@hammersklavier,
StupidBoy wrote:You're not going to find any prominent historical figure in Western culture outside of the last century that wasn't at least nominally a Christian.
As has been mentioned, this is untrue. Aside from the countless Jews and Muslims to be considered, there are also such figures as Nietzsche.
I do not recall Hume being a professed atheist, though some of his arguments seem to suggest that he was an atheist.
StupidBoy wrote:Now I'm not a scholar of Galileo's life, but it seems to me, based on his work, the feelings of the Church at the time, and his outspoken attitude in the face of threats from the Church that he was about as Christian as Spinoza.
Galileo's most significant opposition was from academic circles, and some of his most ardent supporters were churchmen. The Catholic Church forced Galileo to recant his ideas because, in short, Galileo was an *******.
StupidBoy wrote:Philosophy and religion lie at opposite ends of a spectrum.
In the east, they are almost indistinguishable. And even in the west, the idea of secular philosophy is modern. Depending on time, place and the nature of the philosophy/religion, they might be at opposite ends of the spectrum or they might also be the very same study.
StupidBoy wrote: Religion has a set of answers and it seeks to find facts to fit these answers. Philosophy has a set of facts and it seeks to extrapolate, through the faculty of reason, a set of answers to fit these facts.
This is not an uncommon position to hold, but I do not see much truth in the claim. Perhaps in some cases, what you say above is the case, but to generalize about all religion acting in such a fashion is a hasty generalization. Even if we limit ourselves to Western religion, we find that faith traditions tend to begin with the circumstances facing mankind and moving from there to form "answers".
StupidBoy wrote: Religion discards facts that don't fit its hypotheses.
This, I think, is demonstrably false. We can look at a host of religious thinkers and we find them looking at facts and moving from there. This is where we get disagreement in theology: theologians look at facts and move from this point, often times disagreeing. During the 60's and 70's there was a flurry of work done by churchmen examining the cultural changes of the period. These men looked at the circumstances and from those circumstances discussed the spiritual implications.
The Dalai Lama once said that if science contradicts Buddhism, go with the science. I've met more than one Christian clergy member who agreed with His Holiness.
StupidBoy wrote:The scriptures have not been edited to conform to modern society, they haven't been updated to include what we've learned about the human condition. Despite women being allowed to vote, allowed to teach, and even, in some Christian faiths, allowed to be members of the clergy, 1 Timothy 2 has not been removed from the New Testament. The Judeo-based religions simply cannot allow for errors in the thinking portrayed in their scripture; they're based on God's infallibility and the perfection of the message delivered in the scripture of choice for that given religion. If such errors are unacceptable, well then we'll simply pretend that they're not errors.
The scripture does not need to be edited to fit modern circumstances. That's what theology is for. When the scripture becomes entirely outmoded, new scripture is written. That's history.
What needs to be understood is that not all Christians subscribe to Biblical inerrancy: the doctrine that the Bible is without error, contradiction, and that the Bible is the perfect word of God. In fact, this view is, worldwide, a minority Christian opinion. Most Christians are able to admit that the Bible contains error, contradiction, and that the Bible cannot be the perfect word of God because men wrote the texts included in the Bible.
