I wrote this out in a response to another thread (to simple schoolboy) but I figured it should go here since it will be viewed by more people:

I agree with most of your points but the alternative to far-right Christian beliefs is not atheism. Regarding atheists, my guess is that they don't have organizations and money to be throwing around to make big atheist meeting halls and give to charity.

Christianity and its values were not founded on bullying and scaring people to believing in Christ. Historically it was an alternative to the decadence of the Roman empire and its lessons of morality and recognition of human suffering/oppression were valuable for the time. At some point, it became corrupt (like all underdogs) and the influence of the church and scripture has been see-sawing back and forth for the last few hundred years.

People have got to realize that beliefs in God or values or morality are acceptable and can go hand-in-hand with more inquiring ideas about the true nature of things, whether its metaphysics or every day decisions that effect others. They rely on scripture which was written by men and interpreted by men. Its to the point where its actually a popular belief that the theory of evolution, despite being an empirical fact based in science, is questionable to the alternative that's been written down, translated, and re-interpreted numerous times over the past thousand years with a group of people with fairly single-minded interests.

Many Americans don't have time to concern themselves with inquiry because its much easier to have it told to them in a weekly sermon or even by government officials on TV or radio. I don't know if this is in our nature in anyway, but we are a fairly self-interested culture. And to think that these people still consider themselves a persecuted minority to secular interests while the people who represent them are using their votes to wage cultural and physical war on the rest of humanity is extremely troubling and dangerous.

We could look at ourselves and say, well, have I been deeply affected by this. Not particularly, I still have my rights for the most part and I'm not broke. But its my view that the interest of the individual is always benefited by the concern for the rest of humanity's well-being and that means waging wars on other nations, disregard for the environment, disregard for human and civil rights or the poor is not very moral at all. However, the notion that "the Lord is always watching" is enough for some people to conform to the most basic scriptural moral obligations. Some people would likely tell me I'm generalizing a huge part of the population (of America, the most powerful country in the world may I remind us), but I could careless. Its pretty obvious that the balance in this country is unfairly tipped towards a comfortable establishment that is concerned MOSTLY with its own self-interests, whether its preventing gays from moving in down the street or keeping the price of gas cheap.

History has proven the otherside wrong time and time again. Luckily, we have things like storytelling, music, art and science on ourside to give insight into actual human behavior that's typically a movement away from the established cultural beliefs of the past. And yes, the bible still does this in a positive way if you disregard its supposedly divine aspects. A supreme being or greater good, if one does exist, would want us to pursue our own interests and would not be self-serving if that's even definable in purely human terms.

Its open to questioning but I have a hard time seeing how rational people would disagree with me.

as far as evolution goes. does it really effect you that someone believes this. im not talking the guy yelling in your face that its the truth. im talking the person who quietly believes it, how much is this hurting you and stopping you from doing what you do in your day to day life?

does this mean your an evil person and shouldnt be taken seriously because you like all these smaller films with substenance that the majority of america never sees and it makes no money in comparrision to the big budget movies that make 400 million dollars?

its someones simple belief, just like yours, only on a different subject.

Well I'd agree with you on the first point.

The difference with your philosophy and mine is that you say you are powerless to do anything or make any sort of change in people and their opinions and when it comes down to it thats all there is - and its obvious I disagree.

What you failed to address was why its important for people to be informed in other matters besides strictly scriptural or biblical beliefs. I think I gave pretty good reasons why certain idealogies are just not justified or should be accepted without criticism, and how that relates to everybody everywhere. But knowing your posting style for the past two years leads me to believe that you think everything is subjective opinion and nothing that's happening anywhere has any effect on you directly, so why should we even bother trying to make a difference in the way people are thinking. Am I correct? Dead civilians in Iraq or underpaid workers in the midwest are of little importance to me, and an 19th century work of Impressionism is no different than crayon scribbles on a canvas. I would disagree.

I would say that you are overgeneralizing and that most of your points aren't very well made. You put blanket statements on all Christians just as some Christians put blanket statements on those representing the counter culture, and I find it to be offensive. People who are using the religion to serve themselves are not Christians, and real Christians know this. Real Christians also know that free will and free thought are a necessity of faith, and to simply follow the words of some televangelist runs contrary to the essence of Christianity. There is a danger in this country of religion being used for bad, I'll give you that. But this comes from people adapting a religion to fit their bigotry, not the other way around. The problem is as it always has been: mankind is selfish and is willing to co-opt anything to get what it wants. Religion, politics, anything.

wow, thats well thought out

have you ever thought for a instant, that people who believe the bible have weighed it against evolution and just thought, im leaving this in GODS hands?

why is it so hard for you to accept that other people have different opinions than you do

Evolution, and science in general, is not an opinion. It is empirically tested theory, and should be entitled to more respect than mere opinion.

