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| BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE |
true doom murderhead
Joined: 17 May 2008
Location: Austria
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 Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 3:54 pm |
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| Quote: |
I used to be just like you. But with the help of this method, I overcame my problems and now you can do the same for only $49! Order now and get a free pen! Oh wait.
I'm honestly puzzled how someone who's fixated on power structures can overlook that. |
I didn't. Just didn't sate it explicitly, just as many other things. As it was already said, this field of "self-help" is pretty broad. I addressed several variations. I talked about the trick of claiming a position of power several times. proclaiming that you're the prophet of god, for example, and that most self-help book authors don't go that far. Of course many authors use this rhetorical device of an "enlightened being" talking down to the reader. Then there are self-help books that don't do that and just tell you about the stock market in some weird, superstitious way.
I'd say Alan Carr is considered a regular human being by most of his readers. The "Getting Things Done" and "How To Make Friends And Influence People" dudes too. Those are the most popular examples of self-help book authors I can think of right now. They aren't considered divine. They're just average people who had some problems and overcame them and You Can Too. They're much more eye to eye with you than Jesus, who didn't ever live in his biological father's balls and was born to a virgin, or L. Ron Hubbard, who's cruisin' around in an alien ship right now.
| G wrote: |
| Given how people cling to some perceived axioms or "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", I think you can [make a religion out of science]. |
Yeah, that magic is science that you don't understand, though. A science that you sufficiently understand isn't magic anymore. Aerodynamics isn't magic. That airplanes fly isn't magic. We control that.
Scientology claims to be an "empirical science". Look at it and it's clear that it isn't. What it does is make use of a lot of pseudoscience. As is par for the course for religions. As I said, it's in the nature of the beast -- there's nothing to believe in with science. You don't have to believe in aerodynamics for planes to fly. You can test that. You can't test the claims at the heart of religions -- that Jesus is the son of god, that the virgin Mary received him through the holy ghost, that you'll go to heaven if you do X and Y. How are you going to test that, how are you going to get a grasp on that, ever. You can get a grasp on falsifiable claims and reproducible results. Science deals with those. Everything else is superstition.
Pascal's wager is sadly kind of stupid. Of course you lose something if you believe in god. His wager focuses on what happens in the afterlife, not what happens while you're alive. And it's not like being saved is as easy as thinking "yup, god exists" every once in a while. You've got to do a lot more than that (supposedly). You're much better off realizing that no one ever came up with a good reason to believe in god so you don't. Simple as that. Next time someone makes a claim that no one ever backed up you don't believe in it either. And that's a bigger plus than you'll ever get from believing that god exists. Although of course pretending that god exists is very practical at times when dealing with people. Just don't believe it yourself.
If Pascal's wager was concerned with the effects that a believe in god have on a person's life then it would look pretty much the same. You can compare the lives of people that believe in god to lives of people that don't and you won't find that the believers are any better off. Shit happens to them just as to everybody else, good things happen to them just as to everybody else. So, god works in mysterious ways. And apparently they are so mysterious that they aren't even quantifiable even though you supposedly get some benefits if you believe in god. infidels are said to be punished, too. We can see that that's not the case. God is so mysterious that his ways are indistinguishable from luck. Why, then, believe in god at all. Apparently his actions just manifest themselves in what we call "luck", and can't be influenced in any conceivable way.
P.S.: the # sign probably messed up the url in the bbcode. it's the same with wikipedia urls that have parenthesis in them. you have to substitute them with this %20 crap that you sometimes see in urls -- I don't know what those codes are called though
Last edited by | BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE | on Thu Dec 10, 2009 1:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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diplo
Joined: 18 Dec 2006
Location: Brandy Brendo's bungalow
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| Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 4:50 pm |
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| | BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE | wrote: |
| Pascal's wager is sadly kind of stupid. Of course you lose something if you believe in god. His wager focuses on what happens in the afterlife, not what happens while you're alive. And it's not like being saved is as easy as thinking "yup, god exists" every once in a while. You've got to do a lot more than that (supposedly). |
it really is one of the dumber arguments i've come across. besides the point you've (i think) mentioned -- one has quite a lot to lose if this is the only life we have, and we spend any amount of time practicing and observing our religion -- it bases itself on the assumption that the christian god is the God to believe in or not belive in, while dismissing all of the other religions to select. never mind the issue of believing or not: which, among all of the beliefs, is right so that i may select the correct one if i do wish to 'believe'? and, in spite of arguing for the belief in god, pascal's wager, perhaps indirectly, crafts the suggestion that, if there is a god, it would be silly enough to not see through/care about how you've arrived at your belief, which is through a "might as well" bet to insure eternal existence; this, funnily enough, seems like one of the largest insults you could throw at the god concept. |
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G.
suffer like I did
Joined: 25 Jan 2007
Location: European cannon
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| Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 6:32 pm |
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"Power Structure, power structure! Religion and faith as a power structure!"
"Pascal's Wager! Faith as a choice and weighing of losses and benefits!"
"Meh, God doesn't exist anyway!"
Did I take a wrong turn somewhere? |
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 7:34 pm |
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lol.
I don't think anyone takes Pascal's Wager seriously, even theologians. It's been discredited and disproved about a dozen different ways. It's referred to only by, let's call them civilians - people who are not experts in the debate. Largely because it has a fancy and easily-rememberable name attached to a bite-sized little chunk of propositional logic (Occam's Razor is often used in the same way in arguments). People who don't actively engage in philosophy imagine that philosophy is largely concerned with churning out compact little propositions of this kind, and therefore believe themselves to be engaged in philosophy when referring to it.
When Hitchens is on the scene, I think they ask him about it just to be able to hear his answer.
At any rate, even if a person was stupid enough to think more than ten minutes about Pascal's Wager, I think it just goes to prove bbp's point on this score. It lays out in a crystal clear syllogism of your available actions and the potential punishments and rewards. It ends by recommending the best available course of action. It is, in other words, a frank description of a power structure.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 1:03 am |
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| psiga wrote: |
| Adilegian, did you explain why you've gravitated toward Calvinism specifically? |
Maybe I should clarify an order of events: I gravitated to the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) and then discovered the worth of Calvinism and Reformed Theology. I gravitated to the PCUSA in my hometown for, I think, one of the better reasons to get involved in a specific religion/denomination at all: I thought they were just better people to be around. Of course, this is a very local reason contingent upon circumstances of time and place, and those circumstances aren’t fungible to everyone in every place at every time, but I’m not very big on any kind of universalism. (That is, I’m not big on the idea that a thing needs to be true in all situations and for all people if it is to be regarded as true or, to use a better word, worthwhile.)
Calvinism appeals to me for reasons that I think I’ve explained earlier in this thread, but I’ll sum up. As a Christian, I have never felt much interest or value in the technicalities of an afterlife. I attended a fundamentalist youth group for about seven months as a junior in high school, and I remember being very puzzled that someone was crying because he was afraid his parents were going to Hell because they weren’t Christian. I liked the people in that youth group, but I didn’t like the ways that they rejected other people and lifestyles.
