And it shows...

It isn't me saying religions demand obedience. Dozens of scriptures and entire religions emphasize and demand obedience. This gets claimed as a virtue when in fact it is a vice. So powerful is the trait true believer mentality fabricates something to be obedient to rather than walk his own path.

If a handful of words or so were really investigated in ancient languages what they mean - lord, virgin, maiden, sin, resurrection, salvation, baptism - the whole fabricated religious structure falls apart. Everybody knows this, but they act like magic trumps everything. At bottom, faith in magic and superstition is held as the good. It's exactly like thinking throwing salt over your shoulder and believing in its power makes you good, in particular, better than those who don't believe it who are going to hell for their offense of not believing magic claims.

Well you are discussing intelligibly at least, without resorting to "this universe is about going to heaven if you believe in superstitious magic and going to hell if you don't." Can you imagine? THAT is the true believer crap at bottom.

You have nowhere near the information you would need to make such a claim about me. This is a thread about my skepticism regarding supernatural religions, so by definition it is anti-dogma re supernatural claims. But I have alluded several times to the gnostic path of learning about actual spiritual truth, and given many sources of such investigation ... which is all about exactly a Jungian dealing with one's experience, one's self, one's shadow. So I believe you have it backwards: the dogmatic religion avoids and whitewashes its conflicts, the gnostic path investigates them.

Yeah, well I gotta admit that the one thing I don't show respect for is deceptive, self-deluded apologetics. But it's the sin, not the sinner, that I disrespect ... as the saying goes. (One really does find that many of the aphorisms are true, when unwedded from the superstitious magic act stuff.) I greatly value and respect the true self of all, and its predicament of existing, but as we know, supernatural based religions do not respect psychological truths like that. They say things like "give it to Jesus, your parking space, whatever" while people are praying to Jesus and starving to death, being raped, etc. And then we say, "Well it's god's will for these children to starve. Who are we to know his wonderful, mysterious loving ways????????"

Nice crime documentary here, elderly lady hires new helper thru church, which she has been praying all about. He robs, rapes and murders her. Jesus didn't intervene. Note: the guy in pre-medieval times walking around in sandals, illiterate, didn't show his magic act, or love, or justice, to stop the crime. She died thinking he answered her prayers.

I'm sorry. It doesn't hold up to reality testing. If you hear a report of an amputee growing a leg back, you don't believe it ... you know it's a hoax. Why?

Do you think that it is intellectually honest to caricature Christian belief? Please name even ONE Christian posting in this forum who believes the bolded above. Thanks.

The first step in an intellectually honest critique of a religion (or anything, for that matter), is to accurately present the position that you are critiquing.

It is virtually impossible to engage your posts as a Christian, given that I generally don't actually believe what you are railing against.

I have no obligation to defend a position that I myself don't even hold.

The Christian Bible also command believers to not lust after their neighbor's wife, but uh, look around. You are able to recognize that Christians very often fail to love their enemies or to treat others as they want to be treated even though these are also demands of their scriptures. So why would you think that merely pointing to a command in the Bible to be obedient to God is sufficient to cause such obedience among believers?

Come on. The religion holds that blanket obedience to its god is the path, anything else is sin, and ubiquitous hypocrisy is hardly a defense.

I have a big disagreement with a Freudian analyst friend of mine. I say they don't really believe it, she says they do. I say the massive lip service, hypocrisy, and just the simple fact that they have the sacred word of god and scarcely open it, huge swaths of them, and the entire value system with which they live, means they are just mouthing the thing, not consciously, but subconsciously.

Well, I'm always willing to be informed. What about the bold statement is untrue or misleading or a caricature?

I've been looking at lists of things that were believed by the masses at the time Christianity was established. It pretty much proves that belief is not a good thing when one is in a superstitious culture. It's too easy to say, they had so many things wrong (and would kill you if you didn't believe it) that surely this supernatural claim is wrong too. But it bears mentioning.

Also bearing mentioning is that some 1000 years after the new covenant of love and forgiveness was established, the religion began killing and slaughtering on epic scales in religious wars. Yes ... like the ones committed by other religions. Nothing different. One thousand years to learn love ... and this??? It's the one true religion, you better believe it, if you don't we'll kill you, we are the great religion of love and forgiveness, etc.

Religion is myth to attempt to explain things, "believing" to be good, indoctrination, superstitious mysticism. Always was. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes a force of evil. If you default on deciding when it is one or the other, that's amoral and becomes immoral quickly.

