Mocking religion

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 12, 2021 12:40 pm

Lew Dolby wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 12:31 pm
the catholic church has said it doesn't see any onus on itself to hand over child-raping priests to the authorities or even to say which are and which aren't.
Which isn't correct.

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Lew Dolby » Mon Apr 12, 2021 1:00 pm

That's very nice but it's about dealing with this stuff within the church, in fact within the Vatican. Words like "authorities", "laws", "state" refer to the authorities and laws of the church and the state to the Vatican. It even talks of reabillitating offenders (not the church's job if they're in secular prisons). Nowhere does it say hand them over to the secular authorities.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 12, 2021 1:16 pm

Lew Dolby wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 1:00 pm
That's very nice but it's about dealing with this stuff within the church, in fact within the Vatican. Words like "authorities", "laws", "state" refer to the authorities and laws of the church and the state to the Vatican. It even talks of reabillitating offenders (not the church's job if they're in secular prisons). Nowhere does it say hand them over to the secular authorities.
Its wider than that, eg: https://www.reuters.com/article/vatican ... NKCN24H26M

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by lpm » Mon Apr 12, 2021 1:52 pm

Woodchopper, it doesn't count if its an external forcing. Which is how all this emerged - outside forces finally broke through and the secular world forced a reluctant church into action.

Even the CoE obstructed outside investigation in the 1990s and 2000s, only starting to address the issue on its own initiative in the 2010s - and it's not exactly a ruthless and determined rooting out of criminals or full transparency over the past.

But I'm willing to give these institutions a period where they do penance for their sins, to go away and silently contemplate the evil they have done. A 1,000 years should do it. So long as they keep absolute silence on all sexual matters I'll be happy to see them rejoin the conversation in 3021.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Apr 12, 2021 2:26 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 1:52 pm
Woodchopper, it doesn't count if its an external forcing. Which is how all this emerged - outside forces finally broke through and the secular world forced a reluctant church into action.

Even the CoE obstructed outside investigation in the 1990s and 2000s, only starting to address the issue on its own initiative in the 2010s - and it's not exactly a ruthless and determined rooting out of criminals or full transparency over the past.

But I'm willing to give these institutions a period where they do penance for their sins, to go away and silently contemplate the evil they have done. A 1,000 years should do it. So long as they keep absolute silence on all sexual matters I'll be happy to see them rejoin the conversation in 3021.
I'm not trying to absolve them. They spent a very long time covering up and moving on men who raped children.

Was just pointing out that the situation isn't as described.

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Tessa K » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:05 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:16 am
That argument doesn't work because sexual weirdness is embedded in the western Christian church.

It's not some minor side show or add-on, a large segment is all about sexual sin, guilt, celibacy, control of sexual orientation and control of female sexuality. A major break from the Roman religions was the imposition of sexual "morality". Being a christian must surely mean acceptance of quite a lot of the basic philosophy, even if it doesn't mean acceptance of 100%, and that means acceptance of a lot of the sexual content.

We can totally condemn innocent church-goers for the actions of their church. You join any club and you are implicitly accepting a lot of its rules and principles and actions. If you join your university's Young Conservatives club for the social events, you don't need to agree with every single Tory policy but you are implicitly accepting the general philosophy. Anybody who is part of the Christian religion can opt out of minor side shows like eating fish on Fridays, but don't get to opt out of the bedrock beliefs about sexual sin and the right of their religion to control the sexuality of individuals.

It's not having the religious nature that's the bad thing - it's the signing up to content that is unequivocally bad by joining an institution built on prejudice, control and abuse. I don't personally care about people praying or dancing round Stonehenge or fasting for a month, good luck to them, but when they start giving money and support to these institutions... A belief in the resurrection of Jesus does not logically imply anything need follow, but it's remarkable how often what follows are beliefs that young women shouldn't sleep around or that gay men should pray extra hard, and the whole rest of the rotten philosophies built into Christianity from its earliest years.
You're right in that a lot of believers don't subscribe to all the Church's teachings (CofE, Catholic or whatever) and don't feel comfortable with some of the rules but they don't say anything. There should be a lot more 'not in my name' by the more liberal, open-minded faithful who care about the law and human rights- but where is it?

