warumich wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:41 amMy point is that when we in our threads talk about religion vs science, there is a phenomenal variety of religion and spiritual thought (whatever that is) that gets bracketed out, forgotten, or labelled as not proper religion. Then if we have an issue with Protestantism (or Catholicism), this gets rather unfairly widened to religion as a whole (this is not to say that there are no problems in, say, Shintoism, but these would probably be of a different nature). But the variety of religious belief also exists within Western Christian churches, and our "protestant" frame then gets put to work to shoehorn everyone who identifies with Protestantism into a series of propositions and behaviours we feel they must satisfy. And of course, the churches, insofar as they are political and social institutions, do that to themselves as well.
So the fact that the church took so long to acknowledge Galileo was of course unfortunate, but not by itself an indication that every catholic agreed with that. That doesn't make them any less religious. I would take a similar attitude to Darwin - he appears to have had a fairly clearly and delimited idea of religion, based on the 19th c idea of a religion as a doctrinal institution. And so do the young Earth creationists.
Well, if I complain about an official position of (one of the Western) christian church(es) you can always say that it's "not by itself an indication that every [self-identified member of that church or faith or denomination] agreed with that" and while it's true that a lot of people might call themselves believers, they pick and choose which bits they actually believe or follow. This is good in the sense that they realize they need less and less of it.warumich wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 10:36 am... Actually it does seem to me that a lot of the dislike for religion here is actually a dislike for religious institutions. I don't have much beef with that. But keep in mind that institutions are political entities that have their own logic that may very much differ from the philosophical or religious beliefs they claim to represent.
But what if I complain about the beliefs or belief-motivated actions of a [self-identified member of a church or faith or denomination]? Is that just their own personal or political ignorance/prejudice and nothing to do with the echo-chamber they're in?
I've seen various responses to Darwinian Natural Selection from various kinds of christians (who in this context often seem to refer to god as "the Creator"). There are those who avoid the cognitive dissonance by not thinking about it very hard, implicitly accepting the science but still feeling like there's god there somewhere. There are those who see evolution as having been somehow "directed" because of course you can't have something complicated without it having been created by something even more complicated so the solution to this is to create out of nothing something maximally complicated which then created everything else. There are those who take Genesis chapter 1 as true but consider yom to not mean a literal 24-hour* day but rather some long period of time. And then there are those who take it literally, that the universe was created in a week just a few thousand years ago, and that fossils happened during the Noah flood. They're all wrong of course, to increasing degrees**. The correct approach to Genesis is to understand it as (pre-?)historical literature and analyse what it tells us about the bronze-age tribes who handed it down as part of their oral creation mythology.
(* - days actually used to be shorter)
(** - we could also debate the question of how any of these particularly beliefs lead to damaging consequences, but I hope nobody thinks it's a good idea to teach these myths to children as if they were true)