Hypothesis: the more educated you are the less likely you are to be religious

Phatose on 24/1/2012 at 23:40

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

This is actually where things get interesting. How do you know religious are per se unable to think outside their religion? This might refer to some but by far not all of them (not even fanatics I'm sure), but it's exactly this undifferentiated view I was talking about. I consider religions as attempts to establish ethical rules different from some sort of natural law or whatever was in effect eight thousand years ago. So what matters IMHO is the core idea of it concerning worldly life (and the transcendent layer of course). Since these core ideas are more or less equal in every religion, I'd say the "bad" history of every religion is the history of people not being able to actually enforce these inner principles and thus the most important part of their religion. Rather, people tend to focus on outer aspects and ways to legitimate their actions driven by self-preservation.

Does one need intelligence or education to follow? :p

Some will most certainly be able to think outside their religion. But some will not.

Those who do not will be able to say to the other believers "Well, if this religion is convincing in case A, B, and C, and acceptable as divine dictum, how can you dispose of parts D, E, and F? If it's genuinely divine, you can't just pick and choose based on your own whims."

How does a moderate answer those claims without becoming completely suspect?

The idea of having a work of divine commandments, which is flawed and you have to ignore parts of it, is patently ludicrous. You've completely undermined it's divinity, which undermines the whole thing because the divinity is the only thing it had going for it to begin with.

And if you don't ignore those portions, how do you answer the extreme faction who base their viewpoint on it?

Harvester on 25/1/2012 at 00:23

Quote Posted by scarykitties

For instance, most Christians would say that the Old Testament laws suggesting that gays should be stoned to death are out of date because they're replaced by Jesus in the New Testament, which overrules old laws. But those same people would probably suggest that one should follow the Ten Commandments, even though those ALSO are Old Testament laws.

There is one commandment that is actually overruled in the NT (though the general principle still stands), that of keeping the Sabbath, which is why Christians feel free to keep Sunday as their holy day instead of Saturday (the day of the Sabbath). For the rest, it's not so much a case that one should follow the Ten Commandments because they're there, but more of a case that one should follow the Ten Commandments because everything that Jesus and the apostles teach is in accordance with what was said in the Ten Commandments, sometimes even reinforcing them. Except for that thing about the Sabbath, nothing that is taught in the NT conflicts with the Ten Commandments, and that is why we stick to them, they're useful as general guidelines, a summary if you will, for how we should behave.

***

I already said that I don't know the net effect that religion in general or Christianity in particular, has on the state of humanity. The problem is that that's really hard to calculate. What I mean is, for example, when a country leader starts an unjust war motivated by his religious beliefs, that's easily noticeable as a negative effect on humanity. But if a country leader feels like starting a war but stops himself because his religious beliefs tell him he shouldn't start a war, no one will know about it, so no one can know how often things like that happen.
Or smaller, when a religious fanatic kills his child because he believes his child is possessed by Satan, that's noticeable and everyone will rightly be outraged, but no one knows how many people would have otherwise abused their children but don't because they've considered that their faith forbids it. I know my faith has stopped me from doing certain things, that could be the same for other people too, but you can't measure how many times this happens. Even in the case of the Catholic church and condoms, which is something I don't even agree with (I would be fine with distributing condoms), I'm sure it causes AIDS contaminations and I'm just as much against that as you are, but realistically you would have to also take into account the unknowable number of people who listen to the Church's teachings and are faithful to their wives, or abstain from sex if they're not married, and thus don't get AIDS which they otherwise might have. I'm pretty sure that the net effect of this particular Church policy ends up on the negative side, but I hope you see my general point: in many cases people's faith might stop them from doing bad/stupid things, but that never becomes known and is impossible to measure.

demagogue: I'm not really that confrontational in public. Even here I've never started a religion thread, all I do is try to refute atheist arguments that I think are flawed. In person, I'm willing to talk about my faith if people have questions or are otherwise interested, but if people are not interested, I've found it doesn't really work to keep preaching to them. I'm not that great at defending my faith anyway, I don't have your eloquence and way with words, oftentimes I only thing of the right things to say after the conversation is over. In person, I try to communicate my faith through my actions rather than arguments and sermons. I don't really start fights about religion, if someone is truly interested in hearing about the Christian faith, I'm glad to talk about it, but if someone is only interested in a nice round of religion bashing, I'll let them be and won't seek confrontation. Here, I try to do my best to give my viewpoint, but I know full well that my debate skills are lacking compared to many other posters here. I hope you guys will see past that and attack my arguments instead of the clumsy way they're worded.

Harvester on 25/1/2012 at 00:42

Oh, and I'm actually not as confident as I might come across, I imagine it can be a bit misleading. I just pick and choose which atheist arguments I'll try to refute (and those are the ones I feel pretty confident about). If I was forced to state so every time I think an atheist poster has a good point where I don't really have a valid counter-argument, or I have one in my head but can't really find the right words, it would show that I'm not really as confident as I might seem.

demagogue on 25/1/2012 at 01:14

Quote Posted by Harvester

In person, I'm willing to talk about my faith if people have questions or are otherwise interested, but if people are not interested, I've found it doesn't really work to keep preaching to them.

