I bring this up not because I want to wave my “not all Christians” flag, but because it is really important for our common civic life that post-religious people understand there is more to religion than the sad toxic morass they grew up with. Society doesn’t need religion to die off. It needs religion to evolve. It needs people who are naturally religious (and there are a lot of us, we’ve evolved that way) to come together for the common good, not get shoved into a back closet to worship illegally in secret.
I know some who are strongly religious about their political party. I was treasurer of my local Republican party for a while, but I was able to leave them when the party it self starting going off of the things I supported them for (the local party is still pretty good). I might return in the future, we will see.
Sounds like you may be justifying your conclusions instead of the other way around.
Note that I didn't state everything on my list is wrong.
I've had a lot of great conversations with religious people about the nature of their faith, but I have never gotten a good answer on why they chose their particular organized/named faith. Other religions have people who believe just as much as you do that their religion is the "right" one and all the others are wrong. How did you come to choose your particular form of Christianity over the dozens of other named faiths you could choose that have equal levels of historical correlation to their religious texts?
When various sects happen to go head to head, it’s like watching an MMA tournament where a very few competitors are well-trained in BJJ and most of the rest seem to hold a white belt in karate from the nearest strip mall. It’s usually not a competition, but a one-sided beating. Caring about some amount of intellectual seriousness would clearly narrow one’s options down a lot.
If all those people you say refuse to question their beliefs are actually chasing a higher form of good for themselves, why would they engage in any kind of activity that would undermine that pursuit? It doesn't make sense unless you propose to replace it with a structure that is more strongly aligned to with the goal of achieving a higher form of themselves. Which nobody ever actually is when they argue against religion, they just got hurt by somebody's interpretation of it and are trying to find validation for that hurt.
I believe you when you speak of the bad experiences you had, but you seem to think that what you've seen is the only (or at least the typical) manifestation of Christianity. But that isn't true, and if you do indeed believe it's true I respectfully suggest you aren't deeply familiar with Christianity the way you believe.
I am a Christian, and I was raised Christian. I have never once seen a community such as you describe. I realize they exist (everyone knows about the WBC, for instance), but they aren't the norm. Christians I have known aren't trying to indoctrinate anyone, and they are quite happy to entertain respectful discussion and debate about their faith. They are only human, of course, and like all humans they don't wish to constantly debate things they settled for themselves ages ago (so you are sometimes going to get individuals who shut you down). But on the whole Christians are perfectly willing to engage in introspection or intellectual debate to the same extent anyone else is (because let's not forget, many people don't do introspection or intellectual debate of any topic).
> It’s slowly dying in every developed country because it doesn’t make sense when logic and science are applied.
You are welcome to your opinion, but it stands at odds with the fact that there have been many Christian intellectuals throughout history. Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have all found that their faith still makes perfect sense in the context of their intellectual pursuits.
It's really only Pope Francis from this past decade who stopped shunning homosexuality and describing it as an illness (even if he upholds the church's teachings that same-sex marriage is an abomination), expressed openness to ordaining married men as priests, and suggested forgiveness for divorcees who have since remarried, but even he has his limits.
He still views gender transition as a sin, upholds the Catholic Church's longstanding opposition to birth control (the pill, condoms) in favor of abstinence, and opposes abortion.
And there are many Catholics in the US who do not view him as their pope, preferring Benedict XVI and especially John Paul II. There are cardinals in the US who have advocated for denying the current US president communion due to his support for abortion (he claims that he does not personally support abortion due to his faith, but would not impose his belief system on others).
Yes, Catholicism might not be as unyielding as Christian evangelism or fundamentalism. But it's by no means the most accepting of faiths.
For instance: Episcopalians support gender and racial equality, as do the Anglicans they're an offshoot of. Presbyterians are similarly accepting, even if they haven't made an official statement on that front. Reform Judaism similarly is an attempt at reconciling historical traditions with the need to exist in a modern world.
It's hard to ascribe a particular ideology to Islam because it varies widely based on its practitioners and their interpretations (as is the case with Baptists, Lutherans, and many other religions where there is not a central authority). Certainly we see very oppressive policies in a number of Middle Eastern countries, but in the US, especially in the past decades we've seen an alignment of American Muslims with the Democratic party and more liberal / progressive policies (largely due to anti-Muslim rhetoric from the right post-9/11).
A few surveys from Pew:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/12/21/where-chr...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/12/02/religious...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/06/21/where-maj...
If my memory is still ok, I remember those sects splitting due to differences in those beliefs among their members
Because their is a simple trick: God made it so. But most of the time they ignore the flaws of their believe of god's characteristics like Omnipresence, Omnipotence, Omniscience etc.
The world is in pretty bad shape if it's created by an omnipotent omniscient deity. Greek mythology would be a more fitting explanation.
Not like we would have anything to do with it?
If I handcraft a beautiful wooden toy and I give it as a present to a 5-year-old, and they have a tantrum and break it (accident or not), is the state of the toy a testimony to my identity or ability as a craftsman?
Or maybe I should have never given the toy as a present?
Why dies the kid behaves like that in the first place and why is the toy breakable. Shouldn't higher standards apply to an omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient being?
If the world was created by greek gods, ok. They are full of human traits and errors, jealous, vain etc. But the perfect abrahamic god?