They essentially approved of only those lifestyles and ideologies that affirmed the status quo. I think that they justify the privilege of rejecting others with Scriptural interpretations that emphasize the eschatological image of Christ as found in the Book of Revelation. One can find traces of the eschatological, doomsday Christ in the four canonical Gospels, yes, but it’s mistaken to take those minimal instances as representative of the whole. I think that the Book of Revelation was the work of an embittered exile who most needed Christ to fulfill his desires of revenge upon those who had exiled him. The act of faith, in this interpretation, becomes conflated with salvation – and salvation becomes conflated with both spiritual and worldly afterlives. Seeking to help the world became a matter of annoying people with peals to repent rather than considering how to help those who get the shit end of the status quo.
I stuck with Calvinism because it bases salvation not upon faith but upon divine grace, and its understanding of grace is drawn from the divine character as revealed by and as embodied in Christ. Christ’s interests were based in love for the world, and the good news of salvation, as I read those Scriptures, lies in the opening of better possibilities for life-as-lived and not life-as-tolerated-until-we-die.
A Scriptural instance that has struck me as indicative of this love for the world is the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. Taking the story on its own terms – that is, as a myth with meaning other than literal history – it shows a concern for Lazarus as a living human being. If Christ message had been rooted entirely in the promise of an afterlife, there’s no reason why he should have wanted to bring Lazarus back to the “vale of tears." In that often-quoted out of context piece of Scripture, Jesus wept and mourned that someone whom he loved had died, after which he resurrected Lazarus to a better physical condition than he’d had before dying. The ideas here are very worldly: grief matters, love is found in this life, and the possibilities for love in this life are so great that it’s better to be alive than to have died and gone to some vague heaven.
So, in tl;dr form: I gravitated to Calvinism as an accident of gravitating to the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in my hometown, which I gravitated to because I preferred the people who worshipped there, and I stuck around because I found Reformed Theology better suited (as compared with other Protestant denominations) to understanding my life in relation to God in Christ, and vice versa.
| psiga wrote: |
| Since it has ties to some of the same scriptures that are used in myriad other religions, both current and long past, I wonder why you'd hold to an ideology based on those scriptures specifically. Why not an interpretation of the Judaic Dead Sea Scrolls, pre-Jesus? Why not a variation of Islam that is post-Jesus? |
I don’t know how arbitrary this sounds, but it’s because I don’t believe those ideas. To put it another way, I believe in God in Christ with a compulsion that I don’t entirely understand but accept. I went through several years of revolt against this part of myself, and I don’t describe this belief as an untested compulsion. The matter exists independent of personal will or choice, and I have previously actively chosen to disbelieve in it, but I found myself in a situation similar to what Hitchens describes (in the latest video that Cuba posted) as “an honest unbelief." Without pretension, I look inside myself and there, in a very clean and honest way, sits a belief in God in Christ.
There is, in a sense, a feeling of inevitability in my belief. Those years of revolt toward that compulsion didn’t change my beliefs, but they did help me to better understand that nature of belief. Belief is irrational, and what is irrational is not automatically destructive. Reason is one of many cognitive processes necessary in order for us to live well. I don’t think less of either a hammer or a bolt-nut for being incompatible with each other’s function, and it’s entirely possible to use a hammer and a bolt-nut within the scope of the same project… meaning, I don’t think less of reason as being a cognitive mode unsuited for comprehending belief, and I don’t think less of belief as being irrational, and I use both belief and rationality as independent elements of the overall project that I call my religious faith.
So! If I look at the world on a macro-scale, I recognize the arbitrariness of the content of belief. Were I born elsewhere and in a different time, I might have been one of the possibilities you listed. However, I was not born elsewhere or in a different time. The arbitrariness of circumstance becomes irrelevant to me as soon as it becomes merely theoretical.
| psiga wrote: |
| Did you speak of Calvin's and your own take(s) on Total Depravity? More specifically, I am curious how you assess the mythologized concept, in light of advances in understanding of biology and neurology which have used modern scientific methods to determine rational, demonstrable explanations for certain behaviors which used to have no other explanation than some vaguely deep rooted depravity. |
What kinds of behaviors are you referring to, exactly? Do you mean things like mania, schizophrenia, and the like?
Calvin takes Total Depravity as a necessary element in the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. For those who don’t know what Total Depravity means, it refers to the human inability to make perfect choices uninfluenced by selfishness. Selfishness (or what was formerly known pejoratively as “pride") is the most general condition of sinfulness. Selfishness can arise in human behavior in a variety of ways, and those enumerated in the Gospel of St. Mark are: “evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness" (Mk. 7:21, 22).
We currently observe this laundry list of sins as a redress to individual motivations, but that’s not the whole picture. All of these items describe instances wherein personal choices harm the lives of others individually, as well as the community overall.
Whenever you bring up the idea of sinfulness, someone will inevitably bring up instances describable as “deceit," “sensuality," or “pride" that don’t seem really problematic to the contemporary mind. Here, I think it’s important to distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive uses of the words. Not all sensuality is sinful, but one can incorporate sensuality into selfish decisions. Not all deceit is sinful (yes, it was moral to lie to the SS and deny that the Franks were hiding out in Otto Frank’s upstairs office), but one can deceive for selfish reasons that deeply harm others (Enron).
We rarely behave in ways that we feel are morally wrong. Frequently, entitlement and privilege (as suggested and enforced by the distribution of social and political power) justify (and make invisible) selfishness as an element underlying a decision. Even Nazi ideologues felt that they were accomplishing something good for the world.
The point of Total Depravity is that we cannot ever escape destructive selfishness (aka the condition of sinfulness) as an element of our decision-making processes. We cannot therefore come to God with the kind of love necessary to give that relationship equilibrium. We can only enjoy a relationship with God through divine Grace, and we can only obtain salvation (which is hardcore about living better in love on earth and not dying awesomely) when we individually learn (through that relationship) how we tend to behave selfishly.
Whew!
Now that I’ve explained all that… I’m not totally sure if I answered your questions! I know I didn’t get to the matter of conditions established to be inevitable by biology/psychology, and I’m more than happy to get to that if you can clarify what you mean a bit. Just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I go into answering.
| psiga wrote: |
| (This puts an interesting ball into the court of the transhumanists, but nevermind.) |
HA! I don’t know why that never occurred to me. Maybe because I haven’t spent too much time with transhumanism?
| psiga wrote: |
Now, when you said:
"Through the figure of Christ, God loves everyone regardless of unbelief. Some call this "softcore universalism." My response points to extensive Scriptural evidence that God, as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, was never, ever an asshole. ^______________^
In fact, Christ was only ever a jerk toward ancient capitalism, when he beat merchants out of the Hebrew Temple for forcing the sale of sacrificial animals to worshippers."
I found it amusing in light of some of the Matthew passages quoting the J man himself:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes, they of his own household.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. |
Oh yeah! I can see how that might look contradictory.
I think that that passage is probably the closest that the Gospels get to recognizing the political aspect of Christ’s ministry. Renovating a social structure in order to better manifest Christ’s love isn’t going to be a clean process, especially when that effort conflicts with privileged interests. The tensions that Christ describes are generational, and America saw a wealth of such tensions arise between generations regarding activism for improved civil rights for women and blacks.
Improving the character of communities was definitely one of Christ’s priorities, and those improvements are most staunchly resisted by those who benefit most directly from their inherited distribution of political power.
