One of the high points for me regarding religion in the past couple years was finding The Holy Post podcast. One host is Phil Vischer, AKA Bob the Tomato, the creator of Veggie Tales. I have some fundamental (heh) disagreements with their perspective at this point, but they remind me of what I thought the church was while growing up within it, and they still largely reflect what I think it should be. They acknowledge that there’s lots of room for disagreement, they don’t think they have all the answers, and they strike me as genuinely loving people.

If I had heard more people talking like them 20 years ago, I might not have left the church. It’s not a question of “baby food” so much as “cultural identity,” and the cultural identity of the American church is largely flag-waving rah-rah nationalism. Not sure what stats you’re referencing, because megachurches are still quite popular here and quite clear on their “theology.”

If you the parent poster are not located in America, please disregard this post entirely.

However once I realized that, on a very fundamental level, the core of what they where claiming as true wasn't in fact true, I felt I had no choice to walk away.

My experience was seeing huge amounts of falsehood and hypocrisy as religious people followed and repeated all the rituals of the mass but in the day to day life they just did not care about others and pretty much ignored what their religion taught them.

Thank God after those 12 years I saw everything I needed from religion to get as far away from it as I can.

When I went for HS, literally the only elective was Art, and for any student in honors courses, it wasn't an elective: you didn't take art because all of your time was in academic courses except for gym once a week. Don't get me wrong, I think electives are valuable and wish I'd had the opportunity: I'm just describing the educational priorities of that type of school. However they also need revenue, so the ones that remain these days are generally a little more friendly in allowing for an individual's interests.

That is THE King Edwards Tolkien's Alma mater and is normaly first or second ranked in the UK.

In my opinion, Catholicism (for all it's good qualities) is too theoretical and abstract. It's easy to walk out of church without any real takaways that you might apply to your ordinary life.

It hit home as a teenager during Easter Sunday mass. A priest enters the church, wearing his extra religious garb, a crucifix is carried behind him. The procession take several steps, the worshippers then kneel down and immediately stand back up. Several more steps, then kneeling and standing. Then several more steps, then kneeling and standing.

The third time I stood up I felt like it was outside my body looking at myself. Following the crowd with absolutely no idea why or the meaning behind it. To me, I looked like an idiot. My father was religious his entire life, so afterwards I asked him what the ceremony represented, he had no idea. I went to church less and less after that.

Earlier this year I attended a 90 minute "walkthrough" of the mass where my priest explained the structure and meaning of a normal everyday mass. At the end of it he had still only scratched the surface, but it was probably more explanation than most (ex-)Catholics ever receive on the topic.

A key thing for me (I'm still not religious, though I'm religion-adjacent in some ways) was seeing that religion - despite what some would tell you - is at its best when it's not made to be about material truths at all. Its truths, really, are truths about the human condition and how best to live it out.

In this sense, even as someone who doesn't believe in metaphysical spirits, the heart of what they're claiming (if you really dig down deep past many of the surface-level particulars) contains a lot of truth.

That teaching is probably wrong and causes so much damage to so many people.

Funny how the Hebrew and Greek words for fear have so many other meanings, and yet the church has taught but one for so long when considering the "fear of God".

Seems to contradict "perfect love casts out all fear". Perhaps we would all be better off if we understood "wisdom begins with the awe of God" as the preferred intention.

Because fear based things really suck.

Mortal/grave sins must be confessed per catholic doctrine, but to say that the mere acts were final is to misunderstand the whole concept of the new covenant.

[1] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s...

Can you truly perform confession for a sin that you are unrepentant about? Like if someone is continuously having gay sex with no regrets or desire to change can they really "confess" about that? Don't you need to at least "admit" that you have sinned in order to confess?

I agree with you that a couple of instances of gay sex doesn't send a person to hell, but a lifestyle where you accept gay sex as a fundamental part of yourself that you don't even try to change does send you hell if I understand the doctrine correctly.

My disagreement is in the idea of permanently accepting a lifestyle oriented around gay sex while also trying to remain a Christian. That lifestyle is clearly contrary to the church teachings, so maintaining such a stance over a lifetime requires spiritual stagnation such that you don't have to face the dissonance involved. That assumes a foundation of belief; without belief, church is like any other social function; with it, the idea of rejecting teachings shouldn't seem like a viable path. There are plenty of churches where such dissonance is the norm and a welcome contributor to doctrine, but if you aren't taking the teachings as foundational, then you're sort of just using Jesus as a figurehead of a pretty nice guy, which the Catholic church reliably objects to.

Having said all that, there are plenty of problems with implementation. I don't think you'd have to look far to find a Catholic church where many or most people agree to quietly disagree about contraception.They shouldn't be allowed to do so,but it's a much easier thing to hide. And you could argue that it's a much less visible, and thus less subversive, transgression (not clear that that's true.)

In both of those cases, though, the last thing the church should be doing is casting believers out. If they do that, they're abdicating their very clear responsibility to help those people. Whether you agree with those changes being "help", from the perspective of doctrinally sound preachers/congregants/parishes, directing others to lives ordered toward church teachings is the most important and morally obligatory thing.

I guess you would say that the action that sends a person to hell is the refusal to follow church doctrine, but when the church doctrine is "don't have gay sex" ...

However, even with that out of the way, it's not that gay sex accumulates some overwhelming terrible immoral inertia in a person that eventually cannot be stopped. But it drives a person away from God continually. To really understate the idea by a weak analogy, it's like how eating a diet of constant sugar will not necessarily kill you, but is likely to lead to diabetes and metabolic disorders that people rarely come back from, even though we recognize that coming back from these is entirely possible. And not just that, but watching this from the sideline, you can't comprehend how the people suffering from these problems would sooner die than just curb sugar intake. How people walk into the general surgery practices day after day, not even acting surprised when you tell them you'll be cutting their right foot off because the loss of circulation from diabetes has caused it to become gangrenous.

Now apply that to something more important than your foot or your mortal life. The church's perspective is that unrepentant gay sex is to living a life ordered toward God, as excessive sugar intake is to proper metabolic functioning.

The particular urgency in this sin is that I am likely able to drink too much and disrespect my wife and watch porn, but then repent. All those things will weaken my relationship with God, but my acceptance that they're wrong allows me to be guided rightly. Living a committed homosexual life is inconsistent with living a life of God; being committed to both means that sooner or later, the incoherence will cause one or the other link to break completely. "If your left eye causes you to sin, better to cut it out..."

To my mind, most of the planet's population have got to the 'right place' (show love and compassion to those you meet) - and how we all got to this same place is immaterial.

I'm without a doubt an atheist to my core - but doesn't stop me admiring those with faith who use it to lead a good life.

Now it makes me cringe. Like you, still Atheist to the core. But I can really appreciate many of my childhood church’s teachings: God is love, God forgives us, God accepts all of us. I can listen in awe at the sermons of Dr. King Jr. And while I cannot imagine ever believing the supernatural aspects of it all, I will always deeply appreciate and agree with the concern and caring for The Least of These, and our shared responsibility to one another.

(I’m not saying it isn’t. I think all belief in science requires an act of faith, e.g., the universe obeys laws of physics. I just haven’t heard this argued before.)

That points to why belief in free will is an act of faith. It is, by definition, not possible to know (because you could always argue your conclusions were not made by your will). It also lies outside the usual ‘god of the gaps’ straw-man debate, because it is more like an endless chasm. :)

But every Christian that doesn’t reject the first Commandment implicitly believes the same thing. Some of them picket and scream terrible things at their outgroupers. Most are reasonably neutral and nice.

Giving too much oxygen or mind share to the few vocal outliers only lowers your quality of life. Also, there are enough atheists/agnostics/nones that it’s basically useless to talk about them as a monolithic group.

I am far more concerned about the asymmetry of media/discussion about the obnoxious few with bad ideas over the quiet plurality of pleasant people who don’t force their toxic ideas on others.

I’ve encountered this claim more often than I’ve encountered actual fundamentalist churches I think are making any sort of strong claim about the world.

So I’m curious to hear what people think is wrong.

What are the downsides to suspending scientific accuracy for the purposes of doing Aikido?

I had a similar experience — in Kung fu and Buddhism.

Beliefs are a model of the world: just because a model isn’t phrased in terms of my core beliefs doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach me.

In the case of Kung fu and Buddhism, I don’t believe I would understand things as well as I do (physics, physiology, neurology) without having taken the time to understand what those other models were trying to express about the world.

To use an analogy: just because I have an irresolvable dependency conflict with a new piece of software doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach me about software and programming.

My solution to encountering outdated beliefs with great utility was to try and update them — to retell Kung fu (and Buddhism) in that new world view. Buddhism has a maxim to keep what’s useful and discard the rest.

What does “ki” mean in physics?

I think it’s more than esoteric luggage, but a class of physics equations which are nasty to write down because they’re complex differential equations — and the numerics don’t matter to the practice, just the behavior of the system.

So you give a name to that behavior and model it experimentally, describe it euphemistically, etc.

I get spending the time to learn multiple models and translate between them isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, though. Those people reasonably make different choices than I did.

I can’t — so I found it necessary to dig into the old program and port the concepts.

I would argue that more people should do that, even when they don’t immediately understand the old model well enough to port.

