Balancing Skepticism and Faith

[GDon]

If you want you can call him a "historian". He defines himself as an amateur historian.

You are correct; my mistake.

 

[Marcus]

And 77% of Americans believe that Jesus rose from the dead: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/pub...of_americans_believe_jesus_rose_from_the_dead
I wonder what caused the discrepancy between the two numbers. Did the respondents think of the question as Biblical in one case? 'According to the Bible, did Jesus Christ rise from the dead?' but more 'real-world-like' in the other? 'Considering what I know about what happens when people die, is it very likely that there is life after death?'

Americans appear to be as divided about the question of religion as they are about Trump's presidency. Still, there must be whole communities where almost 100% are believers, and (a few) others where a majority aren't.
Since I'm aware that a large majority of Americans are religious, I'm sometimes surprised by the response of audiences to stand-up comedians' jokes about religion, but I guess that these comedians may cater to the 23% minority.

It is amazing what people will believe. Part of it is familiarity I think. If you are told your whole life that some guy rose from the dead (and not in a zombie movie) you're just so used to it that your sense of incredulity has been drained.


On the question of life after death, there is some crossover. There are religious people who don't believe all the dogma, and people who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious who, for example, don't believe in Jesus's superpowers but do believe in life after death.

 

[Marcus]

A lot of Christians can laugh at the absurdity of their belief, and many feel very negatively towards "organized" religion.

Carlin's "religion is BS" skit was kind of instrumental in my own leaving Christianity, tho. I remember thinking after watching it, that it was only the tip of the iceburg he touched upon, because I actually believed there's was an invisible man who lived in the sky who had to become his own child, and killed himself as a sacrifice to himself to appease his own bloodlust, AND after death he came back as a sort of functional zombie before floating away into the sky, AND now all of us followers regularly ate his symbolic flesh and drank his symbolic blood as part of a weird "symbolic cannibalism" ritual.

Sometimes comedy is the best way to point out absurdity, to snap people out of their unthinking acceptance. I'm sure TBD sees Carlin as a "sneering bigot" but I think that as well as entertaining us he is doing a service to humanity.

 

[dann]

It's not a question of what I believe, but of what some claim: that increasing science conflicts increasingly with belief, therefore people stop believing. But there is simply no evidence for that particular claim. Religious dogma says nothing about cloning, nuclear physics, etc, so scientific discoveries in the last 100 years have no direct impact on religion.

Instead, I think it is along the lines you propose: there is no need to attend church and no need to adopt religious dogma, so people drift away; but I'd put that down to social conventions -- e.g. less pressure to be seen as religious due to declining social power by religions. Part of that may indeed be the idea that we have science, so we don't need religion. But that is due more to fashion rather than any particular scientific discovery.

Improved living conditions are very different from "fashion". And increasing science does conflict with religion. There is evidence that people who learn science, the sciences of nature in particular, tend to become irreligious, first and foremost the biologists. People who don't benefit from science at all are more likely to remain religious. The science that you don't know doesn't conflict with your religion ... much ... However, the generations that witnessed the difference that vaccines made didn't need any scientific insight to find out that modern medicine actually delivers when prayers don't. Things like that change the world view even of people who are more or less excluded from real learning by a stupid educational system based on competition rather than on the intention to educate everybody properly.
So the trend is that poor people remain uneducated and religious, and the well-to-do lose the need for the opium of the people as well as the ignorance that also helped make people religious in the past.
It's no wonder that the Jehovah's Witnesses are suspicious of education beyond high school ...

 

[dann]

It is amazing what people will believe. Part of it is familiarity I think. If you are told your whole life that some guy rose from the dead (and not in a zombie movie) you're just so used to it that your sense of incredulity has been drained.

People discard old exploded knowledge and beliefs all the time. It doesn't have much to do with familiarity if it doesn't serve any purpose. In church people seem to fulfill a need to belong - in particular in a competitive society like the USA. In Denmark, people tend to join secularized voluntary associations instead.
(Danish atheists have come up with "godless Thursdays," but I don't really see the point: I'm godless all week and don't feel the need to confirm it.)

 

[dann]

It's over half of Americans.

Weird stuff. LOL

I may have told this anecdote before, but in case I haven't:
In the mid-1990s I was in Louisiana with a group English teachers from Denmark. We spent the first week in Shreveport at the Centenary College, which was associated with Aarhus Universitet, and for this reason, some of their teachers had spent several months in Aarhus, so they knew all about the relaxed Danish attitude to religion. One of them, a Southern Baptist, told us that we might think that we understood the U.S. American attitude to religion, but warned us that we probably didn't. She was in the process of selling her house and told us that one prospective buyer, an elderly man, had said that he was interested in buying it, but he would go home and discuss it with God. Then she said, "You think that it's just a saying. What you don't understand is that this is actually what he does."
And she was right, of course: The idea was totally alien to us!