Bear in mind that Christ’s generational example is pretty radical given a cultural context wherein power and authority are often derived genealogically. (Note that the Gospels first insist on Christ’s legitimacy as God’s begotten son by tracing his genealogy back to Adam. The Gospel writers didn’t put that item at the fore of the Gospels arbitrarily.) Cutting oneself from one’s parents meant sacrificing economic legitimacy as an heir and political legitimacy, as an outcast would not likely inherit his father’s trade – and this includes clerical and managerial trades – with anything resembling a blessing. In the quoted passage, Christ openly warns that his message involves his disciples’ refusing the comforts and flatteries of an unjust social order.
| psiga wrote: |
| Adilegian, when you said "God's punishment for, or judgment of, sinfulness was exhausted with Christ's crucifixion. Only love remains." do you have much to back it up? It'd be neat to toss scripture at the people who like to claim that god is punishing us to this day for gays and whatnot. I mean, this is news to me, that the wrath of god had expired to such a degree. |
I’m going to have to look for the specific theologian whose work gets most into detail on this point. For now, though, I can touch upon this while answering your next question….
| psiga wrote: |
| As for the ten commandments, what's up with the old original commandments, that are all like thou shalt not eat unleavened bread, and thou shalt not eat shrimp? |
There are a couple of Scriptural references here.
| Acts 11:1-9 wrote: |
1The apostles and the brothers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. 2So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him 3and said, "You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them."
4Peter began and explained everything to them precisely as it had happened: 5"I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. I saw something like a large sheet being let down from heaven by its four corners, and it came down to where I was. 6I looked into it and saw four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles, and birds of the air. 7Then I heard a voice telling me, 'Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.'
8"I replied, 'Surely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.'
9"The voice spoke from heaven a second time, 'Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.' 10This happened three times, and then it was all pulled up to heaven again. |
Maintaining a relationship to God suddenly gets a shitload easier! A lot of the old Hebraic commandments forbidding specific practices were pretty practical at the time, and almost all of them related in some way to hygiene. Our current generation isn’t too bright on this point, I’m afraid, and it’s frustrating when people read the more literal parts of Scripture figuratively and the figurative parts literally.
Detractors of Christianity and many modern Christians alike read “unclean" to mean “spiritually unclean," but most of the Old Testament commandments were derived more “scientifically" than many think. The ancient Hebrews reasoned, “God gave people life and health, so whenever we do something that impedes living healthily must be a sign that we’re doing something that God doesn’t want us to do." Spiritual cleanliness and physical cleanliness were not Platonically separated, so “spiritual uncleanliness" meant “probably conducive to illness."
Just to be clear, I’m not claiming that all of those commandments were derived scientifically. Cultural taboos and magical thinking certainly played a crucial part in the whole process. And, as time went on, the old practices were maintained even if living conditions, improved technology, or general cultural values made certain ancient hygienic concerns obsolete.
Old habits die hard, however, and a lot of the early Christians were not at all comfortable being allowed to partake in experiences that a lifetime of ritual had trained them to aver. Early Christians who either hadn’t been raised to respect these taboos, or who had less of a problem letting those taboos go, gave the others a hard time about their timidity. In response, Saint Paul wrote this exhortation:
| Romans 14:1-3 wrote: |
| 1Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. 2One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. |
Conscience now becomes an authoritative arbiter between God and the individual. This effectively wipes clean the need to obey the memory of ancient hygienic rituals that had become revered as the ground rules for a relationship with God.
All of these revisions to the ground rules for a relationship with God have occurred after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, and their possibility (within the Judaic tradition) depends upon that event. Sinfulness ceases to be bound to concrete particulars and, instead, involves factors relating more significantly to conscience and community.
If these restrictions have been lifted for the most universally carnal action – eating – I see no reason whatsoever why the revision wouldn’t apply to sexual behavior. The problem of sinfulness remains in effect in both eating and sex – we can hurt others and ourselves by eating more than our share, and we can likewise hurt ourselves and others through sexual behavior – but sinfulness no longer remains identified with the particular act itself.
If anyone throws Sodom and Gomorrah back at you, inform them that the city was actually blighted as a caution against being bad hosts to guests. To unlock an extra achievement, tell them that the same story appears in other forms in the Mediterranean region closer to what’s now Western Europe, only with disguised, regional gods substituted for the angels visiting Sodom and Gomorrah. If they continue to resist, ask them why they think that a nation so routinely captured, enslaved, and amalgamated into different surrounding cultures as the ancient Hebrews were would not have borrowed from a regional stock of fables.
| psiga wrote: |
| Ann Lamott's quote, "Sin is its own punishment," is a little wonky to consider, since many generally accepted sins feel pretty darned good and work to the favour of the sinner. Just sayin'. |
I guess this depends upon your perspective. When you become sensitive to your own areas of selfishness, you do feel sadness upon realizing that you’ve made the same habitual mistake. To iterate the above points, though, I’m reserved toward the idea of “sins" as such as opposed to “the condition of sinfulness," since the idea of “sins" frequently appears used prescriptively, as though we had a codex of absolute do-nots that we could use to avoid make decisions devoid of selfishness.
| G. wrote: |
| Adilegian wrote: |
| Claiming that Jesus Christ was the son of God is a different sort of “factual assertion." |
Well, to be fair, you could say that's a tautology! |
Can you explain what you mean, here? I thought that I clarified that statement pretty well, but, if I didn’t, I’m glad to do so further.
Will post more later!
_________________
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G.
suffer like I did
Joined: 25 Jan 2007
Location: European cannon
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| Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 3:56 am |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| Can you explain what you mean, here? I thought that I clarified that statement pretty well, but, if I didn’t, I’m glad to do so further. |
You could say that the definition of "Jesus Christ" throughout the ages already entails "Son of God". More of an inductive statement, than a deductive statement, less an information adding statement, more inference from its meaning. More "A = (B, C, D, E), therefor A = E", if you will.
Elucidating on Pascal's Wager:
a)
| G wrote: |
| Granted, this (Pascal's Wager) is a decision matrix dealing with uncertainties which goes lopsided once you're sure of your conditions, but affirmation of your beliefs does nothing in this discussion. |
Given uncertain conditions (Zhuangzi's "Man who dreamt he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man", the Cartesian Evil Daemon, or more recently Putnam's Brain in a Vat), if the existence of God is a coin toss, a yes / no question, you would have to make a decision similar to what Pascal proposed. Declaring a defendent innocent or guilty, investing in stocks, or firewall rules: if you want to avoid false positives or false negatives, you would go for the option that, given the possible and uncertain conditions, would give the highest chance of a true positive. What a decision matrix does not do is whether the possible conditions are valid or not, ie. derive a truth value from the (non-existent) premisses, since there are only conditions.
And speaking of propositional logic, that too doesn't concern itself with the truth or falsehood of its premisses. "All men are donkeys. Aristotle is a man. Therefor, Aristotle is a donkey" is, logically, a perfectly valid argument. Whether it is true or not remains to be seen. Or even worse, a variable used to set up truth tables.
While I'm at it:
In what way is the "power structure" in science better than the "power structure" in religion?
You could argue, and some have, that the pursuit of knowledge is nothing more than a way to make nature mallable through technology, to make life more comfortable, to make man more than that quintessence of dust. On the one hand it empowers Man, makes him master of his domain. On the other it has enslaved people into servitude, estranged people from nature and may have caused irreparable environmental damage.