Both in software and martial arts.

not OP, but I would presume "the claim" is that (a) there is a God, (b) the church knows which one, and (c) they know what he wants.

For comparison, I (atheist) normally state my position as "There is insufficient evidence to conclude there is a God," so any statement about there being any god, or about what influence they should/do have on our lives I treat as a "claim," which requires supporting evidence.

While the whole atheist-agnostic thing is more of a continuum than not, I think the line is whether you believe there is no God or whether you don’t believe there is one. It might seem pedantic but I do think it’s an important distinction.

I used to identify as agnostic for a while--the definition I quoted is one adapted from The Atheist Experience podcast. I'd personally describe someone who actively believes there is no god, i.e. possesses enough evidence to claim "There cannot be any god" an "anti-theist", in my personal lexicon.

Generally this is why I bother to give the specific definition by claim--too often I've encountered religious folk who take "atheist" to mean "one who hates god", or "one who actively has evidence against a god", or similar--which may be true for other folk who use the label atheist, but doesn't match my personal definition.

As you said, "the whole atheist-agnostic thing is more of a continuum than not," so I like to give the definition to clear up any mis-assumptions people may make about me for using said label :)

I also agree that the difference does matter--I also think it's more intellectually honest of me to allow for the possibility that I am wrong, however unlikely--even then, there is an important distinction between acknowledging the existence of a god, and choosing to worship said god if they even existed (which is usually the follow-on question from religious folk I talk to.

We know there is a God AND the Bible is some sort of authoritative (most would claim the most authoritative) description of who/how God is and how he wants us to behave towards him.

Often there is also a third correlating claim that our interpretation of the Bible is the most correct interpretation.

I have issues with 1) "God told me to tell you" (any human claiming to represent God to their fellow humans. They surely would be devoid of ulterior motives, right?)

2) This collection of hitherto uncompiled writings (including a wholesale incorporation of Judaism) that were uncontestedly written by humans, some of which we know the names of, has now become a singular "book" and it's the world of God, shut up or else, etc.

I smell humans, not divinity.

Oh, and YES you nailed it on the last point. Witness the smug way some Evangelicals dismissively tell a Catholic "but I am CHRISTIAN"...

Part of my de-conversion was driven by what looked to me like people willfully deceiving themselves that it was possible to "choose" a church who fit their worldview, without treating the cosmology claims the church inherently makes with the same skepticism.

td;dr: Denominations vary wildly, and it's almost impossible to separate one's personal biases from choosing a congregation.

For example, Catholicism is very heirarchical, stating that one cannot receive salvation except through the Catholic Church. Methodism states that good acts + belief are the gateway to heaven. Lutheranism promises salvation to all that believe in Christ.

Or take the infallibility of the Bible. The Roman Catholic faith places a lot of emphasis on church doctrine, which is based on the Bible to be sure, but also a lot of church constructs. Baptists believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible. Mainline protestants emphasize historical context and nuance. ELCA does not even claim the Bible is the literal word of God.

Plus, individual congregations within a denomination might have differences in emphasis, sociopolitical leanings, etc. It's important to know that "The Church" is in many cases, and especially for Protestant denominations, made up of congregations from the bottom up, and reflects the aggregate of its membership.

If it's possible for all these varied denominations to come to wildly different conclusions about god, the world, and his desires for us, all based off the same source materials and epistemological tools (e.g., faith)--differences that're important enough to have fought wars and divided nations over--why then do people believe these source materials and tools are still a reliable way to determine how one should live their life?

The fact that these huge disagreements exist is evidence to me that the bible specifically and religious texts generally aren't reliable systems to learn about the world.

What frustrates me is people who "church shop" seem to be aware of this, because they're seeking a church that is similar enough to their existing beliefs yet the indicators of that are difficult to find because even within the same denomination a specific population can hold different beliefs, yet they don't extrapolate to the wider issue of the base beliefs being the issue.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624502

There are very different views on what the United States Constitution means and requires. Arguments about it are had on the internet daily, in congress frequently, in the court system constantly, and there was once even a war over it. One could conclude that the Constitution is such a badly written document that you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean, but I see here the work of self-interest. When the stakes are sufficiently high, men are geniuses at convincing themselves that what they want to be true, is true.

For churches claiming that they believe the bible to be the divinely inspired word of God, the stakes are very, very high. In consequence, the incentives to convince yourself that the bible says what you want it to say are also extremely high. Self-deception thrives under those conditions.

> One could conclude that there is not a reliable way to determine when fouls should be called.

One certainly could conclude that, but it seems strange to me to give equal weight to the opinions of those who're most invested in the outcome. I would instead turn to a more objective measure--either the calls of the officials, or even a close reading of the rules and reviewing all the available observations of the event.

> One could conclude that the Constitution is such a badly written document that you can make it mean whatever you want it to mean...

I would certainly agree that there are many points on which the Constitution is unclear or poorly written :) The caveat of the constitution is that we don't have to exist alongside its poor meanings for eternity with no recourse--We the People are imbued with the ability to clarify and update the constitution, a power we've used many times to correct its shortcomings.

If I am to take your use of the Constitution as an analogy to the Christian bible, the opposite is true of that bible: we're unable to clarify and update it where flaws are discovered, and must continue to exist with it as the supposed-word-of-God in its current form. Just as with the Constitution, it is possible that new interpretations of the text can develop, but it's impossible to decide if they are truly "correct" with regard to authorial intent--something much more important of the bible than the constitution.

> Self-deception thrives under those conditions.

I absolutely agree. Part of what frustrates me about conversations around religious accuracy is that the stakes are (typically) set so, so much higher for the religious party: the threat of damnation, eternal torment, and not being able to see one's deceased loved ones make a powerful incentive to overlook otherwise obvious shortcomings in one's reasoning.

In that respect, shopping for churches is mostly irrelevant. What you see as fundamental differences are really more social than theological, in which case the shopping around makes a lot of sense.

"the bible specifically and religious texts generally aren't reliable systems to learn about the world."

I think most mainline Christians would reject the notion that the Old Testament is a factual historical record. (Less so for Evangelical and Pentecostal, however). Religion teaches us "why", not "what".

Edit: Thought about it a little more and I guess fear is a pretty legitimate reason to do so. If one truly believes that if one does not worship then an eternity in hell is on the plate then worshipping does make sense but it cant be anything except a Stockholm syndrome style of worship.

The arguments generally revolve around the tension between justice and forgiveness.

Jumping to forgiveness elides the question of sins and crimes and injustices that demand punishment, atonement, reparation, consequences.

How can God welcome everyone into Paradise, oppressor alongside oppressed, murderer alongside murderer, rapist alongside their victims, and every other kind of perpetrator of evil and those they have trespassed against?

The Cross is meant as a way of reconciling this tension, and a great many sermons have been devoted to trying to explain the mystery of it.

Perhaps because existing answers are unconvincing to those asking :)

To that end:

> How can God welcome everyone into Paradise, oppressor alongside oppressed ... ?

Your god supposedly made this universe, and dictated the laws that govern it--metaphysical and otherwise. I have a difficult time making excuses for oddities in those laws alongside that.

From the outside, it all looks like a bit of a cup game [1]: We have sinned against god, and have been stained eternally by that. God demands punitive justice for our transgressions, yet we cannot redeem ourselves independently, by god's laws. The only way to wash the sin from ourselves is for god to send himself (which is also his son?) to die for our transgressions, satisfying this punishment (though he'll be raised 3 days later), such that we can then pass into his kingdom.

(1) Apologies for irreverence, this just sounds like when a bunch of 3 year olds are playing war in the yard:

  "I shoot you with my laser!"
  "Well my atomic armor blocks your laser!"
  "But my laser is hooked up to my fusion backpack, and cuts through your atomic armor!"

(2) I don't understand how in any way this reforms us sinners that we may pass into heaven and exist alongside each other--we haven't undergone any transformation on our own such that we understand the terrible crimes we're supposedly guilty of; we're certainly (in the church's view) not any less likely to commit sin if we know about these crimes we've committed and the supposed significance that god himself had to die (but only kind of?) for them.

In either reformative or punitive justice, it makes no sense: we're no less likely to commit these sins by threat of punishment, because we can be forgiven simply by believing in Jesus. We also aren't any less likely to commit sin by being reformed because... we haven't reformed at all, we simply believe in this story.

I'd kindly request you to consider looking at this from a secular view, as if someone were proposing this as a system of justice in a secular context: Does this seem a reasonable way to structure a society, where those who break the laws of the society can send someone in their stead for reformation or punishment? I strongly doubt the efficacy of such a system, and I find it so strange that folks accept it in a religious context.

> The Cross is meant as a way of reconciling this tension, and a great many sermons have been devoted to trying to explain the mystery of it.

Perhaps god could have explained it more clearly and saved us all a lot of confusion :)

As it stands, I see no reason to believe this tension exists in the first place. In order for this explanation to make sense I first must subscribe to your premises--that god exists, that we're guilty of eternal sin which we're unable to address ourselves, etc--which I see no reason to do.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bto_3Z1dqc

About 800 years before the birth of Christ the prophet Isaiah wrote the following prophecy (Isaiah 53:5-6):

"But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. 6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."

