What good does religion offer the world today?

@FBM,

FBM wrote:

I got reprobation once for having weed and a firearm in a national park. I was lucky.

Then, shame on you!

Laughing

@neologist,

There's backstory. I let a friend drive my truck while my girf and I were on my motorcycle. Dipshit left a pipe out in plain view. The loaded .357 was a loan from a friend who was a cop. The cop backed me up, the dipshit didn't. The judge knew something was up, since I couldn't have been driving both the truck and the motorcycle at the same time.

1 Reply

@neologist,

neologist wrote:

And his idea that I am anti science or that the Bible is somehow anti science is gratuitous on its face. The Bible was never intended as a scientific treatise.

If you take the Bible literally it is anti-science, but your comment brings to mind something I could say in defense of religion--about how one of its strong points is that people interpret texts as parables...

@FBM:

Earlier I said that when judging religion, we should judge it against other belief systems -- not against the absence of belief systems and ideologies. Humans in their natural state may be just as generous as Christians, but if you take Christianity away from someone, they will not necessarily revert their natural state. Instead, other belief systems will come flooding into the idea-vacuum. So we must judge Christianity against what would be there if it ceased to exist.

One of the things that makes the Bible a better source of information on human nature and morality than some more modern descriptions of the world, is that many readers don't take it literally. They temper their reading of it with common sense. Compare the way an Unitarian reads the Bible with the way a Soviet used to read Karl Marx's books, and suddenly religion doesn't seem so bad as a guide on how the world is.

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@FBM,

The days of weed and dipwads
Smoke and toke all day
Till we fade away . .

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@Kolyo,

But some are not parables.
Daniel 2:44, for example.
Folks pray for it daily without realizing what it is.

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@Kolyo,

What about all those people (including me and a good number of other A2Kers) who escaped Christianity and did not experience an influx of other belief systems and also maintained a healthy sense of ethics/morality?

I see it as very reasonable to compare religious claims against the lack of them.

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@FBM,

Really FBM?

Do you believe in human rights (because that is a belief system)?

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Really FBM?

Do you believe in human rights (because that is a belief system)?

I thought we'd been over this. I know they exist at least in the sense of being a human convention, because there are laws about them that I can personally experience. I don't believe that they are based on any sort of cosmic law or moral absolute.

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@FBM,

FBM wrote:

What about all those people (including me and a good number of other A2Kers) who escaped Christianity and did not experience an influx of other belief systems and also maintained a healthy sense of ethics/morality?

Your claim reminds me of a friend I had in college from the city of Toronto, who claimed Toronto was the one city in North America where people spoke English without any accent at all.

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@Kolyo,

So what's your point? Can you refute my statement?

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http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb192/DinahFyre/10411096_1085786044770179_6160062300094851318_n.jpg

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@FBM,

Well, for starters, I would say the moral convictions you think come "naturally" to you, are probably the vestiges of Christian teachings you learned earlier in life. (In the case of most, here, anyhow, although in your case, Buddhist teachings no doubt also played a formative role.) My belief at present, which I freely admit is just that -- and not accent-free "truth" -- is that our conscious minds are mostly collections of assorted memes derived from various belief systems.

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@Kolyo,

I don't have a problem with that. I don't think conventions such as morals spring up ex nihilo. History, including historical accidents, sets the conditions for the present flow of phenomena. I just don't see the need to posit a supernatural explanation for any of it. It would be a bit of cherry picking to point out only the positive effects of Christian morality and ignore the ill effects. And vice versa.

1 Reply

@Kolyo,

Quote:

@FBM,
Well, for starters, I would say the moral convictions you think come "naturally" to you, are probably the vestiges of Christian teachings you learned earlier in life. (In the case of most, here, anyhow, although in your case, Buddhist teachings no doubt also played a formative role.) My belief at present, which I freely admit is just that -- and not accent-free "truth" -- is that our conscious minds are mostly collections of assorted memes derived from various belief systems.

I got my Morals from the TV
and Morals for dummies

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@FBM,

If you read Romans 3:15, you will find that moral standards are universal.

One difference between folks I have noted is some belief systems seem more likely to set those standards aside.

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@neologist,

neologist wrote:

If you read Romans 3:15, you will find that moral standards are universal.

One difference between folks I have noted is some belief systems seem more likely to set those standards aside.

"Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.”

This says nothing whatsoever about any universality of morals. It's begging the question, assuming that there is a god that makes the morals in the attempt to support that such a god exists in the first place. If I were going to look to a source for morality, I wouldn't look to a set of Bronze Age myths that gave the green light to slavery, genocide, infanticide and human sacrifice. Just sayin'.

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@argome321,

argome321 wrote:

I got my Morals from the TV

If you're being serious, then you might actually have a case that your morality isn't very Christian.

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@FBM,

Oops! Romans 2:15. Should have copied, pasted

Quote:

…14 For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, 15 in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, /quote]

1 Reply

@neologist,

neologist wrote:

Oops! Romans 2:15. Should have copied, pasted

Quote:
…14 For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, 15 in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, /quote]

I read that as a bit ambiguous. On the one hand, it could be read as saying that "the Law" could spontaneously appear in the Gentiles. On the other hand, it still seems to suggest that it was the work of a god that put the Law there in the first place. Which way are you taking it? Or do you know of a different reading?

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@FBM,

I take it as plainly stating that all people have a moral sense; I infer it to be a God given conscience.

1 Reply

What good does religion offer the world today?

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