Religion, in one way or another, has probably influenced all of the ethics by formalizing and in Christianity's case, quite literally setting them into stone, provided solace in times of need, perserved knowledge by virtue of the monks and then by the printing press. At the same time it has pursecuted "infidels", has been an opium for the masses, and burned books that didn't conform to its ideals.
The sword of Damocles hanging over Religion, the question of God's existence is just as metaphysical as the question whether True Knowledge is possible.
To repeat and elaborate on an earlier post: Religion deals with the Why, teleology. Science deals with the How, causality. To pull a Wittgenstein, to take the language and terminology, concepts of one and impose them on the other will of course expose the faults (irrationality in Religion, coldheartedness in Science). But are those faults inherent to the two, or is it because one language game has no meaning in the other?
"But it's what people have done with them!"
Ok, I'll concede that. That's at least one thing they've got in common. |
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 9:07 am |
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Thanks much for your response; it's great food for thought.
| Adilegian wrote: |
| A Scriptural instance that has struck me as indicative of this love for the world is the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. Taking the story on its own terms – that is, as a myth with meaning other than literal history – it shows a concern for Lazarus as a living human being. If Christ message had been rooted entirely in the promise of an afterlife, there’s no reason why he should have wanted to bring Lazarus back to the “vale of tears." In that often-quoted out of context piece of Scripture, Jesus wept and mourned that someone whom he loved had died, after which he resurrected Lazarus to a better physical condition than he’d had before dying. The ideas here are very worldly: grief matters, love is found in this life, and the possibilities for love in this life are so great that it’s better to be alive than to have died and gone to some vague heaven. |
This is kinda funny, again. There are two stories of Lazarus, of course. One is the one that you spoke of, in the gospel of John, where in John 11:25 "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." And that's in line with Jesus wanting people to stay alive.
The other is found in a parable told by Jesus in Luke 16:19, where by 16:22 our other Lazarus is carried to the hereafter by angels to chill with Abraham, and Abraham pointedly refuses to resurrect Lazarus by the end of it. That's not in line with Jesus wanting people to stay alive.
Further, a lot of people seem to believe that these things mean that Jesus literally will be bringing people back from the afterlife, but you've said that your interpretations lean more toward metaphor and parable. Nothing is resolved, and I am essentially left to interpret this as: "Believe whatever makes you feel good."
| Quote: |
| I don’t know how arbitrary this sounds, but it’s because I don’t believe those ideas. To put it another way, I believe in God in Christ with a compulsion that I don’t entirely understand but accept. |
Hm. Arbitrary indeed. I can empathize to a degree, as I have said in previous threads that there is an odd feeling deep down in the center of me, that "we're all gonna die, the world's gonna end, and everything's gonna be alright." Likewise, I accept it. However, I accept it as a product of my own being, as opposed to relinquishing myself to frequently conflicting and easily contestable interpretations of religious scripture.
What I've noticed about Christian/Muslim/Jewish religions is that between all of the various overlapping scriptures and interpretations of scriptures of any given topic, anybody can find an excuse to do anything. One can find both violent, war-like Christians/Muslims/Jews who use scripture to galvanize their beliefs, and one can find peaceful, amiable Christians/Muslims/Jews who do the same. They all get to say that they're Christians/Muslims/Jews, and thus all get to look like hypocrites when one of their ostensible own does something that would be unthinkable to the other.
As you have said, you have been drawn to congregations that you feel comfortable around. Good for you -- and I suppose good for those who find congregations who interpret the same scriptures differently than you do. I have a very old acquaintance who has joined that baffling Born Again sect of Christianity, and apparently feels comfortable believing that anyone who is not Born Again is going to Hell, regardless of whether or not they've been otherwise good Christians for their entire lives. His bible is as biblical as yours.
Again, nothing is resolved, and we all just do whatever feels good.
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| The arbitrariness of circumstance becomes irrelevant to me as soon as it becomes merely theoretical. |
A person of any other faith could say the same in so many words.
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| What kinds of behaviors are you referring to, exactly? Do you mean things like mania, schizophrenia, and the like? |
Those are extremes, but yes, those and everything else. For instance, the role of oxytocin in love and bonding; the role of too much oxytocin in pedophilia. Subtle neurochemical balances which were beyond the understanding of people a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand or more.
Or perhaps the modern use of FMRI machines to determine which parts of the brain are or are not lighting up when someone is considering something. Something relating to political bias, for example. Or how homosexual brains function similarly to heterosexual brains of the opposite sex. They can also be used to determine whether or not an accused psychopath is capable of moral reasoning.
How would a psychopath be reformed thousands of years ago? Or a person with bipolar disorder? Or simple depression that we would now attribute to a disorder in certain microscopic receptors in the brain which receive quantifiable amounts of certain molecules? We can't just pray this stuff away -- and scientific researchers are determining why, rather than just saying, "Oh well; I feel good, and I hope that others will feel good some day, perhaps through finding the grace of the almighty."
I could also dig up links to neurological research on how people negotiate, determine valuation, group into packs/tribes/sides, but I'm feeling a bit spent, and I apologize for that. It would converge quite a bit with what you've said ... just be backed by more of a technical understanding of how humans work, less of a subjective interpretation of various passages of ancient parables.
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| In the quoted passage, Christ openly warns that his message involves his disciples’ refusing the comforts and flatteries of an unjust social order. |
A fair interpretation, from an exegetical perspective. And I still don't buy it as a believable sign that this is the living embodiment of the omnipotent, omniscient creator of all things (even things in the farthest, darkest, most unassuming places). Thank you for your thoughtful response, regardless.
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| we can likewise hurt ourselves and others through sexual behavior – but sinfulness no longer remains identified with the particular act itself. |
I'm sure that's news to a staggering number of people who follow these scriptures. It tends to be one of those "we do it but we don't like to think about whether or not it's right; we just know that other people do it too, and it feels really good, so...." situations. Not even getting into the ongoing religious debate against use of prophylactics, which is part of what makes the desire to have sex no longer such a sin by itself. One could have very robust "not to send peace, but a sword" moments against those of one's own religion with these thoughts.
That you're breaking it down into what does and doesn't have relevance in modern life is good, and I appreciate it -- but (and there has to be a but) it just seems to me that you don't need any of these scriptures as 'training wheels' for your moral values. Sweden, as a nation, is majority atheistic, yet has no more trouble than other first world nations. For that matter, their people are not having to rectify the conflicts of logic and reason that will necessarily come up when applying biblical hermeneutics to modern life.
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| I guess this depends upon your perspective. When you become sensitive to your own areas of selfishness, you do feel sadness upon realizing that you’ve made the same habitual mistake. |
And that itself is a conditioned behavior. I will not deny to you that a small part of me has at times felt pangs of self-doubt upon being confronted with yummy, yummy cocktail shrimp, simply because of that one time that I read thou shalt not eat shrimp and didn't understand why.
So, in some round about way, if you can convince people (who are right-minded and do not have neurological disorders which impair their critical thinking {although even that can be extended so liberally that I don't even want to go there}) that what they're doing has been codified as Wrong and Sinful by somebody who surely spent a lot of time thinking about it, then those people will feel similar pangs of sadness and self-doubt. In much the same way that insulting people with words actually does cause them to feel pain (and you know I could dig up FMRI research on that, too).