I encourage you to read the the whole chapter of Isaiah 53 here:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+53&versi...

As Christians this is our salvation and what we believe when Jesus died and rose from the cross.

Happy Easter! :-)

> Because on the main point, they're all pretty much aligned...

Historically, wars have been fought over these disagreements--both within only Christianity, and in the wider religious space.

I think it's worth considering other religions personally because it's what led to my de-conversion: I couldn't answer the question of why, other than being raised in it, I should believe Christianity over, say, Buddhism or Islam. As I regarded other religions with skepticism, when I was a Christian, I should also regard Christianity.

While the specific point I've made previously deals with selecting a denomination and a church within that denomination it's also true that people choose religions for similar (flawed?) reasoning.

Further:

> What you see as fundamental differences are really more social than theological...

I'm not sure I'm convinced on this. Take gay marriage, for example: I vividly recall being 12 in our church, sitting in on a conversation between my (single) mother and our pastor, on how to deal with people who chose to sin in our lives, specifically referring to my father who was openly gay at the time. The church we went to was firmly against homosexuality, but was of the love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin cloth. On the upshot, they were relatively kind to those of the LGBT community, but they did still make it clear they did not support their "choices" and largely ostracized them--with reasoning that, in their view, was ensconced in theology.

While LGBT rights have certainly been a social issue throughout the world, I think dismissing this "difference" between my church and the one on my college campus who made a point of welcoming LGBT members is to minimize these actual theological differences. There's part of me that wonders if this is a bad-faith maneuvering (not on your part, but organized religion as a whole) to downplay socially repulsive beliefs without having to sacrifice their supposed moral authority.

> I think most mainline Christians would reject the notion that the Old testament is a factual historical record.

This certainly hasn't been true across history, and even now I harbor doubt. Perhaps I've only dealt with more fundamentalist types than you, but the opposite has been true in my experience, and is definitely not true of the more loudmouthed Creationist/Ken Ham style evangelicals. While they may not be representative of the majority, *they are affecting policy* in many regions of the country. My mother, an elementary teacher, frequently voices her frustrations that she's not allowed to pose creationism as an "alternative" to evolution in her classes science units--something that is allowed in several other states[1, though from 2014].

You see similar flaws in other arenas, too: my grandparents view climate change as an issue outside of human concern, squarely in God's hands, in part because they believe in life-after-death and the eventual rapture, so while they should do reasonably well to steward the planet, they don't think we're going to be here forever so it doesn't matter if Earth becomes an unlivable rock; while some may suffer the effects of an adverse climate, it won't matter when everyone's in heaven.

I also wonder about what motivates these changes in how doctrine is viewed. Supposing your right, what drove the digression that the Old Testament is not factual? I doubt it was the Church deciding on its own, outside of societal pressure. I'm sure it's because of pressure from those who found fault in the Old Testament teachings--those who were condemned by it, or ostracized by the churches of their time, and the Churches granted this concession without wholly usurping their power. But what about the next issue? Maybe folks are believing less in Noah's Ark, but how will they contend with folks who're trans, or polyamourus, or take issue with abstract (i.e., not historical) teachings of the bible like not rebelling against kings, for they have been ordained by God [2]?

[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201... [2]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2013&ver...

The contemporary position of the Catholic Church is that non-Catholic Christians and non-Christians can be saved. What you've said there will be read by many readers as saying that only Catholics will be saved, which is not the Catholic position at all, in fact it is the condemned heresy of Feeneyism.

Now, the Catholic Church also teaches that when non-Catholics and non-Christians are saved, they are saved through the Catholic Church – but in a mystical rather than visible way – so what you've said is literally true, but is prone to misinterpretation.

If you look at the core statements of beliefs from various Christian denominations, you will find far more similarities than differences, especially around the core tenets of the faith.

As the Christian god demands "You shall have no other gods before me" how can I freely consider participating in other religions alongside Christianity? Surely one of them must be closest to reality with its claims--unless I am to regard the demands these religions make of me merely as suggestions, or allegorical teachings? While that's certainly possible (and, I'm told, the case of the Greek and Roman gods), that's not how I often encounter religion in my life.

Typically it's being cited as edicts or prohibitions that must be followed, lest terrible things happen, and being used to motivate people's decisions around policy and behavior, policy and behavior which I've watched cause harm to myself and those I care about.

I find it a ridiculous proposition that a person could make a decision that would have such effects by seeing which of these contradictory things "resonates" with them, somehow.

That doesn't actually seem like a problem specific to religion, but a problem with truth, generally. If anyone believes their beliefs are true, they have to reconcile that with the fact that people disagree, which usually proceeds by believing those people are in error or that the differences aren't significant. I don't think Christians actually believe that the truth is something easy to access, given the emphasis on faith and belief that everyone is flawed, etc.

Forgive my possibly abrasive tone, but "given the emphasis on faith and belief that everyone is flawed" falls apart when the focal point of the church and the religion it purports, the god, is held to be infallible.

The notion that all these disparate groups can cite the same 'source of truth' as their guiding principles, yet come to such significantly different conclusions as to fight wars over them shows those principles aren't as useful or reliable as members of any church make them out to be.

That's where my frustrations come in: churchgoers seem inherently aware of these intense differences, yet don't seem to question the reliability of their text (or view, or belief, or...) despite all these alternative conclusions from the same tools and evidence.

(In Street Epistemology the "Outsider Faith Test" is used to demonstrate this; broadly phrased, "If it is possible for a person of Hinduism to use faith to justify their belief in their god(s), and it's possible for a Christian person to use faith to justify their belief in their god, yet those beliefs are in opposition to one another, is faith a reliable tool to determine what is true?")

Not really. That only falls apart under particular assumptions (e.g. an assumption that a perfect thing will only create other perfect things, or that perfection will be the particular kind you imagined it must be).

> (In Street Epistemology the "Outsider Faith Test" is used to demonstrate this; broadly phrased, "If it is possible for a person of Hinduism to use faith to justify their belief in their god(s), and it's possible for a Christian person to use faith to justify their belief in their god, yet those beliefs are in opposition to one another, is faith a reliable tool to determine what is true?")

I've got a pretty clear sense that there are regions of truth that our "reliable tools" cannot access. Faith is basically the hope that some of those regions can be accessed in other ways.

This is a contradiction in terms. If you have a set of tools such that some tools reliably determine truth and some don't, inherently that latter set can't be used to "access" other "regions of truth." Put differently, when I examine the universe with my reliable truth-tools (roughly, the scientific method), I see no reason to believe that these other regions of truth that my tools cannot detect exist. If I use tools that are demonstrably flawed, like faith, I can conclude those things are true, but why would I use known-bad tools to reason with?

It almost feels like a weird inverted understanding of object permanence; I can't see into the other room, so I cannot reliably determine what is inside it. It's possible since I left it that a ninja suck in and left a million dollars in my couch cushions, then retrieved it later--I would have no way to detect that from here, so my 'tools' can't determine that. Why would I choose to believe in the ninja?

It is possible that you could come to believe something that is true by faith (as in, "I have faith we live in a heliocentric solar system, although I cannot prove or determine this with my current set of tools"), you cannot use faith to prove that what you believe is true. A practitioner of Street Epistemology, Anthony Magnabosco, has a very good conversation [1] with someone on that very topic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmFyiLICAa8

You'll notice I put "reliable tools" in quotes. I do not think they are as reliable as you do. For instance, to give a secular example, they're unlikely to be able to give an answer to the simulation hypothesis. Say physics ultimately derives from a certain configuration in Conway's Game of Life, and that configuration is in-fact running on some kid's Hyperpentium 4 PC. Science may be able to access the truth of the configuration and game rules, but it's totally blocked from probing the region of truth beyond that. However, that block is one way, and the kid's totally capable of editing the configuration to add a message "LOL U DOODS R IN MY PC." Now (with or without the message) you may decide to have utter faith in your tools, and deny or dismiss as meaningless what they can't perceive, but that's just denial or averting your eyes. There is truth there, it's just outside the grasp of your tools.

This is another tool in the Street Epistemology toolbox, one normally done at the start of the conversation: you display a container of tic tacs and ask if there's an even or odd number in there--your conversation partner shouldn't be allowed to closely examine the tic tacs. There is a 'true' answer, but it's impossible to determine from their vantage point: as such, what use is either stance? The only "correct" answer is to acknowledge while there may be a true answer, they're unable to determine it from there and as such they don't know.

My tools are perfectly reliable in the sense that they are reliable indicators of truth where they can be applied, e.g. to things that can be observed. You're completely correct in that if we are in a simulation they can only probe the bounds of the problem, and offer no answer as to if we are indeed in a solution (beyond if an observable event occurs that would indicate such)--but I don't feel compelled to choose a "side" on that issue, and I remain skeptical of people who choose to do so in the absence of evidence--the same skepticism I regard folks who believe in a god with an absence of evidence. They may be correct, depending on the claims they make about that god and it's ability to influence the universe, but I see no reason to allow that possibility to influence my life and decision making, just as I don't allow the simulation hypothesis to influence my decision making: having seen no evidence, why would I affect change in my life for this thing?