Some people don't speak out because there's a lot of pressure to conform or lose the community support or be bullied etc. Some just drift away from the Church. Some are happy to turn a blind eye for an easy life. The faithful who object to 'modernisation' such as women priests or gay marriage are very vocal after all.

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:23 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:05 pm
Some people don't speak out because there's a lot of pressure to conform or lose the community support or be bullied etc. Some just drift away... Some are happy to turn a blind eye for an easy life. The faithful who object to 'modernisation' ... are very vocal after all.
To be fair, I think this applies to many areas of life or things one can get involved in.

That said, more generally, I would suggest that much of the to-ing and fro-ing on the various issues faced by the church, whether general policy or individual problems are not going to be things which you'll see much of yourself. The press is unlikely to pick up on much of it (and the lefty press much less so than the telegraph - tory party on its knees and all that), and if you're not in the circles yourself (and I'm not really any more either, to the extent that I ever was) then you won't see it. If you fancy reading the Church Times on a regular basis then you might hear more.

Fwiw a friend of mine is a bishop in the C of E, very supportive of gay marriage, to the extent that he's done various press articles, has written a book about it, and is vocally critical on social media about how backwards the church is on the issue. As with all resistance to idiocy or attempts at progress, there's usually a core group who are really vocally pushing for progress, and a core group who are vocally resisting that, and a lump of relatively apathetic people in the middle.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Tessa K » Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:31 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:23 pm
Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:05 pm
Some people don't speak out because there's a lot of pressure to conform or lose the community support or be bullied etc. Some just drift away... Some are happy to turn a blind eye for an easy life. The faithful who object to 'modernisation' ... are very vocal after all.
To be fair, I think this applies to many areas of life or things one can get involved in.

That said, more generally, I would suggest that much of the to-ing and fro-ing on the various issues faced by the church, whether general policy or individual problems are not going to be things which you'll see much of yourself. The press is unlikely to pick up on much of it (and the lefty press much less so than the telegraph - tory party on its knees and all that), and if you're not in the circles yourself (and I'm not really any more either, to the extent that I ever was) then you won't see it. If you fancy reading the Church Times on a regular basis then you might hear more.

Fwiw a friend of mine is a bishop in the C of E, very supportive of gay marriage, to the extent that he's done various press articles, has written a book about it, and is vocally critical on social media about how backwards the church is on the issue. As with all resistance to idiocy or attempts at progress, there's usually a core group who are really vocally pushing for progress, and a core group who are vocally resisting that, and a lump of relatively apathetic people in the middle.
Priests of all levels are often more pragmatic than the congregation who want everything to stay as it was when they were young (like in the 1950s for a lot of them). Your friend probably knows the church won't survive if it doesn't evolve (and genuinely believes in this issues, of course)

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Millennie Al » Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:07 am

warumich wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:53 am
But maybe we should have a side discussion on what religion is in the first place, because if we're going to hand out blanket condemnations it might be a good idea to know
what exactly we're condemning here.
Science is about truth: religion is about belief.

To use an example which appeared earlier, when Gordon Brown called a voter "bigoted", if you think he did the wrong thing because he should act to maximise the Labour vote, then you're saying that people's beliefs matter more than the truth. If you think he did the wrong thing because he should have taken the time to explain that immigration is a great asset to the country, then you're saying that the truth matters more than people's beliefs (note that this is the case regardless of the virtues of immigration - the point is that he would have been standing up for the truth as far as he knew it). And similarly for whatever your view of what happened.

When people believe tru things, there is no conflict, but there is no fixed and infallible truth. Science means we need to accept this and change our beliefs as belief is always subservient to truth. Religion says the opposite.