This is obviously a poor comparison when speaking about God's purpose in everything, but I think it begins to hint a certain perspective.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9
That's just a complicated way for: Why? Because!
>I love him, and I want him to live, learn, grow. Because you aren't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. So whole mythology and the way we are makes more sense if god isn't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.
No, it's not. What this means is that you yourself are not the measure of reality, and that there are things that you will not understand, because they are bigger than you. And you not understanding or knowing something is irrelevant to reality. To refuse this is to be like the little child who doesn't want to obey or listen to a wise father that is lovingly giving them instructions for their own good.
> Because you aren't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. So whole mythology and the way we are makes more sense if god isn't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.
I really don't follow the reasoning behind this. We don't need God to be messed up in order to explain why we, and everything around us, is messed up.
Every Christian who was ever born was indoctrinated to become one. Except Paul, who was the bronze age equivalent of Jim Bakker.
While your deep understanding of a few people around you is your own, Christianity alone has over a billion people from all cultures and walks of life ascribing to it. I don't think you can realistically claim to treat them as a bloc, and to attempt to might cast doubt on your ability to even judge well the people you do know.
The same way you can associate conspiracy theory nationalism with Qanon believers, you can associate supernatural supremacism (i.e. "chosen by god") with Christians, Muslims, and Jews. While these religions may promote healthy behavior for "in group" morality e.g. community, family, etc. the effects on a geopolitical scale are catastrophic.
Do they? I'll grant you the first part, as that's the point of a religion, but it doesn't seem to automatically imply the second.
The earliest Christians, very famously, went to their deaths voluntarily while publicly forgiving their accusers. While medieval Christians slaughtered thousands trying to retake the holy-land. It's pretty reasonable to argue that those two groups had relatively similar core beliefs, but hard to argue that they had the same actions.
Unless you want to count farming as an action, the vast majority of adherents to basically every religion were, historically, farmers whose lives we know very little about.
It seems much more likely that a group being in power causes the effects that you see. Basically every group has an in-group bias.
1 Peter 3:15-16 literally commands us to do exactly that.
But sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you.
But with modesty and fear, having a good conscience: that whereas they speak evil of you, they may be ashamed who falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.
The idea that religion has any kind of market cornered on THAT concept in the last 7-10 years is a non-starter.
1) Hamas jihadists cultivate decades of repression of the Palestinian populace into a spectacular terrorist strike on Oct 7th.
2) Israel, an apartheid ethnostate, where Rabbis call for extermination of Palestinians in response to the Hamas strike (after decades of dehumanization), drops a nuclear payload worth of bombs on Gaza - which kills thousands of Palestinians (but only a few dozen Hamas soldiers).
3) In the US, Christianist pastors and churches back the Israeli government's push to ethnically cleanse Gaza - primarily because apocalyptic prophesy requires Jews to be in the "holy land" - all of whom are prophesied to perish.
In all of these cases, all of the involved religions make the conflict unavoidable. There were steps to peace in previous decades but religious extremists assassinated key figures to prevent peace.
This isn't exclusive to this region or these religions, of course.
Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinians and it's planks include the extermination of the Jews wholesale, whether in Israel or elsewhere. Part of why Israel was created is because.. a large group of Muslims was attempting to enact an extermination of the Jews (and did kill quite a few).
Israel is not an apartheid ethnostate in any sense of those words and you do dishonor to actual apartheid and ethnic conflicts even by a comparison. Gaza itself has a luxury car dealership[1]!
Not only do non-Jews have equal rights in Israel but it's one of the few countries in the middle east where Arab women have a legal right to vote and free travel without an escort.
I have no idea where you got three from but it's not actually in the Christian Bible or the Torah.
[1]: https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/libyan-luxury-car...
Hamas won under 50% of one election in 2006, then murdered the opposing party and halted all future elections.
You're probably conflating the general fact that the nationalist and religious factions overlap (though there are a great many religious groups in Israel that are not nationalist at all - pretty much all the ultra orthodox), and said nationalists have made extreme statements in the past. But the response to hamas has little to do with that.
(this is my most relevant response to the point you're making, so I'll hold off on the otber incorrect assumptions/statements).
It's not just the contradictions (with science, logic, it's own doctrine) that is hurting their numbers. Almost all the Christians I know have distanced themselves from the church and are embarrassed to be associated with the faith because of the way they see other "Christians" behave. If more Christians really lived their faith they couldn't act/vote/discriminate the way that they do. I can't blame my Christian friends and family for not wanting to be associated with that.
I suspect that the number of Christians are higher than the falling numbers suggest, because many just don't want to be grouped in with the loud people who plainly act in ways that violate the basic message of the faith.
This is a low quality and bigoted comment.
It’s a refuge for indoctrination, meaning you aren’t allowed to truly question. In my experiences at many Christian churches across the US, the people there don’t care about introspection or intellectual debate. Everyone already “knows” their religion is correct and is not actually willing to challenge that because it’s scary.
I know you just said “religion,” but I can only speak about Christianity as I’m deeply familiar with it. I believe Christianity is mostly horrible for society and celebrate every year as I see the numbers drop. It’s slowly dying in every developed country because it doesn’t make sense when logic and science are applied.