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 Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 8:25am On May 28, 2019 |
I CAN'T MAKE THIS ANY CLEARER A pastor friend complained that my arguments are "purely intellectual rhetoric out of touch with reality". He asked, "Do you suppose that such life's complexities and clear patterns of order in the universe could have come about by some unguided impersonal force?" This is how I answered him. "Consider the following two statements: 1) Either (a) life was created by an intelligent entity or (b) it was not. 2) Either (a) the god of the Hebrews is real or (b) the god of the Hebrews was invented like thousands of other gods. Firstly, you should notice that these two statements are wholly independent. For example, if (1a) is true, it does not mean (2a) is true. (1a) could be true and (2b) could be true. So, if you want to believe both (1a) AND (2a) are true, you need separate evidence to support each proposition. Secondly, you cannot say (1a) is true only because you can't conceive of a natural process by which life could arise in the absence of an intelligent entity. For example, you may not be able to conceive of a way in which a 350-tonne machine could travel at 36,000 ft for 4,000 miles at 560 mph carrying 400 humans but that does not mean it is impossible. Your inability to conceive how something happens only tells us about your limitations--it tells us nothing about the limitations of nature. I suggest the facts are these: you cannot show that (1a) is true and nor can you show that (2a) is true, yet you believe them both with absolute certainty. I cannot show that (1a) and (2a) are true so I do not believe either of them. My position is 100% rational; your position is 100% non-rational. I can't make it any clearer than this. 4 Likes 2 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 7:06am On May 27, 2019 |
"Luther was a superb scriptural street fighter, but that was not why he valued the Bible. We need instead to notice how apparently free and easy Luther could be with the Bible, to an extent that would shock many modern Protestants. It is not so surprising that he threw out the so-called deuterocanonical or apocryphal books of the Old Testament, the books such as Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, and Maccabees, which survive only in Greek, not in Hebrew. Plenty of biblical scholars agreed with him on that, though it conveniently got rid of some theologically awkward passages. Yet he also dealt robustly with the rest of the Old Testament. He wanted to expel the book of Esther altogether. He thought that the books of Kings were more reliable than the books of Chronicles, doubted that large chunks of the Old Testament were actually written by their supposed authors, and reckoned that many of its texts were corrupted. He thought that most of the book of Job was fiction and that the prophets had sometimes made mistakes. He poured cold water on the huge numbers in the Old Testament narratives. On the New Testament, Luther was only a little more restrained. He was famously scathing about the Epistle of James, whose teaching on the role of faith and good works does not sit entirely easily with his doctrines. He called it an “epistle of straw,” claimed that it “mangles the Scriptures” and “doesn’t amount to much.” Once he told a student, “I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove.” In Luther’s Bible, James was yanked out of its normal place and sent to the end of the New Testament, along with three other books that he doubted were written by apostles (the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of Jude, and Revelation). He treated other parts of the Bible with almost equally unnerving favoritism. John’s Gospel was for Luther “the one, fine, true, and chief gospel, and is far, far to be preferred over the other three.” All of which suggests a Humpty-Dumptyish readiness to ignore what he disliked, choose what he wanted, and call it the Word of God." ~ Alec Ryrie's "Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World" 2 Likes |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 10:13am On May 24, 2019 |
"Alongside mysticism, by the early seventeenth century establishment Protestantism was in full-scale moral panic about atheism, a bogeyman that the panic helped to conjure into reality. It was not long before thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza began to earn the label. Neither was an atheist in the modern sense, but both had gone a long way from any established orthodoxy. The burgeoning revolution in natural science was questioning conventional Christian metaphysics and subjecting received authorities of all kinds to experimental testing, putting Protestant orthodoxy’s weak points under pressure. The doctrine of the Trinity began to seem like an overelaborate mathematical theorem that ought to be replaced with something more elegant. The English mystic and scientist Isaac Newton abandoned his belief in the Trinity in the 1670s. Newton also, in his famous laws of motion, provided ballast for a rising skeptical philosophy widely seen as tantamount to atheism: deism, the belief that God exists but does not interfere with his creation beyond providing it with inexorable natural laws. Protestants had traditionally taught a doctrine of special providence, in which God is the direct cause of every worldly event. Deism