It seems as though we've disagreed on the meaning of "reliable tools"--I don't mean omniscient, I simply mean they're the best way I've found to believe things that are true with regard to reality; put differently, they don't yield false positives. (Though it's wholly possible for me to reach false conclusions, I am only human.)

So, I should conclude that I don't know if LIGO has ever detected gravitational waves? I am unable to determine that from my vantage point.

I've previously seen people phrase that as "having faith in the beliefs of others," which usually boils down to semantics on what "faith" means: I believe it is likely those people have observed the things they say they have, because of the nature of the scientific community and how these experiments are structured.

I also think we're getting rather far off the specific, original issue: the existence of a god. In my experience this has been the kind of thing a single individual can experiment with and reason around--at least, in all the ways people tend to give evidence for their belief in god:

(1) hearing him communicate with them in some way

(2) seeing him influence the universe in ways they'd expect a god to

(3) believing a god must have been necessary to create the universe due to its complexity/beauty/etc.

You'd contended (please do correct me if I've misunderstood your argument) that the tools I suggested--the scientific method--were incapable of determining what lies behind the observational curtain, which I agree is certainly true: if you can't observe a thing or its effects in any way, you cannot determine its existence. The thing we seem to get hung up on is what we should believe about what lies behind that curtain.

My stance is to take the null hypothesis and assume nothing exists beyond the curtain; at the very least, not a god that interacts with our world and the people in it as the Christian faith claims. In short, "I have not seen sufficient evidence to conclude a god exists."

Your stance seems to be that it is acceptable to believe facts about things beyond this curtain; that we are not in a simulation, that there is a god, etc, framed as having faith in those facts being true, despite observational tools not functioning in this realm.

The tic-tac example wasn't supposed to be an indictment of extrapolative beliefs from experience ("these people have reliably observed the universe before / predicted things / modeled things for years, it seems reasonable to continue to trust their motivations and methods"), just a demonstration of when "I don't know" is a more correct answer over taking a stance when observational tools have reached their limit.

Huh? I picked up that you're kinda evangelical and were drifting there, but that's not where we started and it wasn't actually the conversation I was having.

> My stance is to take the null hypothesis and assume nothing exists beyond the curtain;

Isn't that a little unreasonable? You see a floor, so you assume nothing exists on the other side because it blocks your vision?

You keep taking my statements to strange extremes; I'm going to try to avoid metaphors for clarity.

I use observation and experimentation to determine true things about the world. I extend my belief in these things to other humans in the world who I believe practice observation and experimentation effectively; scientists, mostly.

When we reach the limits of these observation and experimentation based tools, like with the simulation hypothesis, I stop and say "I don't know." By the fact these things and their effects cannot be experimented on or observed, they also cannot affect my life, so why bother making conclusions that I can't verify and won't affect me anyway?

In the case of a god who created the universe, has an interest in my life, has declared certain things to be "right" and certain things to be "wrong," and hypothetically takes action in my life (e.g., the common Christian understanding), this is well within what can be observed and experimented on. As such, I take the null hypothesis like a good scientist: I don't assume there is some god and begin running experiments to determine _which_ one is there, I assume there is _no_ god and begin looking for any evidence that shows there is _any_ god.

In my experience thus far in life, I have not encountered any evidence that makes me suspect there may be any god of any kind, and certainly not the one of the Christian description.

Your original statement was:

> I've got a pretty clear sense that there are regions of truth that our "reliable tools" cannot access. Faith is basically the hope that some of those regions can be accessed in other ways.

The implication I read here is that you believe in things that cannot be demonstrated through observation and experimentation, and that it is reasonable for people to use faith to support these beliefs.

My frustration is with people who make claims about things in those regions without any way of actually demonstrating them, and then making life- and policy-based decisions around those beliefs that affect me and others in the world.

I've tried to convey why this seems unreasonable to me, and you keep taking my points to strange extremes that seem disconnected from our original discussion.

To return to your floor metaphor (which may be a poor choice on my part): I see a floor, and I assume there is no dragon in the basement that I must not aggravate because I've never seen any sign of any dragon, why would I worry about that?

What experiments have you performed to prove the "null hypothesis"? How do you respond to those who claim they've experimented on their faith and found sufficient evidence to assert their belief?

Isn't "taking the null hypothesis" at some level still making a choice of belief? Doesn't that assumption introduce some amount of skepticism and bias into the measurement? What if the proof requires some amount of willful credulity? What if it's designed to be bestowed 'line upon line' and 'precept upon precept' after 'asking in faith' 'believing that' you will 'receive'.

I've found that starting this particular hypothesis under the premise that there is a God who has crafted a plan that requires the use of your agency to regain His spirit and influence in your life tends to yield better results.

No worries :) I love these kinds of conversations.

I'll give a personal anecdote before I start slingin' scientific/philosophical language: My de-conversion started when, as a teenager, I asked myself if I only believed in Christianity (instead of, say, Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism) because I was raised in the church--and that if I'd been raised in some other religion, I would instead believe that. (I'll use this example to better frame the null hypothesis question later, but it's useful to keep in mind as I explain.)

> What experiments have you performed to prove the "null hypothesis"?

This is a minor misunderstanding of what a "null hypothesis" is and how we interact with it. A null hypothesis is basically the assumed-default of the world, based on the fewest assumptions. Any theory you may be investigating may be an alternative hypothesis, but the way you go about collecting data is less about proving an alternative and more about disproving the null.

To be maximally pedantic, science is about constructing models that most accurately model the real world. If the data contradicts a model, then it clearly isn't reliable, and we make adjustments to the model--so we would never "prove" any hypothesis, null or otherwise, we would just find that the data more and more supports a specific hypothesis (over some others).

This philosophical block of text from Wikipedia explains why we frame the null in this way pretty well:

  A negative claim is the opposite of an affirmative or positive claim.
  It asserts the non-existence or exclusion of something.
  The difference with a positive claim is that it takes only a single
  example to demonstrate such a positive assertion ("there is a chair
  in this room," requires pointing to a single chair), while the inability
  to give examples demonstrates that the speaker has not yet found or
  noticed examples rather than demonstrates that no examples exist

So when applied to our god claim, it looks something like this: I see people making saying things like

  (a) god has had influence on our past (in dictating his laws to people, performing miracles, the resurrection etc)

  (b) god has influence in the present (he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind or by influencing the world around us; enabling certain outcomes to occur, like getting a specific job or having a good surgery outcome)

Were I to invert the null, and assume that there is a god, it's possible I could construct my experiments poorly: suppose I pray that I'll get a raise at my job, and the next week my manager tells me I'm getting a raise. Is this evidence that god exists and is influencing my life? Perhaps my boss was just motivated out of my work performance over the past few months. If I'm assuming that god exists, I could easily count this as evidence without that being the case.

Suppose the opposite happens, and I don't get my raise: What does this have to say about our god question? It might be that my raise "doesn't fit god's plan", and he had his own reasons not to grant my request--the typical explanation I hear from believers. It could also be simply that I did not meet my boss's expectations for deserving a raise and it was unreasonable for me to expect one, godly influence or no.

If you loop this over a lifetime of experiences, it's very probable that you'll run into a series of events where god seems to be at work, i.e. you pray for things and they happen, or you have some fortunate luck occur, or whatnot, that you're happy to attribute as evidence to god existing--even if there's perfectly mundane explanations for each of these occurrences. You could be wrong that there is a god, yet merrily believing such because of this poor logic chain. Broadly this is "confirmation bias," [2] or "only counting the hits." You see this with things like when you buy a new car: suddenly you start seeing that car everywhere. In reality, nothing has changed in terms of the percentage-distribution of cars in your local area: you're just now more predisposed to notice the kind of car you have than you were before, so it "feels" like there are now more of them.

You may ask (and apologies if I'm straw-manning), "What if God's actions are simply indistinguishable from the mundane chance?" In science we would say that said effect would be "statistically insignificant"--if you cannot reasonable separate the effect of some thing from random chance, then it's unreasonable to conclude that the "some thing" has influence on what you're observing.

You see this in medical trials with what's called "the placebo effect" [3], where doctors will run a study where some group of people get actual (new) medicine and some group get sugar pills, and yet another group will get nothing; there are many, many cases where the sugar-pill group (the "placebo" group) display effects _different_ than the "control" group who got nothing. If the results of the group who got real medicine are similar in magnitude to those who got the sugar pills, then it'd be unreasonable to conclude that the medicine is having a real effect, since that effect can also be demonstrated by not-real-medicine.

To your questions:

> Doesn't that assumption introduce some amount of skepticism and bias into the measurement?

You're absolutely correct :) Some atheists also use the 'skeptic' label, as it more widely describes their approach to life beyond just their religious beliefs. Bias I would question--would a similar bias not be introduced by assuming there were a god? (I'd argue I've demonstrated quite a significant bias would be introduced.)

If you remember my anecdote from the beginning, I had the question of if I only believed Christianity because I was raised in it, vs these other religions. One way to frame the experiment would be to assume Christianity was correct, and begin collecting evidence: but this would leave me open to the "confirmation bias" of attributing events to a god who may not actually exist. Defaulting to the null hypothesis of there not being any god, and requiring myself to be convinced otherwise, allows me to be much more sure that *were* such an existence to be demonstrated, that it would indeed be true with regard to reality.