That wasn't really what I was curious about. Since the published statistic for the Netherlands is that only 3/10 people under 40 profess to be religious, assuming you grew up there (I don't know that yet), did that have an affect on you, being completely surrounded by people that weren't religious? Did you feel more like you were part of a long history of Christianity there (and the whole culture had left its own roots) or did you feel more like a religious minority building a shell around yourself to guard against that mainstream part of your own culture, like Jews in the US? I guess I'm just curious because it's one thing to grow up a faithful Christian when it's mainstream in your country (like the US), but it's different I'd imagine when you're actually a minority and feel embattled. Granted, even people that don't say they're religious still come from historically Christian families there (as opposed to if you had grown up in like Egypt or something), and probably carry a lot of it with them without realizing.

Quote Posted by Phatos

The idea of having a work of divine commandments, which is flawed and you have to ignore parts of it, is patently ludicrous. You've completely undermined it's divinity, which undermines the whole thing because the divinity is the only thing it had going for it to begin with.

This isn't the only way to look at biblical interpretation. In Judaism you have the "(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_in_Heaven) Not In Heaven" and "(http://www.shma.com/2006/03/elu-ve-elu-divrei-elohim-hayyim-a-biblical-view/) Elu v'Elu" doctrines of interpretation. The first (Deut 30:12: "It [the law] is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, "Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?") says that God's word was written for and through human understanding, essentially licensing "limited" human interpretations as the "correct" ones, as opposed to some cosmic "Divine interpretation" that humans don't have access to and which, according to this interpretation of this passage doesn't exist anyway. And the 2nd ("This and that are both the words of God") saying that even contradictory interpretations by two different rabbis can both be grounded in the text and so "correct" interpretations. (Or another phrase, "At the end of time the Messiah can sort out contradictory interpretations, so for now both these interpretations stand as equally valid.")

Then in Christian biblical hermeneutics there's some of this. It's more complicated because it's more "charisma" grounded than "textually" grounded in its authority as Weber might have put it (i.e., it's the nature of Jesus doing the work, and how you interpret that, not the words per se, or at least the words matter derivatively; actually this is a big issue of interpretation itself so I don't want to prejudge an answer. Edit: Also in a charisma-religion, of course you have a special access to meaning through the mediation of God/Holy Spirit in your consciousness itself, so the Jewish "Not in Heaven" doctrine isn't a tradition, since in Christianity you ostensibly *do* have someone, the Holy Spirit, that comes from heaven & delivers the meaning down with them directly into our experience). But there's lots of grounds for tailoring the word to human purposes and letting interpretations be mutable, e.g., with dispensationalism (text applies differently across time according to the reigning "covenant" of the era; again very "charismatic-authority" oriented) or layered-methods of interpreting (literal, allegorical, moral, mystical), where different meanings can float on the same text but at different levels.

I've always liked the practice & discipline of doing serious theology and I still like it (it's not too far from doing good legal argument or philosophy), and I don't usually vibe with people dismissing it too easily either. They'll jump on some "problem" as if nobody in the religion had ever thought of it before and addressed it seriously, when it probably has a long tradition of dealing with it stretching back for centuries. Good biblical interpretation is definitely one of those things.

In some ways we're unique -- we have a much greater confidence in what reality has told us about itself (the Standard Model, evolution, etc), than any other previous era in history, but in other ways we still have the same basic orientation to the world through our consciousness, which really is a transcendental orientation I think even with the Standard Model, and thus "spiritual", and we just use different words to engage with it in essentially religious ways whatever we call it, or we try to ignore that part of ourselves.

scarykitties on 25/1/2012 at 01:33

I don't see the need to look to magic to explain things that have a rational possible reason.

For instance, is one's conscience actually a magical being talking in our heads, or is it just a part of our minds that is programmed to act a certain way?

Is the universe created by a God, or was it created by some natural process that we don't yet understand? If it was created by God, who created God? If God doesn't have to have a creator, why does the universe have to have a creator?

Is it more reasonable to assume that a relatively primitive culture (the Jews) had the favor of knowing the One True God all along while far more advanced civilizations (Greeks, Romans, Chinese) all flourished at around the same time, had far greater advances in every significant way, but were sadly not the "chosen" ones, OR that Christianity is one religion among many that, through pure chance, happened to survive?

Is it more reasonable to assume that everything described in the Bible really happened, or that it is a piece of historic fiction, mentioning true places and individuals, but embellishing events and fabricating mythological tales, much like the Iliad or any other work of historic fiction?

To all these, I say the latter is the simplest and most reasonable answer.

Renzatic on 25/1/2012 at 01:44

Quote Posted by Scarykitties

To all these, I say the latter is the simplest and most reasonable answer.