is less a passionate love affair with God than a dignified arranged marriage. An additional point of vulnerability was Protestantism’s weapon of choice, the Bible itself. Minor niggles about its text kept appearing. The Hebrew language indicates vowels with inflection marks instead of actual letters. It now appeared that the inflection marks in the Old Testament were of relatively recent origin. Were they part of inspired Scripture or not? In the New Testament, variant versions of some passages were being discovered in ancient manuscripts. Which were the right ones? In its traditional form, 1 John 5:7 declares that “there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one”: the Bible’s most explicit affirmation of the Trinity. By the mid-seventeenth century, it was increasingly clear that the verse was a late addition to the text. The dispute over this verse was crucial in persuading Isaac Newton to abandon the Trinity." ~ Alec Ryrie's "Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World" 2 Likes |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 7:27am On May 23, 2019 |
"The slavers also had a compelling biblical case. The Bible never condemns slavery and implicitly condones it. Where abolitionists appealed to Jesus' Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” their opponents impatiently explained that this meant treating others as you would wish to be treated in their situation: a father may still treat a child as a child, and a master may treat a slave as a slave. Where abolitionists condemned the reduction of human beings to property, slavery’s defenders agreed. Slaves were not property but a sacred trust, people over whom their owners had certain (rather extensive) rights, and for whom they had equally extensive responsibilities. Slave and slaveholder were bound together in a Christian household. If Abraham had bought slaves, if Paul had sent a runaway slave home, if Christ himself had never spoken a word against slavery, who were these upstart prophets to proclaim a new abolitionist gospel of their own invention?" ~ Alec Ryrie's "Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World" 2 Likes |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 3:15pm On May 22, 2019 |
LordReed:Religious beliefs are malleable. Excuses are a dime a dozen, even for the all-knowing God. |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 7:02am On May 22, 2019 |
"Enslavement is almost ubiquitous in human history. What made Atlantic slavery unique was its vast, industrial scale, its racial determinism, and its absolute nature, in which slaves’ legal status was hardly distinct from that of animals. One of the few good things to have emerged from it is the modern conviction that slavery in any form is unacceptable. That judgment would have seemed almost incomprehensible to most of our premodern forebears. Slavery was often compared to poverty: an inescapable fact of life, which individuals might escape but which could hardly be abolished. What better alternative was there for the destitute, prisoners of war, or conquered peoples? Even now, when slavery is formally illegal throughout the world, tens of millions of people endure some form of it. One of the things that human beings do is enslave other human beings. The Bible is full of both matter-of-fact references to enslavement and regulations governing slavery. Christianity was formed in the Roman Empire, one of the most slave-based societies ever seen. The early Christians’ response to this situation was characteristically spiritualizing and nonconfrontational. They insisted on the spiritual equality of all believers. St. Paul taught that in Christ the distinction between slave and free vanishes, and he spoke of being freed from spiritual enslavement. But this led him and others to conclude that physical slavery was of little consequence and that Christian slaves ought humbly to submit to the masters whom God has providentially given them. Indeed, Paul once sent a Christian runaway slave back to his Christian master, urging the master to receive and forgive the slave as a brother in Christ, but not suggesting that the man be freed. In ancient times, for individual Christians to free their slaves was seen as a work of exceptional piety, but there was no shame in not doing so. Nor were Christian slave masters always models of loving kindness: so we learn from a fifth-century bronze neck collar unearthed in Sardinia, stamped with the words “I am the slave of archdeacon Felix: hold me so that I do not flee.”" ~ Alec Ryrie's "Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World" |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 7:36pm On May 20, 2019 |
