[pedonbio]

A conversation with RandomX with no hope of ever ending?  I'm game!

I bet you are! BUHWAHAHAHA!!

[Feral]

Great replies. I don't pretend to have all the answers or even be wise enough to satisfy a good debate however Im not the type to run around with my fingers in my ears saying "have faith have faith." Still people have to realize that is a core pillar of being religious and trying to get around it by not discussing it to someone who doesn't believe is like me trying to explain why I like big tits to a gay guy.

I will say that the old testament is the old testament. And hearing so many arguments from non religious types who criticize the behavior therein is kind of lame to me. It has to be taken at face value. I don't care about getting into a trick box with an Internet atheist who will spring the trap with something like "a ha! If you don't take it literally then it is just allegory and a fairy tale. Or: all or nothing, you cant cherry pick bits and pieces to your liking. I just don't care it doesn't bother me or get me riled up. I know we don't have slaves or numerous wives and you can't stone people to death anymore but that's why it's the old testament. There are plenty of core values established there as well as stories told that are a foundation for what comes later.

It just seems to me that there is a lot of wasted energy in finding inconsistencies and contradictions to everyday life just for the sake of stirring people up and a snide sense of accomplishment that that energy could be put towards something more positive. So if some of you are telling me that goal is not to start and argument or A fight about something people are very passionate over, then what is? To educate people? How's that going? Are the numbers of organized religion dropping?

[DruulEmpire]

Hmmm ... I'm not even sure where to begin, if only because I think Feral may have used a few too many negatives for me to be sure I'm making grammatical sense of whatever his ultimate point is.  I do have to wonder, though, a little at the question "How's education going?"  I'm very much pro-education; in my own book, the more we find out about Creation, the more amazing it is.

For me, and where I probably differ with most believers, is that it comes down to devotion vis-a-vis loyalty.  It's good and useful to be loyal to certain things, to your town, your team, your family (if it's not too dysfunctional), but even better than being loyal is being devoted.  This to me means that you don't just love something frozen in your mind, that instead you are dedicated to something worthy of an eternity of investigation.  You can get jaded and cynical about a loyalty, no matter how worthy it is, but a sense of devotion will hopefully inspire a love of constant exploration, and that's been my own religious experience.

I think the worry may be about any education which specifies "We don't need that anymore."  As John Keats, and later Shelby Foote, pointed out, a fact is not a truth until you love it, and it is a very human condition that we're struggling to both keep truth straight and then try to find anything lovable about it.  I think a failure to appreciate that matches a failure to understand just how stubborn humanity's love of religion really is.

[Belle]

wait.. who lost the debate? lol.

[Galidan]

I'm more interested in why Christians believe their religion to be the true one. I grew up in a Christian home, attended church and went to a Christian school. But when I really thought about it, I couldn't say why I thought my religion was true and others were just myths. I was a Christian because I was told that was the right one from birth, but now I can't be sure. Maybe if I take more time to study the tenets of other faiths I can finally know.

[Klcarsite]

Honestly, I don't think it's possible for religion to "lose the debate".  Religion isn't about thinking, it's about feeling - and you can't debate feelings.  I think that's a big part of what's so very frustrating to us atheists: it doesn't matter how logical or sound your argument is, you cannot get through to a person who has their heart set on religion.  Now I must (ashamedly) admit to having been one of those asshats who did things like refer to God as "your imaginary friend" while in the midst of heated debate.  Overall, I believe religion is limiting and a has had a strongly negative impact on humanity.  Nevertheless, I have occasionally met radiantly spiritual folks who have shown me that my distaste for religion need not - and should not- extend to a distaste for the individuals who carry such beliefs.  There are good and bad people of every description, after all.  One of my favorite quotes from one of these people (damned if I can remember who now) is "The opposite of a normal truth is a falsehood.  The opposite of a great truth is another great truth."  Thus I think it goes with science and religion.  But what's truly fascinating to me is where the two are beginning to merge.  Humanity's love of religion has evolved along with us, after all, and exploring the god-brain barrier has become a new field of study.  Check it out - neurotheology.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology http://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132078267/neurotheology-where-religion-and-science-collide

[RandomX]

I'm more interested in why Christians believe their religion to be the true one. I grew up in a Christian home, attended church and went to a Christian school. But when I really thought about it, I couldn't say why I thought my religion was true and others were just myths. I was a Christian because I was told that was the right one from birth, but now I can't be sure. Maybe if I take more time to study the tenets of other faiths I can finally know.

I don't get it either. When I still was religious, I believed that my religion was one of many. There was one god and all different religions celebrated its existence by worshiping in different ways. You might worship differently but it all funneled up to this enormous omnipotent entity that accepted all religions. For the record, Jews don't believe in an actual Hell, so perhaps that was why I never said that my religion was the right one. I never thought of the Devil filing his nails and waiting for people to come downstairs due entirely to their picking the wrong religion!