I can respect someone's choice to leave something in God's hands as their opinion. However, they owe more than than merely the respect of an opinion to a vetted scientific theory.

Orpheus, read my post instead of skimming over it and please don't take this argument into the realms of actually defining Christianity. You think I'm labeling every Christian in America as some moron, when what I stated was that Christianity could actually be fairly flexible as a religion if not taken to extremes. Then you proceed to say there's a danger of people doing this in this country, which is basically what I said.



So that is your idea of how things are then?

And if by some means the far right is able to convince society that scripture is 100% the word of an all-knowing God, evolution is a farce, and the majority of the Bible should be taken over hard-won scientific facts and inquiry regardless of the effects it has on the general good of the rest of humanity, it means nothing to you since its their opinion and they are entitled to it, and it gives them the right to force it on the rest of us. This is what you believe then? Answer the question.

it is what i believe, im secure enough in my beliefs, whether its everyone else in the world vs just me, that i will believe what i believe, and i am not weak enough to cave just because everyone else is doing it

I'm a believer in evolution but please explain how evolution has been tested. Don't mistake scientists generally agreeing on a theory being the same as that theory having been tested. Even if evolution is correct, we know so little about it at the detail level that to think it has been properly tested is a mistake. People wouldn't be able to point to holes in evolution if it had been tested.

People wouldn't be able to point to the holes if there weren't a wall of facts surrounding the holes.

I don't want to derail this thread, because we've got several threads about evolution, but suffice it to say that most of the "holes" that people point out come from a lack of understanding of what the theory of evolution ACTUALLY proports, as opposed to what the general public BELIEVES it proports. It's mostly strawman-type arguments poking holes in a theory that nobody actually expounds in the form in which the holes are poked.

I think you should read this.

I'm glad people are responding to this post, as I've derailed my fair share of threads recently and its about time that it turned into something other than a thread killer.

One thing that I have to take issue with is this idea that christianity can be sufficiently flexible so as to be acceptable to you. I suspect that in order for you to find christianity acceptable, it would require the almost complete removal of God. I must conceede that denominations such as the Unitarians have nothing that anyone could easily find offensive in them. However, this is because they have taken anything of substance out of their beliefs, and while there is a certain amount of spirituality, there is very little faith. To take christianity to the point where abortion is perfectly acceptable and we should all find our own ways to God is to replace christianity with something else entirely - something that certainly isn't a monotheistic faith passed down to us by Abraham and the othe prophets. If this is what you really want, just say outright that you don't much care for any of traditional christianity and you'd really prefer a Christianity Lite(R) .

I commend you on your cocern regarding the excesses of Christianity's influence on daily life, but I must disagree with you on the extent that you claim it is detrimental to progress. I definitely understand why you might feel this way, but despite the restrictions of Christianity, much of the technological development has taken place in Western, traditionally Christian nations over the past centuries, so I can only draw from this that the two can exist simultaneously. I might even go so far as to say that in some ways, faith is a necessary companion to science, for science without a moral compass is just as dangerous as theocratic excesses. Social Darwinism, and Eugenics, well noted abuses of 'science' occured when science was used to certain groups ends without regards to morality. I would think that faith can offer an important moral debate concerning scientific progress, which is why I must disagree with you on the lack of redeeming qualities in following traditional Christianity.

I've pointed this out before, but "faith" is a Christian virtue, not a religious virtue in general. As far as I'm concerned, faith is no virtue unto itself.

Faith is an EXTREMELY powerful thing. It can make a person do things that that would not otherwise be able to do. It can grant confidence, strength, assuredness, and many other tools for success. However, the power of faith does not discriminate between that which is TRUE or not, and faith in something that is FALSE just as powerful a tool for evil as faith in something that is true can be for good.

That said, I don't think that RELIGIOUS faith played any part in the scientific and cultural revolution of the post-renaissance western world, and in fact I believe it was the rise of enlightened thinking (i.e. the Enlightenment) and the recession of pure religious faith that enabled that revolution, and it's why places like the Middle East are still trapped in the Dark Ages.

