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Yes! Like the bible says, "Test everything, keep the good." (Timothy IIRC).
A bit of a misquote.
It's actually from 1 Thessalonians 5:21 -- but that phrase is in the middle of a thought.
(20) Do not treat prophecies with contempt (21) but test them all; hold on to what is good, (22) reject every kind of evil.
Yes! Like the bible says, "Test everything, keep the good." (Timothy IIRC).A bit of a misquote.
It's actually from 1 Thessalonians 5:21 -- but that phrase is in the middle of a thought.
(20) Do not treat prophecies with contempt (21) but test them all; hold on to what is good, (22) reject every kind of evil.
Thanks. I admit I'm no biblical scholar. (I knew it started with a 'T'!) Still, it's good advice for lots of situations.
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Thanks. I admit I'm no biblical scholar. (I knew it started with a 'T'!) Still, it's good advice for lots of situations.Yes! Like the bible says, "Test everything, keep the good." (Timothy IIRC).A bit of a misquote.
It's actually from 1 Thessalonians 5:21 -- but that phrase is in the middle of a thought.
(20) Do not treat prophecies with contempt (21) but test them all; hold on to what is good, (22) reject every kind of evil.
Sorry. It just kind of bugs me when the Bible is misquoted. "Doesn't it say that 'God helps those who help themselves'?"
I've also learned (thanks(?) to here) that I'd better know what I'm talking about or else someone will call me on it. ;-)
You can test love a posterior. "She made this sacrifice for me, so she probably loves me."
When someone says they love someone, and then they abuse that person, their actions demonstrate that their words are untrue. Without that, the most basic of tests, love has no meaning.
This.
We had a saying in New York when I was growing up: "If you can't be counted on, you can't be counted in." Surficially trite, maybe, but appropriate to the topic at hand. Words don't count in that estimation, and neither does simple obsession.
Anyone still wondering what I'm talking about should listen to the lyrics of the old classic, "Til The Real Thing Comes Along" -- Ruth Brown's recording is one of the better ones. It's been redone so many times, by so many different artists, because it's the truth.
About as relevant as a mathematician kissing their lover is to mathematics.
You mean actual observations of religious people and their historical behavior in the field as to what's important to them are irrelevant?
I am sure that you have carefully and prayerfully come to conclusions about what is true religion and what is false, what is important and what is not, and what God really wants you to do. I am equally sure that the relevant churchmen back then did exactly the same thing.
To pick but one example, "thou shalt not kill" seems, rather clearly, to be saying "don't kill that guy for believing differently than you do". I have no idea what exactly is "not obvious" about that.
How about the fact that "don't kill that guy for believing differently than you" shares space in the Bible with this:
Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the Lord must be destroyed.
Do not bow down before their gods or worship them or follow their practices. You must demolish them and break their sacred stones to pieces
A man or woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads.
I am not saying that you ought to go out and do these things. I am not saying that you think they should be done, even if you do not do them. I am not saying that you ought to feel guilty for not doing them. I am not saying that you must do them or be some kind of religious traitor. I'm not saying they're what your church teaches is really God's will, or constitute what you personally believe is God's will.
But there are a lot of these passages; we both know it. The Bible is full of them. It also, as we also both know, has some pretty decent passages. I particularly like the parable of the Good Samaritan. I once rather aggravated a room of fundamentalists when I pointed out that the Samaritans were not just racially different from the ancient Jews, but also members of another religion. And Jesus upheld one of them over the priests of his own time as a moral exemplar. If looks could kill I'd have been splattered halfway to Mexico. One woman, who previously wanted me to walk her out to the parking lot after a late night class, gave me a glare that suggested I might want to be wary of her in dark parking lots in the future.