> How do you respond to those who claim they've experimented on their faith and found sufficient evidence to assert their belief?

Generally I ask them to walk me through their beliefs and their experiments, in the vein of Street Epistemology. I highly, highly, highly recommend watching a few of Anthony Magnabosco's videos [4] on the subject. He does an amazing job of taking a calm, reasoned, conversational approach and demonstrates many of the techniques and tools I've cited and talked about, with a variety of people on a variety of claims--though typically claims about God. In the interest of full disclosure, Anthony is an atheist, but these conversations are much more of a Socratic dialogue exploring beliefs than they are a debate.

Returning to your question, I have not yet had a conversation with a believer whose evidence I found convincing, typically due to flaws in their reasoning akin to the above. A few months ago I even read several books one such believer recommended to me ("Mere Christianity," "The Problem of Pain," and "Should We Fire God?") on the basis that those books were part of what helped build their faith, and I only came out the other side even more disillusioned about their ability to rationally engage with the subject.

> I've found that starting this particular hypothesis under the premise that there is a God who has crafted a plan that requires the use of your agency to regain His spirit...

This is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with regard to confirmation bias: If I begin looking for signs that there is the Christian god, and I allow myself to count what would otherwise be mere coincidences (or possibly very likely outcomes that I mistakenly though unlikely), I would merrily begin finding this evidence: not because it's good evidence, but because my premise is flawed. Suppose alternatively there is a god, but it's the god of Islam, or of Judaism? A lot of that evidence could support the Christian premise, but still not lead me to the correct conclusion if I'm starting from the Christian default.

I currently see no reason to believe that there is any god with such a plan requiring me to suspend my reasoning--and I would charge that any god that required me to suspend my reasoning in order to be led to believing in him (especially if that belief is demanded, lest I be punished eternally) is a god of poor moral standing.

> What if the proof requires some amount of willful credulity?

Then it's a remarkably ineffective proof :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)#P...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2EgJjQRsYE&list=PLh10RgQgGu...

>(b) god has influence in the present (he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind or by influencing the world around us; enabling certain outcomes to occur, like getting a specific job or having a good surgery outcome)

Your example experiments after this point talk about proving God exists through outcomes. I agree that experiments in this realm based on outcomes are bad. As you said, outcomes can have many different, non-divine causes; and it is impossible to observe the actual source. But what about the first point "he can communicate with people, either directly into their mind..."? What if you designed an experiment that tested whether God exists by testing if He can communicate with you? What about something like Clayton Christensen's experiment[1]? His experiment is more about a religious text than God Himself, but could something like that provide a framework for disproving the null at least?

[1] https://claytonchristensen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Wh... page 3 starting at paragraph 2

I'm flattered, but I merely consider myself a talented amateur who perhaps enjoys this subject of discussion more than is reasonable, and thus have spend an inordinate amount of time on it.

> What about something like Clayton Christensen's experiment[1]?

A critically important point in science, especially dealing with psychological matters, is knowing that the human brain for all its power is an incredibly fallible tool: it's memory is subpar [1] and it's willingness to identify patterns dangerously strong [2]. To this end, we have to design our experiments knowing that our brains will see causality where there may be none, and mis-remember data according to both our hopes and our doubts.

A second point is that an effective experiment must be (a) convincing to those who see it (with regard to the proposed conclusions) and (b) repeatable, such that those who doubt can run the experiment themselves, observe the results, and test their alternative explanations. I've seen many a scientist simultaneously sad that their hoped-for explanation was not supported by an experiment, or that their results were shown to be incorrect by another in their field adapting their experiment, but that same scientist was intensely glad for the fact that their model of the world was now more accurate.

Broadly in Street Epistemology, a methodology that lead to belief in multiple contradictory beliefs across a population is not a useful methodology for determining truth: this is an extension of the "Outsider Faith Test" I discuss somewhere up this thread. But, generally, if person A can use a methodology to conclude god A exists, and person B can use the same methodology to confirm belief in god B, then the methodology is not useful to discern realities. With more concrete examples, I've seen people claim to be filled with some emotion or spirit during Pagan rituals, or followers of the Hindu gods feel like they were having conversations with their gods, or Christians report being filled with spirit while singing hymns in their cathedrals. Since these are all effectively the same methodology--strong emotion during a worship based experience--it's reasonable to doubt that "strong emotion during a worship based experience" is a useful indicator in the existence of a specific god.

My explanation, perhaps typical of a non-believer, is that human psychology is predisposed to having these experiences, akin to the feeling of something being behind you as you ascend the dark basement stairs, or a feeling of wonder as you see how tiny your town is from a neighboring mountain: while these experiences evoke incredibly strong emotions, they aren't indicators of some supernatural power.

> His experiment is more about a religious text than God Himself, but could something like that provide a framework for disproving the null at least?

If Clayton's experiment were about disproving the null, it would have to be designed around showing the null hypothesis "there is no god" to be false. As it stands, his experiment just shows that he can have a strong emotional reaction to a text he reads late at night while praying that he has some reaction to the text he's reading. To properly disprove the null of "there is no god", or more specifically "this feeling was not caused by a god" he would have to demonstrate that either (a) the god explanation has the strongest relationship over any alternatives, or (b) that no other explanations apply. This would involve things like disproving the experience "just being within his head", or caused by his usual feelings around that time of night, or that they were reproducible in a devout atheist, or similar.

This is broadly the issue when citing individual, personal experience as evidence: it is most often collected by those with an existing bias to the results, e.g. believers hoping to have their beliefs confirmed, and it certainly can't stand up to scientific rigor (repeatable with results observable from other parties, in ways that dispel other possible explanations).

For my part, I experience incredibly intense emotions when I'm listening to recordings of communications between Air Traffic Controllers and pilots in emergency situations; in fact, in the past several years those recordings are the only thing that have moved me to actual tears. Waves of emotion about how lonely it must be to be such a pilot, even as you hear ATC routing other traffic around you, or the professional strain in the ATC's voice as they're routing search-and-rescue craft to the scene, or the intense relief when the pilot confirms they're OK after a landing. Is it reasonable for me to conclude that it's in these moments that god chooses to visit me, and fill me with concern for the pilot or gratitude for the ATC or calm over some future trip I'm to take? Or just to acknowledge that when I listen to these recordings, alone in a hotel room while traveling after a long day, I'm likely more predisposed to these emotions than I am normally?

For Clayton's part:

  During my adult life I have been blessed to witness or participate in many miracles – events that the scriptures term “gifts of the Spirit.”  I have healed the sick by the power of the God.

[1a]: https://www.ncsc.org/trends/monthly-trends-articles/2017/the...

[1b]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

A) He's dead[1] B) Jesus did this, and, as you can imagine, people weren't willing to see this as "attributable solely to his god". Even I can think of other explanations (e.g., fraud) if a person were going around the country loudly proclaiming themselves to be using God's power to heal anyone and everyone.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/business/clayton-christen...

>This is broadly the issue when citing individual, personal experience as evidence: it is most often collected by those with an existing bias to the results

Yes, I agree here. Maybe I bungled it, but I was not attempting to prove God exists through this one person's experience. Just examining it as an example of a repeatable experiment.

>reproducible in a devout atheist I would disagree here. A devout atheist presumably has a very strong bias against finding out God exists or interpreting an experience as something supernatural. So maybe "reproducible in a [dispassionate, neutral party]"?

>To this end, we have to design our experiments knowing that our brains will see causality where there may be none, and mis-remember data according to both our hopes and our doubts.

I just wonder if this is an excuse people use for never trying it out at the individual level. A person can say in their heads or out loud "God, are you there?" and observe the results. Of course, there's the question of how long one needs to go through with this. But scientists are often patient and willing to go to great lengths to prove something[1][2]. I don't blame anyone who is not willing to go through with the effort in something they see as pointless as long as they don't take the failure of one or two attempts as proof that God does not exist. E.g., Higgs et al. in a parallel universe quitting before decades passing and before having a multi-billion dollar machine doesn't prove that the Higgs boson doesn't exist.

Maybe my experiment as stated isn't it, but I think there can be a convincing and repeatable experiment along those lines. Millions of people have repeated it and experienced something convincing (to them) (I'm not trying to use "Millions of people" as proof that all of us are right or anything. Just that it can be/has been repeated). But, for sure, it is unknown whether the millions of people and I interpreted the outcome according to their hopes. I think that's why it's worth it for every individual to try for themselves.

>his experiment just shows that he can have a strong emotional reaction to a text he reads late at night while praying that he has some reaction to the text he's reading.

It is true that even very real spiritual experiences can be explained in other ways. So, you're right, the experience still has to be accepted by the observer as from God. Because I believe in an omniscient God who knows you personally, I think you'll experience exactly what you need to experience exactly when you need to experience it. I won't claim it will be irrefutable proof, but maybe it'll be enough to make you want to keep digging.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_field_theory

A conversion in this way would certainly come with an increased accountability and is perhaps why it’s more difficult to come by. Being convinced absolutely and not willing to adhere comes with more dire consequences if one is to believe scriptural record—which admittedly sounds a bit foreboding but may be more merciful than one might assume at first glance. There are even scriptural accounts of similar things being done successfully (see Paul’s experience on his road to Damascus, or if you’re willing to venture into my brand of Christianity see Alma’s experience in chapter 36 of the Book of Mormon).