To all of the people who feel sadness and self-doubt for making love to somebody -- especially somebody of their own sex -- because of conditioning, do we say that they have sinned? Or do we lament that they have been conditioned to feel this out of misunderstanding and outmoded belief? Are those who believe themselves to be "true believers" to the point of ignorance, to the point of hurting those who do not deserve to be hurt anymore, not sinners themselves? What can be said to them that they would understand their error, I wonder.
It seems that you are Christian in a different way than many who believe themselves to be Christian, and this is a problem for Christianity. I am smiling at the thought of a guy going door to door, asking if somebody has found Jesus Christ as their personal savior, and only when the answer is "yes" does that mean that the proselytizing is really on.
Man, OK, I have spent hours writing this and mulling over things. Which has been great and worthwhile, and I thank you again, but I have to respectfully bow out of further conversation, since it's gobbling up time that I actually feel sadness and self-doubt for not spending on, uh... acts of money changing, come to think of it. Really.
Wow, that would be awkward if it weren't so ironically hilarious.
| | BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE | wrote: |
kekeke
so what are your favorite topics to discuss again? not that I'm planning to make sure that those are always around and bearing plenty of sticky-sweet fruit |
I should make with less discussing and more doing. Ye shall have to stick up for yourself, son.
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| BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE |
true doom murderhead
Joined: 17 May 2008
Location: Austria
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| Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 12:35 pm |
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| G. wrote: |
| In what way is the "power structure" in science better than the "power structure" in religion? |
not at all. a "power structure" is always the same: someone's going to win, someone's going to lose. the power structure of trade is the same, for example. the economic power structure. if one man earns a million dollars, other people must have lost the value of one million dollars. there's always someone at the other side of the trade, just that you have no idea who it is. most people have absolutely no understanding of this. no sense of scale. they don't ever see the effects of their actions.
i have zero interest in changing that, at the root, because it can't be done. it's ingrained in the very workings of the universe. personally i know that i merely shift things around. first, in my -- and my associates' -- favor and to lots of other people's detriment. then, in the future, hopefully, in the favor of humanity as a whole and to the detriment of some other system that will be exploited. although the setting in which humanity wouldn't struggle against itself anymore is so far out and bizarre compared to what we know, it's hard to grasp. if it realistically exists at all. |
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 5:50 am |
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| psiga wrote: |
| Adilegian, when you said "God's punishment for, or judgment of, sinfulness was exhausted with Christ's crucifixion. Only love remains." do you have much to back it up? It'd be neat to toss scripture at the people who like to claim that god is punishing us to this day for gays and whatnot. I mean, this is news to me, that the wrath of god had expired to such a degree. |
I think you'll get interpretational disagreement if you actually try to cite the scripture in question. (My guess is chapters 4-8 of Romans, among the most contentious verses in the Bible.) But if you really want a snappy comeback, just go with Luke 13. In Jesus' own words, "People dyin': it ain't because they're sinnin'."
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 8:39 am |
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| Swimmy wrote: |
| In Jesus' own words, "People dyin': it ain't because they're sinnin'." |
But unless ye repent, ye shall likewise perish.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 8:57 pm |
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Yeah, I guess you can't find much in the Bible that won't be fraught with interpretational difficulties. The traditional interpretation is that Jesus means spiritually (otherwise why would it not be the case that they died because they're sinners?), but now that I think of it, even that is up for grabs if you're stubborn enough.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 11:27 pm |
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| psiga wrote: |
| Swimmy wrote: |
| In Jesus' own words, "People dyin': it ain't because they're sinnin'." |
But unless ye repent, ye shall likewise perish. |
If you’re going to interpret this off its surface, sure, it looks pretty bad. There are a lot of problems with the interpretation that Christ meant to “perish" spiritually, the foremost of which is the fact that the Galileans whose deaths were reported to Christ at the beginning of Luke 13 were repenting. (“Now on the same occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.")
These Galileans (along with the majority of Christ’s audience in this scene) are Jews, and it’s important to recognize that Hebraic prophets tend to speak differently to the people of Israel than they do to Gentiles. It’s inconsistent that Christ would tell his Jewish audience to repent or else they’ll be killed suddenly – when one of the sudden killings used as a cautionary point occurred while Jews were sacrificing for forgiveness.
Placing Christ in the context of the Hebraic, prophetic tradition, his use of language that gets translated in English as “perish" probably refers to worldly consequences. The “ye" refers to “Israel" as a distinct cultural, religious, and (to some extent at that time) political entity. This is pretty standard Jewish prophetic discourse: Israel (in general) loses its sense of itself as religiously and culturally distinct, God sends a prophet to warn Israel of Bad Consequences, and Bad Consequences ensue. In this case, the Bad Consequences were the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and the further scattering of Israel.
Which is to say: this verse is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface, Drawing hasty conclusions about its meaning makes me suspect any use of this material to advance a moral point is founded upon a conclusion formed prior to actually observing the text and context. (This goes for both fundamentalists and atheists alike.)
| psiga wrote: |
| Nothing is resolved, and I am essentially left to interpret this as: "Believe whatever makes you feel good." |
If resolution matters to you, then you’re free to pursue this line of thinking.
Re: psiga's post in general. In several instances, you have iterated the very same points that I made in my own prior post – only you have used them as an argument against a position that you imagine I defend, rather than addressing the perspective I have actually described. For example:
| psiga wrote: |
| Quote: |
| The arbitrariness of circumstance becomes irrelevant to me as soon as it becomes merely theoretical. |
A person of any other faith could say the same in so many words. |
This is pretty fatiguing, and it makes me question the value of responding when what I’ve already written has been so clearly ignored in favor of aggressively proving several points that I have already stated agreement with.
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 3:12 am |
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You pull up scripture, I pull up scripture to the contrary. You point out that you interpret something figuratively, I point out that other Christians interpret it literally. You say that after unpretentious self-observation, you have found a good feeling in relation to Christ, and I say that I've done the same but that feeling is unrelated to Christ. You admit that you're going by your gut rather than reason, and I point out that believers of other, often contradictory religions will do the same. I say that hermeneutically deciphering ancient text which you arbitrarily decide on the importance of anyway is not helping Christianity as a movement, and that you yourself ought be the sword that sets the mistaken believers at variance, and... well I don't think you've addressed that.
It's great when we get a good person like yourself who acts kindly through his beliefs which cannot be reasoned with; it is woeful when we get a bad person who will act unkindly through his beliefs which cannot be reasoned with. That is what concerns me about lack of resolution on these matters.
Now, all of that said: I sincerely apologize that you feel I've ignored large chunks of your messages. Anything I did clip, I did for brevity. I can't think of anything that I have left out which would change my position, but perhaps I could be surprised by my own failing. I could also point out that the two contradicting passages regarding the life and afterlife of two different Lazaruses still haven't been rectified, and that your point about sin being its own punishment was not rectified against conditioning people to feel bad about things that aren't bad. Perhaps we both have mental lists of "things that the other person is tiringly oblivious to."
As well, I apologize for sounding curt and aggressive, as I often do when playing the point-counterpoint game on forums as a medium. (Memories of getting on IRC a handful of years ago, and other IC people going "wow, you don't actually sound like a dick!") I should note that I am agnostic rather than atheistic, and so my critical assessments are less of a closed mind, more of a high standard. In the end, I do appreciate the time that you've taken, as well as the insights that you've provided on topics like Sheol, and the past relevance of outmoded commandments.