A very knowledgeable of the Bible de-convert recently said something like, "You know, I defended it to the wall, but after getting out, looking back, I realized I never really considered whether it was true or not, or whether I even believed it ... I was just in reflex attack mode to defend it." Something like that, she said. It was a greatly illuminating comment. Let he who has ears hear it.

Coming out of any kind of indoctrination is heroic. That doesn't mean throwing out the baby with the bath water, throwing the whole thing out. But the "God is love, love keeps no record of wrongs, God killed millions for doing wrong" - you have to throw some of that out. And at that point, you are your own religion, your own spirituality, the "Third Jesus." The path is to go inward and believe in your self. Jesus isn't a magic man/deity then, but a metaphor for every person. The Third Jesus - the first a man walking around in sandals (maybe), the second the one deified by myth believing, the third, every man and woman. No magic, nobody standing in for us from thousands of years ago because torture/sacrifice seemed magic then. A soul without dogma is a soul capable of searching for goodness and truth.

One of my fave preachers said "It's like we've been asleep for 2000 years." I'm in his camp, proudly.

So... much... irony...

We won’t investigate our own shadow unless we have some level of belief that reality at a fundamental level is good. If reality is oppressive and evil, why would I voluntarily expose myself to more of it? Instead, the response to our shadow would be denial, delusion, and escapism. A personal God that is omni-benevolent is progress compared to a belief that reality is evil or that God arbitrarily punishes people.

Think of it in terms of human development. It’s important to protect children from the harshness of reality in order to cultivate a sense of security and encourage their exploratory mechanism. Eventually, through exploration and engagement, reality will expose their naive worldview and cause conflict, but the hope is that enough faith in the good has been established as to not overwhelm them completely with fear and powerlessness.

Do people retreat back into their familiar comfort zone for too long at the expense of higher truths? Of course, but let’s not overlook the benefits along with the costs. And at the cultural level of course there are going to be fear based enforcement tactics and simplified narratives in order to ensure that the teachings will be preserved and able to scale.

The question then is how do we influence people to engage with reality deeper and take on the responsibility of more truth. Making them defensive and shaming isn’t very effective. That’s pretty obvious though, which is why the primary motivation for that behavior is almost always a frustrated attempt to resolve inner conflict through scapegoating.

I'll clarify my point because this is not an adequate response to my criticism. You said:

You are making two descriptive claim about religious people here, first that they will do what they are told regardless of its morality, and second that they claim blind obedience as a virtue. I'll agree with you that most Christians do regard obedience towards God as a virtue (although they would typically disagree that this obedience should be blind). However, I don't think it is accurate to describe religious people as just blindly doing what they are told and the claim they are is likely rooted in negative and false assumptions about religious people. Just look around - religion has historically been a huge source of social unrest and conflict - do you really think that is the result of them being too biddable?

Claiming that Christians are hypocritical for not always obeying God is completely irrelevant to whether your descriptive claim about religious people is accurate.

I think religious ideas and beliefs really do make a difference in people's lives and society at large, but usually not in a simple rationalist model of human behavior where you can derive behavior directly from stated beliefs. I just don't find it impressive to show that, based on this model of human behavior, religious people are hypocrites. After all, it is easy enough to demonstrate this about nearly everyone.

For example, when I taught Ethics I would often include a class on Peter Singer's essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" because it was effective in generating the same sense of hypocrisy in secular (and religious) students that you are here ascribing just to religious people. Students weren't willing to accept that distance is morally relevant, but also acknowledged its real impact on behavior.

It just seems to me that our brains aren't very good at translating our stated moral and existential beliefs, goals, and desires into action. You can understand this as people not actually having those beliefs or desires. But I'm more persuaded by the view that this kind of rationalism is somewhat counter to our evolutionary programming and so we should expect that beliefs that don't have immediate and localized payoffs to be less effective in causing behavior.

This would mean that human beings being born in sin - babies being evil - is some kind of positive reality. Children being treated like and believing they are evil is where serial killers and Adolph Hitler come from.

Is it not obvious I'm looking at it developmentally? I know exactly what it meant when I bought into it: total lack of individuation. And I'm not shaming; I'm shouting give it a reality test instead of believing obvious superstition (or at least what the same believer would consider obvious superstition in ALL other religions and belief systems). Kids gloves is not the way to do that. We aren't kids.

So am I scapegoating individuals by convicting the religion?

Well I know better, but I kind of get the feeling the A-team is being sent in to debate micro points while the critical self-conflicting, fallacious, and supernatural claims central to the religion are ignored.

Of course I'm not saying only the religious are hypocritical, but to use it as a defense for the preposterous nature of the belief system? As in, "We don't really live according to that crap," as a defense of the religion??