The most interesting thing about the universe is that there is no truly simple and reasonable answer to account for it. Our two most adhered to explanations, The One True Creator God, and The Big Bang, are both absolutely outlandish, and completely ridiculous when you truly think about it.

Unfortunately, I have to head out for a bit. I'll expand upon this later on tonight.

Harvester on 25/1/2012 at 01:45

Quote Posted by demagogue

Ah I see. Well, growing up (in Holland) I didn't feel embattled because I grew up pretty sheltered. You see, in Holland there are "public" schools which do not align to any faith, but also Christian schools, which are also "public" in the sense of not private, and also some Muslim schools (though they have come under scrutiny because they perform less well results-wise), as well as some schools which subscribe to certain teaching philosophies. You're free to get a group of people together and start your own school, as long as the teachers are qualified, the required subjects are being taught and the students get decent results on the standardized tests.

I went to a Christian primary school. The teachers were all Christian in name at least, we prayed before and after a day and sang Christian hymns and had religion as a course. Not all of the parents were Christians, but all of them did choose to send their kids to a Christian school when they also could've sent them to a regular, non-religious school, so there weren't any parents that thought Christianity was beneath contempt and taught that to their kids. So there wasn't a hostile environment. Then high school, which was even more Christian to the point were every parent and teacher was Christian and while many kids were somewhat rebellious, many others were actively involved with their faith. No one there gave me flack for believing in God.
All of my friends were from school, so no one I regularly dealt with was actively hostile towards the Christian faith.

It was not until college that most of my classmates were atheist. Back then I was way more shy than I am now, I never really brought up the subject, didn't talk about it unless some else brought it up, which wasn't often. I never lied about being a Christian or anything, or actively sought to hide the fact that I'm a Christian from people, it's just that the subject hardly ever came up.

It also helps that I'm not one of those world-averse Christians who thinks everything about modern culture is sinful and should be avoided. I listen to a lot of mainstream music, I watch mainstream movies and I play video games and read regular books and magazines. If I was the type of person that constantly would have to explain that I haven't heard about that new movie or know about that band because I think mainstream movies and bands are sinful, I would get a lot more heat of course. Sometimes I get funny reactions when I say I don't watch porn though.

EDIT: I also think that in the USA, many atheists grew up in Christian homes and communities, and actively chose to become atheists, so they're more outspoken about it than Dutch atheists, who grew up in atheist homes and didn't make as much of a conscious choice to be atheist. So they don't really feel as strongly about other people's beliefs or their own lack of belief in a higher power, and are less likely to attack religious people.

MORE EDIT: Finally, there's the modern trend that some Dutch atheists or agnostics have lately become a bit more tolerant towards Christians because "at least they kind of believe in the same basic values we do, not like those filthy Muslims who either take our jobs or are all on welfare, who want to take over our country and whose youth terrorize our streets" (that last bit about the youth terrorizing our streets is actually true, by the way).

june gloom on 25/1/2012 at 01:48

Most porn is fucking disgusting anyway.

scarykitties on 25/1/2012 at 02:05

Quote Posted by Renzatic

I didn't say that the Big Bang was the most reasonable explanation. I said that it's more reasonable to assume that it's something natural that we juts don't understand rather than assuming it's a magical humanoid of enormous power that always existed, exists everywhere, knows all, and loves everything (even though those latter three things are logically incongruousness, but when has that stopped religion, anyway?).

Quote Posted by Harvester

Sometimes I get funny reactions when I say I don't watch porn though.

Eh, I watch enough for two, so consider karma served, or something like that.

Quote Posted by dethtoll

Most porn is fucking disgusting anyway.

Pretty much everything dealing with reproduction, or life for that matter, is fairly disgusting on at least some level. May as well get used to it now.

Nicker on 25/1/2012 at 03:13

Quote Posted by Renzatic

Completely ridiculous... other than the fact that the Big Bang is falsifiable and makes no predictions about the state of TUAWKI (the universe as we know it) prior to the expansion of the singularity, whereas the God solution is not falsifiable (and to even attempt such a test would drive a certain well known deity to paroxysms of paranoid rage).

The god solution makes all sorts of unprovable assertions about the nature of the pre-origin universe, most notably that it is inhabited by a self aware being who can make and break his own rules at a whim and who chooses to hide behind the illusion of an entirely reasonable, verifiable and largely comprehensible mechanistic universe.

While the Big Bang is hard to get your head around it is supported by a considerable amount of data. It may seem ridiculous but it is NOT ridiculous in the same way that naming a collection of miscellaneous mysteries “God” is ridiculous. To do so is an attempt to give a “truly simple” explanation. Equating the Big Bang to the God excuse is just an argument from ignorance.

As many theists insist, it may turn out that science does not have its finger on the pulse of reality but it does have the clearest picture of how humans collectively see reality and how that perception directly affects our day to day lives. The scientific method gives us the clearest meaningful consensus about that reality which is currently possible. That is something that the collection of convenient opinions we call religion cannot hope to replicate.