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evnvnv
hapax legomenon
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: the los angeles
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| Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 4:23 am |
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can we all at least agree that this is idiotic
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 6:03 am |
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Sure.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 6:11 am |
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The ad, humanism, or that humanism promotes goodness without God?
Because 1 & 2 I'm on board with, but 3 is a new one on me.
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evnvnv
hapax legomenon
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: the los angeles
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| Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 9:10 am |
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4. that plastering this ad all over los angeles buses just before christmas is going to some how make people sympathetic to their godless ways
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evnvnv
hapax legomenon
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: the los angeles
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| Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2009 9:19 am |
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5. that the source of humanist ethics is the song "santa claus is coming to town"
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2009 7:51 am |
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6. that Santa Claus has anything to do with secularism
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G.
suffer like I did
Joined: 25 Jan 2007
Location: European cannon
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| Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2009 6:15 pm |
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| 6. that Christmas has anything to do with Christianity anymore. |
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2009 9:59 pm |
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7. That humanists are moral for goofy tautological reasons than subjective ones. It's even worse!
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 4:31 am |
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psiga,
I apologize for my own curtness and snippy response. IRL has been kind of stressful lately, and I think the lesson here is not to try to engage in a high-maintenance conversation (by the very nature of the topic) when I'm exhausted in general. I've actually given the points you brought up a lot of private attention, and I'll give a more genteel response when I'm in better spirits.
Really -- I sometimes forget this -- the quality of a debate depends so much upon mood and extra-contextual stuff. I feel like I was kind of an ass to you in my last post, so here.
You can share my ice cream cone and we can be friends!
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somes
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
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| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 4:50 am |
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| | BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE | wrote: |
| G. wrote: |
| In what way is the "power structure" in science better than the "power structure" in religion? |
not at all. a "power structure" is always the same: someone's going to win, someone's going to lose. the power structure of trade is the same, for example. the economic power structure. if one man earns a million dollars, other people must have lost the value of one million dollars. there's always someone at the other side of the trade, just that you have no idea who it is. most people have absolutely no understanding of this. no sense of scale. they don't ever see the effects of their actions.
i have zero interest in changing that, at the root, because it can't be done. it's ingrained in the very workings of the universe. personally i know that i merely shift things around. first, in my -- and my associates' -- favour and to lots of other people's detriment. then, in the future, hopefully, in the favour of humanity as a whole and to the detriment of some other system that will be exploited. although the setting in which humanity wouldn't struggle against itself anymore is so far out and bizarre compared to what we know, it's hard to grasp. if it realistically exists at all. |
thumbs up to this.
also,
| adilegian wrote: |
One can find traces of the eschatological, doomsday Christ in the four canonical Gospels, yes, but it’s mistaken to take those minimal instances as representative of the whole.
...
I stuck with Calvinism because it bases salvation not upon faith but upon divine grace, and its understanding of grace is drawn from the divine character as revealed by and as embodied in Christ. Christ’s interests were based in love for the world, and the good news of salvation, as I read those Scriptures, lies in the opening of better possibilities for life-as-lived and not life-as-tolerated-until-we-die.
A Scriptural instance that has struck me as indicative of this love for the world is the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. |
I find this sort of interesting, as it seems pretty much impossible. You quote the story of Lazarus, and I'm sure you have other examples as well, but to me it seems like you would actually just be pulling out the traces of the "non-eschatological" Christ. From the garden of Eden on, the world is pretty much out to get man, and sucks for us but that's how it is!
I'm too lazy to go through the scriptures right now, but Jesus pretty strongly carries on that tradition from what i recall. |
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 6:24 am |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
You can share my ice cream cone and we can be friends! |
Yay!
Yeah, I really don't want to get bridge-burny with you, since I've long held you in esteem from standpoint of character.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 6:35 am |
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| psiga wrote: |
| Adilegian wrote: |
You can share my ice cream cone and we can be friends! |
Yay!
Yeah, I really don't want to get bridge-burny with you, since I've long held you in esteem from standpoint of character. |
Likewise! I'm glad to know that a cranky post of mine doesn't compromise that.
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evnvnv
hapax legomenon
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: the los angeles
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| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 7:19 am |
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you guys are ruining the tone of this thread with all of your peace and goodwill
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 9:15 am |
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Krampus threatened to shit in my stocking if I didn't do it!
What better way to keep a guy in line than having a threatening personal relationship with an imaginary friendohwait.
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 2:07 pm |
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My, but I can't tell if they're joking.
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falsedan
Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 10:55 pm |
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| | BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE | wrote: |
No, no and no. I am talking about empirical observation. No one can "observe" a "door-viewing experience" empirically. One can observe a dude viewing a door but that "door-viewing" part is kind of lost on the observer. If you disagree, name an event.
I will of course, at this point, mention "the occipital lobe" again. Mr. Mech linked to an article on that. Activity in that brain region can be experienced. It is an experiencable event in that a scientist can stand there and observe his instruments pick it up. That is the definition of experiencable that I was using.
But that's hardly what you'll call a door-viewing experience -- activity in that brain region --, right? So, I don't know, how has anyone ever had an observable religious experience? How can you observe that "door-viewing" part?
So, to really, really make it clear: A "door-viewing" is fiction. It is not observable, it is not experiencable through the senses. It is merely an expression that is applied loosely to whatever events. |
Your denial of the existence of religious experiences applies equally to the simple act of viewing a door; they are both equally hard to empirically measure. Truly you are the modern sophist.
| psiga wrote: |
| Christian/Muslim/Jewish |
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are Abrahamic religions.
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sawtooth
heh
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: flashback
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| Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:03 am |
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fun thread, enjoyable to read, i can't pretend to understand it wholly but I like thinking about it. Thanks to everyone except bbp.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 4:29 pm |
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| sawtooth wrote: |
| i can't pretend to understand it wholly but I like thinking about it. |
sawtooth, you phrase things in just the right way
this is how I feel about almost everything.
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somes
Joined: 25 Jun 2008
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| Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2009 8:30 am |
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| aww, bbp's my favorite! |
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Fri Jan 01, 2010 9:33 am |
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Okay! 2010’s here, and I’m awake. Here’s some responding.
I did some reading today in the latest issue of The Philosopher’s Magazine (which has a hefty heft of pieces on what’s called, in this thread and elsewhere, “the new atheism”), and I recommend it as useful material for anyone who’s been spurred to further reading as a result of this thread. (Some folks in the IRC have mentioned as much, so here’s a recommendation for them!)
| psiga wrote: |
| I say that hermeneutically deciphering ancient text which you arbitrarily decide on the importance of anyway is not helping Christianity as a movement, and that you yourself ought be the sword that sets the mistaken believers at variance, and... well I don't think you've addressed that. |
I can see this. I guess it’s difficult for me to look at Christianity and really say what the hell it is, overall. I mean, there’s Roman Catholicism, which used to be Christianity – the beginning and the end of the religion owing to its position as an authority – and that religious organization does a lot of different things with the same materials (textual, cultural, and otherwise) that I and others do different things with. There are folks like my great-step-aunt and great-step-uncle (Seventh Day Adventists) who have a whole variation of material assumptions based upon a certain tradition (which, ostensibly, is based upon Biblical readings). There’s Meister Eckart, the mystic nuns just preceding the times of the Inquisition, and the Inquisitors themselves… I’d be hard pressed to say which of these are “Christianity,” and I include my own faith in that uncertainty as well.