Rapists rampant in the church, Inquisition for centuries, all the borrowed structure of the dogma, fraud galore ... NOTHING convinces the true believer that a loving god just might not be behind this whole thing. Over a thousand years into the love doctrine, it's murder and torture from the high Pontiff. Maybe it's not really coming from god.

A course in comparative religion, a documentary on the history of the Roman power religion, a documentary on the Holy Inquisition, a consideration that some 4000 religions today are operating, and thousands more previously. What are the chances that it is just a mythological belief system? Near 100% from any reasonable analysis.

It's not about negative evaluation of religious people, it's about negative evaluation of the whole epistemology and insidious apologetics that have to be resorted to to support it. The second you peak out of the indoctrination and begin a gnostic path of learning instead of believing, of challenging instead of miming, you're massively moral, imo.

We both know that the brand of Christianity that you are criticizing is entangled with the identity of its followers especially when so much meaning is invested into it, so you can’t separate the two.

You used the analogy of hating the sin and not the sinner earlier. I know where you are coming from. I didn’t say that a blunt approach can’t be affective, just that it isn’t very affective, meaning there are much more affective approaches.

One way to check ourselves if we are being influenced by scapegoating is if we are equating the identification of the problem too closely with resolving the problem. If we can question our approach based on the results we are getting, and not on the diagnosis of the problem, then that is a positive indicator.

A good way to neutralize the scapegoat mechanism in this case is to forgive the sin. Not just forgive the sinner, but forgive the sin (illusion, deception, etc) independent of the sinner. To be clear, I am not discouraging the hating of the sin which naturally follows from a certain level of awareness of it. I am saying hold onto that hate but layer forgiveness on top of it in order to neutralize the scapegoat mechanism. This allows for progress.

Great name for a band.

Well, you seem to want a disagreement, and my main disagreement with you is that while I'm an atheist and also view the supernatural claims of religion as uncredible legends, I'm not anti-religion, nor do I look down on religious people as a class. Religion seems to me to carry out useful social functions, and I'm hesitant to draw broad moral conclusions about religion based on what seems to me poor evidence.

This is BS. You claimed that religious people would blindly follow whatever they are told to do, regardless of morality. That is a broad and negative evaluation. Now, when pressed to defend your view, you retreat to some pablum about how you just condemn religion's epistemology. Here's a cookie, so do I. Defend or withdraw your original claim.

As soon as you start talking about God you're talking about something else.

I believe we live in a state of nature. Love is a real experience but good and evil are human constructs which other creatures in nature are not bothered by. I don't believe in magical intervention which breaks the laws of nature. But I do believe in experienced inspiration which can have profound influence on our lives. I believe religions are based on attempts to express extraordinary experience in a way that points toward what some call God, others Truth, Nirvana, The Tao, The Great Mystery, The Great Spirit, etc. However, whatever we are reaching for the best we can do is try to point the way.

This is how I read the Bible. It's a record of the spiritual evolution of a people and their progress in spiritual experience and its expression pointing the way. I view the culmination of that progress in the expression "God is Love". Or if you prefer, Love is the beginning and the end. Or "Love Is the Way, the Truth, and the Life". In my view, this is Christianity and it's invitation is to "Chose Love".


PairTheBoard

Beginner's mind ... many possibilities. True believer's mind ... only one. That second part is either a problem for one's orientation or it isn't.

Luv the second paragraph ... that many religions are attempts to understand the tnature of things, how to live, etc. Then I presume the magical intervention and "you're going to hell if you don't believe this myth" is not so cool with you. Most all sincere religions are a valid part of the perennial philosophy, but Christianity, as i understand it, would dispute that with the "going to hell" kicker they added on. All else is heresy, we'll kill you for it when we have enough power.

Misdirection is the only defense ... his only defense is that he doesn't exist ... that type of thing. This isn't going anywhere. When philosophers come with presupp, nothing is really being discussed.

Never said every believer acts amorally all the time, but it appears that the religion HOLDS AS ITS CREED to defer to Mr. Almighty invisible, the greatest tyrant ever, self-described, in all matters of morality. THAT is the point. Therefore individuated takes on such questions are prescribed against by the religion always.

I mean, when one of the gods is plucked out as just a priori the explanation of things ... it just isn't a valid or serious position.

The whole statement is an untrue, misleading caricature.

I am a Fundamentalist Christian, and I don't believe any part of the bolded statement.

That you don't even recognize your statement as being a caricature demonstrates that you don't have a clue what Christianity is.

Please engage what an informed Christian actually says or writes, not a total strawman.