But I digress. I could tell crazy fundamentalist stories for the rest of my life and still not be done. The point is that the Bible's full of instructions that go both ways. 'Kill these people for being different. Don't kill anybody. Absolutely kill this people, and I really mean it this time. No, no, absolutely do not kill those people and God did not mean it.' All this leaves the outsider, who doesn't have a horse in the theological race, with no clear indication at all of which set of orders is supposed to take precedence in the mind of your God even granting the Bible being direct from him.
How is anybody to decide which of you is right, the crusaders or the peacemakers? I know which one I prefer, but so far as I can tell everybody from the beige mainline to the crazy fundie to the rainbow liberal is being about equally selective. The Bible's got plenty of support for the lot of you.
So like I said, you're all doing your best to decently and prayerfully and whatever-other-fully figure out what the home office wants you to do. You read the book. You consult your feelings. You think about society and how you would prefer it to be. But when you differ, and you've always differed, it's far from obvious that one or the other of you is right.
You look at your church's civil rights record and say you've got it right. And you seem to be a relatively decent person too, though I realize coming from me that's probably dubious praise. But the Falwells, Haggards, Robertsons, and the like of the world, and their spiritual ancestors burning their way across Germany and France, did the same thing. I don't think they're very decent people at all, to put it mildly. All of you think you're in the right, and you're all obviously using the same book and more or less the same methods to get there.
Which one of you actually is? I can't tell. I can tell you that I'd rather live in a world ruled by you than a world ruled by Falwell (though the fact that I'd be alive in yours certainly biases me a bit) but that's not the same thing as saying one or the other of you has the better justification to the claim of being the true Christians and the others are confused, crazy, or just plain mean.
If I'm just vindicating my prejudices then why did I write about how the good stuff coexists in religion with the bad stuff? Why did I spend those paragraphs talking about both sides instead of just the one? I made almost exactly the same argument about Christianity and slavery and you were all for it then.
Nice or mean, thorough or quick, I'm getting the same kind of response from you whatever I offer. I give reasons for why I have the opinions I do and back them with argument and evidence. You ignore the lot of this, most especially the parts that you ought to be happy to read, to call me some kind of reverse Falwell.
Ok. I haven't seen much of this style of trolling lately, but it's not my first time through.
What I've said all along is that these things do exist, but religion is about providing a place where people can come together to discuss and debate and work on figuring out what the right thing is. I NEVER said that they've already figured out what the right thing is.
How is religion different from politics, then?
I just scrolled back and found nothing but you vindicating your prejudice. If you've written one word talking about the good stuff in religion, I couldn't find it.
I have repeatedly given you personally and religious people in general credit for several good things. I've made it clear that I personally prefer your type of religion to Falwell's. I've told you my favorite Bible story teaching what I consider correct morality.
What else do you want? If you want me to say that the good stuff outweighs the bad, I can't do that. I don't think it does and I value honesty too much.
What really bothers me about your posting style is that we've agreed that there are horrible things in the Holy Books, in the church/temple/mosque/whatever, in religion, etc. And you are stuck on that like a broken record.
I live in a world where that's the stuff that's omnipresent. (I'm a gay atheist living in a small town in the Midwest, if it makes any difference to you.) I am hardly alone here. I have been around and among the religious for about as much of my life as anybody in America. I've seen what's said when they think they're alone among believers. I've read about the money trails. The most prevalent aspects get the most attention. I even have a friend with an ex-wife who worked as an accountant for the local diocese (theirs, not mine) until she found the hush money account and quit.
I mean, what would there be to say about the rest? "Good for you"? When the face faith presents to the world looks a lot more like John Shelby Spong or this thread's own Moff Rimmer and a lot less like a bunch of bronze age retreads I shall have a quite different focus. Seriously, I gave the man's (Spong's, not Moff's. I don't know that Moff has written a book.) book on rescuing the Bible from fundamentalism to a Catholic friend and she read it, then immediately handed it to her husband to read. She told me it was so stunning to her that she had to share it with someone else. She started to apologize about not getting it back to me, so I told her to keep it. She got way more out of it than I did.