I guess that I see the effort to “correct” the different Christianities en masse as an endeavor as futile as an atheist’s attempt to “correct” different religions from their beliefs in G(g)od(s). (How’s that for a post-structural puppet-word?) I don’t see the effort that goes into interpretation as arbitrary if it is personal and sincere, but this might be a difference in our off-hand understandings of what the word “arbitrary” means.
I’m often put off by defining meaning as “arbitrary” simply because that meaning is not certifiably “essential.” In other words, I’m often confronted with the idea that, because interpretation implies that induced meanings are not essential or embedded in an object, that the object itself is of dubious value.
I was discussing this matter with a friend earlier tonight, in fact, as a way of describing the terms on which most productive theological conversations must proceed. It’s like… when you and someone else discuss a poem, all of your conversation and thought depend upon the mutual agreement that the language-object in focus is, in fact, a poem. (What exactly a poem is remains debatable. For now the important thing is that both you and your other agree that you’re in the presence of each other and a third thing that you’re calling a “poem.”) Belief is an understood starting point, and I feel that many conversations between people who adhere to different Christianities are difficult to initiate on grounds other than one-upmanship simply because the beliefs are so different. “Christianity,” I think, is as misleading of an identifier as “liberal” or “conservative.” It’s a term that we use casually but that ultimately describes nothing specific.
In fact, it’s because I distrust “Christianity” as a description of beliefs and faiths that I stick to discussing the merits of (and listening to the possible weaknesses of) the doctrines and articles of my own faith. I enjoy getting into theory, but (usually) only insofar as I can relate it to anything I know first-hand, and I honestly can’t say that I know any other Christianity as well as I know my own, which is why I only claim to speak for my understanding of doctrines that I trust most.
I feel I should qualify that a “theological conversation” differs from a “conversation on the philosophy of religion.” I would call the conversations in this thread “conversations on the philosophy of religion,” whereas “theological conversations” would need to take place between two people (or more) who agree, at least on some level, on the existence of certain ideas – if not agree on those ideas’ definitions.
Anyway. I hope that something there got at what you were getting at.
I value scholarly research and cultural context very much, so I prefer to preface the act of interpretation with acts of education. In most instances, regarding the Bible, the acts of education involve translation matters. (A lot of potential problems are made more approachable, for instance, if you know that the Greek word frequently interpreted as “virgin” in reference to Mary was often contemporarily used as a term to refer to “a young woman” regardless of prior sexual experience.) I try not to impose too much interpretation upon (or demand closure from) Scripture whose background I’m not well educated on. When given a possible interpretation of Scripture, I ask myself if the interpreter has asked the same questions I would need to have asked to feel comfortable venturing forth an interpretation. If the answer seems to be, “No,” then I approach that interpretation more warily.
| psiga wrote: |
| It's great when we get a good person like yourself who acts kindly through his beliefs which cannot be reasoned with; it is woeful when we get a bad person who will act unkindly through his beliefs which cannot be reasoned with. That is what concerns me about lack of resolution on these matters. |
I guess my question here is: to what extent can this be attributed to religion, and to what extent can this be attributed to influences independent of religion?
| psiga wrote: |
| Krampus threatened to shit in my stocking if I didn't do it! |
Oh God.
Oh fucking God.
I grew up in Bavaria (southern Germany). Bavaria is just north of Austria, the region where Krampus tramps around in terms of cultural awareness. I was exposed to the threat of Krampus at an early age, albeit without the horrific renditions lately performed by brilliant puppet- and costume-designers.
Which means that you have, out of the blue, tapped into one of my oldest childhood horrors.
ICE CREAM RESCINDED! (*snatch!*)
| psiga wrote: |
| What better way to keep a guy in line than having a threatening personal relationship with an imaginary friendohwait. |
I can see how this can be used to call the imaginary quality of a belief in God into question. I’m curious to know what the same research equipment could detect regarding people with animistic beliefs (i.e., belief in things having spirits, such as Japanese mononoke). I guess I’m wondering if that area of the brain relates more to “recognizing people” or “recognizing things that we thing should be recognized as we recognize ourselves as worth recognizing.” I also wonder if the same kinds of reactions would occur in people (such as myself) who treat their cats as though they were “people.” (E.G., talking to them, treating them with courtesies, etc.)
I’ve got some responses to your prior post (the one that precedes my crank-fest), including maybe a few quotations from a couple of books that it inspired me to re-read while thinking about the response. But I’m tired! I’ll close this post with a couple of quotations that I’ve picked up over the past couple of months, and they’re pretty close to the intuitions that guide my thinking on a lot of the matters discussed in this thread.
First, from Ronald Aronson’s piece “Between Heaven and Earth” published in the journal named at the top of this post: “We disappear as persons if we give in to the temptation to take ourselves as no more than objects of explanation.”
Second, from a source that I’ve since unfortunately lost: “Epistemological caution sometimes ends up looking like lack of imagination.”
This is kind of where I’m coming from.
Happy 2010! May it contain less Krampus (and more lactose-free ice creams) than 2009.
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psiga
saudade
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 10:57 am |
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Sigh. I've got a half written response to your last post, but have no idea when I'll get around to finishing it. Still, I wanted to pass this along to you, for brain food:
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/49/2/Religion.htm
I like what he says, and am pretty much in accord up until he starts sounding like he needs to learn some modern sociology and neuroscience.
Oh.
"May 2, 1956."
Oh.
Yeah, that would do it.
That would do it.
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Adilegian
Rogue Scholar
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: Q*Bert Killscreen Nightmare
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| Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 5:53 pm |
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| psiga wrote: |
Sigh. I've got a half written response to your last post, but have no idea when I'll get around to finishing it. Still, I wanted to pass this along to you, for brain food:
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/49/2/Religion.htm
I like what he says, and am pretty much in accord up until he starts sounding like he needs to learn some modern sociology and neuroscience. |
I like this perspective quite a lot, too, and I think that he hits upon an issue of attitude early in the lecture that is often overlooked.
I'm disappointed by how regularly "science" becomes conflated entirely with "technological progress," largely because I think that our current culture of progress requires that we adopt an attitude of unhealthy faith in order to relate to technology as consumers. (By this, I just mean that many of us accept the marketing claims made about certain new technologies in order to find our easiest relationships to those technologies as consumers.) I remember hearing an interview on NPR last year with a woman (whose name I don't remember immediately) who had spent her life proselytizing the scientific attitude, and one of her examples for practicing science involved taking a sketchpad out to a field every night and documenting the appearance of the moon. It's highly unlikely that anyone would discover anything new to the world this way, but it teaches the disciplines of observation and active curiosity that are more important to experiencing the value of science than, say, accepting the claims of a new technology's marketing staff simply on the grounds that it's a product of science an, therefore, your consuming the product will somehow make you more scientific.
Which is to say: I think that the lecture does a fine job of critiquing (both directly and indirectly) troublesome ways of thinking that appear within and outside religion.