 

[Dr. Keith]

Never got the virgin thing. For a heavenly experience, wouldn't one want someone who knew what they were doing?

I don't think you are supposed to be promoting your business on the forum.

 

[GDon]

Improved living conditions are very different from "fashion". And increasing science does conflict with religion. There is evidence that people who learn science, the sciences of nature in particular, tend to become irreligious, first and foremost the biologists.

I don't necessarily disagree, but let me note that what you are describing is not what I meant by "increasing science leads to increasing conflict with religion", the meaning of which I described elsewhere: specific scientific advancements resulting in disproving specific dogma. That a secular education and a general mood that science advances generally 'disprove' religion generally is a separate and worthy question. Anyway, good discussion!

 

[Dr. Keith]

A lot of Christians can laugh at the absurdity of their belief, and many feel very negatively towards "organized" religion.

Carlin's "religion is BS" skit was kind of instrumental in my own leaving Christianity, tho. I remember thinking after watching it, that it was only the tip of the iceburg he touched upon, because I actually believed there's was an invisible man who lived in the sky who had to become his own child, and killed himself as a sacrifice to himself to appease his own bloodlust, AND after death he came back as a sort of functional zombie before floating away into the sky, AND now all of us followers regularly ate his symbolic flesh and drank his symbolic blood as part of a weird "symbolic cannibalism" ritual.

You can't paint all Christians with such a broad brush. For the Catholics it is not symbolic, but actual body and blood. Transubstantiation has got to be one of the weirdest concepts in religion and I find that most Catholics have very little grasp on it.

 

[Thermal]

You can't paint all Christians with such a broad brush. For the Catholics it is not symbolic, but actual body and blood. Transubstantiation has got to be one of the weirdest concepts in religion and I find that most Catholics have very little grasp on it.

And baby, don't ever call the Host 'that box of crackers'. Brothers get all Inquisition on your ass

 

[JoeMorgue]

And baby, don't ever call the Host 'that box of crackers'.

"Okay so I did the math. A communion wafer is about 10 grams. An average adult is about 150 lbs. So that's about 6,800 wafers to make up one Jesus. You get one wafer every Sunday so it would take you 6,800 weeks, so playing by the rules it would take about 520 years of Communion to get one full Jesus..."

*Priest from behind the curtain interrupts me* "Like I told you last week... kinda weird, not really a sin."

 

[TimONeill2]

I was goping to watch this thread from the sidelines, but then we got this:

I don't think Tim O'Neill's blog is excellent.

I see.

He says he's an atheist, although I don't think so.

I am an atheist. I have no belief in any God or gods. I'm a paid up member of the Atheist Foundation of Australia and have been for many years. And I have a posting history online as an atheist that goes back to 1992. So, if you don't "think" I'm an atheist, we will need to examine the false basis for that irrational belief.

What he's trying to do is a work of historical revisionism denying what he calls "myths" of atheism.

I'm afraid that when I have the overwhelming mainstream consensus of historians on my side, what I am presenting is not "revisionism". If you hold to some of the pseudo historical myths I tackle then it's you who is out of step with historical consensus.

The ones I've read are a ceremony of confusion.

Gosh.

To demystify the persecutions against Copernicus is fine, but it cannot be ignored that Copernicus was not persecuted because he published his masterpiece in the same year of his death ....

This can be ignored, because it is demonstrable garbage. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about and you definitely didn't even read my article on the subject or you wouldn't have said something I show to be patently wrong.

... and because he did everything possible to link it to the Scholastic Authority.

Also wrong. He was firmly in the Humanist, anti-Scholastic tradition. Again, you need to educate yourself. And these two errors of fact are from the guy who thinks he can dismiss my stuff as "a ceremony of confusion". Hilarious.

And whatever happened to Copernicus, it would be foolish to deny the fierce persecution of heliocentrism by the church.

Luckily for me, I don't. I just put it in its proper context and show how many of the things said about it are wrong.

Without these important facts, O'Neill's demystification is the creation of a new myth.

Both your supposed "important facts" are dead wrong. But thanks for demonstrating why my site is necessary - you are a picture perfect case of the kind of blundering ignorance dressed as competence it is there to address.

Something similar happens with his "demystification" of Hypatia.

Yawn. Oh, please tell me how I and the leading historians on the subject have got that wrong as well and how old Gibbon, Carl Sagan and that silly movie with Rachel Weisz are actually the go-to sources on the subject. This should be fun ...