What I've said all along is that these things do exist, but religion is about providing a place where people can come together to discuss and debate and work on figuring out what the right thing is. I NEVER said that they've already figured out what the right thing is.
If you'd said that about discourse, in the "come, let us reason together sense" I would agree with you. I don't know how anything would ever be resolved with just faith, even the faith in love you advocate. If you really believe you're saving someone from eternal suffering and/or winning them eternal bliss, then love would dictate that you do everything in your power to force them to follow the right god, have sex the right way, vote the right way, etc. (Of course this is less of a problem for religions which aren't big on salvation, though they have their own skeletons in the closet.)
Religious groups are more often the very last groups on board with progress rather than in the vanguard. Your own church is an exception, but it's notable because it's so exceptional. The Quakers are not the face of the great majority of religion either. The Catholic Church is far more representative of Christianity (being roughly half the world's Christians) than the Unitarian-Universalists. That's a damned shame, but it's the truth. Religions, and not just a crazy minority but hugely powerful, wealthy, and influential religions, believe in and do all the things I find so objectionable.
Historically religions are largely (not universally) interested in thinks like equality and tolerance only so long as those benefit their parishioners directly. So the churches of oppressed people, minorities, and so forth are rather dependable activists for a better world. The churches of powerful groups line up roughly as predictably on the other side.
Maybe it says something about how I roll -Who am I kidding? It does- but I'm just not capable of laughing these kinds of things off very often. Others can, but it's not how I'm wired.
Why I'm an Atheist.
I particularly enjoyed the part about flying.
I am not saying that you ought to go out and do these things. I am not saying that you think they should be done, even if you do not do them. I am not saying that you ought to feel guilty for not doing them. I am not saying that you must do them or be some kind of religious traitor. I'm not saying they're what your church teaches is really God's will, or constitute what you personally believe is God's will....etc.
That was really well written and compelling.
That was really well written and compelling.
Yeeees... Give in to the hate. Only then will you be strong enough in the Dark Side to save one of the better actors misplaced in this trilogy, be burned, maimed by your best friend, live the rest of your life as a crippled shell kept alive by machines, and join the New Atheists.
We have sexy face-melting purple lightning!
:)
I game with a Christian and he is one of the coolest guys I know. I used to game with a Mormon who was the same.
I know cool Christians, too! Woot! And cool atheists! And cool Deists and Mormons and Pagans, too!
So maybe it isn't the religion that makes them good people, despite what the churches all claim.
Samnell, you remind me an awful lot of myself over the past 20 years. I'm gay, grew up in the Midwest, spent almost all my time growing up in either a holy roller church or the school it ran.
In the interests of comparing notes for mutual understanding:
1) Definitely gay.
2) Midwestern (If Michigan counts but if you tell someone North Central they give you a weird look.)
And you've lost me at those. I'm the product of what, at the time, qualified as an interfaith marriage. (It was the mid-Seventies. For health reasons they used condoms until 1980.) My mother was from sort of Anglo-German Lutheran stock and my father a Polish Catholic. This entailed all manner of negotiations when they married as to where the man in the dress would stand with them and what they would promise to do. In the end they had to agree to raise me Catholic, baptize me Catholic, and send me to Catholic school.
The priest got one. I was sprinkled with meaningless water and he said magic words over me. Eighteen years later in a fit of amusement I downloaded a meaningless certificate to rescind said meaningless ritual.
My father went to Catholic school, and not modern progressive will-drive-you-to-the-abortion Catholic school. Regular old death-penguins-from-hell Catholic school. His math education stopped when the nun reached the limits of her ability and just read a chapter ahead in the textbook. This played out in every other subject too, except cruelty. They all majored in that, except the young ones that the institution hadn't destroyed yet. He and all his siblings went there so none of my generation went there, or to any other Catholic school. I asked about this, as a kid in fact, and the first words out of his mouth were that he didn't want them teaching me religion. :) He figured out it was all bunk back in roughly the third grade and started putting a slit in the corner of his weekly offering envelopes so he could pocket the nickel and claim it just fell out.