It's quite possible to have a scientific attitude to an issue which is usually considered a religious matter. For example, a scientific approach to the story of Noah's Ark might involve careful analysis of the story and an attempt to find out exactly where it happened. Of course such a study will inevotably result in the conclusion that the story cannot be true, which may leave the enquirer having to decide between truth and their beliefs.

Similarly, it is possible to perform some limited studies on the effictiveness of prayer. To the extent that an individual has a religious attitude to life, they will ignore any unfavourable result.

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by TopBadger » Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:17 am

My 5 year old daughter goes to the local school, which is CofE, so we've had lots of questions about Jesus to contend with over Easter.

When she's in a questioning phase I usually flip it around and ask her what she thinks the answers are... my little girl told me that the dead coming back to life was 'silly' and 'not real', summarising it as 'just a story'.

I'd scrap faith schools in a moment if I could. The pious can educate their kids in their (possibly chosen, but likely not) faith at their local place of worship rather than take up time on the curriculum.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by JQH » Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:22 am

Lew Dolby wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 12:31 pm
But sometimes we have to view things like (some) organised religions with a blanket view

for instance (and I'm sure this applies to others) the catholic church has said it doesn't see any onus on itself to hand over child-raping priests to the authorities or even to say which are and which aren't imo the only safe assumption for the rest of us is that all RC priests are child-rapists
My bolding.

I'm probably not the only one to see the parallels between this issue and male violence against women; as has been said elsewhere, given its prevalence and the fact that so many men are in denial about it women have to regard men as potential rapists until proven otherwise. And similarly priests should be regarded as suspect until proven otherwise.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:39 am

Same with teachers, police officers, etc as well - we must suspect that all of them are paedophiles until proven otherwise. Any profession where there are a significant number of people found to be paedophiles
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Grumble » Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:46 am

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:39 am
Same with teachers, police officers, etc as well - we must suspect that all of them are paedophiles until proven otherwise. Any profession where there are a significant number of people found to be paedophiles
Well we do now require checks of all staff who may come into contact with children, by law. Obviously it only picks up previous convictions, but safeguarding of minors and vulnerable adults is very much a live issue. Priests are likely to come into contact with people when they are particularly vulnerable (as are police officers).
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by warumich » Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:55 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:07 am
warumich wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:53 am
But maybe we should have a side discussion on what religion is in the first place, because if we're going to hand out blanket condemnations it might be a good idea to know
what exactly we're condemning here.
Science is about truth: religion is about belief.

To use an example which appeared earlier, when Gordon Brown called a voter "bigoted", if you think he did the wrong thing because he should act to maximise the Labour vote, then you're saying that people's beliefs matter more than the truth. If you think he did the wrong thing because he should have taken the time to explain that immigration is a great asset to the country, then you're saying that the truth matters more than people's beliefs (note that this is the case regardless of the virtues of immigration - the point is that he would have been standing up for the truth as far as he knew it). And similarly for whatever your view of what happened.

When people believe tru things, there is no conflict, but there is no fixed and infallible truth. Science means we need to accept this and change our beliefs as belief is always subservient to truth. Religion says the opposite.

It's quite possible to have a scientific attitude to an issue which is usually considered a religious matter. For example, a scientific approach to the story of Noah's Ark might involve careful analysis of the story and an attempt to find out exactly where it happened. Of course such a study will inevotably result in the conclusion that the story cannot be true, which may leave the enquirer having to decide between truth and their beliefs.

Similarly, it is possible to perform some limited studies on the effictiveness of prayer. To the extent that an individual has a religious attitude to life, they will ignore any unfavourable result.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'd guess that from the times you are posting you may be located somewhere in the States? I'd kind of understand where you're coming from, if their version of religion is the one you grew up with. The US is a bit of an oddball in terms of how religion developed. There are plenty of disagreements and evolution (pardon the term) of what people believe, but whereas in European churches (not to mention non-Christian faiths) disagreements might be handled and debated internally, in the States the usual reaction is to bugger off and start your own denomination. That gives US religions a slightly undeserved appearance of permanence, because individual denominations are quite static in their beliefs (there is also a "market place of belief" effect that drives new denominations into more fundamentalist positions, which is an interesting side-effect of US style secularism (see Berger's book in my recommendations post upthread), but that's a side-track).