[DruulEmpire]

There's a beautiful little French movie out right now called "Of Gods and Men" about the struggle of Christian monks to survive in Algeria, and I admit it is all the more fascinating to me because two of the monks are played by two of my favorite villains, Lambert Wilson (the Merovingian in "The Matrix Reloaded") and Michel Lonsdale (Hugo Drax in "Moonraker").  Towards the end as they begin to embrace their doom, one remarks that at last he will get to see how God relates to His Muslim children.

I consider myself lucky to have been raised in my childhood by a mother who was a bit of a fallen-away Catholic and interested in the world's various faiths.  (Nowadays she has become a bit rabidly ultra-Catholic, I guess age does that to some people.)  One of my favorite books growing up was Buddhist, "The Myth of Freedom" by Chogyam Trungpa, and later on I became intrigued by the Sufi enneagram, a means of sorting out nine distinct personality types.  So I wasn't raised in any particular "ghetto" of Christianity.

For me it was God hitting my brain with a great big I EXIST way back in 1980.  I wondered: what to do about it?  Peculiarly enough, though I'd been raised secular, my parents had officially baptized me as Eastern Orthodox, a way of outfoxing the arch-Protestant family of my father and the arch-Catholic family of my mother.  My very first impulse was to talk to the Orthodox -- but, eh, I think I came across as rather flaky to them, and my Orthodox godmother actually got rather ticked off at me.  Looking back on that, all I can think is, it's no wonder they're dying off.  A part of me still misses that possibility, that avenue.

On the other hand, a local priest, a bit of an activist firebrand, took an interest in me, and that was that.  I went with Catholicism because it was there, easily accessible, easily to participate in, and at least one priest had taken an active interest.  In the back of my mind I considered it a kind of placeholder, I held out some distant future possibility of converting again.  It has still not happened.  No one particular brand or flavor of Protestantism has ever tempted me enough to make that leap.  If I ever do turn Protestant, it will probably be because I created my own schism and my own church.

We are finite beings and we take what we can get.  I can only hope that God knows our quintessence better than any church official or baptismal certificate, and understands where our ultimate faith lies.

[pedonbio]

  Peculiarly enough, though I'd been raised secular, my parents had officially baptized me as Eastern Orthodox, a way of outfoxing the arch-Protestant family of my father and the arch-Catholic family of my mother.  My very first impulse was to talk to the Orthodox -- but, eh, I think I came across as rather flaky to them, and my Orthodox godmother actually got rather ticked off at me.  Looking back on that, all I can think is, it's no wonder they're dying off.  A part of me still misses that possibility, that avenue.

I wouldn't worry about Eastern Orthodox dying out any time soon. For one thing, they have ignored the momentary passions (like Millennialism and substitutionary atonement) that sweep through the Western Christian churches. And having married priests works wonders on keeping liability down. 

We are finite beings and we take what we can get.  I can only hope that God knows our quintessence better than any church official or baptismal certificate, and understands where our ultimate faith lies.

As I pointed out in the first post in this thread, the Roman Catholic Church has backed away from trying to reach scientific conclusions since the Lewis and Clark Expedition and, more generally, since the disaster with Gallileo. For some reason Protestants, and fundamentalists within that group, have tried to dictate science based on their own extemely limited intellects. The last four Popes have bungled back into that area with their abortion nonsense, but at least they are consistent. Protestant fundies seem to have an obsessive protective instinct for fetuses from conception until the moment of birth, after which they don't give a fuck.

When Confucius was asked what he would do with an extended life span, he said that if such a span of time were granted him, he would like to spend fifty years studying the Book of Change(s), because that might be enough time to come to a minimal understanding of it.

So with the universe. If I were to spend the rest of my life studying the most obvious force, the weak atomic force, I would still have only the most rudimentary understanding of it. After that, there are at least three more. Why should I go hunting around for mysteries?

[pedonbio]

  Humanity's love of religion has evolved along with us, after all, and exploring the god-brain barrier has become a new field of study.  Check it out - neurotheology.

Carl Sagan has made a pretty convincing argument that belief in a higher power actually evolved with reptiles, and we have simply kept it.

[Belle]

I'm more interested in why Christians believe their religion to be the true one....

Christianity appeals on so many levels that sometimes it makes people realize that science is just not enough.

The list goes on and on as to why Christians believe their relationship with Christ to be the only way. (Notice that I didn't use the word 'religion'.  Christ was strongly against Pharisaic legalism.)

Most notably, and in direct opposition to almost every single other faith on the planet, Christians cannot earn their way to salvation.  Salvation is a gift...and once received, it must still be recognized as a gift.  There is nothing.. absolutely Nothing that a Christian can do to earn their way into heaven.  Every time a Christian reads or hears something about someone "just being a good person" or "donating something" or "thinking positive thoughts" or "treating others with mercy" or "becoming spiritual" or "finding your center" or a million other action verbs that infer that the person themselves is the causal agent behind their own redemption, it is considered a direct lie and demeaning to the "actual" sacrifice that their Lord did for them.