However, I do think the premise of God helps me understand and open new avenues of thought. Personally, I started from the assumption that an Omniscient being, capable of designing the very reality we perceive and live in, can probably come up with a way to “test” and “prove” us in a way that protects our ability to make our own choices yet extends enough grace to satisfy the demands of justice. If I were obligated to believe because I could not refute the evidence, I don’t know how effective that would be of a test to prove I’ve become what I’m supposed to be. Personally I think this Plan works whether you get behind a belief system or not.

I have very much appreciated the insights you’ve shared. You are right, I could be wrong, and have become heavily indoctrinated with a healthy dose of confirmation bias. But for me at least, I’ve found something that I receive great benefit and perspective from. I recognize it won't be that for everyone.

The answer is that you don't, and unfortunately society doesn't look too kindly on taking copious amounts of psychedelics and wandering the desert for a month, so unfortunately it ain't as straightforward to rediscover it from first principles like Jesus did.

Couldn't you compare that to deciding between colleges? They all presumably will teach you information that is true, yet the academic culture and their perspectives on the more subjective aspects may differ between them. In academia, this sort of disagreement between schools of thought is generally considered a good thing. Not sure folks are as happy about disagreement when it comes to theology, but there certainly isn't a shortage of it there either.

Not even close. No one expects their college to impart infallible, ultimate, eternal truth. You expect to be trained in useful theories and practices, and for them to become outdated in due time. Academic disagreements are all part of the dynamic, living, changing reality of academic knowledge. Not so for final truths of what’s right and wrong, true and false.

Maybe that’s why fundamentalists make such lousy arguments in defense of creationism: “science is wrong a lot of the time so how can you trust it?” They’re evaluating academic knowledge through the lens of ultimate truth.

I will say though that in general there are two points I often see missing from this position:

1) At what point in the kids’ lives will it be their decision? Many kids are required to attend church until a certain age or until they are no longer living under their parents’ roof.

2) Why not start by not taking the kids to church until they are old enough to make the decision themselves? Instilling a fear of hell can be difficult to overcome later in life, even after people lose their faith, which isn’t fair to kids who don’t get a say in the matter.

I hope this doesn’t come off as hostile, as I sincerely don’t mean it to be. I do hope more people consider this though when deciding what is best for their kids, both at the beginning of their lives and once they’re grown.

For comparison: in the Netherlands we already dipped below 50% in 2017, and the number of religious people keeps dropping steadily.

In 2019 the remaining religious minority was composed of 20.1% Roman Catholics, 14.8% protestants (various types), 5.0% Muslims, and 5.9% adherents of other religions.

Edit: bear in mind that this is people who consider themselves religious. The percentage of people actually member of a church/mosque/whatever is below 30%.

I think this is a deceiving metric. Most churches are less places of worship or religious education and more social clubs dressed up in religious phrases and iconography. There are so many of them because each is designed to appeal to a particular social group, but they all feature a very similar watered down message that just reinforces the congregation's preexisting beliefs. They tend to focus less on education and more on community events, activism, fundraising, and growing their community - just like any other social club.

If you're looking for a church that genuinely teaches its congregation, that's much harder to find. They don't tend to be as successful in terms of growth or wealth. To teach someone, you must either add to what they know or challenge something they think they already know. Most people don't like being challenged - they'd rather go somewhere that reinforces what they already think or just ditch religion altogether.

It's no surprise that the social club churches are disappearing. Even the least devoted members of a church congregation feels bad leaving, just as they might feel bad cancelling a gym membership they never actually use. But their kids often have no such attachments.

Religion has the same function as "branding" - it's an efficient short-cut to bypass intensive, and possible unavailable intellectual rigor for some. And because Bell Curves are truly reality, providing a moral and ethical framework that works for everyone and that is internally consistent ENOUGH absolutely matters.

NOTHING we can ever know will be absolute truth or knowledge. You can make a simple proof by physical volumes of an individual and of the universe, combined with Shannon's Law. Humans must always come up short on knowledge and understanding of the universe as a result.

Like all things (even science) you can take a thing too far and exceed its limits of explanation or prediction. But that's unavoidable in a static system sense; which is why you dynamic systems defined by reliable and simple rules and waypoints. Religion absolutely provides that in a minimal effort form.

And we shouldn't project upon "average" and "below average" for what we might be familiar with or assume about intellect. Again: Bell curves for all things are reality. The biggest mistake that intellectuals make is that EVERYONE is just like them and thinks exactly the same way. Nope. Not even on a good day.

The social role that churches play is where the opening raises real concern. What comes after organized religion may well look more like conspiracy theory.

- loneliness

- lack of dating/marriage

- lack of community infrastructure

- lack of elder care

If you look at existing charities, much of the rubber meets road work gets done by churches or church affiliated groups.

You don’t have to like the message or the people, but I think it’s pretty obvious ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake.

Edit: reply here since rate limited //

> Yes, this can obviously vary by church--but it's a fallacy to claim that churches as a whole prevented loneliness.

No, you’re the one making a fallacy: your mothers singular bad experience doesn’t refute that churches made a statistically positive impact, which was my claim. You just told an emotional anecdote then declared that I’m wrong due to a straw man. (I never made a universal claim.)

> an entire generation growing up in the shadow of the 2008 financial collapse, as well as unprecedented debt from college

Okay?

The downwards trend in dating and marriage didn’t start in 2008 and doesn’t seem to hold across cultures — there’s a clear cultural component related to social changes in the US.

If you’re saying you think the collapse of churches is on par with excessive college debt as to why two-ish generations aren’t flourishing: I agree.

That’s my point.

> it's a self-selecting population that inherently echochambers, making it difficult to relate to outside groups, thus further damaging community

This sounds like a stereotype more than a fact — and is exactly counter to my experience, where multiple churches collaborate on things like homelessness charities.

That fine grained social structure is a necessary layer of how governments distribute resources effectively, one very poorly replaced by private actors. (In my experience.)

> you don't give any supporting arguments for them

I must have missed yours.

> you quite nicely fit the churchgoer stereotype in that way

Here’s the crux of it: you’re making faulty arguments because you need me to be wrong for your stereotypes to be right.

Eg, calling me a “churchgoer stereotype” when I don’t attend church and you made similarly unsupported arguments.

You’re just a bigot: factually wrong and stereotyping people.

> - loneliness

I'm not convinced churches ever solved this meaningfully--my mother left her church specifically because they never treated her as an equal adult, being a single parent. She was lonely _within_ the church. Yes, this can obviously vary by church--but it's a fallalcy to claim that churches as a whole prevented loneliness.

Especially not for those subjugated *by* the church (LGBT, single parent, unmarried, women [depending on doctrine]...)

> - lack of dating/marriage

* an entire generation growing up in the shadow of the 2008 financial collapse, as well as unprecedented debt from college, climate change, etc. driving down the desire to start a family

> lack of community infrastructure

This is much more influenced by increasing polarization and tribalism, which churches have helped cause by providing a platform and existing insular in-group--it's a self-selecting population that inherently echochambers, making it difficult to relate to outside groups, thus further damaging community.

Overall, you make these claims that churches are significant in these ways, but you don't give any supporting arguments for them--you quite nicely fit the churchgoer stereotype in that way.

People are avoiding dating and marriage because of climate change? This doesn't sound real.

I suspect COVID making everything socially bizarre is having a much bigger impact on dating than a financial bubble bursting 13 years ago.

If you’ve never lived in a society that offered socialist advantages like affordable health care, elder care, government-funded community engagement programs, etc. then I guess it’s easy to be scared by things you don’t understand.

I’m not putting this on you, but when people turn to religion with fear already pulsing through their veins, good things never happen.

I don’t think it’s commenting in good faith to think the only reason I would find those things dystopic is because I am ignorant or haven’t experienced them.

That sort of insulting non-answer from utopian is precisely what tends to scare me — and lead to horrific outcomes in the real world.

There is nothing dystopian about having a dental emergency handled in the middle of the night, at no cost to you.

I’ll say it again:

You’re assuming I’m ignorant about or haven’t experienced what you’re talking about.

This comment, like the one before, isn’t made in good faith.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

That's a rich assessment on a thread about the precipitous decline in US church attendance.

I rest my case.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> - lack of dating/marriage

> - lack of community infrastructure

> - lack of elder care

Do you have any evidence to back this argument up?

> You just told an emotional anecdote then declared that I’m wrong due to a straw man

...

> That’s my point.

...

> ...and is exactly counter to my experience...

...

> Here’s the crux of it: you’re making faulty arguments ...

Apologies; You didn't provide any evidence or elaboration on claims in your original post, just that "I think it's pretty obvious ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake," so I did make assumptions about your motivations etc. It would have been better of me to ask "Why do you think churches would have addressed these problems?" instead of blindly countering what I thought your arguments were.

That said:

> I must have missed your [supporting arguments].

I'd thought I gave several possible counter-arguments to your points--which you then responded to? I'm confused as to what you 'missed'.

> Eg, calling me a “churchgoer stereotype”

I did not call you a churchgoer, I said you fit the stereotype, in that you made claims without bothering to effectively support them (at the time); you may consider this 'bigoted' to stereotype in this manner, but to me it's a chronic frustration with defenders of churches. I'll grant that it's implied that I called you a churchgoer, but the specifics there are beside the point.

At this point I would also add on the stereotype that, when your ideas are confronted, you act as if you're under "attack" and are being "oppressed," a la "war on christmas."

> You’re just a bigot: factually wrong and stereotyping people.

I'm not certain I agree with that definition of 'bigot'; I'm also not certain you've demonstrated my factual incorrectness.

I'm also rather frustrated around the disconnect of you treating churches as a roughly homogenous group (as in "ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake", "[most charity] work gets done by churches", "several modern problems trace to the collapse of churches"), yet when I similarly generalize it's "stereotyping" and I'm a bigot.

We clearly have different experiences w.r.t. churches, as most people do. I have plenty of friends who have a litany of issues with the churches they grew up in; I have several other friends and family members who have had wonderful experiences in their churches. Both of these common classes of experience (you may call them anecdotal, I call them endemic) existing in the same space makes it very frustrating to me when people make claims around the positivity of churches with little support and ignoring these widespread flaws. You say it was a mistake to ditch churches without "a replacement"--I'd claim there are many whose lives are better off for having not been subject to the whims of their church, and calling it a mistake to abandon them is to ignore the church's share in their own faults where they exist.

> [saying churches are a self-selecting population that inherently echochambers] sounds like a stereotype more than a fact

People who go to church literally self-select in that they all believe in __roughly__ the same doctrine, god, etc. Even more so if you account for the fact that "church shopping" is a thing where people try to find one that "fits," and then they get their general beliefs reinforced by going. I really don't see what's a stereotype here.

The "outside groups" they struggle to relate to is demonstrable by things like how they interact with LGBT people, or folks of other religions, or atheists. There are certainly examples of where some churches do these things well, but again your claim of "ditching churches without a replacement was a mistake" __does not__ makes these distinctions, and ignoring them is tantamount to ignoring the harm churches--generalized or no!--have done to these groups.

And a direct result of that history is that the Church mandates certain practices to shape one's willpower: fasting (roughly half the year, in total, though "fasting" here means small vegan meals), some form of tithing &/or charitable work, explicit self-examination (not only standard prayers, but also Confession with a priest, who helps make a plan against bad habits, as well as an annual event where everyone in the parish asks forgiveness of each other) etc.

Unfortunately this argument entirely fails to support all the rest of the luggage, especially the metaphysical hokum: you can perfectly chose to live your life according to a set of rules that will help you (and others) without having to justify it via the existence of some bearded dude sitting on a cloud.

That's a strange straw man. No God-fearing person I know believes in such a thing. God is not a being, but rather is _being itself_. In fact, when Moses asked God what his name was, God replies something like "I am who am". If you prefer an Aristotelian frame, he is the "unmoved mover" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover

I agree that "bearded dude sitting on a cloud" is a strawman, but "entity who spoke directly to Adam and Moses" is pretty accurate, in most Christian's eyes.

Exactly, it's figurative language. My point is that when we read in scripture that

> Moses asked God what his name was, God replies something like "I am who am".

the notion of Moses asking God may also be figurative.

I rest my case.

"God-fearing" is a very ancient phrasing used by the Israelites to refer to anyone that believes in the God as I've described him, "the unmoved mover", "the God of gods", "the Lord of hosts", etc. The term "fear" is our best English translation of the Hebrew text, but the implication here is that we believe that God is just, not arbitrary, and therefore we can respect and submit to his rule and expect fair treatment. Fear only concretely shows up in our hearts when we choose to disobey him. Those who don't believe in his existence or his justice naturally don't have fear when they disobey him, hence the term.

I hope this helps!

No, I was referring to the fact that religious people basically have a slave-like mentality [1][2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPD1YGghtDk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eefS0gayKFc

And this just strengthens David Foster Wallace's argument: if you're going to be a slave anyway, why not be a slave to the greatest possible thing, Creation itself?

You are simply living from moment to moment, with no grounding connecting your beliefs aside from your personal desires for them.

What’s very concrete is what God has revealed to us historically through his people Israel, and through his son’s incarnation. What the church does is try to take these revelations/projections and through reason map out the source.

Also, even though I don't really believe there's any "metaphysical hokum" going on behind it, I'm still moved (aesthetically, and -- dare I say? -- spiritually) by liturgy and church architecture. I'm sitting in the same place, while seeing and smelling and saying the same things that people have for hundreds or thousands of years. That's pretty cool, and I always feel better afterwards. So, even if I'm rationally convinced that it's a psychological (rather than metaphysical) effect, it's still worth doing.

Yeah, I hear you, but this is where we part ways: to me it's not a matter of willpower, but rather one of - a sin, I know - pride: I can't bear the idea that I'm walking the path of my life using the equivalent of moral crutches.

As to your second argument: no argument there, not everything about religion is bad, even if, in the case of beautiful churches, you could argue that the way they were erected wasn't necessarily "ethical".

You do realize that this idea is explicitly condemned by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam?

If at one time the bearded man on a cloud was the useful tool of the day to manipulate crowds and was later "condemned" because better ways were devised to keep the flock believing, in what way does that affect my argument that 90% of religion is utter, unprovable, fairy-tale BS?

[EDIT]: and yeah if you insist on plowing the dirt of literal interpretation, I'll point you to this argument made by another poster : please take a look at the first image that pops when querying google for "god" and come back and tell us that the argument has no basis.

https://images.google.com/search?q=god

There's even a psychological technique to build confidence by imagining a supportive person helping you. That's even closer to God or Jesus than a real but absent person.

I'm unconvinced that remembering dead parents amounts to believing in imaginary beings.

Reality is less relative than you're making it out to be. Dead people are "real" because I can reliably predict observable effects their past actions would have had on the world and then confirm them with observation. For example, if I wanted to track down some college essays written by my grandparents, I might actually be able to find some, even though I don't have them in my memories. Or, more practically, I can ask a mutual friend, "remember when {dead person} said X?" And they will say, "yeah, and then they said Y", and I will say, "yeah".

The fact that dead people are dead doesn't make them "hokum" in the way that Zeus or Thor or Moroni are hokum. It's fine to doubt your own mind's relationship with reality, but don't doubt it so much that you become totally disconnected and consider all the people in your memories who you can't immediately re-confirm the existence of to be as immaterial as God.

I'm sorry, but I have two problems with that approach:

    1. Knowing I'm willingly drinking snake oil believing it'll somehow improve me makes it very hard for me to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. On a good day, I'd call myself an idiot, and on a bad one a pathological liar.

    2. Once you open the door to being told fairy tales in hope of improving yourself, you also open the door to letting yourself being manipulated into believing *any* kind BS by other, manipulative people. This is precisely the kind of mental attitude that has given us all the "interesting" byproducts of religion: religious wars, religious persecution, faith-based terrorism, death cults, debasement of arbitrary category of people (eg women, gays) etc ... (the list is long and extremely gruesome).

To me faith is something that you _have_ to understand through the lens of your life. There is no understanding faith before life. Your experiences allow you to understand faith. Which isn't to say that life is more important than faith, not at all, just that life is the lens in which you view faith.

In that mindset, faith seems exceptionally deep and complex. Full of discussion, learning, change. Not a black and white truth, but a series of learnings and understanding. You can't learn (in my mind) without change, and so the idea of a churn that teaches absolute truths felt fundamentally broken to me. I think faith is a journey in knowledge. And so many churches seem almost aggressive towards knowledge. They favor rote memorization, i think, as a method to avoid change. To avoid their doctrine as being mutable.

This mindset also seems pervasive into how these people behave in life, too. Just like how children need to learn to think critically, adults need to practice thinking critically. Such a strong emphasis on rote memorization has wide affects, i think.

No grand statements here, and i mean no offense to religion. Just my thoughts on some denominations.

Why does God need/desire your worship? You know, I have kids. I "hope" they love me and always will, but I'll never force them to say it and I'm definitely not going to punish them if they are mad at me and won't prop up my ego.

It's the on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, brand new, modern theology/philosophy which tends to end up shaky, simply because it's been done with fewer resources and has seen far less attention.

Whatever your take on religion is, pointing to the opinions of people living in a much more inscrutable world is not good evidence.

Personally I fall into the camp that omniscience omnipresence and omnibenevolence are just logically incompatible with the christian belief of a good god.

This is an appeal to authority. "It's good cuz these people said so"

As an atheist, I do not find[1] those philosophies to be particularly coherent or self-consistent - but obviously, my criticism is only superficial. So, I'll do one better.

A large number of theistic philosophers share my opinion on this - hence the innumerable schisms within Abrahamic religions. Those philosophers looked at their religion, found inconsistencies in it, and forked it.

The problem is that the survivors of those schisms (Catholicism, Eastern orthodoxy, Russian orthodoxy, the Anglican church, Protestantism in its many flavours, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, etc, etc, etc) did not survive because of their logical or intellectual rigour, or because they were more consistent or coherent then the parent branch that they splintered off from. They survived because they won political, violent power struggles. They survived because might made right. They survived because some influential autocratic warlord was personally swayed by their ideas, and imposed his will on his subjects and neighbours.