This kind of goes back to my aesthetic view of religion, but this interests me in particular:
| Feynman wrote: |
| In my opinion, it is not possible for religion to find a set of metaphysical ideas which will be guaranteed not to get into conflicts with an ever‑advancing and always‑changing science which is going into an unknown. We don't know how to answer the questions; it is impossible to find an answer which someday will not be found to be wrong. The difficulty arises because science and religion are both trying to answer questions in the same realm here. |
In ways, he's right here, and I'm interested in this from the vantage point of the history of religion. I think that organizational centralization isn't healthy for religion (big surprise coming from a Protestant right?), and I think that has contributed to why religion has put itself so heavily at odds with science. A centralized church makes itself thoroughly "catholic" by intertwining beliefs about the material identity of the world with its moral speculations, and it heaps upon this "catholicism" a political role in Western Europe that stands to suffer in the event that the weakest part of its identity (the claims about the material world) comes under attack. It defends its less supportable claims (such as that of an Earth-centered universe), pisses off the scientific community at large, and generates an animosity that will take perhaps centuries more to become moot.
I'd look at poetry as an example whose development parallels that between religion and science in terms of form, but whose path has been very different. During the 16th through 18th centuries (and to some extend the 19th), poetry was one of the primary means of political communication in England. (I know most about English historical poetry, then American, then sundry European poetries, so I'll just stick to writing about the English.) "Poetry" was indistinguishable from "politics" in a way that greatly restricted formal and thematic curiosity. In a more closely aesthetic sense, "poetry" was also indistinguishable from "narrative." English poetry lost control over narrative when the novel emerged, and it lost its political relevance as imperial ambitions failed and politics became more about democratic discourse than inherited aristocratic images (such as the oak and English fleece). Much as religion had formerly needed authority over the material world in order to have merit as a moral and communal presence, poetry had needed political and narrative authority in order to be poetry.
Obviously, poetry still exists, and (I'd argue) is better for lacking its former power as an overtly political tool. Losing authority over narrative also pushed poetry toward more lyrical modes of expression -- in a sense, these losses can be argued to have improved poetry by forcing it to become more what it uniquely is. I'd like to see the same thing happen with what's loosely called "Christianity," and I think a great first step would be for it to drop the pretense of grafting claims over the material world to its reasons for being.
And on a closing note! I think that the relative lack of centralized organization is something that Christianity could learn from Islam. Doctrinal inflexibility is one of the worst things you can do to religious faith, and you've got to let that shit adapt to context if it's going to continue to mean anything.
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 7:14 pm |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| And on a closing note! I think that the relative lack of centralized organization is something that Christianity could learn from Islam. Doctrinal inflexibility is one of the worst things you can do to religious faith, and you've got to let that shit adapt to context if it's going to continue to mean anything. |
The sticking point is that the church is thoroughly convinced that the Draconian measures they incorporate are the ones that have allowed them to prosper and expand, not the faith and charity of their audience. This was actually why I left Catholicism. Catholicism is built upon a rigid system and when it takes until 1997 for you to finally "allow" the Sun to be the center of the solar system, you've got a problem.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 10:13 pm |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| And on a closing note! I think that the relative lack of centralized organization is something that Christianity could learn from Islam. Doctrinal inflexibility is one of the worst things you can do to religious faith, and you've got to let that shit adapt to context if it's going to continue to mean anything. |
Of course, doctrinal flexibility in Islam has fomented real, physical, terrible civil wars within that faith that are lamentable both in themselves and also for the collateral damage they cause to us in the west. I wonder if the relative institutionalization of Christianity hasn't helped Christians not kill each other (only helped of course, not prevented entirely).
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Let's Play, starring me. |
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evnvnv
hapax legomenon
Joined: 05 Dec 2006
Location: the los angeles
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| Posted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 10:46 pm |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| And on a closing note! I think that the relative lack of centralized organization is something that Christianity could learn from Buddhism. Doctrinal inflexibility is one of the worst things you can do to religious faith, and you've got to let that shit adapt to context if it's going to continue to mean anything. |
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The text will not live forever. The cup are small |
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boojiboy7
narcissistic irony-laden twat
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
Location: take me on a blatant doom trip.
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| Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 3:06 pm |
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| Adilegian wrote: |
| And on a closing note! I think that the relative lack of centralized organization is something that Christianity could learn from Islam. Doctrinal inflexibility is one of the worst things you can do to religious faith, and you've got to let that shit adapt to context if it's going to continue to mean anything. |
This whole post interested me, mostly out of my own bizarre religious upbringing (raised by a Quaker and an Athiest, went to Jesuit high school).
Most people when they talk about the problems of centralized organization in religion are talking about the Catholic church, which I understand. And from the outside, it certainly appears as much, and for a good number of Catholics who don't particularly care to think about it, it is such.
Part of this comes from the whole papl infallibility issue, which has been both misused by the Church, and misunderstood by everyone pretty regularly. At it's heart, the pope is only supposed to be infallible on a very few specific doctrinal issues. Issues like Mary as a Virgin, Jesus as son of God, etc. However, papal infallibility does not extend beyond these vary basic tenets of Catholicism. So, an issue of morality, such as abortion, can be said by the pope to be wrong, and people can be excommunicated and such from the Chruch for it, but it's not an infallible matter.
What this ends up meaning is pretty interesting if you hang out with enough intelligent Catholics. It means that there becomes this wide diversity of beliefs that share a cetnral basic belief, and a central love for the traditions and such of an organization, but differ wholeheartedly on a lot of other issues. I've met a ton of pro-choice Catholics, for example, and a ton who disagree with a lot of what the Church says and does in regards to science and such (though it is interesting to note that the Church has included evolution in its teachings for awhile now, going with the stupidly obvious conclusion of hey, maybe God just does it this way). The 1997 "allowing" of the Sun as center of the universe was just as stupid as it sounds, but then again, nobody who was Catholic gave a rat's ass about it. They all (including clergy) had accepted that shit hundreds of years ago, and it just took the Church awhile to get around to updating the documents, which is stupid and beaurocratical and reflects the major downside of having such a giant organization. The Church has long acknowledge that in so much as science does not affect moral choices, they really don't need to comment on it.
Additionally, there are a lot of Catholics who regularly disagree with the Pope, but feel it doesn't violate their religion as Catholics. It's a much more heterogenous group of beliefs than the Church would project.
The Jesuits were totally awesome for this, by the way.
It was all very interesting to observe for four years, as someone who was not Catholic and never will be. The religion becomes much more of a culture than an organization. Even among the clergy, there are major differences. A Jesuit has a lot of basic differences with a Franciscan, for example, despite both being part of the same organization.
I would not argue, however, that this is a model that works for other groups at all, and has only really happened due to a couple thousand years and a lot of fighting in the church itself. But it has always interested me how differently I and other view Catholicism from within and outside of it. |
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Talbain
Joined: 14 Jan 2007
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| BLUE | BLACK | PURPLE |
true doom murderhead
Joined: 17 May 2008
Location: Austria
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| Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2010 2:55 pm |
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| Quote: |
| G(g)od(s). (How’s that for a post-structural puppet-word?) |
I've been with a Jewish woman recently, so I can add something to that!
| Quote: |
| G(g)-d(s). (How’s that for a post-structural puppet-word?) |
They do that with the hyphen instead of the o. For added G-dliness or something |
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