It's kind of neat actually.  By accepting the fact that you cannot do it by yourself and that your inherent nature prevents you from achieving your own salvation, you must then figure out what in the Sam-Hill he's talking about.

Most people just stop right there.  You are not going to tell them that the God of this universe is going to strike them down if they are a good person.  That just doesn't make sense.  So you you're telling me that if I live an almost flawless life, am good to everyone I meet, make great decisions, and do all of these good 'works' that I'm still not redeemed?  That's a load of bull.

There's a logical problem.  For you smart people out there, I want you to go past the simple question of 'who' defines good and bad for this person and step up to the next level.. the cool level... the one that says that good and bad are NOT a thing.. they are a mindset.  They are a pathway, not a rulebook. 

And follow me here.. there is no way to fit the true understanding of good and bad into our finite minds.  If we throw these concepts of good and bad out, we throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Trust me, they'll come back up later on in the conversation.  Some sort of recognition to these precepts has to be made.  The simple problem with the atheist mindset is that it is finite.  It works along the assumptive reasoning of a definable edge.  It attempts to uses man made logical and mathematical constructs of theories and laws to form a final unified hypothesis on the nature of things.. the nature of me.. the neurotheology of my mind.  I don't care if you are Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking or Einstein, your mind ain't big enough.  Semantically manipulating our language or even denying our own existence are all exercises in futility by men who have sought to personally limit themselves.  It seems there is a correlation between theory formation and becoming more personally dogmatic.

Whether you are a died in the wool reductionist or holistic scientist or both, there is no escaping the reality of a reality that is bigger than we can conceive.  Admit it.  It is bigger.  Admit it.  It is bigger than yourself.  Religion can lose arguments because it is man-made..  people can make mistakes. 

That is why Christians, even incredibly intelligent Christians, cling to the concept of Grace.  Yes.  A concept that seems to be outside of the lexicon of science.  There is no other "religion" or system of belief that can touch it with a 10 foot pole. 

Go ahead, look around at other religions and faiths.  Spend your whole life searching for 'oneness' or peace like a narcissistic character from 'Eat Pray Love".

They all require action from you to achieve whatever it is they are selling.  All but one.

Christianity honestly accepts the existence of a universe bigger than you can realize, bigger than you could possibly understand yet patiently, lovingly, gracefully gives you one. simple. answer.

Jesus.

[DruulEmpire]

I do worry that this is a very prevalent dogma.  All I can say is that I personally do not trust at all the smugness of claiming "Hey, I don't need works."  I say there definitely must be works -- a point which some Protestants enjoy "accusing" us Catholics, especially the more activist and left-wing, of.  "By their fruits ye shall know them," the scripture goes.  You deliberately bear no fruit, just what the heck kind of a tree are you?

This is also a Jewish grievance.  Judaism is tough, whereas Christianity can be suspiciously streamlined.  The trouble being, I don't know if sheer toughness is necessarily any more virtuous in and of itself than convenient streamlining.

[Belle]

No smugness at all.  Works will always be the symptom, and yes - the fruit of the relationship.  Works will never create the path to salvation, but their presence will be the key indicators of the type of life that is being lived.  They are the clothes, not the man.  It is ever so important to understand that they are the result, not the cause.  Never the cause.

The Jewish grievance is predicated on an even stronger dogmatic tradition of control than the Catholic church.

I'm not sure what streamlining is.

[3deroticer]

I do worry that this is a very prevalent dogma.  All I can say is that I personally do not trust at all the smugness of claiming "Hey, I don't need works."  I say there definitely must be works -- a point which some Protestants enjoy "accusing" us Catholics, especially the more activist and left-wing, of.  "By their fruits ye shall know them," the scripture goes.  You deliberately bear no fruit, just what the heck kind of a tree are you?

This is also a Jewish grievance.  Judaism is tough, whereas Christianity can be suspiciously streamlined.  The trouble being, I don't know if sheer toughness is necessarily any more virtuous in and of itself than convenient streamlining.

There is a book that may interest you called "The Year of Living Biblically (One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible)" by A.J.Jacobs

He didn't make following Jesus footstep sound so easy!

[rtpoe]

Well, to be fair, he was dealing with the rules and regulations from the Old Testament. Jesus pretty much reinterpreted all that, and his followers continued on and created a completely new way of living, one that didn't necessarily keep all those little rules.

The one thing that really gets under my skin is when people lump widely varying religions/sects  together, and then tar all of them with the same brush. The Roman Catholic Church gets hit for things that the Bible-thumping Protestant fundamentalists do, for example.

And it seems only Christianity (in some form or another) is the only faith that is subject to criticism. No one ever tells the Jainists to lighten up, or the believers in Shinto that their faith is silly.