621–630 of 1001 posts
As a practicing Catholic this is greatly troubling. I truly want all to be saved. I fear "progress" that so many non-religious people will tolerate and irreligious will promote. This is not new. Abortion has been pushed for decades and is the greatest sin of our age. Our generation will be looked back upon the same way we look back at slave holders/traders. Those who dehumanizing the vulnerable to the point were we c…
As a practicing Catholic this is greatly troubling. I truly want all to be saved. I fear "progress" that so many non-religious people will tolerate and irreligious will promote. This is not new. Abortion has been pushed for decades and is the greatest sin of our age. Our generation will be looked back upon the same way we look back at slave holders/traders. Those who dehumanizing the vulnerable to the point were we c…
But what are irreligious people supposed to do when multiple large groups of people want to "save" them in mutually incompatible ways? Seeing as the largest religious group accounts for something like 30% of the world's population, being religious means at least a 70% chance of being wrong even if there is something supernatural (100% if there isn't). That's a terrible stat figure for life- (and death-)changing decisions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My own experience being raised mainline Protestant was a bit different which might be illustrative: My parents were not at all devout, but still took wisdom and moral lessons from the Bible, especially from the teachings of Jesus. At the same time the preachers in town leaned right in their beliefs and focused on reading and interpreting more obscure passages. This resulted in a modest ongoing tension about what exac…
As a non-practicing Jew, I found the Jefferson bible very inspiring. Stripping the religious trappings from the teachings tempers the whole thing; I really like the humanity : it’s a story about a man with his own foibles, attempting to teach himself & others to be better people.
"Blessed are the meek; for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven." Except there is no kingdom of heaven, after all; and the meek are not blessed but oppressed. The supernatural stuff was there to show that the oppressive nature of the world and its cruelty was not the only thing; there was hope beyond it in the world to come, which gave the strength to believe in something absurd.
Otherwise its just John the Baptist; a person preaching who ended up dead on the whims of the powerful.
Speaking as a person of faith, religion has been largely obsoleted by social media and political tribalism. Most people get their moral compass from Instagram or Twitter or whatever. Celebrities, op-end writers, talk show hosts, and corporations have become the bishops of the new American moral universe.
I don’t think anyone is getting their morals from Instagram.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Now every single indicator of courtship is at all time lows, mental illness is off the charts and we're all miserable. I'm guessing this has far more to do with political and economic changes than decline in religion.
Religion isn't the point, you need to be a part of a community to meet people. It's very rare for you to be able to make real friends, or find a mate by staring at a screen all day. Church provides one mechanism, but in the old times you could also join a bowling league or an elks club. Now instead of being a member of a community where your actions are held to account, you can hop on Twitter and call all types of pe…
https://www.eharmony.com/blog/how-you-meet-your-spouse-matte...
For comparison, UK church membership is Numbers for those claiming to be of "No religion" range from from 50 to 60% depending on region. 38% don't believe in God or any higher spiritual power. The interesting thing is people will identify as Christian on the census while also not claiming to subscribe to any particular religion in other surveys. 2021 census (just completed this month) results will be interesting http…
Yes, reading this thread as someone from the UK makes me realise the US is very different culturally from the UK. I'm sure the proportion of people for whom religion is important in their lives is much much smaller in the UK than the US. I think most British people only encounter religion at Christmas and weddings, unless they're of a religious minority group.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet our society is more polarized than ever. From your anecdote, one would think that declining religion would result in peace and love overflowing in society, but we see the opposite. Public morality cannot be maintained without religion; we will sadly see the end result of that in coming years.
> Public morality cannot be maintained without religion This tired, offensive and a thousand time debunked old trope requires imo a little more argumentation than the "it is thus" justification you just provided. I'd recommend reading Hitchens, specifically [1] where he addresses that lame claim at length. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Is_Not_Great [EDIT]: here's a good summary from the man himself: https://w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent). If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? Obviously religious people remain the vast m…
> Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. Religiosity is highly inversely correlated with criminality amount Americans.[1] Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity. To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially. It's certainly not the only way to promote ethical…
Throughout history, religious leaders have very rarely opposed killing "the enemy". Likewise it's a rare soldier in a time of war who is insists on obeying, "Thou shalt not kill".
Yet if this is true, then how do you define religiosity if it overlooks willingly acting in contradiction to the most essential laws that a faith and its faithful claim to believe?
My personal observation (having left a fundamentalist background, though still identifying as Christian) is that hardcore young-earth creationism of the Ken Ham variety has driven a ton of deconversion in my generation. Ken Ham & his ilk have been teaching for decades, explicitly and repeatedly, that if you do not buy into their specific 6-day literal interpretation of Genesis, then you might as well be an atheist. […
How did you personally abandon fundamentalism and end up still identifying as Christian? I grew up learning from Ken Ham (literally shook his hand at summer camp), but I'm now a genuinely atheistic apostate and I can't comprehend what you have left of Christianity when you abandon a literal understanding of the Bible. Young Earth Creationism pseudoscience is one reason, but there are tons of others. Ham, I think, is…
TO your question, I don't claim to have all the answers (let alone all the "Answers in Genesis") but I've come to understand there's a lot more nuance to a "literal" understanding of the Bible than Ken Ham may have led you to believe.
A couple of resources I've found helpful when navigating the intersection of historic Christianity and modern science are biologist Joel Duff [0] and physicist Aron Wall [1]. (Fun side note on the latter: he's the son of Perl creator Larry Wall.)
[0] https://thenaturalhistorian.com/ [1] http://www.wall.org/~aron/blog/