Consequently religion was not a significant part of my upbringing, for which I am grateful. Excepting maybe a few times as an infant or toddler I didn't attend any kind of religious service until I was twelve. (I'm trying to match the record. I had a funeral in 2002 though and nobody's getting any younger. Nuisance, that.) My mother's parents gave me a children's book of Bible stories that I read about four or five of and was promptly horrified with when allowed to read it a few years later. Then my mother started talking about the crown of thorns for some damned reason, which was too much for nine year old Samnell. For a kid who mainly has firsthand experience of pain from things like grabbing a rosebush, that's serious stuff. She ended up informing me that it was nothing to cry about.
When it came time to come to terms with my sexual orientation, I couldn't. Because nothingI was told was gay described me.
I lucked out there. I figured out what being gay was from the internet in the mid-90s. By the time I'd processed that whacking off to boys on the swim team was definitely gay behavior, I already knew all the basics.
Telling my parents? My best friend accidentally did that when they looked at my monitor during an IM conversation. :) Threw them for a bit of a loop (But the first words out of their mouths: "We still love you.") but they adjusted.
The church leaders use to beat us kids with sticks, force us to go without food one day a week to show our devotion, demanded that we never watch tv, movies, or listen to anything but Bluegrass gospel, and had us spend most of our school day in 2' x 2' boxes.
So everything but the rape? To say that sucks is putting it mildly. Tell me there was a police raid and they shut the place down for good? Things like that make being a pacifist awfully frustrating sometimes.
I don't think they really planned it, but my parents pretty much encouraged me to transgress in my reading and viewing. I took things like movie ratings far more seriously than they did, presuming them to be some kind of law. At the same time of course I heard all the best dirty jokes from my father. He and my mother literally met over a gag penis drawn in a folded up zillionth-generation xerox of somehow's homemade dirty joke. (They found the card, or a version of it, in one of my father's coworkers' desks after he retired.)
So, yes, I understand how you feel. However, if not now then someday you will realize that not all Christians are like this.
LilithsThrall, I don't believe that right now. I've spent a fair portion of a recent post on the subject, which I wrote in response to you, not just acknowledging well-behaved non-fundie Christians but naming a semi-famous one right out. I also explicitly named you among their number and mentioned two other historically decent denominations. I really don't know where you're getting this from.
I am primarily concerned with the poorly-behaved crazies, of course. It is, to use your word, out of concern for their pathology and their obsession with getting it on the rest of us. I have other, if sometimes similar, concerns about the non-fundamentalist kind of religion. Many of these are straightforward political issues which I'm sure you can probably imagine. Religion receives great subsidies from the American government and enjoys privileged access to the state at virtually every level, which I think incompatible with the important principle of having a secular government instead of some kind of demi-posterior theocracy.
I furthermore do not think faith is a very good motivator for action, however it sometimes works out well in the end. I don't think it's a very good practice to place emotions ahead of reason and evidence, ordinarily. Certainly it's not best practices on important things that may have real concrete impact on other people who didn't quite sign on for the ride. Those complaints remain true even for liberal faiths, which I otherwise find almost infinitely less objectionable.
But ok. To be absolutely clear about this: Do I think every Christian is just like Falwell, Robertson, Haggard, Fred Phelps, and the rest of the crazies?
In a word: "No."
Samnell, I don't think religion should get government subsidies. I believe it should be treated the same as any other non- profit. To do otherwise is to compromise the church. When the church gets supported by the government, the church quickly gets dominated by legalists.
Purity of the church aside, since I'm not a member and thus not invested in the notion, the state of affairs right now isn't really that churches are treated like any non-profit. Rather they are presumed non-profit and have to deal with virtually none of the paperwork, legal requirements, oversight, and so forth.
If a church wants to do all of that and complies fully with the law, then I have no problem at all with it being treated like any other nonprofit. This rarely, if ever, happens.
How do you test good art?
This is a question that is important to me because I sell art in my day job. As I started to think about it I realized it was more complex than can really be summarized in one post. There is more than one way in which art can be "good". There is more than one way in which art can be "valuable". Some of these ways are are subjective and some are objective. Many can be studied mathematically. If anyone is honestly interested in my thoughts on art theory, feel free to start a new thread (let's not derail this one [too late!]). However, I will give a couple of simple, subjective tests you can use:
Q) Is [this art] good art?
A) Do you like it? If yes, then it's good art. If no, it still may be good art, but not for you.
Q) How much is [this art] worth?
A) How much are you willing to pay for it? (Ancillary: Be a savvy shopper, though. Not everything retains its value once it walks out the door.)
I'll just leave this here for Samnell and Kirth.
We actually talked about the Santa lie I think a few dozen pages ago. If I recall correctly, we were of one mind about being hurt and a little upset by the deception on the part of our parents.
I was just thinking about it again a few nights ago. Santa Claus was one of a tiny pantheon of holiday gift-givers in my childhood. Birthday Bear. Easter Bunny. Santa. (Did anybody else have Birthday Bear or were my parents weird?)
I was not especially upset about the Easter Bunny and Birthday Bear, I think for a couple of reasons. The Easter Bunny is not much of a media feature. I don't recall ever talking about it with other kids. Ditto Birthday Bear. But the other part of it was that those two were always a bit tongue and cheek. My parents would actually leave tags off a present or two or sign them "Santa". So it was much less "it's fun to pretend" and more "there's a real guy that is too fat for our tiny furnace chimney and thus Dad has to open the door for him".
Of course Santa is also rather explicitly a kids version of the god of a salvation religion too. I don't recall any stories about the others making lists or dispensing coal, or even really awesome Lego pirate ships.
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(Did anybody else have Birthday Bear or were my parents weird?)
That's all you. Mine made sure I knew who was giving me my gifts, and they were all real people I should thank. Totally believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa tho, until I found the presents in my parents drawer a few days before Christmas.
We actually talked about the Santa lie I think a few dozen pages ago. If I recall correctly, we were of one mind about being hurt and a little upset by the deception on the part of our parents.
It made me a lifelong skeptic, and the cynical bastard I am today. I should actually be grateful -- after realizing as a kid that my parents would premeditatedly enter into a conspiracy to lie to me, solely for their own amusement, I stopped trusting anyone's word about anything. That's saved me a lot of grief over the years.
(Did anybody else have Birthday Bear or were my parents weird?)
Your parents were just weird. Then again, apple, tree, yada yada.
(Did anybody else have Birthday Bear or were my parents weird?)Your parents were just weird. Then again, apple, tree, yada yada.
Well X-Mas comes on the 24th as far as gift-giving goes and a lot of the amusement is in finding funny ways to hide money. This year my father hid some up the ass of a racoon dog toy for my mother, which he gave her in an empty tissue box. I hid some at the bottom of a cup of her favorite ice cream. Last year we both crammed ours into the horse trailer that came in a pack of farm toys, because she's into Farmville on Facebook.
Mine was in a box of pseudoephedrine. (I've had really terrible allergies this year.) Previously it's been inside a sealed package of chocolate and frosting swiss rolls like I used to have in my lunch as a kid, inside a roll of toilet paper...
You mean other families aren't like this? Now *that's* weird. :)
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The most memorable Christmas gift I ever got was from my father. I opened the box, only to find another, smaller box inside it. On opening this box, I was greeted by yet another box. Inside that box? Yep, another box.
I forget exactly how many boxes he managed to fit in there, but the final box just had a scrap of paper in it telling me to look in the garage. That's where I found my new bike. :) I like to use this method on friends once in a while myself.