"The Jehovah Witnesses’ apocalypticism is undimmed, as any glance at their publications will show, but since 1925 there has been no further authoritative date setting [of the second coming of Christ]. There have been excitements around other dates, in particular 1975, which some of the Society’s directors apparently endorsed. Yet in 1976, the Society’s vice president could confidently reproach an assembly of Canadian Witnesses: “Do you know why nothing happened in 1975? It was because you expected something to happen.” For most of the twentieth century, the Society simply held tight to 1914, declaring week by week in its main magazine that the new world would dawn “before the generation that saw the events of 1914 passes away.” In 1995, this increasingly implausible claim, too, was redefined, explaining that “generation” was a spiritual rather than a literal term. The Witnesses’ global growth is built not on their apocalyptic hope but on the abrupt, disconcerting separatism of their lives in the present. Rutherford continued Russell’s pattern of distancing the Witnesses symbolically from Christian norms, for example by insisting that Christ was impaled rather than dying on something so popish as a cross. For this, other Christians have duly reviled them, but the real hatred has come from governments. The most extreme example, their fate in Nazi Germany, we will return to. Nowhere else have they faced actual extermination, but during World War II they were subject to state bans in much of the British Empire and were more likely to be imprisoned than any other religious conscientious objectors in the United States. The Witnesses’ refusal to salute flags or stand for national anthems led to their children’s being expelled from some American schools. In all of these countries, with grim irony, the Witnesses were accused of Nazi sympathies. Since 1945, their sharpest trials have been in one-party states. Malawi banned the Society in 1967 after Witnesses refused to join the ruling party, and over twenty thousand were expelled to brutal camp conditions in Zambia in 1972. Some eventually ended up in Mozambique, where after 1975 some seven thousand Witnesses were interned in Communist reeducation camps. The Witnesses’ best-known ethical stance, the rejection of blood transfusions, is characteristic. Russell, citing Acts 15:20, argued that it was wrong to eat meat in which blood remained. In 1945, Rutherford ruled that this prohibition extended to blood transfusions. No other religious group of any kind has found this argument persuasive, and it is an odd fit in an organization that has no general aversion to modernity or to science. Its value, apparently, lies in compelling Witnesses to assert a highly visible difference that challenges social notions of religious tolerance. It is not easy for outsiders to love the Witnesses. They have endured appalling persecution with astonishing stoicism, but facing and even courting persecution are part of their identity. Their steady growth—they currently number some eight million active members worldwide—can easily be ascribed to their missionary barrage and to their formidable system of control rather than to any real attraction offered by their faith. There is a large constituency of ex-Witnesses with little good to say about the Society. The Society has no culture of intellectual openness or of scholarship and does not reply to critics. Yet there is more to the Witnesses than hostile caricature admits. Their determined internationalism and disregard for racial differences have made them—along with the Seventh-day Adventists—among America’s most racially integrated religious groups. They are capable of winning real respect from their neighbors, especially in tough social environments. When other churches have reputations for clericalism, hypocrisy, or financial corruption, the Witnesses can justly boast that they have no paid ministers, take no collections, and maintain strict moral discipline. The rigorous training that all Witnesses undertake, from carefully directed study of texts to sharing in leadership, can be as rewarding as it is demanding. Outsiders need not admire the Society, but they should try not to hate it, not least because hatred is one of the fuels on which it thrives. Neither Witnesses nor mainstream Protestants like to admit it, but they belong to the same extended family." ~ Alec Ryrie's "Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World" 4 Likes |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 8:43am On May 20, 2019 |
GOD, PLEASE COOK MY DINNER Some people believe God can work miracles, like cure advanced cancer or save people in terrible plane crashes. The Bible tells us that God can do anything, he can even move a mountain into the sea. These are extraordinary things. I would just like God to do something simple. When I get home from work late and dead tired, I would like to put my food on the kitchen table and have God cook it for me. Or, if that is selfish of me, I would like him to notice when an elderly woman, alone in her cold house, is dying from hypothermia and make the house warm for her. Or, if she has become too weak to get out of her chair, to make her a cup of tea and boil her an egg. Oddly, there is no known case of God doing any of these very simple things--things that almost any human could, and would, do for someone in need. God only does things that could happen without God--a proportion of people with cancer do go into remission, and sometimes there are survivors of plane crashes. But dinners do not cook themselves and cold houses do not make themselves warm. Think about this for a moment. It means the world behaves EXACTLY as it would if there was no God at all. If only God would just boil an egg once in a while. But he won't. 10 Likes 5 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 8:04am On May 16, 2019 |
GODS AS FASHION The litter-bin of history is piled high with discarded gods. Gods survive for a few hundred or a few thousand years but men grow tired and invent new gods, or subtly change old ones until they are unrecognisable. All popular gods begin their years of veneration in the minds of a small group of people and, through various means, expand their reach and become accepted by large groups of people. Sometimes conquerors impose their preferred gods on the conquered. Or missionaries convert people, perhaps with the help of incentives like schools, hospitals or jobs. When people convert, usually starting with young people, they grow to love and rely on their new gods just as much as they did the old ones. And the old gods are forgotten. The old gods lose respect and may even become the butt of jokes and ironic banter. People like to think their gods are real and their beliefs are true but the process of spreading belief in gods has nothing in common with how we discover truths—it has much more in common with fashion, glacially slow-moving fashion, but fashion all the same. Really, a god is a temporary fashion—not an eternal truth. 4 Likes 2 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 12:02pm On May 15, 2019 |
THE ARGUMENT FROM LEGO You can make thousands of different things from Lego bricks. For example, you could take 300 Lego bricks and carefully assemble them into a toy fire engine. When you're done, you have a toy fire engine. Take the toy fire engine and break all the pieces apart. What do you have? You have a pile of Lego bricks but you don't have a fire engine. You can make thousands of different things from organic molecules. For example, take 300 trillion or so organic molecules and carefully (very carefully) assemble them into a mouse, a tree or a human being. When you're done you have a mouse, a tree or a human being. Take the human being and break all the molecules apart. What do you have? You have a messy sludge of organic molecules but you don't have a human being. All this seems rather obvious, but billions of people strongly disagree. They confidently assert that when the disassembly is fully completed, some part of the human will remain intact and functioning. It can't be seen. It has no mass, it is not made of molecules or photons, or any known forces. Indeed, it cannot be detected in any way. We have an everyday word for such a thing--we call it 'absolutely nothing'. Even more extraordinary, they insist that these examples of 'absolutely nothing' can experience the world, have the memories, emotions, and personality of the disassembled human and be capable of enjoying relationships with other examples of absolutely nothing. And they are sure these chimeric entities will exist forever--even beyond the heat death of the universe! It is quite a claim. It cannot be tested and we have no way to show that it is true (or even possibly true). The people who believe it, do so because it is a tradition, or they have an ancient book that claims it is true, or perhaps they believe it because they like the idea. But none of these things are reasons to conclude the idea is true. It is probably fair to say, this is mankind's most enduring and most widespread delusion, but fortunately, not everyone believes it. For starters, I don't believe it. And neither should you. 6 Likes 2 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 7:38am On May 10, 2019*. Modified: 9:42am On May 10, 2019 |
awesomeJ:Proof that these spiritual coverings work? The millions who die of incurable ailments when they could have been healed by faith;Proof that faith heals incurable ailments? The plenty more millions who suffer needs cos they don't know the God that makes one richly abound;Yet the poorest regions in the world happen to be places dominated by religious fervency. And some of the richest people in the world happen to be non-religious. The billions who are now weeping and gnashing their teeth in agony in the underworld.Proof that there are billions in the underworld now weeping and gnashing their teeth? Have you been there? Those are folks whose lives are/have become worse for failing to accept the simplicity of faith.How have their lives worsened for not believing in faith? Lies do not become truths simply by repeating them endlessly. 5 Likes 2 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 6:10am On May 10, 2019 |
Olayinka Ayinde Somewhere in Nigeria, if you eat in public during the fasting period, you will be arrested and punished. Somewhere in China, if you're caught fasting during Ramadan, you'll also be arrested and jailed. You see, there are people all over the place whose heads are not correct. Some are in Nigeria and some are in China. 5 Likes 1 Share |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 10:27am On May 09, 2019 |
HOW WELL DO YOU SLEEP? If you could prove Christianity is true, you would become more famous than Jesus--he just told us to believe in him and threatened us with burning forever if we don't believe. If you could prove Islam is true, you would become more famous than Mohammed--he just told us Islam is true and warned us not to doubt it. Logical thinkers understand that if a religion is not true, nor are its threats. So they demand proof that a religion is true BEFORE being concerned by its threats. Logical thinkers wonder why religions rely on threats and indoctrinating infants instead of producing solid evidence for their supernatural claims. And they wonder why no one has EVER proven a supernatural claim. Logical thinkers sleep well at night. They are not kept awake by fears of devils, demons, witches, God's judgment or the heat of hell. They leave it to the sheep to believe fantastical stories without a shred of evidence, and to lay awake worrying about things that don't exist. 3 Likes 1 Share |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 8:43am On May 08, 2019 |
