881–890 of 1001 posts
For the life of me, I cannot remember his name and I cannot find a reference, but there is a post-war German theologian who celebrated the kind of personal Christianity that doesn't require a church hierarchy, arguing that acting independently with the values of the faith without being told what to do is the best outcome.
Well Martin Luther certainly qualifies, but I can't guess what war you have in mind that took place before 1517.
Although I believe religion is outdated and in many ways I'm happy to see it in decline in the West, I do worry about the side effects the decline of religion has. It seems to me that people my age today (late twenties, early thirties) are extremely self-centred and struggle to see any higher pursuit in life than self-satisfaction. This is in contrast to the few religious people I know who are far more family focused…
Quick note: your sister's story was also common enough in the 1880-1950 timeframe. She'd also have been considered a loose woman, immoral, etc, and come under vicious religious censure. Now, statistically, would that have improved things more generally? I don't know. But it was a thing. If we were to spin the clock back to pre-industrialization and its concomitant labor crunching, I don't know that period of history…
To be fair I don’t think it’s entirely a lack of religion to blame for this trend though. I think a less religious but more culturally conservative society would also see lower levels of single parenthood. It seems likely to me to be partly the absence of religious beliefs alongside the promotion of more destructive cultural values that has done the damage.
A third component is the way in which the welfare state (at least here in the UK) “rewards” people who make poor life decisions. My sister rightly understood the only way a working class girl with no qualifications is going to move out of her parents’ home is to have a kid. In the past she would have been forced to have found someone who could provide for her or she would have needed to find a way to earn a living.
Now if despite she would have made all the same bad decisions anyway I suspect you’re right, past societies would have looked on her decisions much less favourably and she would likely be far worse off. But I doubt this would have happened. She was always a smart kid - far smarter than me. But when everyone around you is skipping school to smoke in the park or having kids at 15 while being given a new home by the government it’s hard to resist what seems like an obvious path.
I guess what I’m saying is that I would acknowledge that it’s not entirely a lack of religion at play here, but the decline of family values that religion promoted and the lack of moral objection to certain lifestyles has given room for less preferable cultural attitudes and beliefs to arise. The fact people think I’m wrong to criticise my sister for choosing to have a child with an alcoholic she barely knew to move out of my parents home, for example. It honestly annoys me how many people say her selfish decision which her child will bare the brunt of is something that she should be proud of. I love with all my heart but it’s selfish and wrong, and she was failed by everyone who didn’t plainly tell her that.
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Growing up in the 80's (UK) as a Roman Catholic, I remember the services being full on Sunday mornings. Not been since I left home at 18, because frankly I stopped believing in God the same time I stopped believing in Father Christmas (7?). The only reason I went was to make my parents happy. Now I'm in my 40's I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place. We know from numerous studies…
As someone who is semi-atheist, I have started to think that the invention of God was mostly to discipline children and to give them hope. Eventually, those children grew up and told same stories to their kids and until one day those stories became religion. Then came prophets who decided to prey upon these people and sold organized religion. I say this because I got a toddler and sometimes it is easier to make up st…
The Economist published article in this week's edition contrasting the rise of the current left/right fervor to relative decline of the religious fervor. The accompanying image captures this really well - https://www.economist.com/img/b/1000/563/90/sites/default/fi... . The full article is here - https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/03/27/religious...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/america...
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I was "in touch" with religion for 12 years (my parents sent me to a very catholic school even though both are atheists) My experience was seeing huge amounts of falsehood and hypocrisy as religious people followed and repeated all the rituals of the mass but in the day to day life they just did not care about others and pretty much ignored what their religion taught them. Thank God after those 12 years I saw everyth…
Is this the religious equivalent of a parent making the kid smoke a carton of cigarettes at once, to turn them off smoking?
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I grew up attending church, and on the whole have nothing but good things to say about the whole experience. It gave me both spiritual and moral support when I needed it the most and some of the best people I have ever known, I got to know through church. In fact in ways I mourn the loss of both my faith and my 'church'. However once I realized that, on a very fundamental level, the core of what they where claiming a…
I was in the exact same place as you about 10 years ago. A key thing for me (I'm still not religious, though I'm religion-adjacent in some ways) was seeing that religion - despite what some would tell you - is at its best when it's not made to be about material truths at all. Its truths, really, are truths about the human condition and how best to live it out. In this sense, even as someone who doesn't believe in met…
That teaching is probably wrong and causes so much damage to so many people.
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In that quote, Wallace is just morphing, conflating, and fudging the definition of the word "worship". He says people "worship" (with a variety of subtly different meanings) a variety of things and then, implies that because we can use the same word, "worship", to describe those activities, they are equivalent. I despise this rhetorical technique. I find it both insulting, intellectually dishonest and useless.
I could not disagree more. Wallace's use of language here is instructive, poignant, and immensely useFUL. I'll bet you're an engineer, data scientist, or other technical professional, not simply b/c you're here, but b/c your response to Wallace's use of ambiguity and multiple layers of meaning reveals as much about the nature of your own relationship with language, which I'd guess prefers that things should be clear,…
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I think part of the problem is that there is no clear tradition of “cultural Christian” like there is for “atheist Jew”. I don’t believe in God. I love the high church and choral traditions. I attend a church where the minister feels the same. Am I a Christian? No. And yes.
"Cultural Christian" is just what western culture is. "atheist Jews" can exist only because they exist in the cultural Christian west.
Then you have people that may have grown up surrounded by some of the trappings of Christianity, but because of their atheism, do not attend church and take part in only the most universal rituals (Christmas, basically, and even then, the Christian bits are mainly removed). Christian thought is not the moral or philosophical touchstone.
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…
On the point of creation, while Ham contends we MUST take it literally or the entire veracity of the Bible falls apart, there is an inconsistency even within the literal YEC interpretation. Consider Genesis 2:7 "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." If God breathed into the nostrils of does this mean that God had lungs? A YEC would say "of course not, this is a metaphorical/poetic description of the action". And thus they reveal their inconsistency: the YEC demands a literal understanding of the first six days, but when pressed for a simple implication like this, they revert to a metaphorical understanding.
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In all fairness, this same rhetorical technique was commonly used in the faith that I was raised in. We were often taught that one could violate the Jewish/Christian commandment to "have no other gods before me" by placing more importance on material goods or hobbies (your car, your boat, sports, etc.) than worshiping God.
Does this apply to husbands and wives as well as cars?
Luke 14:26:
> If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be my disciple.
* https://biblehub.com/luke/14-26.htm
This is hyperbole, which Jesus uses relatively often. It is also more subtle in the original Greek: while we often use the word "hate", the original has more of a connotation of (IIRC) separate-yourself-from. See also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_5:29
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_5:30
It is not that one's parents, spouse, siblings are bad in themselves, but that one has to be mindful that the source of being tempted to not act morally and doing the right thing can come from anywhere—even people that we would otherwise cherish.