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I don't know why, but as of late, I have become increasingly skeptical of my own skepticism. I cannot point to one specific event at the root of this, but after some introspection and reflection I have realized that all I ever look for is evidence to support what I already believe, rather than looking for objective evidence. While my opinion of organized religion has remained the same (I still think that they're all worthless and are at the root of many of the worlds' problems), I find myself more aligned with deism than atheism now. I think the turning point came when (for whatever reason) I asked myself if I was letting my disdain for organized religion affect my belief (or lack thereof) in a god, if it was the other way around, or if they were mutually exclusive. For whatever reason the first just felt right.
Not sure if there's a reason behind this post other than the fact that I felt compelled to share and don't really feel comfortable doing so with the people I'm in daily contact with.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled snark and sniping. :D
I don't know why, but as of late, I have become increasingly skeptical of my own skepticism. I cannot point to one specific event at the root of this, but after some introspection and reflection I have realized that all I ever look for is evidence to support what I already believe, rather than looking for objective evidence.
Bravo. There's real skepticism, and there's the ersatz stuff that some people cling to in order to feel smart. Keep looking and reflecting (and most of all, experiencing), and see where you end up in a few years -- I'm curious to see if you follow more or less the same route that I did.
Merry Christmas everyone, godless and godful alike!
I think godly is the preferred adjective, unless speaking of Mary. :)
Bully for you, Xpltvdeleted. I think we should question the motives behind our beliefs.
What you are explaining sounds like Cognitive dissonance to me. So you seek out information to support your own beliefs. I believe we are all guilty of it. I know I am. That is why I try to explore different perspectives. It is why I keep coming back to this thread.
Bully for you, Xpltvdeleted. I think we should question the motives behind our beliefs.
What you are explaining sounds like Cognitive dissonance to me. So you seek out information to support your own beliefs. I believe we are all guilty of it. I know I am. That is why I try to explore different perspectives. It is why I keep coming back to this thread.
It's why I keep asking for evidence. I don't go way out of my way to read religious apologists since there's only so much time and effort I have available to dispense and I can think of lots better areas to focus it on than a topic I consider thoroughly decided centuries ago. But if someone really has a good reason to think there is a god, for example, then I'm always ready to here how I might be wrong and if so revise my opinions accordingly. I mean what else is a horrific evil dogmatist who is easily millions of times as bad as all the worlds fundamentalists put together who kicks puppies on the side to do?
Yeah, godful does kind of sound like a contraction of god-awful, doesn't it?Merry Christmas everyone, godless and godful alike!I think godly is the preferred adjective, unless speaking of Mary. :)
I suppose that could be an additional reason for objection, though lots of fundamentalists I've encountered believe themselves indwelt by the Holy Spirit. So I suppose they shouldn't necessarily object to the implication that there's a big pile of god stuffed in their pancreas or something.
It is a bit funny when the same sorts proclaim themselves very concerned about possession, though.
I don't go way out of my way to read religious apologists since there's only so much time and effort I have available to dispense and I can think of lots better areas to focus it on than a topic I consider thoroughly decided centuries ago.
And why should a…say YEC… go way out of his way to read about some 'theory'?
Evidence! You say. Well, he has 'evidence' too.
Science is an important tool, but only a fool of the greatest sort thinks that science is the key to absolute understanding of everything...
Color me a fool then. I concede that science does not currently have the answer to everything. But I kind of like its track record. Sure, it makes some mistakes but so has intuition.
There were some crazy ideas floated during the Black Plague that seemed to work.
I put faith* in my car and I haven't the slightest idea how it works.
*Of course, how are we going to define faith here?
Maybe we need to define 'science' for this discussion as well. If I say I have faith in science, I do not exactly mean our current working theories. I believe, given enough time, we will figure things out. All of the things we do not understand the cause of at present, will reveal themselves to be as mundane as a ball of burning gas.