If you want you can call him a "historian". He defines himself as an amateur historian.

At least you finally managed to get something right. But the fact remains that I always ensure I am presenting mainstream historical consensus views. So my status is actually irrelevant here. Keep playing and we'll soon see who knows what they are talking about and who ... doesn't.

 

[Marcus]

You can't paint all Christians with such a broad brush. For the Catholics it is not symbolic, but actual body and blood. Transubstantiation has got to be one of the weirdest concepts in religion and I find that most Catholics have very little grasp on it.

Transubstantiation sounds so much nicer than cannibalism but if it walks like a duck...

 

[JoeMorgue]

No it's magic cannibalism which is totally different.

 

[Thor 2]

Perhaps you don't know what finite means or is it you have not been following the conversation?

I was replying to a post by GDon where he was suggesting that scientific refutations of things religious was pretty much confined to the evolution and heliocentric topics. My post was suggesting the number of religious utterances were finite, (talking about the past here ...... get it?), and many so ridiculous nobody would feel compelled to refute them.

Yes, I get it, but you don't, apparently. You are talking about religion as if it was all over! It isn't. New religious utterances are added every day, and so are new interpretations of the old ones, get it?

This is probably the most pathetic responding post you have made thus far, and the bar has been set very low. You will gain more respect if you just admit your mistake and move on, rather than go on in this manner. Making up stuff about what I am implying, without anything to back it up, just to round the post off. Yes good one.

 

[kellyb]

You can't paint all Christians with such a broad brush. For the Catholics it is not symbolic, but actual body and blood. Transubstantiation has got to be one of the weirdest concepts in religion and I find that most Catholics have very little grasp on it.

I was just talking about transubstantiation in another thread a few days ago. I was just relaying my own memory of watching Carlin over 15 years ago, back when I was very much a Christian, bordering on a "fanatical" one. (I was a protestant.)

 

[Thor 2]

I was just talking about transubstantiation in another thread a few days ago. I was just relaying my own memory of watching Carlin over 15 years ago, back when I was very much a Christian, bordering on a "fanatical" one. (I was a protestant.)

So as a "fanatical" Christian you went to see Carlin?

Did you go to scoff and stay to pr..... No hang on, that doesn't work does it?

 

[Minoosh]

There are certain...neural networks leftover from my former Christian mind which are permanent fixtures in my psychology, though, and I'm ok with that. When I look at someone needing my help, my mind goes right to seeing them as "sacred", a la "I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me...".

I don't think I ever really believed Christianity, but I never completely lost the concept of God, either. The above statement can still give me goosebumps, and I don't try to reason my way out of that reaction. Sure, it's probably readily explained by human beings developing some kind of adaptive sense of reciprocity. There's still something "sacred" about it. But then some guys think they're doing sacred acts when they live-stream snuff films of someone's head being chopped off. It's so subjective. I think, surely these people aren't getting it right?

Skepticism seemed like my default, but it didn't leads me to atheism. It led to being irreligious, because all these god beliefs could not possibly be true. The above example is extreme, but even just different strains of Christianity had such divergent claims. I couldn't envision how resurrection, for example, was supposed to work.

I dated a guy on match.com who said he knew he'd see his late wife in heaven, which I felt was going to be pretty awkward for him if he'd hooked up with someone else on the Internet. He seemed like a normal guy, nice guy, rational etc. and it took me aback to realize he literally believed it. My own nebulous beliefs probably require their own cognitive dissonance, but not as much as an actual religion would.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Science is only a method. It's the method of science and the method of religion that are in conflict and are mutually exclusive.

To use your own words . . .

Science method - "Science is not a religion, or even an opinion. Science is a method for discovering facts."

Religion method - "Religion is faith. It can make any claim, and it does not need evidence, only faith."

Diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive methods.

Applying the scientific method and the religious method to the same thing at the same time results in cognitive dissonance.

For specific items, yes, of course. You can't both think thunder is Thor's chariot AND that it is a meteorological phenomenon. But that is not the point. The point in the OP, which was what I responded to, was whether you can both maintain a religious stance and work with science. And of course you can. Just don't apply religion to falsifiable phenomenon, and vice versa.

So, the two may be counterpoints, but they are not mutually exclusive. Most human's lives are full of counterpoints.

Hans

 

[Dr. Keith]

I was just talking about transubstantiation in another thread a few days ago. I was just relaying my own memory of watching Carlin over 15 years ago, back when I was very much a Christian, bordering on a "fanatical" one. (I was a protestant.)

Sorry, tongue in cheek emoji was not easily accessible.