verged on hostile in my 30s (one priest-child sex abuse scandal hit pretty close to home, although not directly on me or immediate family), started finding myself drawn back in my 40s after my father died and our daughter hit school age and then... two years ago started grad school on a p/t basis. I'm currently halfway through a Master's degree in Theology, on pace to graduate June 2024. Whether you love religion, hate it, or are somewhere in between, hard to argue that religion hasn't been "important" throughout human history. I find it very interesting. In fact, have a term paper due tomorrow in which I pick apart the Vatican's deal with the Communist Party of China. Take one course at a time. Last term was a course focused only on the letters of St. Paul and my exigesis paper was a 10-pager on one sentence in 2 Corinthians.

That's really interesting, I have a son who would do that if he could afford it.

[John_Brian_K]

The rules that govern religion bother me.  I have a good friend who is pretty religious, every once in awhile we get into discussions about religion and mostly it is just us asking each other questions and listening to the responses.  We are close enough to where it never gets confrontational and he doe snot think he needs to save me or any of that...at least he never acts like he feels that way.

The one I grew up with says you have to take jesus as your personal savior in order to get into heaven...something to that affect, now I do not really believe in heaven or hell, but I can be a good person my entire life, never hurt a soul, but if I do not take him into my heart I am doomed, but the dude who spent his life hurting other people...maybe suddenly finds god and is really sorry about being a bad guy his whole life will get in because he repents and truly believes?

Lost me there.

[chasfh]

7 minutes ago, John_Brian_K said:

The rules that govern religion bother me.  I have a good friend who is pretty religious, every once in awhile we get into discussions about religion and mostly it is just us asking each other questions and listening to the responses.  We are close enough to where it never gets confrontational and he doe snot think he needs to save me or any of that...at least he never acts like he feels that way.

The one I grew up with says you have to take jesus as your personal savior in order to get into heaven...something to that affect, now I do not really believe in heaven or hell, but I can be a good person my entire life, never hurt a soul, but if I do not take him into my heart I am doomed, but the dude who spent his life hurting other people...maybe suddenly finds god and is really sorry about being a bad guy his whole life will get in because he repents and truly believes?

Lost me there.

And this doesn’t even contemplate the idea that the particular peculiar belief he subscribes to might not even be the right one, and that when he dies, whatever other god is actually there will be super pissed that your good friend didn’t believe in him instead.

[gehringer_2]

32 minutes ago, John_Brian_K said:

The rules that govern religion bother me.  I have a good friend who is pretty religious, every once in awhile we get into discussions about religion and mostly it is just us asking each other questions and listening to the responses.  We are close enough to where it never gets confrontational and he doe snot think he needs to save me or any of that...at least he never acts like he feels that way.

The one I grew up with says you have to take jesus as your personal savior in order to get into heaven...something to that affect, now I do not really believe in heaven or hell, but I can be a good person my entire life, never hurt a soul, but if I do not take him into my heart I am doomed, but the dude who spent his life hurting other people...maybe suddenly finds god and is really sorry about being a bad guy his whole life will get in because he repents and truly believes?

Lost me there.

A primer on 'Christian' theology is a hard thing because there are lots of contradictory versions. The singular 'personal' savior declaration emphasis is fairly unique to US evangelicalism. By contrast in Roman Catholicism there is much heavier emphasis on the need to follow the rules and maintaining righteousness as you go -  a requirement to be constantly absolved of the sins you commit by doing confession and penance 'as you go' to keep up your 'standing'. The more subtle concept in non-evangelical protestantism is 'faith.' Faith is generally seen as a general 'trust' in God. The relationship between 'living in faith' and sin is harder to pin down exactly. A person living in faith should not be prone to sin, that should be the mark of their faith, but should they fail, their 'faith' offers them the route to forgiveness. Or as St. Paul might put it, a person living in faith is no longer under the jurisdiction of 'law'. Maybe a simple but approximate way (untold words have already been written on the topic!) to put a Pauline theology would be to say that to be in faith removes you from the jurisdiction of any simple rule based morality and places you into one ruled under love for God and your fellow man.

Edited June 30, 2022 by gehringer_2

[gehringer_2]

Quote

Their high school canceled an LGBTQ play. These teens put it on anyway.

  --https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/31/marian-school-theater-lgbtq-indiana/

"Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand"