I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent).

If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. It’s difficult for me though to not think that a religious person’s reasoning is broken in some way, and to be more skeptical of how they verify ideas in general.

If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

A lot of the rationalization of religious people is complicated in a way that suggests they have some underlying idea of what the accurate world model is (they just want to believe otherwise): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...

One thing I credit the internet for is allowing me to read and learn enough to escape it. I think most people will end up with whatever belief system they grow up surrounded by.

As someone who went in the opposite direction, I observed as I got older that “evidence based reasoning” is less useful than I had assumed. Nearly everyone has beliefs about the world that are based on faith whether they call it that or not. Very few political premises are based on scientific evidence that’s well established as say anthropogenic climate change. For the most part the data is mixed and hard to interpret and peoples’ views aren’t really based on the data anyway. (Try talking with a gun control advocate. First note that homicides went down in Australia after gun buybacks. Note reaction. Then note that homicides were going down at the same rate before gun buybacks as after gun buybacks. Note reaction.)

And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to structure your communities and economies and raise and educate your children. Not for metaphysical reasons, just because the strong conclusions you can reliably reach with the current state of social and political science is just very limited.

I don't disagree really - there's still space for intuition and making a guess in places with limited information. I also agree most people are using evidence to drive motivated reasoning for a pre-existing conclusion rather than using it to try to struggle towards whatever the truth may be.

The god question is pretty old though, and most of the religious arguments are pretty clearly wrong/bad. They've lost most of their ground to actual experiments and the scientific method. I suspect this is why we see church attendance continuing to decline.

> And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to...

I can't agree with either point: 1) basing your view on faith is equally as good as non-faith, or 2) expecting a world view based on any belief will reliably lead you to draw conclusions that won't be bad.

Both of these assume that beliefs are primary in shaping "your world view" and that that view is what shapes how you interact with the world. In fact, what's important isn't what you believe; what's important is how you choose to think. It's the questions you choose to ask. It's how willing you are to start without multiple choice answers and then go looking for a multitude of possible solutions. And it's whether you're willing to accept partial and interim solutions, and sometimes, [shudder] no answer at all.

I know it's not popular to look for answers and then be willing to say, "Nope. I can't answer this." But as you point out, sometimes it's impossible to answer a question with a definitive yes or no. Sometimes you have to gather more information. And the useful part of your world view is how you choose to go about becoming more informed.

If you don't look any further and just guess, or just trust someone else to tell you how to think (especially someone who won't explain their sources or their reasoning), then you will make a lot poor choices in your life, regardless of whether faith is part of that formula or not.

If instead you seek out others whom you know are better informed, and if you ask questions yourself and try to test those answers yourself, that will serve you far better than will any belief system. But most of all, if you are willing to stop your quest at some point and say, "I can't answer this question definitively" and accept that you have two choices: a) a tentative best answer that seeks to work around what you don't know, or b) that you simply refuse to answer now and accept that "I don't know", now THAT's enlightenment. In my opinion, that's a world view that will minimize error and make fewer mistakes. Beliefs be damned.

The problem is that for the most part all this asking questions and becoming informed doesn’t get your average person anywhere. I read a lot and know a bunch about a lot of things but at the end of the day I’m left with “the science” Lessing us without firm conclusions about pretty much everything I might care about.

And “I don’t know” isn’t really a practical answer. You have to raise your kids now, decide what to feed your kids now, vote now, not wait around for conclusive proof.

And people who say “beliefs be damned” don’t actually mean it. They embrace beliefs and value judgments all the time. Does scientific evidence tell us we’re all equal and created in God’s image? No, it’s something we choose to believe, and even people who aren’t religious believe a secular version of that as an article of faith. (Which is good!) Science says the average IQ of people in Bangladesh (where I’m from) is 82, a standard deviation lower than Americans. What do I choose to believe about Bangladeshis? Most decent Americans don’t say “well the best answer we have is Bangladeshis aren’t as smart as Americans.” They start from a belief about equality and work backward from there. The death penalty, how to treat murderers, criminal justice, civil rights. Science more or less doesn’t have the answers we need to these human problems.

There is no strongly-held opinion anywhere in the world that you can't play that rhetorical trick on, which may be why there are whole papers that have been written about why it's almost never persuasive to deploy gotcha statistics that way.

is this a rebuttal or an agreement? I think the point of the example was that most people can't rigorously defend their strongly held opinions. they just throw gotchas at each other.

You know, I think you're right. Sorry about that! Just read my comment as an especially annoying yes-and.

I found a good articulation of this here: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-holy-church-of-christ-w...

"Suddenly we’ve got numerical infinities on that ethics spreadsheet, inputs that win out against any finite moral optimization. Where to put the infinities on the spreadsheet is of course the entire point of this metaphysical endeavor. We need the axiomatic moral imperatives, whether they be human life or free speech or something else, to which everything else loses in the moral calculus. The rest is mere arithmetic.

And this is precisely where the rationalist worldview grows mute: there’s simply no way to derive the absolute moral principles that should rule our lives from lab experiments, and any such proposal will necessarily require a faith-based leap--the ‘dignity’ of human life, the sanctity of private property, etc.—not very different than the tzelem Elohim or Imago Dei of Genesis. Science is absolutely mute here. There’s no such thing as a ‘scientific ethics’ or a ‘scientific foreign policy’, and the people who claim as much are precisely the same naifs who treat science as a body of knowledge rather than an epistemology, i.e., those who’ve never actually practiced it."

The answer to "we don't have enough information," is not to reason less.

Many decisions aren't primarily based on reason/logic, but on priorities and preferences. Having more information rather than less is almost always a good thing, but it's a lot more useful when you already have some goal in mind.

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

That line would only hold if fundamentalists have correctly identified the fundamentals. I wage they have badly missed it, which is why their theology is so bad.

> being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness

Being a good person is not the primary point of religion. It is rather a hoped for outcome. Religion is not therapy.

The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things. This means even if most people most of the time are perfectly pleasant, they can get swept up in other stuff that gets out of hand and hurts people. If you can't persuade someone with evidence based reasoning because their position is based on 'faith' or belief in the face of contrary evidence I don't know what to do with that.

There are forms of religious people that dismiss all the 'crazy' things and just have some vague mysticism - which is probably the least harmful form, but is a little odd to me. People like to feel a part of something grand I suppose - but we already are. Existence is pretty amazing even without the human religious myths being true. Maybe one day the myths will be just a part of our collective history (as many older ones currently are).

Everyone is crazy in their own way. There is no rationality strong enough to remove the crazy from people, and smart people over time have formed their own craziness not bound by religion or mysticism.

This site for example is pooh-poohing religion now, but five minutes later will gush over LSD's power to give pseudo-spiritual epiphanies. It used to love stoicism, which was shopworn even in the Victorian age. Probably in a year from now some other retread of old belief system will be rediscovered, maybe EST or Theosophy, or something.

> The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things

I don’t think that’s true at all, and possibly the opposite is true. Comparing Bangladesh, where I’m from, to America, people here are a lot less religious. But I wouldn’t say the net amount of “crazy” believes is different. People in Bangladesh are a lot more down to earth and less likely to believe in faddish ideas that tend to fill the vacuum in the absence of religion.

American culture around eating and fitness, and particularly the “clean food” stuff is a good example of this. It’s for the most part completely unscientific, but fervently believed.

> People in Bangladesh are a lot more down to earth and less likely to believe in faddish ideas that tend to fill the vacuum in the absence of religion.

How do you square this position with all the social media fueled mob lynchings/murders in Bangladesh?

One example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49102074

I’m not claiming the US is any better, we have mass shootings and all kinds of violence, but generally not lynch mobs (at least in the 21st century)

We have had social and mainstream media fueled riots across entire country last summer, based on a whole bunch of untrue crazy beliefs too.

> The thing that scares me about it is when people believe crazy things, they're more likely to believe other crazy things.

Some examples I can think of are Pol Pot, Stalin and the North Korean Kim dynasty.

My point is there is much rhetoric about religion being a historical scourge of society, but the same people making those assertions conveniently forget that atheistic ideologies had very negative consequences as well.

I'm not arguing based on whataboutism here. I'm saying that blaming religion for the ills of society while exalting atheism is fallacious.

There's an important distinction - the religious crimes are often done because of the underlying ideology. Stalin did terrible things, but it wasn't in the name of atheism.

Throwing away bad doctrine doesn't instantly make you good, but it helps not to have problematic ideology at the start.

If you're going to build a world, one that updates based on evidence is a good place to start. Seek out evidence that violates your confirmation bias, steelman arguments, change your mind when warranted.

> Stalin did terrible things, but it wasn't in the name of atheism.

USSR anti-religious campaign of 1928–1941:

"The campaign began in 1929, with the drafting of new legislation that severely prohibited religious activities and called for an education process on religion in order to further disseminate atheism and materialist philosophy. "

"The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church and Islam, which had the largest number of faithful. Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its believers, were shot or sent to labour camps. Theological schools were closed, and church publications were prohibited.[1] More than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone.[2] Only a twelfth of the Russian Orthodox Church's priests were left functioning in their parishes by 1941.[3]"

"Stalin called for an "atheist five year plan" from 1932–1937, led by the LMG, in order to completely eliminate all religious expression in the USSR.[43] It was declared that the concept of God would disappear from the Soviet Union.[43]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti-religious_campaign_(...

if you've ever talked to non-fundamentalists, usually they just regurgitate whatever the contemporary secular morality of the moment is with a mild religious gloss, and they suffer in membership much worse than the fundamentalists because it's obvious.

Fundamentalism is usually just taking the source material seriously at what it says; liberal Christianity tends to try and reinterpret the source material to fit contemporary mores. It's impossible to justify homosexuality in the scriptures for example; most progressive arguments end up just setting fire to the inspiration of the bible to do so, by saying "they weren't really speaking about homosexuality" or "why should we trust what Paul says about it?"

Fundamentalists are disliked, but they are a lot more logically and internally consistent than the mainline. Mainline is just the halfway stop to atheism, honestly.

Exactly. Fundamentalists miss the actual fundamentals.

People mistake the American Evangelical Christianity that is a few hundred years old for the church established by the apostles nearly 2000 years ago. That church was it which considered the weak as equally valuable as the strong, that insisted on helping the poor, that believed men and women both to be of the utmost value. That established hospitals to care for the sick. All of these things were not the norm. The weak were considered less valuable. Women were not worth as much as men. Sick people should be avoided. The poor aren’t worth helping.

People are rightfully scornful of American evangelicalism, but they throw the baby out with the bath water and try to pretend that the orthodox (in sense of true and right) church has not done tremendous good in this world.

> People are rightfully scornful of American evangelicalism, but they throw the baby out with the bath water and try to pretend that the orthodox (in sense of true and right) church has not done tremendous good in this world.

There's no "true and right" church. In fact the non-stop schism of the christian faith is evidence that the views espoused by christians are incredibly incoherent. One model to use is that the bible is a map and your interactions with actual people are the actual road. And you're trying to navigate your life with this map. You have a few options:

  - Trust the map no matter what (fundamentalists)
    - You end up also arguing about how the map *really* reads, because it's incoherent at its core! Denominations are started by people trying too hard to ascertain the "fundamentals."
  - Trust the road no matter what
    - Is your map even relevant then? What's the difference between this and being an atheist?
  - Trust the road when you can see it and can't argue with it, trust the map otherwise
    - This leads to shit like voting against progress because you are ignorant to the harm it does. Since the map is incoherent you still end up drawing incorrect conclusions in directions that are harmful.

These basically all suck and cause problems vs the strategy of "live in the world, and use some other map."

To take a counter example, do you believe that the Catholic Church has had a pattern of covering up for pedophiles in its clergy? If so how far back does that pattern go? Why shouldn’t we assume it goes back hundreds of years, or the full 2000 year history of the church?

By the way, that same old church taught wives to obey their husbands and to this day does not allow them to be clergy. The notion that women are not worth as much as men was not recently introduced.

Virtually every youth-serving organization used to not handle abuse of youth properly. I am not going to pin this just on the Catholic Church. Other youth-serving organizations, like sports, other churches, YMCAs, etc. were all deficient.

I am a volunteer in the Boy Scouts of America. Its market-leading and pioneering youth-protection programs are still examples to this day, and the vast majority of claims in its current bankruptcy process are from before these programs started. Society has changed, and youth are much better off for it.

"Virtually every youth-serving organization used to not handle abuse of youth properly."

This again? The existence of others committing the same crimes does not indemnify the Church.

Love the "Society has changed" argument. Clearly, recognizing that pedophilia is wrong by the Church is a product of changing times...not like they moved clergy from parish to parish to avoid them being caught.

Nice try with the 'whatabout-ism', but nearly by definition the non-religious groups are less sanctimonious.

I’d say the church from Rome has always had problems like any group of humans. Collectively the churches established by the apostles I’d say got the truth right. Though if I were to pick a date where they went seriously wrong and led to what you saw at the time of the reformation and today I’d say 1054 AD

As for women being treated poorly that is not something the church introduced, but has practically been done by men since time began. If you read early church history you’d probably realize that your moral basis itself is founded upon the work church did.

If you’re someone who is open minded you should try to hear good arguments from another perspective. I’d recommend Dominion by Tom Holland perhaps - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465093507/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm...

What I’ve found is people who actually don’t believe their opinions strongly avoid books challenging those opinions, while those who do are perfectly willing to be challenged, because they are confident their opinion is the right one.

For example a person who weakly believes in a free market will avoid reading Marx, a person who strongly believes it will. And vice versa for let’s say Ayn Rand.

If the whole point of an organization is morality, and the organization doesn't do any better in that arena than society at large, I don't see much point in the organization.

On the topic of the treatment of women, you'll note the original assertion was that this was something the church was especially good at, and I pointed out a sexist practice core to the church as currently practiced, not in the dustbin of history.

Well my guess is you haven’t been to many non evangelicals churches nor looked at how they act or behave. The church reveres a woman above all other humans save him who was both God and man. Orphanages were setup by churches. Hospitals, schools, homeless shelters. They do that explicitly because of their beliefs.

You can read the bible directly and see problems with fundamentals (I did).

It's just the 'no true scotsman' fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I contest that organized religion, particularly Christianity has done net positive to the world though. From the crusades til now, Christianity has always seemed to demonize other groups, and for people in those groups especially (non-Christians, gays, women), the church has not done any good for them whatsoever.

But even I accept your argument that they had, why is organized religion the only way to achieve that good? Why not provide societal benefit through secular and people focused governance, for instance? Why does the teachings of thousands of years old people have to do anything with it, even if we do cherry pick them and only listen to the parts that we as a modern society agree are good? When you draw your philosophy from a book that says at the end “don’t change this or you’re going to hell”, then it’s little surprise that extremists arise with what are actually fairly reasonable interpretations of the Bible.

See, but even your straw man is based on that post schism period. And the church is what taught us that even those traditionally “on the fringe” should be valued and not discarded. You’re taking up the position the church convinced the world of to argue against her. I really do think your beef (and a legitimate one) is with evangelical Christianity (and possibly Roman Catholics but probably less so). You should read up on where those traditions arose from.

The question really is did Jesus rise from the dead?

Was Plato actually on to something when he said there were more “real” things which made our reality look like shadows.

The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus. There is no getting beyond that idea. Once you see it, there is no going back. So I’d be very careful reading old books if I were you.

Even quantum mechanics is starting to make us realize we might not understand what really constitutes reality. That at the deepest levels there is two eternally existing relationships.

> The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus.

Do Hindus agree? Do Muslims? Do Buddhists? If not, are they wrong? Why?

The statement you made is an opinion of a group, stated as a fact. There is nothing wrong with groups having opinions, but they shouldn't be pushed to others as facts. That's the source of many past and present conflicts.

Oh don’t get me wrong. I know this is my opinion. And I don’t think Hindus and Muslims don’t have very high symbols and good world views.

I’m just saying from what I’ve seen the symbol that Christ is it is very high and explains the world well. I’d love to have discussions over coffee with people with different cosmological explanations of the world.

The question why this isn’t something to be discarded is because a billion people share my opinion and we aren’t unreasonable for having it.

The idea that the most powerful king took up the side of the poor and needy, and aligned himself with them is an idea that I can’t see being defeated. The hero looking like he lost only to win once for all, to set the captives free is a story that is endlessly being recreated in books from people of all world views.

True though, to many, Christ is the symbol of what they’ve seen in American Evangelical Christianity and that symbol might just die out, but the one taught in the 1st century till now I can’t imagine ever dying out.

A lot of christians foolishly think there is not any truth beauty or goodness in other world views and refuse to learn from them. There is a lot a Christian can learn from Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, even Mormons, and probably a whole ton of other religious beliefs. They can learn from Greek myths, eastern myths and so on.

I actually just wish non christians would just at least take the story of Jesus as a myth or legend that they could still learn from like other enduring myths. That would at least give the idea behind it the respect it deserves given its huge influence. The story of Moses even if just fiction is still a powerful story. I mean have you never read a book like Les Mis or LOTR or something and not seen the power those stories have for good?

> The reason the church will continue to be is because there is no higher symbol than that of Jesus. There is no getting beyond that idea. Once you see it, there is no going back. So I’d be very careful reading old books if I were you.

Many countries in Europe have >50% of young people who identify as non-religious [1]

Don't the declining numbers of religious people in Europe contradict that statement? Younger generations in these traditionally Christian countries are very aware of the symbol and idea - and many are in full agreement with many of the values you mention, except they just don't believe the mystical part (and refuse many of the conservative stances from the church).

If this happened in countries that have had Christianity as their foundational identity for hundreds of years, why can't it happen elsewhere?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/21/christianity-n...

> Why not provide societal benefit through secular and people focused governance, for instance?

Because they weren't. That's the point. The culture at the time didn't care to support anyone but the most powerful.

Could a non-religious approach have fixed it? Maybe, but none emerged that did so. Not 2000 years ago, anyway.

So Christianity entered the scene at a time when no one was doing these good things, and gave people a reason to rally behind them.

Even today, statistically speaking, Muslims give far more of their income to charity than any other group, and if I'm not mistaken, Atheists ranked last. (Christians only marginally performed better, which says a lot about the state of modern Christianity.)

So why is that? I think it has to do with tribalism. You can't form a strong tribe around NOT believing stuff. Not believing in something isn't enough of a reason to form strong social bonds and take on major projects.

Does that mean you can't come up with a good secular belief that people can rally behind? Of course not. Liberalism was a secular idea that made massive changes. Same for democracy. But you need a flag to rally around.

"Disbelief" makes for a poor flag. It's not much of a rallying cry.

What's more, the rationalist/atheist community tends to be very strongly individualist. Individualism, almost by definition, isn't particularly interested in things like hospitals or caring for the poor.

> People mistake the American Evangelical Christianity...

Hell, people mistake American Evangelical Christianity with "true Christianity". Far too many allow themselves into being duped into thinking that the loudest, most odious, and most forceful are the most legitimate claimants to Christianity.

Barf.

> Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness.

Religiosity is highly inversely correlated with criminality amount Americans.[1] Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity. To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially.

It's certainly not the only way to promote ethical behavior. But even as an atheist, I'll freely admit that religion serves a pretty beneficial important role in our society. A role that we haven't really figured out how to replace with secular counterparts.

[1] http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime... [2] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...

One of your sources is overtly Christian and the other is quite conservative[0]. Here is an academic survey of such studies; seems a lot more nuanced: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261834488_Religion_...

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

Charity - religious people are more likely to donate to religious organisations. In fact roughly a third of all donation money in the US goes to supporting religion.

Large churches are quite astonishingly wealthy and also tax exempt, so it's not clear why they need the money more than any number of smaller charities and social programs.

Crime: There isn't any reliable evidence that religion reduces crime in general. It may make certain kinds of crime less likely, but it's very difficult to disentangle all of the influences - because of course religion also affects crime reporting, and defines which actions can even be considered crimes. This can be a huge problem for victims who live in the same religious community as perpetrators.

One textbook example is the history of child abuse in Catholicism. It didn't show up in crime figures for a very long time because the Church worked hard to cover it up. The truth didn't come out until the political power of the Church was reduced to a level where it could no longer do that.

Another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland

There's a good case for considering the possibility that religion actually encourages these kinds of abusive cultures - whether or not they're considered criminal at the time.

So there really isn't an argument that religion serves a beneficial role. It has some benefits, but it also causes a lot of social and political distortions, some of which are extreme and persistently harmful.

> Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity.

Religious people donate significantly more to their churches. Whether that's charity which actually goes on to help people is highly variable. You can say we haven't really figured out how to replace them, but to me it seems pretty clear. Replace a patchwork of "charities" with an actual support network which works for everyone and not just parishioners. Fund it through taxes. You know, the was every single other developed nation in the world handles things. The whole "charity is just as good as sound policy" thing has never panned out and is why we have so many medical bankruptcies as just one example.

> To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially.

That's different from religiosity correlating with "being a good person" though, which I'm interpreting as "the ability to act both morally and independently".

It does seem that some people need religion to be a good person, because they lack the moral structure to do without (due to trauma or bad parenting or whatever). For those people, religion allows them to function in society with a set of business rules, but they still tend to lack a solid moral/ethical decision matrix to function on their own or act outside the contexts they have rules for.

You are assuming causality there. It could be that an individual’s mindset could lead to both less criminality and more religious participation. It’s not obvious that sending criminals to church would make them less criminal.

Does that include war?

Throughout history, religious leaders have very rarely opposed killing "the enemy". Likewise it's a rare soldier in a time of war who is insists on obeying, "Thou shalt not kill".

Yet if this is true, then how do you define religiosity if it overlooks willingly acting in contradiction to the most essential laws that a faith and its faithful claim to believe?

> Throughout history, religious leaders have very rarely opposed killing "the enemy".

The 20th century would like a word with you.

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

Not a bad argument, but if we need religion to be 100% accurate then we'd only ever support the most modern and innovative religion.

The issue is that most religions (including my own) place tremendous importance on the accuracy of teachings that go back hundreds or thousands of years. It was impossible for the original authors to know what we know today, yet we either fault them for it or declare any advances in knowledge to be heretical. Clearly, both of these positions are wrong in the extreme.

And yet, there's a good reason for that, too. If we subject religion to every modern idea, then the religion doesn't really stand for anything. It simply mirrors society back at it.

I don't know the solution to this. There may not be one (short of saying "f--- religion" as a whole, which I think would be a terrible mistake).

If anyone has ever participated in a 12-step program, you can see this in action in a much more modern way. Every program has an unchanging dogma, based on the assumption that the founders hit on something special and right, and that any changes would risk watering it down. As a result, you end up with programs that have ideas that would have been very mainstream when they were founded, but are now largely viewed as wrong-headed or even cruel. And yet, these programs continue to be a lifeline to many people who would have otherwise spiralled into self-destruction.

Again, what's the solution? Heck if I know...

>If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

Can you steelman what the basic thing is that religious people get wrong?

A lot of the creationist arguments stem from "irreducible complexity" or a misunderstanding of natural selection (the "eye just formed itself somehow"). Both of these things sound reasonable when explained in isolation to someone who grew up with religion, but natural selection is much stronger (light sensing cells benefit survival way before they're an entire eye) etc.

It's the 'watchmaker' argument - things must have come from a creator because nothing can ever just exist. This always ignores the natural follow up - who created god then? There is no good answer for this (and it just creates an infinite regress).

Religious steelmans are weird, because the arguments out front are not the real objections or even the real debate (which makes things confusing). The real debate is more about belief in belief, tribal affiliation, perceived morality, and identity. The arguments out front are mostly rationalizations to try and explain away contrary evidence.

Religious people are arguing from a position entirely driven by motivated reasoning. They're not trying to uncover the truth, they're trying to defend what they already know to be true.

You see this occasionally on the atheist side too (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as...) the difference though, is the evidence is there if you care to look.

If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit.

> things most have come from a creator because nothing can ever just exist.

This isn't the "watchmaker" argument, this is the "principle of sufficient reason" argument applied to existence. The principle of sufficient reason is "an effect must have a cause sufficient to explain it". Things exist _right now_, but (so goes the argument) they didn't always exist (that is they are not things-which-must-by-their-very-nature-exist). Therefore, the fact that they exist _right now_ needs a cause that operates right now. The causal chain of why-does-this-contingent-thing-exist-right-now cannot be infinite. Therefore, the causal chain must terminate in some being that must by its very nature exist.

This argument was not made by Christian theists, but by Aristotle over 300 years before Christianity came into existence. It was rediscovered by Christian theists a millenium and a half later (in the 1200s) and accepted because it matched what God said of Himself to Moses 1200 years before Aristotle (Exodus 3:14)

https://biblehub.com/exodus/3-14.htm

This line of reasoning is totally unconvincing to pure naturalists like me.

I simply believe that the universe exists, and that we'll likely never know anything beyond that, as the big bang appears to be the limit of what evidence is possible to measure.

What I don't see is anything that necessitates turning the fact that the universe exists into a principle that the ultimate "cause" must be a being that frankly behaves like a abusive patriarch while threatening humanity with eternal torture.

I'd recommend Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe which goes into some of the more modern theories beyond The Big Bang (Inflation Theory, MWI of QM) - I thought it was pretty interesting and didn't know about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)

My interpretation of the comment you replied to wasn't that they were trying to justify the argument, but just clarify what the argument specifically was (and where it came from).

What you may not see is that everything is incredibly intelligible.

Of course it is: it's a work of human writing, by people who were quite serious thinkers of their era.

But you can't use the content of the bible to prove the existence of the supernatural any more than you could use Beowufl to do the same.

Agreed, I don’t think one should try to prove the supernatural starting from the Bible.

One first has to define supernatural :)

My general thought is that at the deepest possible metaphysical level, everyone has a foundational framework that realize on untestable axioms. (Eg. we have free will)

Identifying those is an interesting exercise, but then at some point I realize that at all levels of natural depth, the universe has extreme order and intelligibility. Eg. The simulation argument is a reframing of the creation arguments.

From that point, one can surmise that some creator would be intelligible, and would likely communicate with beings that have free will. Eg. humans are a cloud of hydrocarbon atoms that contemplate their own existence.

The rest then follows, and so on

"That the universe exists" isn't a sufficient explanation since we know that it doesn't exist of necessity (since it is composed of parts). The argument doesn't say anything about what this "First mover" is like, only that it must be sufficient to explain the effects it produces (which includes being-a-person since that's qualitatively different than not-being-one). It's only when you come to the realization that to-be is the same as to-be-beautiful is the same as to-be-true that things start to look vaguely like the God of the burning bush and the problem of pain starts to raise its head (and then you have to meet the cross and either break on it or be saved by it).

Thanks - I think this does a better job clarifying that bit better than I did (which notably doesn't address the infinite regress issue).

The watchmaker argument is more narrowly the creationist 'eye can't have just formed itself' argument (basically the eye must have been made by some sophisticated watchmaker: god).

When you say "which notably doesn't address the infinite regress issue" are you talking about what you said or what I did? (Just trying to understand if I wasn't clear enough in my explanations).

I think you clarified where the 'something can't come from nothing' argument originates from (and that it's separate from the watchmaker one).

My point was just that as an argument the answer being 'god' isn't very compelling when it then just moves the question to 'where did god come from', nothing is actually explained by this.

In my experience with religious people you get unsatisfactory answers to that, so adding massive complexity (god) as an answer doesn't really help when it can't answer the underlying question (it just introduces a new and more complex one). This is ignoring all the other problems with the god hypothesis which don't hold up either.

Irreducible complexity is a somewhat compelling argument to me (a life-long atheist).

I understand natural selection. I've taken graduate course in genomics with top grades. Still, the concept that random point changes to a several billion base pair sequence could produce advantageous new genes goes against everything I know about complexity and combinatorics.

But I admit natural selection is still a far better explanation than anything else we have, so I continue to accept it grudgingly.

I understand why scientists don't want to give religious leaders a foothold to sow doubt and push their nonsense, but I wish the scientific community was more open to criticisms of evolution that are presented rigorously. For example, a model of evolution where proteins first evolve in microorganisms before being integrated into larger organisms (for example through viral vectors) makes a lot more sense to me than SNP-driven natural selection.

As a religious person, I don't see how the issues you describe are any lesser in non-religious populations. You're misplacing your blame; society would still have these problems without religion, and it'd arguably be worse, too.

Indeed, I've known a lot of religious people like the ones you speak of. And I've known and read from many other "religious"/deist people who think those types of people are silly.

>If there was real compelling evidence of supernatural behavior I'd change my mind, but whenever it's been claimed and tested - it's bullshit.

How is it possible to test for "supernatural behavior"?

> ""How is it possible to test for "supernatural behavior"?

- "I'm a psychic and can tell what's in these containers without looking"

- "I can detect water with magic rods"

- "I can heal you with the power of god"

It's worth watching An Honest Liar about the life of the Amazing Randi.

What's interesting is even when Randi shows people how they're being tricked they refuse to believe it.

The above examples are pretty easy to test (and people do), but believers just ignore the results or make up reasons why results don't matter or can't be tested.

Those are of course easy strawman examples of charlatans trying to make money.

This Carl Sagan quote is relevant:

>An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

Sure - technically every atheist should be agnostic in the sense that you can never know anything with 100% confidence, but pragmatically you live as if you're an atheist. In the strict sense I'm "almost certain there is no god", but no one can be truly certain given the nature of the things Sagan points out.

Just because something is hard to prove with certainty doesn't mean the probability is equally likely. You can't really be a strict atheist about magic sea fairies either, but you probably are (in the sense you that you think they don't exist). Priors matter for things.

While many of those people were charlatans, many of them are also earnest. The water rods people really believe they can detect water with the sticks and have stories about how they helped a friend with a leak and such.

Many astrology people really believe they can make personality predictions (they can't unless they're vague enough to be predictive of nothing). It's not all conartists.

Maybe I'm just being snarky or missing the real meaning of the term, but I think of "supernatural" as something that is beyond any capacity to test or prove. Anything that can be proven would fall under my definition of "natural", even if it's beyond my capacity to explain or understand.

By definition, I'd consider any sort of gods, demons, ghosts, or whatever to be either nonexistent or something that exists (which would imply that it's something natural and operates in some currently unknown way).

>I think of "supernatural" as something that is beyond any capacity to test or prove.

I agree. It's worth noting that the fundamental nature of our consciousness could fall into that realm, judging by how it is scientifically impossible to isolate and control for, and is thus seemingly indefineable.

Free will is supernatural. That is why leading atheists posit that it doesn’t exist.

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is often quoted as the fundamental tenet of Christianity.

> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

Donald Knuth is a devout Christian and he has been right about lots of very complicated things.

> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?

Compartmentalization.

I think that's the reason it's possible, but how can you trust they've compartmentalized the right thing?

Basically you can be a great surgeon and religious, but you can't be a great evolutionary biologist and a creationist (at least not without some serious blinders).

If I'm talking to a doctor that's a creationist and they're skeptical about a vaccine - my prior would be that it's more likely this doctor was corrupted by anti-vaxx pseudoscience woo than has an accurate model of the vaccine's risk. I'd want to talk to someone who I know doesn't have a core example of corrupted reasoning.

I’d prefer my scientists to be less confident in their understanding of the world, and more humble about their knowledge. Maybe reading Kuhn does that for most people today, but there’s a long tradition of religion fulfilling a similar function, allowing “mystery” back in, emphasizing the imperfection of man. Religion should instill an attitude of “I don’t know, but I want to know.” That’s the right attitude for discovery.

I find your example is more strongly of the corruption of fundamentalism on the person rather than of compartmentalization.

This is a precursory investigation into some beliefs, using logic instead of emotion: https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22

" before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time "

Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion.

Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point.

Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.

'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind.

Science is a tool, not a Truth.

> that would be missing the point.

Which is?

> Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.

It can be, for some people. Not all. My personal relationship to the greater good has more to do with reasoned arguments rather than spirituality.

> 'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind. Would you agree it's a highly important tool?

Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe.

In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason.

In order to even accept the very notion of 'reason' you have to accept some kind of higher truth.

In addition you have to accept that there is 'a reasoner'.

You can't avoid taking a metaphysical posture - this is the anti-rational position that a lot of knee-jerk opposition to religion is founded upon.

There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason' - the Church founded all the best/most Universities in the world, and every other university is modelled after that.

The Motto of the Ivy Leagues are: 'Truth' or 'Truth and Light' or 'Light' etc. i.e. metaphysical aspirations.

Religion is the contemplation of higher order truths, mixed in with a bunch of applied social stuff.

Therefore: "Preferring Reasoning to Religion" is to misunderstand religion (i.e. Apples to Oranges), although to be fair, a lot of religious adherents do have a problem with that as well.

> Scientific Materialism posits that you are merely a random bag of particles, bouncing through a random universe.

No, it doesn't. (Scientific materialism posits rules, it concludes (or models with) randomness only where the best efforts to model rules without randomness fail.

> In such a model, there is no intelligence, consciousness, rationality or even reason.

False. There's not teleological purpose, if that's what you mean by “reason”, which is a heavily overloaded term, but all the others (including reason in its causal sense) are compatible with scientific materialism.

> There's nothing about the Church that is 'anti reason'

That depends on the Church; and recently the ones which don't have a fundamental conflict with reason have been losing people to irreligion, while those which do have such a conflict have had all the growth. So, over time, the religion that exists progressively has more of a conflict with reason.

Religion is just a tool too. It's just not wielded by the flock, but rather by someone that wants to control the actions of the flock.

Spirituality can be something else altogether, but usually just boils down to magical thinking.

Religion is a social organization and embodiment of a Spiritual practice.

Technically, not necessary, but that would be like saying, technically, humans do not need 'each other' or need 'education' In reality, we do, immensely. When we don't have it wee seek it out learning ans religion, couched in different terms.

A good example is 'Yoga'. Yoga is 100% a religious practice, it's Hatha Yoga, a subdomain of Hinduism. Yoga exists to help prepare the body to be enlightened, specifically via the Kundalini Fire.

By removing the direct, religious language from Yoga, it's promulgators hoped to make it more amenable and acceptable to Westerners and it has been. (I do Yoga myself).

But merely changing the words to make them 'not seem religious' doesn't really change the underlying religious practice.

Isn't Spirituality also a tool, that enables you to understand and improve your relationship to the greater good?

All tools have value, in some context or another

You make strong assertions that would be difficult to prove in general and based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. that materialistic reductionism is the only accurate worldview). I believe the viewpoint you espouse that religious people have broken reasoning is bit myopic in understanding human rationality and intellectual pursuits as well. Humans are complicated as is our understanding of reality we all share.

Good counterpoints are people like Donald E. Knuth, who is a preeminent mathematician, Turing Award recipient, and also a devout Lutheran [1]. He gave a talk on science and religion at Google even that gives a more nuanced view on science and religion [2]. There's also Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project who is a devout Christian as well. Other non-western examples include Ramanujan who attributed his mathematics to "divinity" [3]. Of course otherwise rational scientists can also become besot with irrational pursuits and beliefs, like Linus Pauling obessions with Vitamin C [4].

More broadly the religious concepts implicit in the Judeo-Christian creation mythos (and other major world religions) also encourage (in many scholars opinions and mine as well) a view that the world is a result of rational thought and not purely a choatic war that man happens to be besot by and perhaps might survive. For example compare the differences of Genesis to the Enuma Elish "There is no suggestion of any primordial battle or internecine war which eventually led to the creation of the universe. The one God is above the whole of nature, which He Himself created by His own absolute will. The primeval water, earth, sky, and luminaries are not pictured as deities or as parts of disembodied deities, but are all parts of the manifold works of the Creator. Man, in turn, is not conceived of as an afterthought, as in Enuma Elish, but rather as the pinnacle of creation." [5]. It's my belief that the inception of science (not mere technologists vs philosophers as the ancient Greeks or Romans had) is encouraged by a societal belief that the world has rational underpinnings and isn't just mad chaos.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPpk-1btGZk 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan 4: https://quackwatch.org/related/pauling/ 5: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/creation-and-cosmogony-...

I don't mean to imply that a religious person can't be outlier smart in other ways (Knuth being a great example but there are many others), but that doesn't mean something isn't broken with their world view. People are wildly inconsistent by default (myself included) and it takes great effort to try and recognize these kinds of failures in order to correct them.

In fact, the smarter the person is - the more complex their rationalizations typically are.

As far as finding major religions support a rational world view, it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything so I won't do that here. I'll just say that while I'd like that to be true, I think that it's not.

Your comment does directly imply that you don't trust their overall decision making and/or rationality based on your personal worldview. I believe that's bordering on a vary narrow and limiting view of human rationality, culture, and worldviews. Though yes I would agree with you to an extent as overly dogmatic religious beliefs leave little for other viewpoints or venues of thought as well.

> it's too easy to cherry pick religious text examples to support anything

Certainly it's easy to cherry pick religious texts -- though there is some serious non-religious scholarly works in these areas as well but it's an area fraught with assumptions. The point being that it's not completely unreasonable to argue that (some) major world religions do promote aspects of rational worldviews (those being an orderly universe governed by knowable discernible rules). Perhaps your rationalistic or atheistic worldview is more correct but as with the view that certain religions promote rationality, that argument is fraught with challenges as well. That's my primary point.

> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

That is pretty ridiculous. It’s like saying if there is bad science the scientific theory is broken.

>If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?

What people call fundamentalists are often not all about the actual fundamentals. Rather, they're stuck on one or another bad, but still old idea. Actual fundamentals do not reflect the hateful, angry, bitter image that's conjured up by the term "fundamentalist."

My own experience being raised mainline Protestant was a bit different which might be illustrative: My parents were not at all devout, but still took wisdom and moral lessons from the Bible, especially from the teachings of Jesus. At the same time the preachers in town leaned right in their beliefs and focused on reading and interpreting more obscure passages. This resulted in a modest ongoing tension about what exactly it all meant. Then one Sunday School a conservative leaning preacher taught the kids how to spot witches. That was the last straw and we never went back to Mass or Sunday School and gradually withdrew from everything else with Easter and Christmas being the final holdouts. So I drifted to atheism but still find wisdom in the Bible and dare to compare the passages that focus on Jesus to stories of the Buddha. Culturally there is still quite a bit of influence there, but the fundamentalist component is a massive division like a great wall.

As a non-practicing Jew, I found the Jefferson bible very inspiring. Stripping the religious trappings from the teachings tempers the whole thing; I really like the humanity: it’s a story about a man with his own foibles, attempting to teach himself & others to be better people.

For those that are confused as to what a 'Jefferson Bible' is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible

"The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, is one of two religious works constructed by Thomas Jefferson. The first, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1804, but no copies exist today. The second, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting with a razor and glue numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson's condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine."

https://uuhouston.org/files/The_Jefferson_Bible.pdf Free here

Yes, a surprisingly short read.

Reading it I couldn't help but see Jesus as something of a troll. Like in this passage:

JESUS went unto the mount of Olives.

And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.

And the scribes and Pharisees brought in a woman caught committing adultery; and when they had set her in the midst,

They say unto him, Master, this woman was caught committing adultery, in the very act.

Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

This they said, to test him, that they might have cause to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground.

So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him be the first to cast a stone at her.

And again he stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground.

And they which heard it, began going out one by one, beginning at the eldest: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

When Jesus had lifted up himself, he said unto her, Woman, whither are they gone? hath no man condemned thee?

She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

Jesus was the ultimate troll to the religious authorities, that's why they killed him.

Another great example of his trolling was when he was cornered by a bunch of people wanting to stone him to death:

>31 Again his Jewish opponents picked up stones to stone him, 32 but Jesus said to them, 'I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?' 33 We are not stoning you for any good work,' they replied, 'but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.' 34 Jesus answered them, 'Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are 'gods''? (He's quoting the 82nd Psalm of the Old Testament here)[1] 35 If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came--and Scripture cannot be set aside-- 36 what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, 'I am God's Son'? 37

[1]82 Psalm if the Old Testament: I said, ‘You are “gods”; you are all sons of the Most High.’

I brought this up in Sunday school at a baptist church and it didn't go over well...

I said we are gods on this Earth because of our power to initiate the creation of a new life and the power to end a life.

That's great hahaha. There are some who believe that's actually what Jesus was trying to say: the he was a son of god (there was no definite article "the" in ancient greek), and that everyone else is too (essentially what the Buddhists and Hindus claim); but that message was misunderstood, misinterpreted, censored, and modified to suit political ends.

There are a number of more esoteric quotes attributed to jesus like the one I posted above which make this case quite compelling

If you have that list, I would be very interested to see it! I've never heard of this interpretation, and my ancient greek is very poor. Not trying to be snarky, or clappingback, or anything, I am actually genuinely interested.

I first stumbled upon this theory in an Alan Watts lecture. Here is relevant clip from the lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2DbsuzTt6g

There are many quotes where Jesus spoke about the union of all people within him and within god. This is basically the same as the Buddhist concept of Indra's Net: the divine unity and mutual interpenetration of all things.

>"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus"

>"I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me."

>"For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ."

This idea seems to be the logical basis for many of his more commonly known teachings:

>"Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you."

>“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

>"whatsoever you do to the least of your brothers and sisters, you do unto me"

This last quote seems to indicate that when people realized all of the above, they would also realize their equality with jesus as children of god; which is essentially blasphemy to the modern day mainstream interpretation of the King James translation.

>"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father."

Thank you!

"... But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes."

Great quote.

Funnily enough, this passage is generally considered a later addition to the Gospel of John: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_the_woman_taken_in_a...

Why is he a troll here? Seems like a solid message.

When he was asked about what to do with the woman who was brought in, he immediately started ignoring everyone and started doodling in the dirt, and then continued doing so as everyone slowly left. That's a little trollish (although not necessarily in a bad way!)

The stories have Jesus trolling the Pharisees and others. Imagining the reactions and situation behind some of these stories are strong LOL moments.

Seems like the scribes and Pharisees that are trying to troll Jesus and he trolls them back?

To be clear, I think Jesus is trolling the right way. :-)

Except that without the supernatural part, it was a wandering, homeless religious teacher who got himself killed at an early age teaching things which got his followers killed too, and end up being pointless.

"Blessed are the meek; for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven." Except there is no kingdom of heaven, after all; and the meek are not blessed but oppressed. The supernatural stuff was there to show that the oppressive nature of the world and its cruelty was not the only thing; there was hope beyond it in the world to come, which gave the strength to believe in something absurd.

Otherwise its just John the Baptist; a person preaching who ended up dead on the whims of the powerful.

This demonstrates the big flaw of Christianity. Even thought there are millions of sincere, loving and friendly Christians around the world, the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism. Sooner or later someone will be confronted with the fundamentalist ideas about women, non-christians, and sexual diversity (for example), and start spreading the hate ideas contained in parts of that book.

I would posit that the most fundamental idea in the Bible is that humanity has fundamentally continued to be selfish and prideful while God has continually chosen to extend grace and keep his promises to people (mainly covered in the Old Testament). He dis this to the ultimate extent by living with us and dying on the cross so that all of the promises could be fulfilled once and for all (new testament).

It is exactly the selfish and prideful that decide to leverage select words/passages/ideas out of context for their own power over others rather than their inward correction of self.

Lastly, I’d add that many of the passages/letters written were to the audience of CHRISTIANS. I bible doesn’t really demand that non-Christians apply any of this to their lives until the first foundational stone is set. Paul even writes to this effect in 1st Corinthians.

The fundamentalist interpretation is only one way to read the biblical text, and it tends to ignore the context the text was written for.

Women: Jesus' ministry was financially supported by women. Jesus explicitly did not condemn the woman caught in adultery like the Pharisees did although he did not condone her conduct, either. Jesus taught to women (e.g. Mary, Martha's sister) while the rabbis forbid it; one rabbi said he would rather burn the Torah than teach to a woman, and the Torah was so sacred that they put old unusable Torah scrolls in the walls of the synagogue rather than the trash. A woman dealing in purple cloth hosted one of the early churches (and probably led it after Paul left). A woman is mentioned with the title apostle.

Homosexuality: nowhere does the Bible hate homosexuals. It says that it is a harmful behavior and is not to be tolerated in God's people because it leads to death. It is not "hate" to consider someone's behavior unhealthy, or even to disapprove of someone's behavior. We don't "hate" thieves because we disapprove of thievery. In fact, most people hate thievery and think it is so harmful to society that it should be repressed, but it does not mean we must hate thieves. American LGBTQetc seem to require love to look like complete acceptance and consider anything else as "intolerance", but that is a false dichotomy.

Jesus might not have been anti-women, but the New Testament certainly is.

> A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.

In particular, Paul (one of the writers) was - take that as you will. Overall, it's generally extremely progressive (for its time and context!).

> for its time and context!.

The problem is that people are applying the morality of the Bible in the modern era when it's clearly outdated. Biblical morality is clearly not correct now on a number of issues (divorce, gay rights, etc, etc).

I mean, comparing someone’s sexuality to thievery is almost exactly the point.

As you point out, we are intolerant of theivery as a society; treating homosexuals analogous to how we treat thieves is probably intolerant.

> the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism

But I think your degree of fundamentalism-ness is defined by your relationship to that book. If you see it as completely inerrant, then yeah, you're instantly in trouble because it can be trivially shown to be in self-conflict.

If you're willing to examine the book critically and in context, you do a lot better. Obviously the risk with this is that those doing that interpretation are entrusted with a lot of power over what people believe. But I think there's a middle ground here between the medieval Catholicism that the reformation reacted against (where the Word is obscured to the point that even the secondary texts like the liturgies weren't given in the vernacular) and the rugged individualism of modern evangelicals (where it's Bible-or-bust and writers like Rob Bell are excommunicated for daring to suggest that universalism might actually be consistent with the character of Jesus).

I would see this wide middle ground as a place where we agree on a very short list of actual fundamentals (something like the Nicene Creed, basically), and other than that people are free to study and believe what they want, as long as it isn't hurting others.

> If you're willing to examine the book critically and in context, you do a lot better.

Yeah, but in that case you have to concede that the Bible is not miraculous inspired, so why is it any better than other books such as the Vedas or the Iliad? This is the whole problem in the foundation of religion.

It also shows the blindsight of progressive Christians: they're following a religion that at the foundation goes against things they believe. For example, new testament writers say that Jesus came to save from the sin of Adam, but if no Adam and Eve existed, the explanation does't work anymore.

I don't think a literal Adam is necessary for the "sin of Adam" to be a thing, particularly if you're in a mindset already where the purpose of Christ's time on Earth was to establish a kingdom, rather than just to deliver some pleasant homilies and maybe troll a few pharisees on the way to his real intention, which was dying and being resurrected.

In any case, the Bible can absolutely be miraculously inspired and still be subject to critical examination. Looking at the history of how the individual books have been studied, translated, and selected, it's obvious that the text itself had always been very much interwoven with academia and tradition.

Are there clear examples of that in the Bible (New Testament) or is it just how people interpret it?

Edit. I’m not challenging or arguing any point. I was genuinely curious.

Eph 22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Cor 33 For God is not a God of disorder but of peace—as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people.

34 Women[a] should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.

Tim 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[a] she must be quiet.

I think those constitute clear sexism and/or misogyny?

Note: this is a bit cherry-picking out of context, which I'll admit sometimes happens in Christian circles as well. But I think understanding the context and culture of the time can make things a bit more clear. Yes, the culture of the time had a different handling of gender roles, and some of that persists in other cultures around the world to this day. These were letters written to the Christians in the churches of the day. Likely the content would be written slightly differently if it were written to a church in the modern day USA.

For example: Ephesians 6 goes on from what you clipped: 25 For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her 26 to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. 27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. 28 In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. 29 No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. 30 And we are members of his body.

This seems to me to indicate that husbands should be self-sacrificing and putting their wives' needs above their own. All the submission indicated here is similar to the way that Christ (the Son) submits to God the Father. These would have been very strong and shocking words in that culture, that normally would have allowed for husbands to have complete "rule" over their wives, and instead is urging husbands to self-sacrifice for their wives. So if anything, it would have been improving the standing of women rather than "keeping them down."

If you're married, have you ever willingly given up on your own desires, instead following your spouse's needs/wants? Have they ever done the same for you? This seems to be what this passage is encouraging.

I'm not cherry picking out of context. The following lines don't make it any better to me. The text is ultimately still saying women should bow and submit to their husbands decisions in all things, as long as their husbands treat them well. Yeah, I get that this was 'progressive' for its time. I still find it absurd people follow text like this as holy.

Your interpretation is well and dandy but perhaps as a society we need to stop holding text that's so dated in such high regard, where many peoples interpretation is far less optimistic and charitable than yours.

It’s worth noting though that all your quotes are from the various post-gospel letters, not quotes from Jesus.

It's all in the Bible.

Yeah but this subthread discussion is regarding "are those passages taken out of context by preachers?" And it is interesting to note that the quotes given are all examples of 1st century preachers attempting to apply Jesus' message out of the original context. Yes the epistles are part of the Bible, but they are a distinctly different category from the gospels or accounts of Old Testament prophets. The guys writing them are not believed to be infallibly writing from the hand of god, and even fundamentalists agree they must be interpreted within the context in which they were written and their intended audience.

Mind you I'm an atheist, albeit with an amateur interest in biblical scholarship and archaeology. I just find that period interesting. And I think there is plenty of bad things Jesus actually said or did to point to. But I do believe the most egregious moral flaws of the New Testament are in the epistles, not the the gospels.

I think you're committing a historical fallacy. What you're saying is like condemning Abraham Lincoln because he said things that today we'd find unsavory or unenlightened. Fact is, Lincoln was highly progressive in his days.

Yes, the scriptures include things that are problematic, especially in the context of today's mores. But in so many cases, understanding the norms of the times really helps understand the "why", which is important.

The historical fallacy would be saying that early Christians were reprehensible because of their views independent of the time they existed in. I never said that. What I am saying is that following the teachings of those people 2000 years later is what's foolish, as we've come quite a long way in moral development since then.

In the case of Abraham Lincoln, he deserves credit for being progressive for his time in his pursuit of abolition. Does that mean we should follow his views on the inequality of white and black people, because he was progressive then? No, we've come a long way since then.

I think we're more on the same page than not.

For Lincoln, celebrate his accomplishments and how he helped us progress. For the difficult things, understand they are artifacts of his time. They are important to understanding him and can further help color who he was.

Reasonable Christians do the same with the Bible.

Lincoln was a person. The Bible is meant to be the actual teachings of divinity. That's a key difference.

If we're meant to update for modern morality maybe we need a Newer Testament. Until then, the ambiguity of the words of long dead shepherds leave quite a lot to be misinterpreted, as well-intentioned your interpretation may be.

However, people don't go around claiming that Lincoln was God's chosen one and that his word is sacred. That's why we're fine in understanding that Lincoln was a man of his time and many things he said should nowadays be considered garbage. This is not how religion sees the Bible and the words of Jesus and other prophets.

My problem with this perspective is that, sure, the bible had some teachings that could be considered an improvement at the time. But if it really is a divinely inspired text, the teachings wouldn't be just a slight improvement of the norms at the time, but would consistently teach equal standing of every person.

And considering we have the old testament which was full of, let's be honest here, barbaric teachings but apparently were appropriate for the time. You would think by now we would have the New Testament V.96 that would contain teachings that are relevant today, not forcing you to pick and choose just the good parts.

There are many different ways to read the bible. Mainly, the bible is not a literal instructional manual unless you are a fundamentalist. And fundamentalists suck. For others, it's a written record of humanity's relationship with God. It's also a collection of writings from a number of different authors and genres - it has history, poetry, letters, and so on. The old testament was written by people thousands of years ago who had an imperfect understanding of God, nature, humans, society, etc.

In large part, the story of Jesus demonstrates how we should reject those archaic rules of our ancestors and act according to very simple principles; nonviolence, love for God, and love for all humans.

I have no real bone to pick with Christianity. The asking comment was for examples of sexism and misogyny in the Bible which I provided.

I’ll add this as a great overview and resource for the context around that letter(and all the others): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y71r-T98E2Q

Take out the writings of Paul (who never actually met Christ) and the whole thing becomes so much less problematic.

Paul claims to have met Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3-6) [1] and claims apostolic authority because of it (Acts 15:3-8) [2]. Furthermore, other apostles agreed that he had, or at least that he had the correct message (Gal 2:6-10) [3] and that his writings had the force of scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16) [4]. It is a letter from Peter, the head of the church in Jerusalem, claiming equating Paul's writing with "the other Scriptures", so you can't take out Paul's writing by claiming that that the original apostles did not believe what Paul wrote.

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+9&version=...

[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians...

[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians%202&v...

[4] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Peter+3&ver...

The day Christians remove Paul's letters from the Bible, then your argument will make sense.

It's all in the Bible.

Have Christians all agreed to take out the gospel according to Paul?

I can't remember ever being in a church where women were required to stay silent. So not quite dropped but at least not enforced by most. Ask me again once everyone dropped miles for metric.

There are plenty of modern Christian sects where I'm certain men do get more of a voice than women.

Ah yes, the old 'ephesians is mysogyny' out-of-context quote, which always manages to completely omit the lines which follow:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.1 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 o“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

won't get into the others, i'm quite sure there are cohesive rebukes / contextualization elsewhere

How does saying a husband should respect and love his wife mean that wives having to submit to their husbands isn't misogynistic? Yes, treat them well, but women must bow to their husbands in all decisions. It's a clear reinforcement of a power dynamic that ultimately means men control all the power in society.

The husband is to love his wife as he would himself; moreso, actually, he is to love his wife in the way Christ loved the church--who sacrificed his life for the well-being of the church (namely so that we could have an intimate relationship with God). It is with this understand of what a husband is that the wife submits to the husband. Submission is not unquestioning obedience, unless you insist on taking the most fundamentalist interpretation. And a husband that insists on unquestioning obedience is failing to even love his wife as himself, and certainly not with Christ's self-sacrificing love.

Your interpretation is certainly kind and would probably lead to a great way of life - my issue is still this text can easily be interpreted to be far less charitable and imply that the power of household decisionmaking lies with the husband, so long as he respects and loves his wife. Respecting and loving your wife is really, really up to interpretation. There are plenty of people now and throughout history who would not interpret this text the same way you have.

The text unequivocally gives different instructions for men and women, and the instructions given to men imply having the power in a relationship. Your interpretation doesn't sway my reading of the text as it is.

It's hard for me to see how you're reading Ephesians 5 in good faith. Wives submit to your husbands, husbands sacrifice your lives for your wives (like how Jesus ya know, was crucified for his Church). And you read this as misogynistic?

This is not by far the most problematic Pauline passage in terms of male/female roles. Taken at face value this is some pretty deep advice for how to have a functioning marriage where two people need to make decisions for their family and don't necessarily see eye-to-eye on everything.

Your explanation doesn't make sense because the roles are unequal. The text requires sacrifice from men but subservience from women, creating a hierarchy of powers inside the family. Your interpretation would be acceptable if the text said that both women and men had to sacrifice and submit to each other.

Yes, the husband in a family making all the decisions as long as they respect their wife is for sure misogynistic.

Your interpretation of this being advice for a family to function even when they don't see eye to eye everything makes no sense to me. So if a man and woman in a marriage don't see eye to eye on an issue, the man makes the decision as long as he's kind to his wife? A wife may have her opinion, but really she has to submit in all things to their husband?

I'm all for husbands loving their wives, but maybe text that clearly says that men have the power of decision making in a household could be interpreted as meaning...men have the power in a relationship.

Perhaps we're working with two different definitions of misogyny?

"hatred of, aversion to, or prejudice against women" https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/misogyny

Where does power come into it exactly?

Power has everything to do with prejudice. Divinely ordaining men with the power of the household is prejudice against women.

'Power' in the Christian context is quite a lot different from your impression I think:

> And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10:42-45

To read Ephesians 5 without this in the background is totally misconstruing the text.

How does that contradict the idea that ultimately women are to submit to the will of men in the household?

I'm one of the fundamentalists everyone here seems to hate. My wife is a very strong willed person and she does submit to my decisions (never because I ask or demand it) but because we see Christ submit to the will of the father. Just as I submit to Christ.

For clarity, I in no way rule over my wife, and am in no way of more value than her. The Bible makes it clear that all people are of the utmost value because they are made in the image of God.

For additional context, yes my wife submits to me, but I make no decisions without her consent. I don't even buy a $5 item off Amazon without talking to her. My Biblical role is to serve my wife and family which I'm thrilled to do each day, just as we see Jesus serve his disciples when he washes their feet.

What I'm trying to get to is that please do not mistake a fundamental view of the Bible as misogyny. Any teaching or text can be cherry picked without context to make any view look evil and cruel.

Your description of the dynamic between you and your wife is incoherent. You assert that she submits to you, but then you say that you make no decisions without her consent. So when she does not give her consent, she doesn't submit to you? Or does she simply always gives her consent, because the submission to you is a predicate. But then asking for her consent is a complete sham, a pretense to give her some agency in your mind.

Irrespective of those contradictions however, a social dynamic in which the woman must axiomatically submit to the man is always inherently misogynistic no matter the justifications, be they religious or not.

Sorry, rereading my post doesn't really make the dynamic clear and I'm not sure I could do it justice without having a dialog, but I'll attempt it.

First, neither of us make purchasing nor time commitment decisions without checking with each other, my last comment made it appear there's a large imbalance in the relationship with her making all decisions.

Our natural dynamics are that I operate on a system of respect, and she operates on a system of love. Yet the Bible calls us to do the opposite, I am to act in love, and she in respect (basically showing each other care in the way we best receive it).

Earlier in our marriage, I was really bad at showing her love as she received it (acts of service and giving her verbal feedback to her opinions and thoughts --- sometimes I still fail, but I get better as we grow). She was bad at showing respect (when she didn't feel loved/heard she would yell).

Regarding her choosing to submit, it's a motivation/outlook more than anything. When we are discussing a decision, she most always asks what I think we should do first. She will then give her thoughts on the topic and then leaves the decision up to me. There have of course been times where I end up making decisions that don't end up being the best in hindsight, but she never comes back and throws it in my face, because she chose to submit to my decision.

Since it's easy to say something that is misconstrued in text, I do want to be clear I never lord over my wife. I never demand that she submit to me, she chooses to do that on her own.

Hopefully that helps a little, I'm sure it's still probably unclear, my mom (who is quite left leaning and a feminist) doesn't grasp the Biblical concept of submission (thinking it means being weak and timid) and doesn't feel women should submit. Although she admires my wife's and my relationship, even though it differs from her views and has zero concern that both my daughters are raised in a household where the wife submits because the leadership is carried out with love and patience.

I'm confused. You say your wife submits to you, then you provide examples of how that is not the dynamic in your home.

So your wife submits to you, but she also independently makes decisions which you come to an agreement on?

That's great for your family, does that mean a family where the wife makes all the decisions and controls the power is immoral?

The verses you mention don't negate the previous ones. Yes, they said the husbands should love their wives, as long as the wives are subservient to their husbands, i.e., both things are considered necessary.

Taking the scriptures literally and limiting yourself only to direct recommendations from New Testament (i.e. no backlinking to Old Testament), at the very least, treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal[0].

It's interesting to observe the ways various Christian groups try to navigate their way around gender roles in their communities. You have a full spectrum here. From some fundamentalist US churches that will take everything super-literally, through groups like Jehovah's Witnesses[1] who sort-of take this literally, but make reasonable exceptions[2], through Catholics in Western countries, where most believers probably haven't even heard or thought about these passages, and any semblance of adhering to them is likely seen as more traditional than religious - all the way to lenient Christian groups that allow women priests.

In my experience, all Christianity is like this. Every group in every location[3] has their own specific understanding of which words are to be taken literally, which ones figuratively (and to what degree), and which ones to be completely ignored.

--

[0] - E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Timothy_2:12, https://www.openbible.info/topics/head_coverings and related references - literally, women should not teach, not usurp authority of a man, should wear head covering when performing the subset of religious functions they're allowed to, etc.

[1] - If I seem to focus on JWs too much in this thread, that's because I spent 20 years being one.

[2] - E.g. over at Jehovah's Witnesses, there's a lot that would technically qualify as "praying or prophesising" where women are't required to cover their heads, and men are not required to uncover theirs. Also definition of "cover" is "with a hat or similar", probably not what the authors had in mind.

[3] - As I understand it, Catholics in the West and in Africa are essentially two different religions. The former, having lived with it for centuries, ignore or pay lip service to all the rules that the latter obey to the letter.

> treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal

It reflects the mores of the times, which were different than ours. People 2000 years from now will certainly look at us and be aghast at some of our norms.

My denomination has had woman pastors since the mid 1800s.

Women shouldn't speak in church: https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/14-34.htm

Homosexuality is unnatural: https://www.biblestudytools.com/romans/1-27.html

There are real issues there, but the homosexuality quote is one of the "big eight" anti gay quotes that come up often and turn out to be misunderstood or translation errors that don't hold up to serious scrutiny. Homosexuality as we know it today was not well known or named at the time that text was written, just to start. Searching for the "big eight" helps both with that specifically and the general business of understanding how ancient stories get misunderstood by our modern news clip processing habits.

The New Testament is often mistakenly touted as a "reformation" from the Old Testament, and cherry-picked apart into a more progressive form of Christianity, but, it's not all that different from the Old Testament in actuality. New Testament also defines dress codes for women and re-affirms a patriarchal family heirarchy.

> it's not all that different from the Old Testament in actuality

Um, have you actually read them? They are miles apart. Can you find me the reams of legal codes or origin stories in the New Testament, for example?

Agree completely. While both texts do largely focus on people of Jewish origins, there is not a lot of actual overlap on content. Some of the NT books are seen as prophetical, so that lines up to some degree - but even those read very different.

It's not just content that differs either - the literary style of the NT also deviates greatly, since it borrows much more from hellenized culture than the OT. Especially the synoptic gospels. For example, John, was composed using a layered "onion" type narrative structure which was popular in other greek texts.

They're even so different, that one form of heresy that was more common back in the day (Gnosticism), would sometimes claim that the OT deity was a false-god (the demiurge), because how else do you explain such a personality change?

There are, but it's worth noting that they are all quotes from Paul, not Jesus.

You mean, the same Jesus who appointed only men to be his disciples, while the women in his entourage were servants? It seems that Paul was just putting into words his practice.

Funny you mention that! Yes, the four gospels that were canonized by a patriarchal church organization do seem to paint a picture like that. But the Gospel of Thomas, and other ancient "heretical" texts tell a different story, where Jesus explicitly acknowledgd women as equals and Mary as the favorite disciple. So even some very early Christians would disagree with Paul here.

Why are you singling out Christianity? The same could be said for any of the book based religions.

I know, but the concern about Christianity is that it is a majority religion in the West, with strong political power. This has to be focus at least where I live.

Witches? Seriously? That's just looney crap.

I take it that "last straw" means the "straw that broke the camel's back". I just hope that stories like that won't be conflated with healthy practice of Christianity in people's minds.

I get your point, but isn't this the "no true Scotsman" fallacy? I know Christians like you exist and I like that most media portrays "good" Christians to look basically like the prototype you described. However, I have personally met only one Christian of this type and all my other interactions have been with the fundamenlist caricatures described elsewhere here. (Who is vocal about their Christianity might be skewing my observations, but this is a problem in its own: why are only the fundamentalists vocal around me)

> isn't this the "no true Scotsman" fallacy

You have a point. The definition of Christian is flexible, so how do you define "true"-ness? In my denomination, you'll find a wide variance of views on whether Mormons are Christian, for example.

> all my other interactions have been with the fundamenlist caricatures described elsewhere here

Like what you later intimated and what someone else said, I'll bet significant money that it's because they are so vocal. They are called capital-E evangelicals for a reason. The United Methodist church is lowercase-E evangelical; very much not in your face.

You've probably met a lot more, but only noticed the more intense ones.

This isn't an excuse, more curiosity, but did that take place during the mass hysteria about supposed satanic cults?

Grew up Protestant and rejected it because of the hypocrisy I saw around me. I saw "good church going people" who I knew were not good people and I saw how they were able to use the authority of their positions to exert influence. I also found that asking too many inconvenient questions in youth group meetings led to uncomfortable situations. It became clear that the religion part of things had little to no impact on how good, bad or decent the people practicing it were. People were good or bad, religious people simply had a metaphysical framework they could use to excuse themselves... and the bad ones would do just this. Led me to reject confirmation and leave altogether. Now it's been 40 years and I am more convinced than ever that I made the correct decision. Religion is fundamentally flawed as I see it practiced around me and needs to be kept out of civil society strictly and completely. You want to practice it in your home or church? Go for it. You want to inject it into civil society (schools, government, etc)... you need to be stopped utterly and completely.

Just curious: which denomination were you?

Generic Presbyterian. The vanilla ice cream of religions.

Do you know if it was PC USA (which is more mainline) or PCA (which is more evangelical/fundamentalist)? It's actually a pretty huge split in that denomination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_in_the_United_St...

This was PC USA.

After being raised in a non-Fundamentalist denomination I'd say the progressive ones are more insidious and no less harmful. Their foundations are all the same text, no matter how literal or figurative they interpret it. IME they usually also teach the same bad ways of thinking: emotion over logic, testimony over hard evidence, authority beyond your understanding, etc.

I suspect you're setting up a false dichotomy. There are more choices on theology than ones that require you to check your brain in at the door, such as 1. fundamentalism and 2. feel-good pop psychology.

I am not taught emotion over logic. In fact, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (a framework derived from but not described by him) has you evaluate beliefs with reason being a co-equal base. In confirmation and later in-depth adult classes, we were instructed to wrestle with the scripture. For example, we dug into the context of the times to understand better why certain things would have been said. We acknowledged selected verses made no sense. We agreed some parts we have no choice but to disregard. We frankly don't take Revelations that seriously because it's mostly batshit crazy. :-)

I am not taught testimony over evidence. My church fully embraces evolution. We see Genesis for the story and the poetry.

Authority beyond understanding: that gets back into the theological allegiance insisted on by the fundamentalists mainly.

As much as I appreciate your level headed approach of the whole thing, the very basis of most religion is based on _faith_ that [insert relevant scriptures] are holding some truth about the very existence and power of [insert omnipotent entity]. I'll be honest, I have a hard time putting this very fundamental point as having any basis in logic and reason. Even putting beliefs at the same level as reason is rather questionable, IMHO.

Edit: I'm not here to tell you you're wrong or to question your beliefs. You're very much free to hold them. I'm just having a hard time equating religion with objectivity when they are fundamentally rooted in something subjective by nature.

While I should attempt to create objective and rational explanation for everything, I think most people recognize I'd be hubristic to assume I can do this in all cases. Whether or not a belief system has to come into play is perhaps subjective. The irony is that I think most belief systems have the staying power they do because they cannot be entirely discredited through logic and reason.

I agree with you that it's not based on logic and reason. And I am OK with that. The mystery and subjectiveness is part of the point and part of reality that we need to grapple with.

"Mystery" and "subjectiveness" are euphemistic descriptions of mythology and fairy tales, used to justify some pretty terrific political and military policies even today. People who go to church are implicitly supporting these things. Some of them have an excuse, in that they were simply raised that way and never had an opportunity for enlightenment. People who should know better don't have that excuse.

> used to justify some pretty terrific political and military policies even today

People who want to war will use any reason they can. Many have used religion, unfortunately. Mao and Hitler didn't, though.

I went to a Catholic highschool as a non-catholic. It was taught by marianists and we had visiting jesuits often. They generally taught that you reached your faith through logic and exploration and doubt of faith until you hit the point where you realize you can't explain it all with logic. They were very harsh on everyone's beliefs and made you analyze them. It didn't work for me but I appreciated the emphasis on critical thinking.

I did enjoy the classes where we just gutted and analyzed the bible like any other literary work, they were not shy about it and it was fun to watch it shock the "devout Catholic kids".

> They generally taught that you reached your faith through logic and exploration and doubt of faith until you hit the point where you realize you can't explain it all with logic.

So the absence of evidence is evidence of the supernatural? Isn't this the god-of-the-gaps?

> They generally taught that you reached your faith through logic and exploration and doubt of faith until you hit the point where you realize you can't explain it all with logic

I'm fine with this... until they start proposing that the explanation for "you can't explain it all with logic" is "therefore there is an almighty God" rather than "therefore we don't how it works yet". At this point, my level of faith approaches zero (I sit somewhere along the lines of agnosticism or apatheism, depending on my mood) so you're losing me completely.

You just said that beliefs and reason are a co-equal base. This is exactly against reason, as reason cannot be bended in some cases just because you believe it should not apply in certain areas. That's why your denomination continues to subscribe to ideas that go against reason like Trinity, just to name a very common one.

Methodist Quadrilateral still teaches their followers to view issues and compare them to their scripture, then their traditions, then reason, and Christian experiences...

Those are literally the four pillars of Wesleyan, which are all emotion over logic.

"reason", one of the "four pillars of [the] Wesleyan [Quadrilateral]" is "all emotion over logic"?

Yes, but you've conveniently left out your other pillars...

Reasoning is just the act of thinking. An explanation for something which, according to you, should be framed around: Scripture, Tradition, and Christian Experiences.

Scripture: Tells you how to feel (emotion) Tradition: Tells you this is how we've always felt (emotion) Christian Experience: Is a grouping of Scripture and Tradition (emotion)

Reason is also the invitation to use our God-given intellect to help us come to conclusions. Otherwise we're disparaging God by disparaging that intellect.

Otherwise, yes, the other three bases of the Quadrilateral aren't "reason".

Not sure I follow. If the religious outfit is teaching things like:

- This book is a set of moral guidance aimed to cause favorable social outcome.

- These stories are myths.

- We should analyze these books to critically determine their relevance to our modern lives.

- Your personal understanding of spirituality is unique to yourself.

It seems only productive? It seems a much more dangerous stance, one even paralleling a fundamentalist stance, that there might be nothing to learn at all from scripture and millennia of human organized religion and so it must be completely discarded.

I haven't encountered a single religion that would teach what you just described. Can you name some?

I can't imagine such religion staying around for long, as presenting things this way leads to obvious question: what makes $holyBook special over, say, Harry Potter? Or Star Trek? Or your national fiction writer of yore that wrote stories to cheer up their readers in difficult times[0]?

This is not a joke question, by any means. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, so I had (my religion's interpretation of) the Bible down pat. And yet, looking back, even when I still believed I already realized my moral compass was built 50% on the Bible, and 50% on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's probably the latter that kept me from becoming a fundamentalist believer :). Alas, while I could easily find a community of people willing to wait for Jesus with me, I have a hard time finding people who want to work towards the utopian ideals of the United Federation of Planets with me.

--

[0] - E.g. Henryk Sienkiewicz in my country.

Universalists, Reconstructionist Judaism, Quakers with unprogrammed worship, virtually any panentheist religion which asserts that the concept of God is universal and inherent in every element we can perceive. Even early Christian Gnosticism had echoes of this style of thought.

You're missing:

- These myths are the only ones we believe. The other ones are false and harmful.

- There is an invisible man who created everything and sits in judgment of all of us for the purposes of what happens to us in an afterlife that nobody has been able to observe.

- Follow us so that he does not judge you unfavorably.

The problem with the Bible is that the main character is God, and so everything that happens in the book affects him. The lessons do not give proper ethical cause and effect reasons for why you should do or not do something except that God is displeased with your humanity. Churches can add to these lessons and actually teach ethics, but they originate with the idea that a perfect being is really bad at creating perfect beings.

Despite how many churches start having pastors with spiked hair and jeans and sneakers and tattoos, THAT does not change, and it's fundamentally ridiculous and harmful.

This is a strawman for what you believe all religious organizations to be. In fact, you don't even need to be a religious organization to hold such beliefs. See: Alcoholics Anonymous.

The problem that religious doctrine seeks to address is one of how to preserve our sanity when we're inexplicably stuck on this rock together. Science doesn't seem to have any good explanation for why we're here either -- just that we exist and the universe has for a long time too. There a multiple colliding personal beliefs of individuals on things like: fairness, justice, or whatever a favorable outcome socially even might be. I think it's fine that people might seriously study the mythos of Greek, Abrahamic, and Eastern religion together.

People are born without a purpose other than survival and it is perfectly normal, if not recommended, that they maintain a healthy curiosity about the meaning of their existence. The alternative, unless I'm mistaken, is nihilism.

> In fact, you don't even need to be a religious organization to hold such beliefs. See: Alcoholics Anonymous.

Alcoholics Anonymous is an explicitly religious organization is it not? To me they certainly cast themselves so strongly in that manner that to claim they are a not is to make a distinction without a difference.

Note: I have not attended ?A itself but spent time with adjacent ?anon groups designed to support people whose friends and family members are struggling with addiction. The messages I received were, to me, pretty hard core religious, and one specific kind of religion in particular.

But you don't need religion for that. The ancients already knew this by creating the arts as an expression of humanity looking for its meaning. My opinion is that modern humans debased art and nowadays have difficulty finding things that are meaningful. Religion and superstition, on the other hand, have maintained their focus.

It isn't a strawman. It is a fundamentally accurate description of the major Western religions. The kind you would go to a church to.

I’ve met a handful of Jewish rabbis who teach exactly this btw.

However their comment is not the stories are “myths”. But instead are verbal stories that likely greatly exaggerate the situation to teach us a lesson and keep us engaged.

They didn't keep the Bible around for thousands of years because they compared it with other myths and thought it was the best, they did it because they thought it was true. The "natural selection" argument for the Bible leaves out the fact that reading it as a myth is not its "habitat," to keep up the analogy. On a comparative mythology basis, the winner will probably be a work of fiction written after the printing press.

Who is "they"? This seems like an argument against organized religion because of religious hegemony in certain cultures.

Certainly people _do_ gravitate towards moral mythology whether they like to admit it or not. The popularity of superheroes in North American culture speaks to this in modern times, most of which appear to be stories about defeating evil in ways that parallel those of ancient myths.

The argument is that the Bible is a really great myth because it survived for so long. The fallacy in that argument is that the Bible did not survive as a myth, it survived as a written record of events.

The Catholic approach, at least, is that the Bible contains a variety of literary styles, and so it's both. Some books are records of events, some are letters, some are myths in the Joseph Campbell sense of stories that are meant relate deeper truths about human nature and mankind's relationship with God. Most of the people who did this preserving over the centuries didn't subscribe so much to literal-minded fundamentalism.

The Catholic approach doesn't allow for swapping out biblical myths for other myths, which means that the Bible wasn't competing as a myth in their cannon either. If there was a form of "natural selection" operating on it, it was not operating on it as a myth. However I grant that "they thought it was true" is a vast oversimplification of the many motivations that people have had for printing copies of the Bible - which can include purely financial ones!

Ah, I think I see what you mean. Yes, most of the curation of the biblical canon was settled by the 4th century or so, and after that it came along with the religion as a fixed entity. But that doesn't mean there wasn't some natural selection of myths before that, especially those that had already been around for a long time before they were written down. Some weren't exclusive to Judaism; compare Noah to Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

I don't think 3rd century Christians were comparing different accounts and selecting them on the basis of how well they would function as allegorical myths. I could be wrong, but as far as I know that is a modern invention, developed to reconcile the supernatural elements of scriptures with the naturalistic worldview that developed during the enlightenment. To understand the setting of early canonization, you have got to picture a world of persecution, faith and martyrdom that is hard for us to imagine in our liberal, secular and comfortable world.

I understand that the view of the Bible as a product of natural selection is a way to transpose the belief that it was not made through purely human forces to a philosophical system where all nonhuman forces are natural. However, the argument for relevance to modernity is severely weakened by this rebasing. It is not the present environment that determines the shape of the animal, but the historical environment, and while the survival of a species is a testament to its adaptation for the historical environment, it is not a testament to its adaptation for the present environment. Since the historical environment was a combination of true faith, and later illiberality, there is no reason to think that it should be adapted for the modern environment of the allegorical view and religious freedom. That is why I do not think the naturalistic view works as a justification for the providence of the scriptures.

I've seen the churches you talk about, and I would almost call them "progressive-fundamentalist". The hallmark of fundamentalism isn't really adhering strictly to the text (after all, the text is so multifaceted that there's not even just one definition of "strict adherence", despite what they would tell you). The defining trait is turning the text into a battle-cry instead of an invitation for contemplation and love and self- and community-work. Progressives are just as likely to do this as conservatives.

I was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools until college. When I was in high school I recall having serious issues with what they were teaching. Here's a few of the gems they left me with:

    1. You should only get married if you intended on having children.
    2. If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled. 
    3. Homosexuality was abhorrent and sinful.
    4. Women should not obtain positions of power in the church.  They used Adam and Eve to justify their position.

Many years later I found out that the reason why my freshman year biology teacher left unexpectedly over the summer was because he had been shuffled to another location after molesting young boys. He was eventually imprisoned for this, after being extradited to Australia. The church and the school knew this but said nothing to the parents or the students and it was swept under the rug. It was complete silence until they were forced to say something at a point where those who were molested were fairly far into their lives.

Thinking back on all of this still makes me angry today. A priest in my elementary school was brought in and then quietly and suddenly left a few months later and I am left with unanswered questions.

I don't need that in my life. I don't need religion to be a moral person, and from my point of view the system that I was raised in was very far from moral. The Catholic church has done more to affirm my Atheist .. non-beliefs? .. than anything else.

> If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled.

This depends on a lot of things. If two people get married, and one of them already knows that they are sterile or for whatever reason cannot have children, but they don't reveal that to the other until after they are married, that is grounds for the other person to seek an annulment. This is not the same thing as saying that the marriage "should" be annulled.

If on the other hand, knowledge of the person's sterility doesn't arise until after they are married, I don't think that's grounds for an annulment.

No, this was "if you can not conceive children you should be single." It wasn't about being hiding things from your spouse or anything like that.

Oh, that's patently false. I'm sorry you were fed misinformation.

What about the rest of my list?

In the eyes of the Roman Catholic church women are still not equals, homosexuality is a sin, and a major purpose of marriage is still to bear children in the name of the lord.

Women and men are not equal. We have equal human dignity, but for example our bodies are different. What level of "equality" would you be content with?

Yes, the purpose of marriage is procreation. What else would its purpose be, a tax break? I don't know exactly what you mean about "bear children in the name of the lord", though. Personally, I see having and raising children as a way of bringing me closer to God, because being in the role of the father forces me to sacrifice for the kids. Every tiny sacrifice I make is a reminder of Christ's supreme sacrifice. There are a thousand ways being a father has made me humble. Both going from zero to one kid, and then going from one to more-than-one, showed me that it's possible to love more than one person with all my being / I didn't allocate my love among my spouse and kids, I have 100% for all of them.

The Church doesn't say "Homosexuality is a sin". The misuse of the procreative faculty (by anybody, heterosexual, homosexual, etc etc) is a sin. It's exactly as grave a sin to use contraception, or to have an extra-marital affair, as it is to engage in homosexual acts.

N.B. I'm just some guy with a keyboard. I'm not a canon lawyer nor a Church historian or anything like that. If and where I've gotten things wrong, I want to learn the truth.

> Women and men are not equal. We have equal human dignity, but for example our bodies are different. What level of "equality" would you be content with?

How many women priests does the Roman Catholic church have? I'll give you a hint, it's ZERO. In fact, you will be excommunicated from the church if you ordain a woman as a priest. I think that equality there would be a good starting point. If the church can not condone women in equal positions of power, how can they possibly see the common man and woman as equals?

> Yes, the purpose of marriage is procreation. What else would its purpose be, a tax break?

Not in the slightest! It is a bond of commitment between two people. Even the "standard" marriage vows mention nothing about children or procreation.

> The Church doesn't say "Homosexuality is a sin". The misuse of the procreative faculty (by anybody, heterosexual, homosexual, etc etc) is a sin. It's exactly as grave a sin to use contraception, or to have an extra-marital affair, as it is to engage in homosexual acts.

This is where we disagree, hard. As long as two consenting adults agree, I do not care what they do with each other. So the church says that homosexuality is a not sin, but they can't have a sexual relationship with each other, they can't get married, and they are misusing their procreative faculty? That's equating homosexuality with sin but with extra steps.

Serious question here -- what would you do if one of your children was gay? Would you tell them that they can't be married, can't adopt children, or that they are sinners? If so, how could you possibly be 100% for all of them?

N.B. I'm just some married guy with a wife and a keyboard. I have two daughters, and I don't care or worry about their sexual preferences. I've known plenty of gay people throughout my life and feel that they deserve equal footing in the eyes of their peers, the law, and the church.

You've got a lot of "I do not care" and "I think" in your reply -- I'm not necessarily trying to convince you, I just saw the misinformation and wanted to move it more in a direction that the Church actually holds.

I mean, I can rewrite the whole thing without any of those words and the message would be the same.

The church does not give women equal power or rights within its ranks.

The church views two consenting adults who love each other as sinners simply because they can not bear children, given that they are of the same sex.

Such an organization has no place in my life and, based on the gallup poll in the article, I am clearly not alone here.

Have a good day, Phil.

Not just other commenters, the (sociological) science backs you up as well: political backlash is a big reason for recent disaffiliation. https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-24-423/

That’s the predictable, and in the end, best outcome. The most foolish thing cultural “christianity,” could do is pick a political party. Now that we’re a generation past that, the so-called “religious right” has evolved into a thin veneer of pseudo-religion over a very specific political faction, and that shallow falseness is driving most people away.

As for actual Christianity and those who study it, in many ways the teachings of Christ could not be more different than the “religious right” advocates today. Christ taught followers to love their neighbors as themselves, and not to judge other people, because in God’s eyes all humans were equally and impossibly flawed. When a mob formed to stone an “adulteress,” as was the prescribed punishment for that “crime” in ancient Judaea, Jesus said “let the person who is without sin throw the first stone.” The mob dissolved, and he told the woman she was forgiven.

Note that this is not what the religious-political faction of Jesus day wanted either, and in the end they arranged for him to be crucified as a result.

I emigrated from another country to the US and, having participated in religion in the past (even if just for socialization), became frightened to discover that American churches (at least 90% of them) are nothing more than a cover to conservative political activism. I never entered into a single one after that.

I doubt that the number is 90%, and I have no idea how anyone would rigorously measure it, but I understand your point.

One of the annoying things is that it isn’t even quite true to say they preach “conservative,” political action. There’s a particular political philosophy of the “religious right,” which is really it’s own flavor of thing and doesn’t fit the classical definitions of liberal vs conservative that we would have used in say, 1980.

That’s a lot of what’s turning over the Republican Party right now. Old-fashioned “conservatives” like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney are being uprooted in favor of... whatever you call the hodgepodge of today’s Republican ideas.

I'm not religious, so I don't go to my wife's church, but with the pandemic now, they are streaming their services on Sundays for the few of their congregation who are respecting stay-at-home. Now that it's background noise Sunday mornings, I can hear what they're saying, and it's essentially a Republican sermon. Sure, the pastor mentions Jesus every once in a while, but for the most part it's straight up conservative talking points and propaganda. If I didn't know it was a church service, I would have thought she was streaming Fox News. I know, anecdote and sample size of one, but wow.

They're all anti-maskers, too. She had to stop by once to deliver something during service, and everyone's packed in there singing and shouting, zero masks to be found. Pretty scary.

Jesus also told the woman to "go forth and sin no more" as part of being forgiven, which is a significantly important detail that often gets overlooked when paraphrasing this story.

The entire story of Christ is based on redemption from sin - if one tries to eliminate that because having extrajudicial demands on one's conduct is not fashionable in the modern day, what's left is, objectively speaking, not Christianity anymore, not even qualifying as a moral framework, and leaves you with nothing more than a nice story about a nice guy.

Let us not forget that Jesus was described as fashioning a whip (which is not something you do on a momentary whim in the bronze age, that takes time and effort, and in this case, likely stewing the whole time) and deploying it against scalpers in the temple. What the "judge not" passage calls for is recognizing that you aren't the ultimate authority worthy of meting out punishment at the end of the day (which also jibes with significant portions of the Israeli covenant and its lethal punishments being deprecated), but it does not demand that people remain tolerant or silent in the face of sin.

I agree with everything you said. I’ll also admit, it’s hard for me to see much difference between today’s “religious right” and the temple market that Jesus personally wrecked.

Agreed.. but I think that intent factors into it a lot more than people tend to give credit for. If one of the key takeaways of Christianity is "don't sin", then right behind it is "you (and everyone else) will screw up, try to be better anyways". And that applies just as well to things like lying and cheating as it does to scrupulosity and being judgmental.

Your typical fundamentalist might be nominally Christian by declaration, but they give short shrift to so many things they deem not important that it amounts to shallow virtue signaling. The moral guidelines are all-or-nothing. You either accept it all or you might as well save yourself the time because there's no such thing as partial credit. Sin is sin.

For me, and many I know, anti-religious sentiment is pretty simple. We just think it is science fiction, and thus not good to believe it is real. Even if its all very nice and friendly and reasonable fiction, it is better to understand it isn't real.

My anti-religious sentiment goes far beyond that. I could not care less if people believe in science fiction. We all believe lies, don't we?

My problem is that religions dictate universal truth, which is used as a justification to oppress. Many of us were abused or oppressed by mainstream religons as children.

The reason fundamentalists are so appealing is because they at least try to maintain some level of consistency.

How does one know which parts of the bible to accept or which parts are metaphor and which parts are literal or which version of the bible to believe? At least the most literal interpretation always tries to be consistent.

What makes any interpretation better than scriptural literalism? Is it the fact that some happen to agree with current social trends? Seems like the source material is flawed and unnecessary in the first place.

Totally agree. I'm not religious at all, but at least being a "fundamentalist" seems intellectually honesty. If you believe your religious text is the true word of an all powerful God, surely it's infallible? What gives you the right to pick and choose which parts to take literally or not?

Would an all powerful God who wants "true believers" to find salvation leave them for thousands of years muddling through with just an ambiguous and inconsistent book to live by?

I think fundamentalists care less about consistency than closure. They want to minimize mystery and unknowns by insisting that even some very implausible parts of the Bible are expressly and unquestionably true. Similarly, Catholicism seems also to be quite formal about Biblical interpretation, but willing to let the church decide which tenets should be explicit vs metaphor. In contrast to both, I understand that Orthodoxy is less concerned about closure and more willing to leave 'lesser' questions unanswered or remain ambiguous.

Religious truth isn't decided only by scripture or church hermeneutics. Sometimes it's just what your community chooses to care about (or not).

The whole implausible argument always struck me as lacking.

You accept the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent god, but then say they couldn’t possibly do anything supernatural because that would go against the science they created.

> ...bad theology...heresies...

Without "scriptural literalism" how do you know what bad theology and heresy are? Is good theology not simply that which most closely corresponds to Scripture? Your comment makes sense on a Roman Catholic view – in which the traditions of the church are authoritative – but not on the Protestant view (sola Scriptura).

Some are led by consensus and “spirit-leading.” Like the Quakers.

Fundamentalism is still a vague description. I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had. As I grew as an adult my ire went from "religious institutions" to "certain moral communities".

In any moral community there will be outliers and some of those outliers can take hold of a message. You can see this in modern day with secular moral communities as well. My main takeaway, after 20-some years of evaluating this is that morals are something okay to evaluate your group on, but they are not ethics. They cannot apply widely, make their way into law, or try to shape society because by their very definition they are intrinsic to small groups. That doesn't mean these groups can't teach us something, but the foundation of their ideas requires subscription and often holistically.

> I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had.

I know of too many Catholics who say the same. Not growing up Catholic, it's hard to relate. Their stories often involve excessively strict dogma or scriptural interpretation that denies or vilifies innocent human nature. E.g., taking your girlfriend to mass to hear an incendiary anti-abortion sermon, then losing said girlfriend due to that mass, then later ending your relationship with the church out of frustration.

Unfortunately, you are the exception. I grew up in a church household and family. It is sad that so many people see the bible as a weapon to enforce their point of view instead of a manual to direct their own life. It is crazy the amount of hate that my "christian" family members post on FB.

Jesus drove people out of the temple with a whip for disrespecting it. He called people (these are all based on KJV translation) "generation of vipers", "hypocrites", "whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones", he said it would be better some people to not have been born, that it would be better for some to have a millstone hanged on their neck and be drowned in the sea.

None of that was hatred. It was love. He was dealing with people's religious and moral failings.

It is not love to tell people they are okay when they are morally bankrupt.

In that case, I will show love by saying that many religions are morally bankrupt.

I've talked to people of the younger generations (in the USA) who are not even aware that there is anything other than fundamentalist literalism. Either the Earth is 6000 years old and Jonah literally rode in the belly of a whale, or there is no God.

This sets up a situation where you have to be willfully ignorant or lie to defend the existence of God, since this stuff is bollocks.

In reality fundamentalist literalism is a relatively recent (19th century) theological development, but it's taken over completely in many US denominations.

A further wedge has been driven by the total politicization of religion. Many also believe that you must be a far-right Republican to be a Christian. If you'd asked me as a teenager or early 20-something what it meant to be a Christian I'd have thought "you have to support the military and vote Republican."

> In reality fundamentalist literalism is a relatively recent (19th century) theological development

I was under the impression that it began with the Protestant Reformation - specifically Calvinism (16th century)

Hmm... my answer may have been US-centric. I was thinking of this kind of thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fundamentals

Early 20th century though, but the antecedents go back to the 19th.

This is regarded by some as the foundational text of 20th century American fundamentalism. Written and published by an oil tycoon, of course.

Well given the logical definition of God 6 day creation and riding in a whale are not a problem at all, anything is possible. I never saw a 6000 year old Earth in the Bible though.

The idea is to assume we have an unbroken record of genealogy in the bible and add up all the lifetimes of people mentioned, which gives the ~6000 years. [0]

I'm not sure whether there is any basis for this assumption in the text though..

[0] https://creation.com/6000-years

Yeah I don’t think there is, and doesn’t need to be either. If you believe it’s the Word of God then it’s got just what it was suppose to have in it, nothing more and nothing less. Most of the debated things are just not that important on the scale with things that are cut and dry, by design.

It’s like the science thing, there is science in the Bible, but the Bible is not a science book. Science is more of a way to describe the function of the lego blocks that make up the world around us, the Bible is more concerned with how the lego blocks came about and what the cosmic purpose of them is. Which is why science and Bible are never at odds, just like how metaphysics is never at odds with physics. Or how things like gravity and light are well beyond the scope of biological evolution.

Nobody hates you. The gallup just shows that your belief system is slowly becoming irrelevant. If you can still draw anything from it (while leaving the rest of the competing sects alone), all the more power to you.

Even without the hate, isn't it harmful to indoctrinate children into believing in fantasy?

Sure, adding hate makes it far worse, but one fantasy god with a fantasy origin story and fantastical powers is one too many.

The beauty of protestantism is that there is no ultimate arbiter to decide that one sect is "good" or "bad."

You view certain fundamentalists' interpretation as somehow "bad?" So what? They probably view your sect as being equally degenerate.

What gives you standing to cast this judgment?

The framework of Protestantism allows and accounts for these divergent views. So you really can't throw down the "no true Scotsman" fallacy against those sects you disagree with in its broader defense.

I think you're missing the bitterness that comes from growing up with a set of coping mechanisms and losing them. Moderate Christianity, taught by moral and good people, nevertheless can lead one to use the thought of eternal life as a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the reality of death and suffering in the world. If you eventually lose your ability to believe in that (which is involuntary for many), it can be quite painful.

1. Stance on abortion among your brothers in church? As if brothers should even have one that matters?

2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell?

Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I don’t come here as an atheist, just as someone who’s trying really hard to believe but finding no acceptable ground to stand at all. The only smart people I find religious (especially Christian) are ones who were born and grew up forced to go to church. Typically they’d give up on practising it in their teens, basically break every rule in their book for two decades and then somehow rediscover it because now it’s convenient to find some community and higher purpose in their life. The ones who convert from elsewhere when they are adults are almost always gullible and did so for the most transactional reasons you can think of.

> Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable.

I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he's ever met". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between.

Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about rules at all, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with rules you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with rules you become a bitter atheist.

A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion.

Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me. Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it. Most, I think, see that even if it does, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and osmosis, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into whatever. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads.

I like this quote from Pope Francis:

> We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

You say that most Protestants are loving people but that doesn’t seem to be the case at least in the US. Evangelicals are not the only group to vote republican/trump, but they are the vast majority. Very few Christians seem to see the problems (fundamental ones) with that regime but just want to vote for a madman because their goals are met at the expense of literal death and suffering (see Birx’s statements from yesterday).

Again to iterate, it’s not just Christians who voted and continue to vote for him, it’s also a bunch of other people, but the common denominator seems to be an undertone of selfishness and heartlessness, people who are afraid of everyone else and want their life to not change the world be dammed, so yeah can’t really see anyone supporting this ideology to be a good person.

> the common denominator seems to be an undertone of selfishness and heartlessness, people who are afraid of everyone else and want their life to not change the world be dammed, so yeah can’t really see anyone supporting this ideology to be a good person.

This seems to be a pretty close-minded view. Sure, selfishness and heartlessness could be a big motivator to vote one way. But as someone who knows Christians who voted for Trump, here are a few reasons which I'd argue aren't due to moral failings:

* Some strongly believe abortion is murder, and are worried about the number of lives thus being extinguished.

* Some believe that there is a growing anti-religious sentiment in their opposition, and they vote against that anti-religious sentiment. Every one of these friends is a strong proponent of religious pluralism.

* Many Christian voters come from less urban, less affluent areas of the country. These voters felt ignored by mainstream candidates, and Trump courted them better than most candidates in decades, actually speaking to the day-to-day issues of that constituency.

* Many Christians have different moral views than society at large. When viewing males as "the head of the household" is considered sexist and oppressive, couples that (both) opt in for such a household-model will understandably not be drawn in by progressive rhetoric castigating them for it.

Again, this isn't to paint a rosy picture saying "Bad people of group X are just as likely to vote either way". But to say that you can't see anyone supporting an ideology to be a good person under the hood is going to lead to a lot of animosity in life.

> You say that most Protestants are loving people

I didn't say that actually, though I also wouldn't say the inverse. I don't really know the exact answer, and I don't really think it's important here.

> Very few Christians seem to see the problems with that regime

It is important to note that Evangelical != Protestant, and Protestant != Christian, and Christian != Religious person. There are huge gaps between each sub-category and the parent category; evangelicals may be one of the larger categories in the U.S., and may be largely Trumpist (though even then, not all of them), but they hardly represent the whole of religion.

> the common denominator seems to be an undertone of selfishness and heartlessness

I feel an immense amount of anger towards Trump and his entire movement, not despite but because many of my family-members have aligned themselves with it. And yet, outside of those contexts, I still see them being good and kind to their loved ones and others. I've also come to see that their alignment is largely based in fear - which, even if it's ill-founded and driven by false narratives, is an emotion I can feel sympathy for. Wrestling with this dichotomy - seeing the evil they've confused with good and the ways it's changed them, while knowing that they are still my loved ones and they still contain some goodness underneath - has been one of the most stressful and difficult things I've had to grapple with in my entire life.

But one thing I've held onto from my religious days is the principle that human beings are not simply good or evil. All of us contain good and evil, and (both as individuals and as people with individuals that we care about) it's a question of identifying and nurturing the good, and trying to let go of the evil, each day anew.

> I feel an immense amount of anger towards Trump and his entire movement, not despite but because many of my family-members have aligned themselves with it.

> Wrestling with this dichotomy - seeing the evil they've confused with good and the ways it's changed them, while knowing that they are still my loved ones and they still have bits of good underneath - has been one of the most stressful and difficult things I've had to grapple with in my entire life.

Hear, hear. It was hard for this to come to a reckoning last year with everything else bad going on.

I grew up being bullied by people because I was different. I was a mess honestly, a weird, smelly kid who was a bit of an eyesore. These are people who were nice to each other, and people who would have been seen as caring, loving and kind people to their families and others that liked them. I was even mocked by one of my teachers.

Very few people think they are not forgiving, loving and caring. Many people will open the book, find the things that reassure them they are loving, caring, and a wise person, and close it happy.

Your friends don't try to convert you because they hide themselves around you. If they tried, you would cut them out of your life, despite your empathy; just mentioning that you will pray for someone can make them angry. If they persisted, really believing their friend was in danger of losing eternal life, you would end the friendship.

Really, all the stuff you say sounds nice, but secular people only show love to people who they think are lovable. When you become one of the unlovables, they will cheerfully drop what you say and bring out the knives, and your philosophy is worthless to stop it.

I don't want to minimize your experiences, but you're taking those experiences and projecting them onto people and things (both those I mentioned as well as entire categories) that aren't really tied to them.

> people who would have been seen as caring, loving and kind people to their families and others that liked them

Good and evil can exist within the same person. Evil can also masquerade externally with the signifiers of good. I don't know the people you're talking about so I can't really comment on them specifically; but being a human means being a paradox.

Not that that excuses what happened to you. It sounds like that was very hard and I'm very sorry to hear about it. I can't really speak more to it or to the people involved because again, I don't know much about it. I simply don't believe that even the worst human on earth is irredeemable or worthless in principle, whether or not they ever change in practice. Of course that doesn't mean they should be left to get away with doing whatever they want to whomever.

> Many people will open the book, find the things that reassure them they are loving, caring, and a wise person, and close it happy

The other half of "nobody is completely good or evil" is that life is a never-finished journey of self-work. Doing what you describe is a trap that many people fall into, sure. But I don't think it invalidates the efforts of people who decide to do otherwise.

> Your friends don't try to convert you because they hide themselves around you. If they tried, you would cut them out of your life, despite your empathy; just mentioning that you will pray for someone can make them angry. If they persisted, really believing their friend was in danger of losing eternal life, you would end the friendship.

With respect, you don't know them. My parents, unlike my friends, do try periodically to convert me, and I haven't cut them out of my life. It causes friction between us, sure, and they've learned that and they've dampened it some. But we make the relationship work.

When it comes my friends, I simply know they aren't hiding themselves. We talk openly about this stuff sometimes; we have good conversations. We don't avoid it like I have to with my parents. I don't mind when my friends say they'll pray for me, because I know they're saying it out of open love, and not passive-aggression. We respect each other's agency, we know we're on different journeys. I've known people who weren't that way. I've seen the hollowness of ulterior motives behind their smiles and their social gestures. I know the difference.

Real relationships go beyond and above disagreements, and the ones I get to pick for myself are with individuals who can tolerate nuance and paradox.

> Really, all the stuff you say sounds nice, but secular people only show love to people who they think are lovable. When you become one of the unlovables, they will cheerfully drop what you say and bring out the knives, and your philosophy is worthless to stop it.

I'm not sure where this came from (though I'd be happy to hear more about it). Above you seemed to take issue with religious people, but here you mention secular (non-religious) people

> Stance on abortion among your brothers in church

Denominational stance is reluctance: https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-unite...

> Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell

I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology!

Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.

The idea of hell was widespread in ancient times. For example, the Greeks believed it. They also believed that everyone went to hell. This is exactly the mythology that christians spread nowadays. The only difference is that Christians believed that the few who accepted Christ would be rescued from Hell, the same way Eurydice was saved by Orpheus (hence the idea that the church is the bride of Jesus). It is all a rehash of ancient myths.

I think calling it a rehash is unfair. I would call it "independent discovery", where the same general lived human experience gives rise to the same general ideas about the universe and society and right and wrong. Religion is a technology for dealing with the experience of being a person.

I don't think it is independent discovery, because Christianity was born at a time when Greek ideas were widespread (Palestine having been a Greek-dominated area for centuries before the arrival of Romans). I believe there was an amalgamation of elements from ancient Hebrew religion with other pagan myths mainly from Greece.

"Independent" may have been overstating it, I just think something is being lost when we frame one religion (or even a subset of its concepts) as being purely derivative of another. Just because ideas are similar doesn't necessarily mean they have the exact same origin, and in fact I think it's much more interesting to look at the cases where they didn't have the same origin, because it tells us something about ourselves as human beings.

> 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell?

I'm not a Baptist, but presumably nearly all of them find it sad and unfortunate and feel compassion for most of humanity.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, though. Only believing things that make you happy isn't a very good philosophy of life.

Mainline Protestant typically relatively neutral leaning pro choice.

That's fair, but to play devils advocate, every sect can point the finger at some other sect, or at heretics within their own sect. No sect will agree to any negative critique, and because their doctrines tend to be self consistent, critique is pointless anyway. Yet the sects are not completely separate, but are collusive to some degree. And individual beliefs may be a mishmash of ideas from multiple sects. Indeed for this reason, the divisions between sects are not hard edged.

American fundamentalism would have no political power without the tacit consent of the mainstream. The predominant sects in my state are mainline, yet they voted en masse to outlaw gay marriage (before the US supreme court ruled otherwise).

Fundamentalism is corrosive and detrimental to society. I don't get angry at moderate religious views but I still think they're laughable superstition. I respect your right as a human to believe I just think it's silly.

I'm not sure the narrative you're trying to paint here actually works. If you dig deeper into the actual poll, it says:

> In addition to Protestants, declines in church membership are proportionately smaller among political conservatives, Republicans, married adults and college graduates. These groups tend to have among the highest rates of church membership, along with Southern residents and non-Hispanic Black adults.

From the actual first-party news article on the poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-...

For better or worse, conservative (both politically and theologically) people seem to be holding on to their Christian faith in greater numbers (at least marginally) than their more progressive or liberal leaning counterparts.

Anyway, as someone who almost left the faith, I would agree with the overall narrative that Christianity became ineffective in the late 20th century. Personally though, I would attribute it to a lack of focus on youth and issues relevant to youths. I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I saw a poll that indicated most people who leave do so in the transition from high school to college. That certainly lines up with what I observed, most people just didn't care enough to keep going (regardless of what branch they were in). I would have been one of them myself, if I hadn't been able to find a college Christian community that was dramatically more vibrant than what I grew up with. But overall I think I'm one of the lucky ones.

Yeah, I suspect this news story (and poll) only scratches the surface as to identifying the multiple demographic trends afoot. Most notable to my eye was the 15% drop in church membership between GenX and Millenial. Of course, to do that metric justice we'd need to monitor change in that age group over time. Are today's 18-to-30 year olds so different than 18-to-80 year olds were in the 1970's or 1990s?

I suspect the range of ages that are today's Millenials has forever been less traditional than other age groups. That's unsurprising given they have the least personal history of any adult group to weigh when deciding their life's priorities, and are likely to think least about their relationship to others in their family (since they just left the parents behind and have yet to add any more). At that age, the need to join another 'family' and adopt a bunch of new familial responsibilities is likely to be less compelling a notion than it may be a few years hence.

I became an atheist/agnostic as a teenager and now in my late 20's I have slowly come back to religion. So I am really interested in this topic.

My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment.

These online atheists communities can be very unfortunate. Your noble search for the truth leads you to question religion - but then you get caught in an echo chamber spending a lot of energy hating on others for their beliefs. A noble pursuit devolved into hatred and groupthink. On the other hand, fundamentalists took a religion which preaches love and acceptance and twisted it into something bitter and hateful. I think it's kind of poetic how much those two communities mirror each other.

The fixation on fundamentalism is a combination of two things. First, there are people from those fundamentalist churches who were damaged in some way and have now swung way to the opposite extreme of hating all religion. They grew up learning to see the world through rigid dogma, and online atheist communities tend to be fairly dogmatic themselves. Not hard to see the appeal there. Second, and probably more common, are atheists who never had any close contact with fundamentalism but they justify their beliefs by taking on the low-hanging fruit. It is very easy to pick on young-earth creationists, vehement anti-gay groups, prosperity gospel, etc. Those groups' thinking really does rely on fear and hate, things that the bible actually tells us to reject.

What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.

As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? They think that all Christians are anti-science when Christian monks were pivotal in the discovery of genetics and the big bang theory, among other scientific achievements. They ignore that some giants of Enlightenment philosophy, like Descartes and Spinoza, were attempting to use new rational methods to affirm the existence of God in their major works.

The problem is, when you are an atheist engaging in the really complex arguments posed by the most intelligent and eloquent religious people of history, the waters become very muddy. You might even have to concede, just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith, too. It's much easier to feel good about bashing the usual suspects - Joel Osteen, the 700 Club, Westboro Baptist and friends. And so a lot of people get sucked into that low-level discourse, and never get a chance to make the exhilarating journey back to religion. I don't really care if someone stays an atheist, many good people are atheists. But I do care if they never get a chance to see the promise of religion because of toxic echo chambers and groupthink.

As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.

> just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith

Well, that's the whole point: Atheists don't.

Indeed we can't explain everything, not even close. But we don't have any reason to even remotely believe in any kind of supernatural power, which in turn begs an explanation it self ad infinitum.

You don't have any reason that you have considered. Which is totally fine. The problem comes when atheists believe a priori that any argument for God's existence would be automatically false, even the ones they have never heard or considered.

Your statement suggests there are infinitely many hypotheses that posit "a thing exists, but there is no evidence for it". Then you say others have failed to (properly) consider those hypotheses that you choose to believe. (Which may or not be true, but no evidence either way is evident.)

However, aren't you also saying you are not willing to (properly) consider the infinitely many alternative hypotheses to your own, much less the negation hypothesis of "NOT God"?

Which is better then? To choose to believe in one untestable hypothesis or to believe in none?

A suggestion that there are things you haven't heard of doesn't equate to infinite things. Let's say there are 10 arguments for God's existence, but the only one you are familiar with is "a thing exists, but there is no evidence for it", isn't my statement accurate?

In turn, your statement suggests that all possible ideas about religion for the past thousands of years of human history can be boiled down to a single sentence. You have assumed that everything you don't know about religion is exactly the same as the very little you do know about it. Which one of us is supposed to be close-minded again?

I am willing to consider anything and listen to what anybody has to say. As I said in my post above I went through an atheist period of my own, after all.

No, Atheism doesn't mean that by definition a priori God doesn't exist. That would be wrong indeed, but I never encountered such arguments.

Isn't it right there in the name? a - theism?

No, there is no a priory in there. Others make claims about god and atheists simply say: those are unsubstantiated. That’s all.

>What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.

I'd say you're being inconsistent with your religion and that the religious part of how you came to these views is unnecessary. Sure I agree attacking the very worst of religion is easy, but even at its very best, religion doesn't make a compelling argument for its necessity.

The reason for fixation on fundamentalism is because they have the most consistent story that can be argued against. Once you start cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible seem like it could fit into today's social norms and current understanding of the physical world, you're basically showing none of it necessary.

What would you say to someone that believes a giant turtle created everything, is the one true god and also held those same stances on evolution etc? They just prepend the fact that a giant turtle created everything and then vanished without a trace. Anyone could come up with a number of creative stories that are unverifiable or disprovable and seemingly are compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. What makes your god or any god(s) in particular more reasonable or necessary than the great turtle?

I think you betray your lack of understanding by categorizing any religious belief aside from fundamentalism as "cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible...". There is a 2,000 year old tradition of hermeneutic interpretation of the bible, resulting in dozens of different, more nuanced approaches to reading and thinking about the book. But you've brushed all that aside as "cherry picking" so that your criticism can still be coherent without having to make any effort to learn more than you already know. You must maintain a narrow, simplistic definition of religion in order to retain confidence in your belief system. Isn't that a bit backwards?

One individual making up a story about a turtle is not a religion. Religions emerge from thousands of years of collective human consciousness. The stories are told and retold from millions of mouths to millions of ears. You understand that input to a human's cognitive system can shape their perception, consciousness, behavior, of course? These stories and characters have accompanied us through every technological revolution from agriculture to smartphones. Repeated through countless generations, they have literally shaped us as a species. With that suggestion in mind, can you really confront the idea that God is "The Word", and that we are "made in his image", without even a tiny amount of awe and wonder?

Ok ignoring the appeal to tradition, how would you argue for hinduism over christianity or vice versa? Both are 2k+ years old with very different beliefs at their core. Reincarnation vs an afterlife, single vs many gods.

Nothing about having a long history and nuanced approaches over the years answers my question of necessitation.

It's easy to see parallels if you really want to look. The cycle of reincarnation is the thing that Hindus want to escape from (both seek unity with god), and it can be described as monotheistic as well.

Just different approaches to the same divine.

Why ignore the main point of my comment? I directly addressed one reason why a random turtle god and an actual religion are very different.

I was talking about traditions, yes, but to write it off as simply an "appeal to tradition" falls very short

No that is the entirety of your comment. Without the appeal to tradition there is nothing separating a random turtle god from an actual religion.

If there is more than an appeal to tradition how would you argue for or against different religions? Religions with as much tradition as Christianity - Hinduism, Buddhism, and even some monarchies and dynasties also have the same stories that are told by millions of mouths to millions of years over generations as you say.

I don’t understand atheist online communities like you talk about. I’m very much an atheist, but I’m baffled by anyone who desires to have atheist get-togethers. What is the point? is it like fake bacon for people who like the taste of being preached to and preaching, but are atheist? Religious people do it because their are supposed to but what reason would atheists do it? When you were exploring atheism why did you go?

People tend to participate in online communities that affirm their sense of identity. Maybe people who get really involved are those who see atheism as a more important aspect of their identity?

I was definitely turned on to atheism on the internet, but I never really stuck around those forums. I grew up in a fairly liberal Catholic church, so I didn't really relate to all the vehemence against fundamentalism. Even though I grew up in a church, I didn't even know about "young earth creationism" until I learned about it from atheists on the internet. In my science class in Catholic school, we learned all about evolution. We used the same textbooks as the public schools. I don't remember hearing anything bad about LGBT, though I'm sure people talked about it since it was the early 2000's and gay marriage was still a real widespread controversy, as incredibly dumb as that seems now.

Overall I guess my experience was very different from someone who grew up conservative protestant and found atheism. As a result I never hated religion, just didn't believe in it for a while.

This is such a refreshing comment. It's far better to engage in dialogue with those whom you disagree in order to understand their position opposed to assuming they are evil, stupid, or otherwise sub-human. Wouldn't it be wonderful if such an approach was applied not only to religious conversations but those of politics, work disputes, conflicts with your significant other...everything?

> As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right?

The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that they don't prove anything even worth refuting. Almost all of them simply attempt to prove the existence of a deistic God that does not meaningfully interact with the world (beyond creating it or sustaining it).

Deistic Gods by their vary nature don't provide any meaningful knowledge. Believing that there was a creator doesn't provide any useful information about how to help live your life or how the world works.

As a starting point I don't think there are any good arguments for why a person should believe that the bible was influenced/written by God any more than other books.

I already replied to your comment below, but this one is interesting too.

> The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that they don't prove anything even worth refuting. Almost all of them simply attempt to prove the existence of a deistic God that does not meaningfully interact with the world (beyond creating it or sustaining it).

I don't think any good philosopher would admit to the embarrassment of actually having "proved" something!

Jokes aside, you wouldn't consider "sustaining the world" to be a fairly meaningful ongoing interaction?

> Believing that there was a creator doesn't provide any useful information

Very pragmatic! Assume there is a God - what kind of things would he consider "useful"?

> Very pragmatic! Assume there is a God - what kind of things would he consider "useful"?

I generally define usefulness in terms of helping a person make better decisions to help increase the utility (bringing joy, fulfillment, happiness) of sentient creatures.

How does knowing about the existence of a deistic God help a person make better decisions?

This is my issue with deism. It could be true or false and my life wouldn't change one bit.

I'm not a Christian, but a lot of this matches my experience with the overwhelming majority of atheists. There's a severe echo chamber effect and ignorance of both Christianity itself and especially of other religions, to the point that they make wide-ranging pronouncements that only really apply to a single perverted branch of a particular religion.

> As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.

I disagree here though. In a secular world, rejecting religion isn't exactly the mark of a radical truth-seeker. When I started through my own atheistic phase as a teen, the greatest disappointment was the observation that my 'companions' in that regard weren't exactly insightful, just followers of the zeitgeist; if anything they mirrored the fundamentalists in their ignorance.

> "that you take your atheism on faith, too." This is a nonsensical statement. Atheism is a recognition that there is zero evidence for the existence of any gods. It requires no faith.

> "Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre ... should be super easy to refute, right?"

You're shifting the burden of proof; there is nothing to refute. It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions. Regardless of a persons' intelligence, they cannot argue their deity into existence. It either exists or it doesn't. None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.

>Atheism is a recognition that there is zero evidence for the existence of any gods.

You're bemoaning a lack of empirical evidence when the problem is actually a philosophical one.

>there is nothing to refute

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like your stance is that God doesn't exist because God doesn't exist? Circular argument much? Atheism is a positive statement, too.

>It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions.

Of course it's not your "job". But I'd rather talk to someone who can actually explain why they think what they think.

> It either exists or it doesn't.

We are not omnipotent beings. We must strive to gain knowledge and understanding of the universe we live in. How do you know whether or not it exists?

>None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.

Disagree completely, they all presented interesting arguments.

> the problem is actually a philosophical one.

This is what I would say too if I had no evidence for the things I was claiming exist.

> your stance is that God doesn't exist because God doesn't exist?

You said Kierkegaard et al's arguments should be easy to refute. If I come up with a clever argument for the existence of leprechauns, and no one can refute my amazing logic, do leprechauns all of a sudden magically exist? Again, there is nothing to refute. You can come up with the most magnificent argument you like for a god, but that god either exists or does not, independent of that argument, and my inability to refute any claims you've made is not evidence your god exists.

>How do you know whether or not it exists?

Is there a hidden third option I'm missing?

> Disagree completely, they all presented interesting arguments.

Replace in any of those arguments the word "unicorn" instead of "god" and they are as equally meaningful.

You don't believe that we can access meaningful knowledge about the world through logic? If not, then what the heck are you doing on a forum about computers?

I think the issue is that we can't access meaningful knowledge about the existence of a God that interacts meaningfully with the world through logic alone. Why do you think the Bible is inspired/manipulated/written by God more than other books?

Well it depends on the nature of God's interaction, doesn't it? There are no big hands coming out of the sky and moving things around, I'll give you that. The theologist Paul Tillich argued that God is not a being-in-the-world, but exists outside of time and space. Given that, atheist expectations of an empirical proof of God tend to miss the mark.

On the contrary, I think that tons of other things were inspired by God. As Walt Whitman wrote, "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars". A healthy dose of relativism is not incompatible with religious belief - see the Trappist monk Thomas Merton who famously took a pretty serious spiritual interest in both Zen Buddhism and Islam.

> You don't believe that we can access meaningful knowledge about the world through logic?

And there it is, the pathetic strawman. The last refuge of a person with nothing intelligent to say; the death knell of every argument.

Computer logic is falsifiable. Asserting deities exist is not.

Why not?

It's so refreshing to see somebody who has had a similar experience to my own. I've never been a member of a church like the ones that people describe in a lot of the comments. We focus on devotion to God and improving the earth. For example, here's how we marked our church's 100th birthday:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-its-100th-birthday-a...

And what did you gain out of it?

I grew up in a non-fundamentalist Christian cult (catholic) and it was at best a massive waste of time. I detest that part of my life.

> it was at best a massive waste of time

Why? Can you expand on that?

Because I cannot recall a single good thing I got out of the whole experience.

I was raised liberal Catholic by an atheist father and an eclectic hippie New-Age-Catholic-Hindu-dowsing-crystals-homeopathy-and-runic[0]-divination mother, for the purposes of getting into a good school.

While it is fair to say that one specific fundamentalist young-Earth creationist Baptist certainly turned me from “it isn’t true but it doesn’t matter” to “it is actively harmful for people to believe this”, I should also say that the liberal version of Catholicism at my school — liberal enough to not explicitly condemn abortion or homosexuality, even though this was the U.K. in the 1990s and Section 28 still in force — had terrible sex education which completely ignored the existence of e.g. chlamydia, and I do think that was due to the religion given how quickly I learned about it the moment I moved to the next step in my education.

The open-mindedness may have been good for me as a teenager going through a goth-paganism phase, but it also meant she gave my dad homeopathic remedies when he got bowel cancer, and she got Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother “despite” her use of Bach flower remedies for memory.

[0] naturally this meant I learned to read the outer border of the Allen & Unwin edition of The Hobbit, and the text in the hand drawn maps inside: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/...

it also depends on the church and with time. the southern baptist church i went to when young didn't have much if any extreme fundamentalism. the one i attended for a bit as a teenager (not by choice) was a little more fundamentalist, but not extreme. i stopped going to church after that.

but really, teasing apart the strains doesn't matter in the long run. our gods are changing, just as they always have.

Since mainline protestantism is in full collapse, is it really true the progressive christianity has any chance of surviving long term?

A lot can change in a couple of centuries. Right now, Catholicism is still growing in South America and Africa. As people in those regions become better educated and affluent, they may indeed follow the evolutionary path of other more affluent economies.

But with the resounding recent rise throughout the world in populism (which is a form of faith, but in a person or a dream rather than an economy), it's hard to know how humankind will respond to the challenges of the modern world.

We could choose to retreat from our current immersion in fast-paced life via technology and withdraw into one (or many) 'simpler' ways of life. If we do it wouldn't surprise me if we also choose to reimagine the world that surrounds us as being less concrete and more a realm of possibility in which choose our own reality.

I find it perplexing that you describe catholicism as progressive, since it maintains strict sexual purity standards, a male clergy, anti abortion and homosexuality etc.(Perhaps I misread you)

Isnt it true that SA is having extreme growth of the prosperity gospel form of fundamentalism too?

I wouldn't write it off yet. The popularity of protestantism is very prone to wax and wane with the times. A really charismatic preacher or two can make a big impact. Most of the mainlines we see in the US today started from just itinerant preachers and camp meetings. Personally, I think that's because the emphasis on "personal relationships" with God lends itself to more of a "social contagion" model of popularity, as people seek to imitate friends and neighbors who share spiritual experiences. That's not a negative thing necessarily. But they can't lean on tradition like the Orthodox or Catholics do.

Seeing those same comments in this thread reminded me of something Jordan Peterson questions: with this decline of religious-based narratives for guidelines, what is replacing it?

I had a similar experience as a Catholic in the northeast.

Lately as the politics of old people and loud young people have tilted right-wing, and more extreme philosophy is accepted, it’s disturbing how the theology has followed the money.

I probably sound like a simpleton here, but I’ve always found religion to be a source of peace and solace and a positive influence. Some of that is a result of ignoring teachings that are more... noxious to me personally or focusing away from behavior of the human agents of the church.

Unfortunately, cycles of religious fundamentalism is a feature of the American body politic.

[Posted this under a reply below that got downvoted, so reposting here]

I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he knows". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between (and these are all independent axes, to be clear).

Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about technicalities, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter atheist.

A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love (as well as forgiveness and growth) toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion.

Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me (if they were to do that on a regular basis, we wouldn't be close friends). Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it; they know that spirituality is a matter of the heart, and the heart isn't so simple. Most, I think, see that even if hell does exist, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and friendship, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into anything. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads.

I like this quote from Pope Francis:

> We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

ADDENDUM: So where has that left me? I don't practice religion, though I read from the occasional religious author and I think spirituality in the broader sense is a useful metaphor for matters surrounding the heart and trying to be a better member of the world. I have really nice conversations, even with religious people, around those subjects. I've been known to go with a friend or relative to the odd church service (as long as it's at a church that's reasonably compatible with the above), and I often get some benefit from it in the form of meditation on myself and my relationship with the world. I've thought about finding a church to join for the sake of community, though I go back and forth on that since I don't believe in even the smallest literal sense (I try to let go of my literalism, but I still have mental habits from the days when I thought it was all about that, both religious and not). Maybe one day I'll find the right church and get past that.

> which brings heresies like hating LGBT

This is funny to read because LGBT and a series of other movements cause me to feel much the same as I do about "religious" fundamentalism. Excessive self-styling and countering any adverse ideas with a refusal to compromise or cede any ground. Not tolerating adverse ideas and manifestations thereof in daily life but "calling it out" and attacking them constantly.

Extremism in opiniated/constructed ideas, polarized cancel culture etc has become much more popular and dominating in the public discourse and media than it has been for the past 50+ years.

I just don't get how fundamentalists can remain so busy going on about their fundaments. It's all very tiresome.