I cannot think of a single person whose life was made worse because they started requiring evidence for claims before accepting them as a core belief. I wonder where we got the idea that believing things without evidence is a good thing? 14 Likes 8 Shares |
| Autos › Re: ***Weekly Auction List: Preorder Your Cars From The US***Flexible Payment Plan** by joseph1013: 5:18pm On May 07, 2019 |
Has anyone patronized this guy? How genuine is he? 1 Like |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 5:30am On Apr 29, 2019 |
TVSA:  . . |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 9:02am On Apr 26, 2019 |
"A different path was chosen by Menno Simons, a Dutch Anabaptist whose Mennonite movement survives to the present. Simons preached pacifism and noncompliance with a positively suicidal integrity. Mennonites quickly became renowned for their readiness to lay down their lives for their faith and their refusal to lift a finger to fight for it. It was this small community, not the more numerous and more timorous mainstream reformers, that provided the bulk of the martyrs of the Dutch persecution. The tale of Dirk Willemsz became iconic. Willemsz escaped from a Catholic prison in the spring of 1569 and fled across a frozen river. He crossed safely, but the ice gave way under the officer who was following him. Willemsz turned back and saved the man’s life by pulling him from the water. As a result, he was rearrested and, eventually, executed. In legal terms, this rigor made sense: he was still an unrepentant heretic. But such stories did not give the law a good name. The Dutch Republic was content to tolerate Mennonites. Their closed communities were antisocial but not openly subversive. They had scruples about matters like swearing oaths and bearing arms, which took a little goodwill to accommodate politically, but the goodwill was there, greased by the Mennonites’ willingness to pay hefty extra taxes to regularize their status. The Mennonites’ heroic virtues did not, however, extend to toleration. In the 1550s, they themselves divided bitterly, and by the end of the century there were at least six distinct, mutually reviling Mennonite groups in the Netherlands. The most divisive issue, with painful irony, was how far they ought to tolerate one another. One party, the Waterlanders, rejected the practice of formally excluding or “shunning” those who fell foul of the godly community’s discipline. For this they were duly shunned by the others. They persisted in preaching reunion, and in the 1630s several Mennonite groups drew on Waterlander principles to form a body, the United Congregations, that decided to tolerate differences over minor issues in the faith. Unfortunately, it was unclear what counted as a minor issue. The Waterlanders themselves, who disliked binding rules of any kind, were not actually permitted to join the United Congregations, but by this time the Waterlanders had divisions of their own. In the 1620s, an educated, dissident movement of freethinkers known as the Collegiants had emerged, rejecting all hierarchies and structures and permitting any participant in their informal meetings to speak. The Waterlanders expelled them. The Collegiants themselves, in turn, expelled those who questioned Christ’s divinity. The United Congregations then split over how to deal with the Collegiants. The faction who argued that Collegiants, anti-Trinitarians, and even the unbaptized should be admitted to the Eucharist were eventually expelled in 1664 and sought refuge among the Waterlanders. Naturally, the Waterlanders refused to admit such dangerous spiritual anarchists. This farce contains the paradoxes of Protestant tolerance and intolerance in microcosm. It shows Protestants’ endless appetite for squabbling and their widespread conviction that separated brethren remained brethren. It also shows that the most divisive issue of all was tolerance itself." ~ Alec Ryrie's "Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World" 2 Likes 1 Share |
| Business › Re: If You Are Uber Partner In Lagos, Please Share Your Experience Here by joseph1013: 9:46pm On Apr 18, 2019 |
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| Business › Re: If You Are Uber Partner In Lagos, Please Share Your Experience Here by joseph1013: 8:29pm On Apr 18, 2019*. Modified: 8:55pm On Apr 18, 2019 |
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| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 7:38pm On Apr 18, 2019 |
Wow... I have been out of circulation for many days now. I can see that 9inches is still with the same usual argument for the Abrahamic divinity. The only problem is that he is unable to provide evidence for such an entity. Well... |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 8:01am On Apr 05, 2019 |
GOD'S FAILED STRATEGY Some say that God not only exists but longs to have a meaningful relationship with each one of us. However, in his infinite wisdom, God decided to hide from us--forcing us to rely on faith to believe he exists. One problem with this strategy is that once we resort to faith, we can believe ANY god exists or many gods exist and, with only faith to go on, it's hard for anyone to prove us wrong. This is rather like giving us a special dice with not six faces, but a few thousand faces--with a different god inscribed on each face. So God allows chance to decide who will engage in a meaningful relationship with him and who won't. It's pretty obvious this doesn't work very well. After 3,000 or more years, people still worship many different gods. And even those who believe in God have widely varying beliefs about what he is like, what he wants of us and his plans for us. Furthermore, in some parts of the world, people are increasingly moving from faith to rationality and deciding there are no good reasons to believe God exists. Hiding from the people you dearly love is a ridiculous strategy and you don't need to be omniscient to figure that out. 7 Likes 1 Share |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 6:40am On Apr 03, 2019 |
WE WANT A CURE! When I berate religious beliefs for the harm they cause, especially for violence and killing, I can be sure someone will try to rebut me by saying there are other causes of violence to worry about, like greed, anger, and envy. This is like a doctor who announces a cure for HIV being shouted down by fellow doctors because he hasn't found the cure for heart disease! Let's be clear. Religious beliefs are the root cause of much violence, killing, and conflict. Religious beliefs can divide families and lead to the neglect and abuse of children. Religious beliefs underpin systemic discrimination against minorities and women, and they promote superstitions that take us back thousands of years and make us gullible and vulnerable. Despite all these things, there is not a single god that can be shown to exist or a single religion that can be shown to be true. Religion is truly the human disease. We don't need to accommodate religion, we need to cure it. 5 Likes 4 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 9:21am On Apr 01, 2019 |
Omooba224:It's preposterous. They say they agree that all scriptures is inspired by God, yet when Paul says women should not speak in the Church, they say it is Paul's opinion and not binding on believers. Let's pick whatever verse we want and leave all else. 6 Likes 3 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 9:09am On Mar 31, 2019 |
Charles Uzor wrote: If it's beautiful verse, like: "blessed are the kind and generous", then God inspired it, and it must be interpreted literally; ... if it's unsettling verse, like: "slaves, obey your earthly masters, even those who are cruel", then we must invoke classic theology and anthropology, taking into account the culture of a dark period in history. And yet the book is inerrant. Blame it on cognitive dissonance. 5 Likes |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 8:57am On Mar 29, 2019 |
HOW INVINCIBLES DIE Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Texaco, Global Crossing, and United Airlines are companies with two things in common; they were huge and successful, and they became bankrupt. From the inside, it must have seemed these businesses were invincible--too large and too good to fail but a couple of bad decisions, a changing business environment, a legal squabble, and they were gone. In some cases, such as General Motors, failure came after months of desperate re-organisations, negotiations, and deals. In other cases, such as Lehman Brothers, collapse came in days and shocked the world. The lesson here is no organisation is too big to fail. Being large certainly has advantages but all too often it carries the seed of self-destruction--complacency. I recall the time when IBM was the mammoth of the computer industry. It was so dominant that all its competitors looked like tiddlers. There was even a half-serious, half joking motto used by IT Directors everywhere, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." Arguably, IBM's downfall began in 1975 when 20-year-old Harvard dropout, Bill Gates, set up a two-man software company with his buddy Paul Allen. They called the company Micro-Soft. In 1980, Micro-Soft (by then re-named Microsoft) teamed up with the Goliath IBM to develop an operating system for the new IBM personal computer. With the clout of IBM behind it, sales of personal computers took off like a rocket. The effect of this was IBM set a hardware standard for PCs and Microsoft set a standard for the operating system. These standards allowed competitors to flood into the market with PCs that were compatible with all the software being produced for the IBM PC. It was not this competition that damaged IBM though--it was an unforeseen consequence of it. Companies started to buy PCs for their employees and this created demand for networking them. IBM's fortune had been based on mainframe computers that people accessed using "dumb terminals"--display screens with a keyboard that were only able to display data sent to them by the mainframe computer that did all the work. Once companies had networked their PCs, they found these small computers could do jobs they previously needed a mainframe computer to do, and at a fraction of the cost. It was this that IBM, from their dominant position in large computers, was blinded to. They saw personal computers as a nice little earner to add to their gigantic revenues from mainframes. In fact, personal computers were replacing mainframes in many situations. These tiny computers were eating mainframes for breakfast. IBM's organisation and culture was suited to selling expensive, high margin mainframe computers in low volumes but the world was turning to cheap, low margin personal computers in high volumes. By 1979, the company's growth rate has stalled and by 1991 it was making heavy losses--it had accumulated losses of $16 billion by 1993. In the end, IBM survived thanks to hiring an outside executive, Louis V. Gerstner Jr as CEO, and by becoming an entirely different business focusing on its strengths in research, software, consulting and specialist supercomputers. Sometimes I reflect on these things when I think about the future of religions. The two biggest religions; Christianity and Islam may feel invincible to those on the inside. Well, maybe not Christianity. We can already see serious cracks in Christianity. Congregations are dropping fast in Europe, Australia, and Canada. Even in the religiously conservative USA, the 15 -35 age group has seen a significant move away from Christianity over the past 20 years. Some European countries can now be properly described as post-Christian. Islam is still growing and must feel very secure to insiders. But stress cracks are appearing. The problem is, Islam partly retains it followers through threats of punishment, violence, and even death, so it is very hard to gauge how many Muslims have turned away from their religion. We have only anecdotal evidence which we cannot rely on. For what it's worth, there are reports of a significant number of atheists now in Saudi Arabia, online we see the number of ex-Muslim atheist groups growing and you can now find atheist bloggers from most Islamic countries. We also hear reports of young people in large numbers skipping Friday prayers in Iran. I have evidence of an increasing number of ex-Muslims contacting western organisations discussing their plight. There is something else that is beginning to happen. Muslims are raised to believe their religion and their holy book, the Qur'an, are perfect, and the religion of submission tolerates no dissent. Consequently, very few Muslims hear open criticism of their religion--until now. Now, online, it is easy to find people criticising the Prophet Muhammad, finding flaws in the Qur'an and challenging the vacuous arguments for the existence of God so beloved by Muslims. If you've been told your religion is perfect, you need find only one flaw to know that you have been lied to. That is the fatal weakness of the doctrine of perfection. How many Muslims have realised it? Islam is the most backward and oppressive major religion in the world. Its treatment of women, of gay people, of apostates and of Muslims who dare to speak out against it, have no place in the 21st century. Islam carries a thread of religious supremacy and domination that has inspired thousands of Muslims to sacrifice their lives in acts of war or terrorism and has killed thousands of others in the process. Islam is not going anytime soon but it is not too big to fail. Its death will not come from outside but from within as its own supporters realise it is a religion that is not fit for purpose in the modern world, that it is a source of conflict and not harmony, and, ultimately, that it is just another Iron Age religion drawn from the imaginations of our long-dead ancestors. 7 Likes 2 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 7:38am On Mar 28, 2019 |
UNDERSTANDING THE CHRISTIAN DEBATER On Social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc), I have observed that Christian debaters have a language of their own. Here is an explanation of some of their popular idioms. “Your mind is closed. You don’t want to know the truth” Really means: You understand this better than me, I need to read Answers In Genesis again. “[Say nothing] ” then click the Block button (or the Delete button to delete a post or a thread) Really means: Phew, I don’t think my friends have enough faith to see stuff like this. “Jesus loves you” or “Amen...Thank you.” Really means: I have no clue how to answer that point. "I'll pray for you." Really means: If you won't believe me, I'll report you to God. “But what about .....?” Really means: OK, I lost the last point so I'll try a different one. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." Really means: Hahaha, you can't get out of this one! “You have faith every time you sit on a chair” Really means: Faith may be stupid but you use faith too so we're both stupid! "You're going to hell!" Really means: Hell scares the sh*t out of me so it should scare you too. “The wisdom of men is foolishness to things of the spirit.” Really means: The evidence does support your view but I just CANNOT believe I'm wrong. “One day Jesus will open your heart so you can see the truth” Really means: I hope someday you will get to be as crazy as I am. 8 Likes 2 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 7:42am On Mar 26, 2019*. Modified: 9:49am On Mar 26, 2019 |
SOMETHING I AM PROUD OF People PM me and tell me they have left their religion and they tell me how that has transformed their lives. They say they are happier, have fewer fears, more free time and see the world in a new light—one that, at last, makes complete sense. Some of them thank me. They say my posts have helped them on their journey. Like karleb above, some of them prefer to be low-key unbelievers. And that's fine. I am only happy that people have moved on from superstitions created by their long-deceased ancestors but that is not what makes me proud. What makes me proud is that I have never threatened anyone with torture if they don't become an atheist; I have never held a knife at a person's throat saying, "Repeat after me. There is no God, there is no God." I have never used violence or threats of any kind. I use logic. I encourage people to think better and, sometimes, I use humour. And I am proud of our species. Proud that, despite the most egregious childhood indoctrination, people can reach out to reason and change beliefs that are lodged in the deep recesses of their brains. That is one of the things that makes us great. All religions use childhood indoctrination and some also use threats of eternal torture or, even, threats of physical violence or death. These methods are necessary to ensure ridiculous beliefs persist across the generations. We do not need ridiculous beliefs, we do not need to use threats and violence against our children, and we do not need religions, especially as we presently have them in Africa. Let them go. 17 Likes 4 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 2:36pm On Mar 22, 2019 |
SCIENCE DOESN'T HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS When people say, "Science doesn't have all the answers", I have to agree. Honestly, I don't even know what proportion of the answers science has. Could it be 50%, 1% or 0.0001%? I just don't know. Nor does anyone. But people who say that usually have something else in mind. They usually mean there are realms, such as the supernatural, that science cannot investigate at all and, without science, it's OK to believe whatever you like. My question is, without science, how can you arrive at reliable knowledge about the supernatural? I get four answers to that question: 1) Personal experience 2) Faith 3) Revelation 4) Intuition These are all subjective ways of determining what is true (epistemologies). They all suffer from the same problem--they give different answers to different people. The answers you get are influenced by your mood, personality and culture, and they change over time. This is enough for you to know these methods are unreliable--they give you answers but you have no way of being sure your answers are correct. Worse still, most of these epistemologies have a tendency to make you CERTAIN you have the correct answer. Being certain of something that is not true doesn't just make you wrong, it can make you dogmatic and dangerous too. So science does not have all the answers but subjective epistemologies have no answers at all--they cannot even tell us if a supernatural realm exists, far less enable us to investigate it. If you really want to believe only things that are true, give subjective epistemologies a wide berth--they can make you believe in fairy stories and absurdities. There is no truly solid ground when it comes to knowledge but science gets infinitely closer to it than anything else. Right now, science is the only game in town. 13 Likes 5 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 1:23pm On Mar 22, 2019 |
MYJIST:What you have typed makes no sense. I am gullible for requiring evidence before I believe in the god you serve? Which of the gods do you believe in, and what evidence can you provide to substantiate your claim? 5 Likes |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 10:17am On Mar 21, 2019 |
WHEN FAITH SCORES AN OWN-GOAL We know believers ultimately have to rely on faith to support their worldview and we know faith is utterly useless as a way of discovering what is true and what is false. But what really makes my eyes roll is when they make claims that no one could POSSIBLY know are true. Take, for example, the claim that God is omniscient. How could anyone know that? Even God (if he existed) couldn't be sure of this--if there is something he doesn't know, he wouldn't know he doesn't know it! This is faith playing football against itself--and losing! 10 Likes 2 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 10:56am On Mar 20, 2019 |
GOD, THE X FACTOR When solving a problem using algebra it's common to refer to the unknown quantity as "x". It would save a huge amount of confusion if religious people would learn this simple principle. For example, when theists consider the great problems of how humans came to be conscious, or how DNA came to encode the proteins necessary for life, or the granddaddy of all such problems, how the universe came to exist, they correctly conclude that we do not yet know the answers to these problems. But instead of saying, for example, "Let x = the cause of the universe", where x is an unknown process, force or agency, they say "God is the cause of the universe". All but the dimmest theists know this is an attempt at sleight of hand. God ≠ an unknown process, force or agency. God refers to a specific agent (usually one the theist's mum believed in). So theists, if you wish to use this argument, use it correctly. Conclude that x, an unknown process, force or agency, caused the universe. If you wish to pray to x, sing hymns to it, humble yourself before it and pay offerings in honour of it, that is your prerogative. But don't be surprised if the rest of us shake our heads and roll our eyes in silent incredulity. 8 Likes 2 Shares |
| Christianity Etc › Re: My Thoughts And Questions About Religion by joseph1013(op): 10:53am On Mar 20, 2019 |
joseph1013: |
