I think we should call the leaders of such Sunday Meetup groups "Priests", or maybe "Ministers".
The ones you mentioned do not meet to talk about ancient philosophy. They meet to talk about an imaginary entity you come to kneel to and pray it does not bring the end of the world.
The managers of these groups also expect the participants to tell them what they did wrong (confession) and when they hear that a guy is going to rape someone because he feels that need, they cowardly cover for him. Mostly because they put their comfort above the life of someone else (secret of confession).
So yeah, that wood be good but for now this is just a meeting of people who learned this from their parents and do not want to think about the whole craziness of the idea.
The charity work is nice, though.
(And I think the answer is no, the Buddha did not say that.)
The social aspect seems to be the biggest motivating factor for what makes people either join or leave a religion.
People often choose to stop a belief because of the failings of their parents, spiritual leader, etc without thought to their direct relationship with their deity and the belief system itself.
- In other words, if you are Catholic and your priest was a criminal does that mean the next logical step is to become an atheist?
- If you’re an atheist and science says that the inherent beauty of laws of the universe means that it is a possibility that our world was engineered by powerful being(s) does that mean you should jump your belief all the way to creationism?
I wonder how many people who attend church and identify as Christian hold similar views to mine: overall it's a pretty good system but very few stories in the Bible are historically accurate.
You get the holidays and culture, nice set of shared stories and a shared common sense. Thinking any of it is factually accurate or that god is a thing or being that actually exists is almost considered weird.
In Slovenia (where I’m from), for example, about 70% of the population identifies as Catholic, but only 25% say there might be a god. Another 30% say there’s probably some sort of greater spirit, but not necessarily god.
The American version always seemed odd to me. Believing that stuff in the Bible is factually true, not just fables with lessons ... that’s weird.
At least that’s what they told the peasants. In reality it’s all about power politics and money. Same as now.
You gotta remember that for 2000 years the church was politics. Sure there were kings but who crowns the king? The church does.
Because Occam's razor is clear. I successfully grow flowers on my balcony and my verification and peer review of temperature is not alarming. It's hard to make a living as a scientist, and journals need sensationalism, so of course people in their 30s+ would show me numbers that fit the agenda. From logical thinking the deduction is there is no global warming, but I do believe there is in some parts of the world, and we'd best do something about it.
Same thing goes for what ancient civilisations believed within the concept of their lifestyles.
Much of the bible is a mix of history inspired folk tales, political propaganda, morality tales, and self-help advice from various eras. It’s a great resource in that respect, but I wouldn’t use it to explain any particular “how”
Being raised in the church and briefly having taught kids there, please don't do this. Even in progressive churches the lessons they risk being exposed to will teach lazy thinking: trust in authority, testimony above hard evidence, etc. At worst they may be taught to hate or despise themselves, others, or natural desires.
I really think the article's author is on to a good line of thinking.
From a Texas Monthly article: "Jensen, who joined the church in 2005, did not come to St. Andrew’s in search of protective cover. On the contrary. In an article posted on the church’s Web site, he explained that he came in search of a moral and political community .... He told the congregation that he did not accept the divinity of Jesus, but he did endorse the core principles in Jesus’ teaching and pledged to be a responsible member if they would have him. That was enough for the folk at St. Andrew’s." [0]
(That didn't sit well with traditionalist elements in the larger church and led to ecclesiastical trouble. [1])
[0] https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/st-andrews-presbyteria...
[1] https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/confession/the-inquisition/
Otherwise you're soon running into creationism, or purity culture, or speaking in tongues and the evil of backsliders, or why women can't hold jobs, why dolls violate the 2nd commandment, or, imo, one of the worst, Calvinism and it's TULIP doctrine[1]. I'm not sure what's worst, L, wherein God only saves some, and sends the rest to hell as an example of his grace to those going to heaven, or P, where if you express reservations or concerns about the church, you're obviously not actually saved and are going to hell.
https://www.meetup.com/Bible-Study-for-Skeptics-Agnostics-an...
I'm also a regular on the creationist debate circuit. In fact, I'm doing one this afternoon:
At first glance, it appears that agnosticism is more rooted in science and evidence than atheism.
What is atheism’s general view of BioLogos and evolutionary creation as supported by the former head of the Human Gene Project and NIH, Francis Collins?
My personal view is more nuanced than that, but it's much too long a story for an HN comment. The TL;DR is that the divergence between science and religion happens very, very early in one's thought process. Humans seek to explain their experiences, but there are two very different kinds of explanation you can choose to seek. You can pursue mechanism, i.e. what are the laws that describe the phenomena we observe, or you can pursue teleology, i.e. what is the purpose of the phenomena that we observe? If you choose the former, you end up with science, and if you pursue the latter, you end up with religion.
Neither approach subsumes the other. Science fails to identify purpose, and teleology fails to identify a mechanism. But humans want both, so we struggle to put together some kind of synthesis. BioLoogos is a valiant attempt at a synthesis, but it's not really supportable by anything other than our desire to construct a unified theory of our existence, i.e. to tell a story that makes us feel warm and fuzzy. IMHO it's problematic from the perspective of both theology and science. But, like I said, it's a long story.
