GDon
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2013
- Messages
- 1,567
You are correct; my mistake.If you want you can call him a "historian". He defines himself as an amateur historian.
You are correct; my mistake.If you want you can call him a "historian". He defines himself as an amateur historian.
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.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.
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.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.![]()
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.
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.
It's over half of Americans.
Weird stuff. LOL
Never got the virgin thing. For a heavenly experience, wouldn't one want someone who knew what they were doing?
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!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.
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.
And baby, don't ever call the Host 'that box of crackers'.
I don't think Tim O'Neill's blog is excellent.
He says he's an atheist, although I don't think so.
What he's trying to do is a work of historical revisionism denying what he calls "myths" of atheism.
The ones I've read are a ceremony of confusion.
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 ....
... and because he did everything possible to link it to the Scholastic Authority.
And whatever happened to Copernicus, it would be foolish to deny the fierce persecution of heliocentrism by the church.
Without these important facts, O'Neill's demystification is the creation of a new myth.
Something similar happens with his "demystification" of Hypatia.
If you want you can call him a "historian". He defines himself as an amateur historian.
Transubstantiation sounds so much nicer than cannibalism but if it walks like a duck...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.
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?
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.)
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?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...".
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.
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.)