As far as the history of religion indicates, your statement "Science means we need to accept this and change our beliefs as belief is always subservient to truth. Religion says the opposite", is I'm afraid, simply not true, and that is a fact borne out by historical and sociological evidence. Religious beliefs change constantly, and religions care about the truth as much as anyone else. You may argue that the way they arrive at what they think the truth is, is different and thus inferior to how science does so, but even so the differences are not quite as large as you may think. Clearly, the Noah's Ark story and similar ones are incompatible with scientific evidence, but most churches have adapted to this and interpret these stories as allegorical or apocryphal or somesuch. Not all, clearly, but you cannot take the red-faced shouty evangelists as an indication of what religion is in general.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Tue Apr 13, 2021 10:01 am

Grumble wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:46 am
El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:39 am
Same with teachers, police officers, etc as well - we must suspect that all of them are paedophiles until proven otherwise. Any profession where there are a significant number of people found to be paedophiles
Well we do now require checks of all staff who may come into contact with children, by law. Obviously it only picks up previous convictions, but safeguarding of minors and vulnerable adults is very much a live issue. Priests are likely to come into contact with people when they are particularly vulnerable (as are police officers).
Priests are also now checked as much as teachers or police officers.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Allo V Psycho » Tue Apr 13, 2021 10:22 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:07 am
warumich wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:53 am
But maybe we should have a side discussion on what religion is in the first place, because if we're going to hand out blanket condemnations it might be a good idea to know
what exactly we're condemning here.
Science is about truth: religion is about belief.

I think I've said this before on the forum (maybe the previous one) but my personal working position as a scientist was that science is not about 'truth' - that was a philosophical construct, rather than a practical one. Instead, I reckoned science was about 'conditional statements of probability that were useful' (useful in the sense that they made further testable predictions, not that they drove dynamos, necessarily). But I was absolutely not a philosopher of science, just a working lab rat. Religion, it seems to me, doesn't make testable predictions, because a divine intervention could always change the outcome.

On a different tack, the story of the Ark seems to be used here in the sense of 'absolutely false'. I'm not completely sure about that. I wouldn't be surprised if some Mesopotamian farmer (called, say, Utnapishtim) put his breeding livestock and family on a boat, and thereby survived a flood which wiped out a number of his neighbours. Myths might have a seed of truth somewhere (like the Trojan war).

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Tessa K » Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:15 am

TopBadger wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:17 am
My 5 year old daughter goes to the local school, which is CofE, so we've had lots of questions about Jesus to contend with over Easter.

When she's in a questioning phase I usually flip it around and ask her what she thinks the answers are... my little girl told me that the dead coming back to life was 'silly' and 'not real', summarising it as 'just a story'.

I'd scrap faith schools in a moment if I could. The pious can educate their kids in their (possibly chosen, but likely not) faith at their local place of worship rather than take up time on the curriculum.
It's not just the religious indoctrination either. Faith schools cherry pick applicants to improve their results based on the idea that kids from 'better' homes will perform better. The percentage of kids getting free school meals is much lower at many faith schools than secular schools as they reject applicants from deprived or low income families, assuming the kids will be more problematic. It stinks.

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by jimbob » Tue Apr 13, 2021 5:02 pm

Allo V Psycho wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 10:22 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:07 am
warumich wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:53 am
But maybe we should have a side discussion on what religion is in the first place, because if we're going to hand out blanket condemnations it might be a good idea to know
what exactly we're condemning here.
Science is about truth: religion is about belief.

I think I've said this before on the forum (maybe the previous one) but my personal working position as a scientist was that science is not about 'truth' - that was a philosophical construct, rather than a practical one. Instead, I reckoned science was about 'conditional statements of probability that were useful' (useful in the sense that they made further testable predictions, not that they drove dynamos, necessarily). But I was absolutely not a philosopher of science, just a working lab rat. Religion, it seems to me, doesn't make testable predictions, because a divine intervention could always change the outcome.

On a different tack, the story of the Ark seems to be used here in the sense of 'absolutely false'. I'm not completely sure about that. I wouldn't be surprised if some Mesopotamian farmer (called, say, Utnapishtim) put his breeding livestock and family on a boat, and thereby survived a flood which wiped out a number of his neighbours. Myths might have a seed of truth somewhere (like the Trojan war).
I think Genesis makes more sense as a collation of tribal myths that have been collected but without trying to reconcile the disparate elements, for example Cain and Abel and the exiling of Cain doesn't really fit if you're supposed to remember that there should only be his parents (or any surviving siblings that are not mentioned). To me it also reads as though many of the stories were polytheistic (or at least henotheistic) stories that has been shoehorned into a monotheistic narrative.

Similarly, lots of the stories make more sense in the context of a flat Earth, which is what you'd expect from bronze-age pastoralists. From the flood (where did the water go? Oh it fell off the edge) to the Devil tempting Jesus (OK not bronze age pastoralists there) by taking him very high and showing him all the kingdoms of Earth.


Back to your point about myths having a seed of truth - quite a few Dreamtime myths support this. Not just the ones that describe features of land out to the Great Barrier Reef which seem too accurate to be anything other than oral history from the end of the ice age but even of volcanic eruptions on the continent of Australia but also several meteorite crater origin stories or volcanic eruptions and now possibly even this (which I hadn't spotted until now)

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02 ... -ever-told

In context of the flood myth from the Fertile Crescent, we know that mesolithic people would be drawn to shorelines as they have many easy-to-access resources compared to further inland. Look at what the coastline of the Persian Gulf was like during the Ice age to 4000BC

A severe flood of prime coastal land, followed by thousands of years of sea level rise at a few miles a year and where the coast ended up where Ur was founded would almost be very likely to get into oral histories.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by shpalman » Tue Apr 13, 2021 6:20 pm

having that swing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for it meaning a thing
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by JellyandJackson » Tue Apr 13, 2021 7:04 pm

Tessa K wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 3:05 pm
lpm wrote:
Mon Apr 12, 2021 11:16 am
That argument doesn't work because sexual weirdness is embedded in the western Christian church.

It's not some minor side show or add-on, a large segment is all about sexual sin, guilt, celibacy, control of sexual orientation and control of female sexuality. A major break from the Roman religions was the imposition of sexual "morality". Being a christian must surely mean acceptance of quite a lot of the basic philosophy, even if it doesn't mean acceptance of 100%, and that means acceptance of a lot of the sexual content.

We can totally condemn innocent church-goers for the actions of their church. You join any club and you are implicitly accepting a lot of its rules and principles and actions. If you join your university's Young Conservatives club for the social events, you don't need to agree with every single Tory policy but you are implicitly accepting the general philosophy. Anybody who is part of the Christian religion can opt out of minor side shows like eating fish on Fridays, but don't get to opt out of the bedrock beliefs about sexual sin and the right of their religion to control the sexuality of individuals.

It's not having the religious nature that's the bad thing - it's the signing up to content that is unequivocally bad by joining an institution built on prejudice, control and abuse. I don't personally care about people praying or dancing round Stonehenge or fasting for a month, good luck to them, but when they start giving money and support to these institutions... A belief in the resurrection of Jesus does not logically imply anything need follow, but it's remarkable how often what follows are beliefs that young women shouldn't sleep around or that gay men should pray extra hard, and the whole rest of the rotten philosophies built into Christianity from its earliest years.
You're right in that a lot of believers don't subscribe to all the Church's teachings (CofE, Catholic or whatever) and don't feel comfortable with some of the rules but they don't say anything. There should be a lot more 'not in my name' by the more liberal, open-minded faithful who care about the law and human rights- but where is it?

Some people don't speak out because there's a lot of pressure to conform or lose the community support or be bullied etc. Some just drift away from the Church. Some are happy to turn a blind eye for an easy life. The faithful who object to 'modernisation' such as women priests or gay marriage are very vocal after all.
Going back a long way (sorry): Depends a great deal on which bit of the church you’re in, but ime there’s quite a bit of “not in my name” at pew level. This gets filtered out for a number of reasons: the inherent conservatism of the organisation, perhaps some parish priests thinking they know best & trying to impose uniformity of belief or otherwise making sure dissenting voices don’t get heard, etc. Some people do indeed just give up and leave.
Taking equal marriage as an example, a survey last year https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 69096.html found a majority of people in congregations support equal marriage*, but, as one campaigner said on a course I was on at the weekend, “the leadership don’t know what the people in their congregations think, because they have studiously avoided asking”.
*Actually, it’s 48%, I don’t know how they make that “most”.
ETA the actual article on the survey, muppet.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Millennie Al » Wed Apr 14, 2021 2:04 am

warumich wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:55 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:07 am
Science is about truth: religion is about belief.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'd guess that from the times you are posting you may be located somewhere in the States? I'd kind of understand where you're coming from, if their version of religion is the one you grew up with.
I am not looking at this from a US perspective.
As far as the history of religion indicates, your statement "Science means we need to accept this and change our beliefs as belief is always subservient to truth. Religion says the opposite", is I'm afraid, simply not true, and that is a fact borne out by historical and sociological evidence. Religious beliefs change constantly, and religions care about the truth as much as anyone else. You may argue that the way they arrive at what they think the truth is, is different and thus inferior to how science does so, but even so the differences are not quite as large as you may think. Clearly, the Noah's Ark story and similar ones are incompatible with scientific evidence, but most churches have adapted to this and interpret these stories as allegorical or apocryphal or somesuch. Not all, clearly, but you cannot take the red-faced shouty evangelists as an indication of what religion is in general.
It's not that religious beliefs do not change: it's that when they change it's not by assessing evidence, it's a reluctant acceptance of the inevitable. The Noah's Ark story shows that in the face of evidence that the story is essentially false, the religious reaction is not to accept that, with the consequence that their prior belief was wrong, but to try to twist it into something which can somehow be still true.

It's religion that has the concepts of heresy and blasphemy - which both are clearly attempts to defend the current belief against inconvenient facts.

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Millennie Al » Wed Apr 14, 2021 2:11 am

Allo V Psycho wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 10:22 am
On a different tack, the story of the Ark seems to be used here in the sense of 'absolutely false'. I'm not completely sure about that. I wouldn't be surprised if some Mesopotamian farmer (called, say, Utnapishtim) put his breeding livestock and family on a boat, and thereby survived a flood which wiped out a number of his neighbours. Myths might have a seed of truth somewhere (like the Trojan war).
Yes, and see a few flood stories at https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blo ... d-stories/ but I used it as an example because the essentials of the story are very well knows and clearly completely false. They are that: there was a flood covering the whole world, some people and animals were on board a floating vehicle which was build due to them being pre-warned by a god, and that the world's land areas were repopulated from these people and animals after the flood which had killed all other people and animals. Obviously there must have been very many times in the past where a few people had saved themselves and livestock from floods, but any stories inspired by them which are essentially true would not be sufficiently dramatic to be worthy of being religious stories.

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Tessa K
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by Tessa K » Wed Apr 14, 2021 8:14 am

JellyandJackson wrote:
Tue Apr 13, 2021 7:04 pm

Going back a long way (sorry): Depends a great deal on which bit of the church you’re in, but ime there’s quite a bit of “not in my name” at pew level. This gets filtered out for a number of reasons: the inherent conservatism of the organisation, perhaps some parish priests thinking they know best & trying to impose uniformity of belief or otherwise making sure dissenting voices don’t get heard, etc. Some people do indeed just give up and leave.
Taking equal marriage as an example, a survey last year https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 69096.html found a majority of people in congregations support equal marriage*, but, as one campaigner said on a course I was on at the weekend, “the leadership don’t know what the people in their congregations think, because they have studiously avoided asking”.
*Actually, it’s 48%, I don’t know how they make that “most”.
ETA the actual article on the survey, muppet.
Yes, very much which bit of the church you're in. My experience of growing up was in a small rural community which was white, conservative (and Conservative) about pretty much everything and still is. The congregation is ageing and very resistant to change. The situation is different in some urban churches where the congregations are more mixed. There's also a cultural element as some of the church variants attended by black congregations are very conservative and hardline in their beliefs and practices. And then there's the churches that promote the Alpha course...

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Re: Mocking religion

Post by warumich » Wed Apr 14, 2021 10:36 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 2:04 am
It's not that religious beliefs do not change: it's that when they change it's not by assessing evidence, it's a reluctant acceptance of the inevitable.
That's just not true though. Religion has been one of the main drivers of the scientific revolution (look at, oh idk, Shapin 1996). At the same time, science is also not about abandoning previously held beliefs in the face of disconfirming evidence without a great amount of reluctance (Kuhn 1961). But even if you think Kuhn is old-hat, this is just part of the historical evidence that nobody is really disputing. People, scientists included, do not change their minds just because of inconvenient facts. There is more going on, people need persuading, they need to have assurances that the inconvenient facts come from reliable sources, they need to find a way of reconciling inconvenient facts with other beliefs they hold true, balance the probabilities, it's f.cking messy. And that's as it should be, science is not a paint by numbers game where you just look at evidence and magically derive the one and only logical conclusion. If it was that easy we'd have made advances far quicker.

All this is a matter of the historical record, both the fact that science by and large is messy, and that religion by and large responds proactively to evidence as well. Heresy is not a concept that exists in all religions, not even most religions afaik, so this is viewing religion again from a very European perspective. But even then, heresy is and was remarkably common, priests, monks and bishops routinely went against official teaching in their natural philosophical investigations and even went to the stakes for it. These were not non-religious people. Heresy laws are measures of social control and as such a political phenomenon pretty much divorced from religion as such. You can demonstrate that you don't need religion for heresy laws by trying to point out that Churchill was a racist on the Daily Express forum, or burning a Union Jack in Whitehall. 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. Look for example at the Conservative and Unionist (lol) Party.

But with my science communication hat on, I'm very well aware that pointing at the facts alone, even while recommending authoritative references, is not going to persuade many people. You may want to take this moment to reflect on just how difficult it actually is to abandon previously held beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary. It's difficult to try and make this point without sounding a bit condescending, I'm sorry, but think about why you don't take my word for it when I counter one of your assertions with "it's just not true". Is it lack of evidence? I did try to provide a brief reading list, though of course I don't expect you or anyone on this thread to read 10 books on the histories of science and religion. Unfortunately historians tend to present their work in the form of books rather than short articles so it takes more time and money to get up to speed, but I did recommend a recorded lecture upthread that "only" takes an hour and should I would have thought be interesting to anyone on a science forum anyway. Is it that you don't trust the evidence? Maybe historians of science have all got it wrong, though that would be quite an assertion that would need much more deeper engagement. Is it that you don't trust me to present the evidence properly? Fine, I'm just a random internet guy as far as you're concerned, I get that. So there are plenty of perfectly rational reasons for you (and me!) to not assess the evidence, just as there are for scientists and religious people. We all accept evidence only reluctantly and when it starts to appear inevitable. And then we often get it wrong.


Shapin, S (1996): The Scientific Revolution, Chicago University Press
Kuhn (1961) needs not bibliography entry, surely.
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Re: Mocking religion

Post by shpalman » Wed Apr 14, 2021 2:33 pm

warumich wrote:
Wed Apr 14, 2021 10:36 am
... Unfortunately historians tend to present their work in the form of books rather than short articles so it takes more time and money to get up to speed, but I did recommend a recorded lecture upthread that "only" takes an hour and should I would have thought be interesting to anyone on a science forum anyway...
Do you mean this one? Peter Harrison - The Shifting Territories of Science and Religion
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