Personally I liken the typical materialist denial of telos to only trusting quantitative data, which is something they also do. You don't even get half the picture because the two halves form a greater whole.
To be honest, it was a catastrophe when the dualism of the Abrahamic religions was split down the middle and the spiritual half was abandoned. Its no surprise that modernism is so unfulfilling when the default philosophies that are compatible with pure materialism are hedonism and nihilism.
Right, I didn't mean to imply that it was. It's just an explanation (a hypothesis at this point) for how otherwise reasonable people end up with radically different worldviews.
When our kids were very little, my Episcopalian wife said we needed to raise them in a religious tradition "so they'd have something to reject when they grow up." So we did; both were baptized (as infants) and confirmed (as teens) at her parish. Fast forward three decades: One now-grown and -married kid is on the vestry (board of directors) of the parish, while the other hasn't darkened the door of any church since he was a teenager, apart from his sister's wedding.
(Later I ended up joining as well; see https://www.questioningchristian.com/2005/05/why_i_call_myse...)
Outside of a particular brand of Protestantism which happens to be quite popular in the US, Christians doctrine doesn't hold that the Bible is a literally factual narrative.
But beyond that, which obviously doesn't quite cover the degree of divergence you seem to be suggesting, there are probably Churches you'd fit into without hypocrisy, though som e might argue they they are only partially or historically Christian, e.g., some Unitarian Universalist churches.
My experience in Canada is that there are a lot of people who would most closely align with Liberal Christianity[0] but then spend their time in churches which are more "traditional". I think there is a bit of disconnect and tension in the current state of the churches here, though I think as this subgroup of Christians grows it will have to be addressed.
The history of the Jewish and Christian scriptures and the subsequent history of the many faith communities who read them, shows how much time and effort people have spent trying to understand themselves and the world.
IME and those I've read about on various ex Reddit subs is that many stop believing because the evidence is non-existent. Learning about the hypocrisy of leadership may push people out of certain organizations, but to stop believing is another thing.
Nobel-winning physicist, Roger Penrose.
Question: Do the wonders of physics and the beauty of its laws inspire belief in something that is beyond science?
Answer: ‘There is a sense in which I would say I’m an agnostic[...] But that doesn’t mean I’m an atheist. Do I believe in something outside science? Well, it’s a bit hard to know. What is science? Where are its boundaries? Is there something going on in consciousness, which is outside of science? Well, I like not to think that. It is certainly outside the science we have now. But it’s something we can explore scientifically. Whether we will have an understanding of what’s going on, which is deep enough to solve the mystery of what it is to be, I don’t know.’
Source: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-singular-mind-roger-pe...
I've stopped believing in Christianity because the things I learned about physics and sociology far better explain the evidence that I've seen. Others appear to have done the same. Whether their is some untest-able higher power is irrelevant to my life. And if it can be tested and falsified then given enough time and effort it will be proven. Yet centuries of human effort have been wasted exploring what may simply be a side effect of overzealous agent detection.
Great way to put it, definitely going to steal this one!
Our brain's pattern recognition circuits are highly developed and we like to anthropomorphize. Tens of thousands of years ago with a lack of scientific knowledge, who else but the gods could we have pointed to in order to explain the world around us?
I find some of these other explanations strange and quite at odds with the experience of me and the rest of my deconverted family.
For those that become “religious” and see it as their personal mission and spiritual relationship, then the social part has scant importance because the hypocrisy is that of other corruptible individuals.
This is a very American kind of statement.
In this world, most people don't 'join' religions - they are born into them, and they are usually a part of the social fabric.
In the New World we have this notion that Religions are a bunch of competing ideas, that you can join or unjoin this or that.
Joining/unjoining kinds of religions are so fundamentally different things that they probably need different words.
Catholicism is so different from Evangelicalism that they probably should not be put in the same boat.
Catholicism in many ways is more similar to Judaism than Evangelicalism.
Anglicans (Church of England), Catholics (Church of Latin world), Presbyterians (Church of Scotland), Methodists (Church of Some Germans) and Judaism ('Church' of Jews) - should almost be thought of in cultural or ethnic terms as much as religious.
The Church has always been a cultural and community centre as much as any place of mere belief.
The notion that we treat it almost in terms of 'belief' is a constant fallacy which causes us to often miss the point.
Finally - religious fervour moved out of the Church in the last century into left/right wing politics. It's just taking a different form now.
Most of what I'm bemoaning here boils down to frustration with the apparent increase in anti-intellectualism, and how it pervades everything. If you don't understand enough of what's been discussed before, you can't even have a coherent conversation. There are all too many incoherent conversations going on.
The trend seems to be that people first decide what's most personally appealing to believe, then label themselves whatever fits with their in-group, with almost no attempt to connect the two. From a philosophical perspective, there is a lot of reinventing the wheel (poorly) going on, and very little recognition that carefully thought out frameworks which considered every possible angle and relentlessly sought internal logical consistency have existed for hundreds of years.