Less successful heresies (that, to me have about as good a claim at providing strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views as their parent religions) have gone extinct. Not because their arguments or ideas were bad, but because they didn't have enough spear-tips, sword-points, and gun-muzzles behind them.

This sort of selection process does not seem to be like it leads to accurately determining which of these systems survived because they are actually strong, coherent, self-consistent, and which survived because they were better at killing heretics.

[1] My impression of religion is that it tends to identify its inconsistencies and incoherentness, and neatly package it into a black box that it does not engage with, and expects you to have faith. You get a highly self-consistent system, as long as you don't look inside the box.

Actually, in many cases, they survived because neither side won the power struggle. E.g., Both sides of the Chalcedon(/Ephesus) schism, the East-West Schism, the Protestant/Catholic schism, the Old Catholic/Catholic schism , the Catholic/Anglican schism (even in England), the reverse schisms between the Uniate Churches and their previous Church of the East/Oriental Orthodox/Eastern Orthodox communities, etc. survive.

From my understanding of European history, that didn't happen because their rhetoricians and intellectuals sat down to peacefully hash things out over tea and crumpets. They didn't survive because of the strength of their arguments - but because of the economics behind them, and because of the caprices of the particular personalities involved.

I'm willing to accept that in the past two centuries, these processes of religious selection have changed substantially [1] - but the fact that this entire argument is painted in the framework of major religions that were established long before the end of European religious wars leads me to believe that 'how religions splintered in 500 AD' is far more relevant for surveying the modern religious atlas than 'how religions splintered in 1900 AD.'

[1] As long as we close our eyes to that Sunni-Shiite thing that's still on-going, and is likely to keep going for the foreseeable future.

They did spend a lot of time and they mostly failed. In many cases those school of thought that ultimately failed were also squashed during a religious power struggle (which is gives organized religion a bad outlook).

If you're asking "What happens to us after we die?" then the church has as good an answer as anyone, because nobody's bringing any hard evidence to the table.

If you're asking "How should I act and think to be a good person?" then religion has some ideas - some of them really good ideas, like the golden rule - but it's a huge question touching on almost everything. And some of today's questions require a lot of extrapolation over and above the words of the bible.

If you're asking natural philosophy questions, like "what is lightning" or "what do we need to do to prevent future flooding" then you probably won't reference religion at all (except perhaps when you get back to moral questions, like if your flood defence displaces people)

(1) These two statements seem to me to be incompatible. We live in the natural world. If something "outside the natural world" (whatever that nonsensical statement means) affects the natural world, then surely it's partly part of the natural world?

(2) It is not my business to define what e.g. christians believe, but if I am not mistaken the actual resurrection of an actual man is quite central. How is this not a (bold!) claim about the natural world?

So "beyond the natural world" would be shorthand for alternatives to naturalism; the idea there are rules that govern the 'natural world' beyond natural laws or things that can be measured or observed scientifically.

The resurrection is a prime example of rules "beyond the natural" impacting our natural world.

(No, "god did it" isn't an explanation.)

If this is all that 1000++ y.o. religions can muster, I say good riddance, laughable attempts at explaining the world.

What you will find there is that we know that the Bible is an amalgam of a script that was pieced together by many, many human authors. It is trivial today to tell because we can cross-reference Koine Greek versus translations and authors chose different words consistently for the same concepts.

So, no. Not really beyond the natural/physical world at all. Just one lie of many competing lies.

If we're in the business of bad-faith expositions of positions we disagree with, what's so attractive about the alternative that unfathomable aeons ago nothing exploded into something that coalesced in such an improbable way that a bunch of incredibly complicated chemical reactions happened (with no known mechanism for selection, mind you) to produce a biological organism capable of assembling electrons transmitted through the aether to another organism that could make snarky replies?

I'm sure you can reduce nearly any argument into silly-sounding caricatures of itself, but it's not a useful method for actually understanding what's true (or if truth even exists).

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/

[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#Go...

Axiom 1) All comments by whatshisface are right.

Theorem 1) This comment is right.

Proof: Whatshisface wrote this comment.

That's a proof in the mathematical sense and there's nothing wrong with it in that way, but that it has nothing to do with the truth of the theorem.

I'm not sure what you want to achieve by focusing on this topic. You just saying you don't agree with the axioms in the article, right? So just say that.

The Discourse on the Method of Descartes, in which his famous phrase je pense, donc je suis occurs also includes a preceding segment where he considers whether he can know anything at all, or whether he's a disembodied consciousness fed false information by evil demonic powers (if you will, the "Matrix hypothesis"). He rebuts that hypothesis with a simple assertion that a just and loving God wouldn't allow such an arrangement of events to be the true nature of reality.

Depending on your bent, that can either allow the discourse to continue or put the brakes completely on it.

the long term effects wast that this not a healthy thing to tell a young teenager, and it's time for society to move on.

1000% that's why I am against many (perhaps most by % in the US?) of the organized religious congregations.

those that identify queer, gender-fluid, whatever are told their literal existence is sin. it's hard to imagine how damaging that is if you're not in this community. It'd be like telling someone who has orange hair they are going to hell for something they have absolutely no control over.

In the worst cases they push parents to try to 'change' their kids, which has been shown to be incredibly dangerous and damaging.

Even if you're in a 'liberal' church that says we love gays like we love all humans, but don't think about getting married and in some cases can't have sex, that still does a huge amount of psychological damage and putting us on the outside of 'normal.'

Finally, I realized, “Why does God want me to be scared all the time?” Shouldn’t God be allaying my fears, not being the source of them?

Maybe this is my ignorance talking, but I thought those with active church membership continue to go to participate in social events and make friends/partners?

Some of the topics being discussed in our (US) church in the past couple of years:

* the devastating personal and economic toll of the pandemic and how we can help individually and in aggregate

* race relations in the US and the history of injustices caused by racism, including police brutality, and how we can respond in our daily lives

* LGBTQ-related topics, including the ability of people of different sexual identities to participate fully at all levels of the church hierarchy

* the environmental impact of our actions at the personal level all the way up to the institutional level as it pertains to human-caused climate change

You can find many churches in the US with people that believe in every possible belief related to all of these issues.

No, it's not just potlucks and singles nights :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology#Socioecono...

I mentored kids for much of my life and you can bet I told them they could be anything they want if they set their mind to it. What should I preach? That they're victims and screwed because of accident of geography/genetics? Is that a useful framework for life?

You can say that you teach them the system is unfair will help them break it. But that amounts to political indoctrination if you're not careful. Instead, teach them to change the world themselves by being kind to those around them.

> Whats the alternative for those less fortunate?

(disclaimer: atheist)

Your stance is a classic of church thinking: remove the agency from the people in the situation, and delegate it to god, saying he will fix the problem __somehow__, but they need'nt involve themselves.

The alternative is honesty and historical accuracy. To try to conceal or ignore what forces in their past have done to minimize them is to make it impossible for them to decide for themselves how they want to deal with these problems--you're removing their agency.

Maybe they'll choose to dedicate their lives to researching genetic problems, or to correcting social injustice, raising awareness of subconscious bias or changing how certain systems in our culture purposefully minimize portions of the population.

This attitude, that being kind to those around them will bring change, while noble, is incredibly naive and shortsighted. Nearly every major social change in United States history was brought about through groups of people uniting and demonstrating their combined force, demanding the rights they'd been denied.

> You can say that you teach them the system is unfair will help them break it. But that amounts to political indoctrination if you're not careful.

Your alternative will lead to stunted critical thinking, and serves only to prevent the questions many deconverting folk have asked of the god they believed in: "How is this fair?", "How could you let this happen?", "How will you fix this?"

Sure, many people do that. Not exactly a new or novel idea, but personally I'm not a fan.

I have never personally known a clergy member to be particularly political, but we know that a large part of the US is politically driven by religious forces. Like it or not, church and state are not fully separated.

I guess what I'm saying is that none of what I've written here was particularly intended as advice to you in your position as a religious teacher of children. I will say, however, that Jesus himself did have some explicitly political teachings. Matthew 19:24 comes to mind:

> And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Do with this what you will.

Sounds like there's something you got out of religion after all!

That's not nearly as strange as it sounds, because one really does need to understand the Bible to really grasp the nuances of much of Western literature.

On the other hand — if it is people that are losing their faith, that is perhaps different, and I can see your concern.

My personal worldview - at the end of the day, we're human and should see others as humans who make mistakes and give enough grace for them to try to improve.

I'd posit that these generations are primarily looking for acceptance, not answers. And they're not getting that acceptance, so they leave. Which was my experience - I started questioning teachings (directly based on my reading of scripture) and had leaders shut down on me entirely and refuse to talk further instead of engaging because it didn't fit in the prescribed "answer" - and this was in a fairly "open-minded" church. I'd come back tomorrow if I could find a church that (most importantly) actually accepted me for me and (secondly) would actually engage in tough topics instead of just giving me hollow "answers" that didn't answer the question (and often conflicted directly with scripture!). I guess what I'm looking for is a church that actually practiced grace and acceptance, answers be damned. That's what Jesus did (see hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes and preaching a message of love for everyone). Why can't the church do it too?