Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

This doesn't make sense. You can't argue with Turing's math and algorithmic discoveries/creations (unless you can prove them wrong) but you certainly can some of his flawed philosophies. QED False equivocation.

Especially keeping Seleucid influence down when they tried to hellenize Israel

I found a good articulation of this here: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-holy-church-of-christ-w...

"Suddenly we’ve got numerical infinities on that ethics spreadsheet, inputs that win out against any finite moral optimization. Where to put the infinities on the spreadsheet is of course the entire point of this metaphysical endeavor. We need the axiomatic moral imperatives, whether they be human life or free speech or something else, to which everything else loses in the moral calculus. The rest is mere arithmetic.

And this is precisely where the rationalist worldview grows mute: there’s simply no way to derive the absolute moral principles that should rule our lives from lab experiments, and any such proposal will necessarily require a faith-based leap--the ‘dignity’ of human life, the sanctity of private property, etc.—not very different than the tzelem Elohim or Imago Dei of Genesis. Science is absolutely mute here. There’s no such thing as a ‘scientific ethics’ or a ‘scientific foreign policy’, and the people who claim as much are precisely the same naifs who treat science as a body of knowledge rather than an epistemology, i.e., those who’ve never actually practiced it."

I'm not a church-goer and now in my late thirties have seen many, including myself, have significant crises ending up therapy of some kind. Thankfully, these crises have all had successful and revelationary outcomes. Crises such as financial, relationship, burn-out, questioning purpose, depression. In all cases it's been a revelation for the people involved because they were simply unequipped to deal with the situation; didn't have the tools in their toolkit.

It dawned on me that as a kid I did go to church as part of school, and there I would receive almost daily "counselling", or at least broaching life issues, challenges and philosophical concepts regularly.

When not a church-goer, where does one get this same level of regular counselling, self-improvement or self-analysis? I'm not advocating religion though I feel like the concept of meeting regularly and talking about big issues is very positive, and I feel overlooked.

> It's a question of whether or not you buy into the set of assumptions. If you do, you can avail yourself of any one several strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views, which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff.

As an atheist, I do not find[1] those philosophies to be particularly coherent or self-consistent - but obviously, my criticism is only superficial. So, I'll do one better.

A large number of theistic philosophers share my opinion on this - hence the innumerable schisms within Abrahamic religions. Those philosophers looked at their religion, found inconsistencies in it, and forked it.

The problem is that the survivors of those schisms (Catholicism, Eastern orthodoxy, Russian orthodoxy, the Anglican church, Protestantism in its many flavours, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, etc, etc, etc) did not survive because of their logical or intellectual rigour, or because they were more consistent or coherent then the parent branch that they splintered off from. They survived because they won political, violent power struggles. They survived because might made right. They survived because some influential autocratic warlord was personally swayed by their ideas, and imposed his will on his subjects and neighbours.

Less successful heresies (that, to me have about as good a claim at providing strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views as their parent religions) have gone extinct. Not because their arguments or ideas were bad, but because they didn't have enough spear-tips, sword-points, and gun-muzzles behind them.

This sort of selection process does not seem to be like it leads to accurately determining which of these systems survived because they are actually strong, coherent, self-consistent, and which survived because they were better at killing heretics.

[1] My impression of religion is that it tends to identify its inconsistencies and incoherentness, and neatly package it into a black box that it does not engage with, and expects you to have faith. You get a highly self-consistent system, as long as you don't look inside the box.