The rise of the unenlightened in the past 40 years to positions of political power that they had never held in such force before is IMO the greatest contributing factor towards the beginnings of the decline of the American civilization over that period. The religious right believes that they have risen as a reaction to this decline as brought on by hippies and liberals communists and integrationists and secular humanists and all of their other phony boogieman labels, but IMO it's the rise to power of the anti-intellectual class in America that has led to the decline in our education, the decline in our attempts at understanding between cultures around the world, and rise of FAITH at the expense of TRUTH.

That should get this thread back on it's original track.

So... we just kind of hit the jackpot with the enlightenment? It just existed in and of its own completely outside of mainstream christian society? This could very well be the case, it just seems to me that christianity seems to stress the individual and more free thought than say, Islam or Hinduism.

If a religion truly stressed free thought, it would cease to exist.

Well, I will say that Christianity (or at least Roman Catholicism, which was the only Christianity before the Enlightenment) does stress "free will", and that was certainly a factor in the enlightenment. But it was merely a seed idea in the consciousness of Europe. Christianity certainty didn't drive the Enlightenment, in fact it was an impediment at nearly every turn from the 14th Century right through until the 19th Century when the power of the Vatican waned to its lowest point.

It's unbelievably complicated, but the greatest impetus for the Enlightenment was the Black Plague in the 1340's. It shook people's faith, it killed off 1/3 of the population of Europe and led to the largest land redistribution in history (since huge areas were completely wiped out of people), it led to the consolidation of power in the large states, which were then able to challenge the supremacy of Rome and the Church, it changed commerce, it changed medicine, it led people to look for answers to their great questions in new places. I could go on and on about how the Plague changed everything.

Faith and reason existed side by side, but when they came into conflict, reason always won out because reason is solid and true when based only in fact. Rationality in philosophy and science prevailed in spite of faith, not because of it.

I don't think that christianity stresses the individual whatsoever. I think it has a slight toleration to the individual, but for the most part it always seemed to me that it is a very "get in line and don't ask questions" kind of deal. I think if it stressed individualism the religion (like any religion really would crumble). I think christianity hides this better than other religions, but I think there is a very strong herd mentality that is not only stressed, but strongly encouraged.

I think this is 1/2 true. The greatest factor in the decline of America has been the general acceptance of mediocrity in the name of equality. The everyone's special mentality.




I think you are confusing "The Church" with Christianity. The organized portion of the religion certain encourages uniform opinions about things, Christianity itself (and most other religions) put a strong emphasis on the individual and their responsibilities toward themselves and God. It's not really till you introduce the command structure of "The Church" before things get so f**ked up.

I too agree that the rise of anti intellectualism could very well spell the end of American dominance in the world. Just as the Black Plague shook the foundations of the world, I think 9/11 has played a major role in shaping what we see as the current policital landscape of America. This is not to say that there wasn't an anti-intellection movement prior to 2001, I think the general fear created by 9/11 has given more financial and military power to this movement. Faith and pseudo intellectualism has all but replaced facts and science. Just today I saw a "bumper sticker" of a Darwin fish being eaten by a fish with the word "Truth" in it. We only have to look at Fox news for a good synopsis on how we conduct ourselves when dealing with complex issues. There seems to be this notion that there are two sides to every battle. This is odd because it really represents the duality of good and evil and ignores the possibility of a middleground or third position. It also strikes me as odd that the media and people in general feel that in order to be "fair" a counter opinion must be presented no matter the debate. Despite the reams of evidence for some type of global warming we still have to hear from those who ignore it in every news discussionl. I wouldn't be surprised at this in the fringe media but it's becoming more and more present, even programs like 20/20 couch all their reports by having the dissenting opinon represented. It's almost as if we need to hear from the "Flat Earth" people if we want to talk about a round planet.

I think I have a decent handle on why this is occurring in the good 'ol USA but this seems to be a global trend as well. Anti-intellectualism is present in many societies around the world. I can't speak for Asia but the Middle East sure seems mired in a self destructive debate that's based in very little fact or sense of reality. Europe may have all but forgotten religion but they've reverted to racism and cling to the past much in the same way the religious right views history. Could it be that living on a shrinking planet has everyone running scared? Is reverting to simple religious beliefs the easiest mental route for the world?

In regards to Christianity I find it highly amusing that the hot topic is making fun of Tom Cruise and his Scientology. No doubt the man's nuts, but is he any crazier than the person that believes in an invidible man in the sky that knows all, sees all but does nothing?

Nice post, gogol.

Journalists often think that all debates have two equal sides, more often than not to pique interest. In the sciences, there obviously can be right and wrong answers, and by highlighting the thoughts of a few critics instead of presenting the balance of scientific opinion, journalists can do the public debate a disservice.