Weeeeeeell it seems that I have been assigned this little thread as homework.
Plotinus, I hope you don't mind a somewhat personal question, but have you had much experience outside the forum interacting with anti-theists (those far greater than myself, I should hope)?
It depends on what you mean by "anti-theists". Obviously I've had plenty of experience interacting with non-theists (or "normal people" as they're usually known around here), including a fair few atheists, but I don't personally know that many whom I would call
anti-theism. Maybe a few who hate religion.
In the online world I should think most of the people I interact with outside this forum are either not religious or actively atheist. I spend a lot of time on the
Guardian website, where most of the commenting community are actively and consistently hostile to religion; this is one of the reasons I often give up on the whole site in disgust and stop reading it. But the paper is so right for me in every other way, I keep coming back...
What would you say are some common and/or irritating misconceptions that they have about religion and/or your profession?
It's hard to know where to begin with that. I suppose the overriding misconceptions are that there is no evidence for God's existence, that faith is necessarily irrational, that all religious people are stupid, that religious has been consistently anti-science or anti-free thought throughout its history, that religious people are all right-wing, that Christianity is identical with conservative evangelicalism, and so on.
These views aren't confined to the uneducated. I mentioned the Guardian - they had
an interview with AC Grayling the other day in which he stated that atheists can't really be called militant, since they don't burn people at the stake, whereas religious authorities used to burn atheists. Which is of course absolute nonsense. When were
atheists burned at the stake? On the contrary, atheists have persecuted the religious far more vehemently, as the history of communism shows - and as Andrew Pinsent
nicely pointed out in the subsequent letters column. Yet AC Grayling is an expert on early modern philosophy and really ought to know about this sort of thing. Unfortunately, when it comes to religion, it seems everyone rewrites history to suit their own prejudices (and atheists are hardly alone in doing this - neo-pagans are the worst, but that's another story).
As for misconceptions about theologians, I think most people just haven't got a clue what they are at all.
I know the question was for Plot, but I felt like tossing in something I've observed. It seems to be a common notion among theists and anti-theists that theologians are religious. The idea that theologians can be atheists is alien to a lot of people.
That is true and it surprises me. No-one expects (say) a Plato scholar to be a Platonist - do they?
Little related: What are the most popular topics that interest wackos? By "wacko" I mean people who pursue unconventional or unpopular world views. I'm not after mere misconceptions, but more like things that are open to interpretation. Typical example would be Knights Templar, and outside religious field the archetype: Freemasons (although all of these are related and interlap, you know, I read so in the internets). Are there such topics bubbling under, not so popular, but almost?
Obviously anything to do with Jesus, in particular the idea that the "official" view of him in the New Testament is a fabrication and the "truth", as conveyed in non-canonical gospels, was suppressed. You can tell that this is a conspiracy theory because, like all conspiracy theories, it prefers one set of evidence over another solely on the grounds that it's unofficial and doesn't actually have anything else to recommend it (and is in fact worthless). Relatedly, there is the idea that Christianity as we know it was a political construct and that the non-canonical gospels were "excluded" or "edited out" from the New Testament, which again is nonsense.
But you really never can tell what people will get obsessed about. I wrote a page or so in one book about the experiences of mediums, and how good they are as evidence of life after death. I thought I treated them with considerably more respect than most philosophers of religion do (they normally dismiss them out of hand) although I concluded that they're not very good evidence. I got a letter from some nutcase who represented some very weird spiritualist church and who was convinced that I'd totally misrepresented the whole issue. In fact he included a huge amount of material to support this case, and got quite rude in some of it. His nutcasery was evident from the fact that he'd interpreted what I'd said about mediums as an inaccurate description of
his church, not as a general statement about all mediums, including those not in his church. Anyway, I didn't respond.
And another question: What's the most efficient way you know to point out inconcistency in 1) the Bible, 2) the New Testament?
I suppose the inconsistencies between Chronicles and Kings are the most obvious. They are chock-full of conflicting reports about how almost every measurement and number.
The New Testament is harder because although there are very well-known inconsistencies, fundamentalists know them as well and have answers, implausible though most of them are. I think the contradictions between Galatians and Acts are quite good if you want to make the point, though, as these are less well known.
In Gal. 1:17, Paul states that after his conversion he did not go to Jerusalem or meet the apostles. But in Acts 9:26-27 he does exactly that. Perhaps this refers to the visit that, Paul says in Gal. 1:18, he made after three years. (The Acts account suggests a much earlier visit than that, but it doesn't explicitly say so.) However, Paul says in Gal. 1:19 that on that occasion he met only Peter and James, whereas Acts 9:17-19 has him meeting all of the apostles and debating with the "hellenists".
There are various discrepancies of this kind between Paul and Acts, which I'm sure you can find listed elsewhere. An interesting one is the account that Acts gives in 15:23-29 of the letter that, at the "council of Jerusalem", the apostles wrote to the churches. In that letter, we are told that they instructed Christians not to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols. But not only does Paul never mention this letter in any of his writings (including Galatians 2:1-10 where he describes the same event), but in 1 Corinthians 8, he tells the Corinthians that it's perfectly OK to do eat meat that's been sacrificed to idols (although in some circumstances he advises against it).
What's on the cutting edge of theology these days? New breakthroughs or theories that have been developing that deserve attention?
I can't really answer this question as I've not kept up with contemporary theology, since I'm professionally a philosopher now. However, I can point to two on the periphery of theology. One is the development within philosophy of religion of the philosophical examination of religious doctrines (beyond just the existence of God, life after death, and miracles, which are its traditional concerns). For example, philosophers have been scrutinising the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation in great depth and detail. Some of this may be considered philosophical theology rather than philosophy of religion, but either way it's only really been happening in the last twenty or twenty-five years or so.
Another development is the growth of science and religion as a field in its own right, which examines the relationship between the two. As far as I can tell this is mainly being done by scientists (who may have theological training as well), rather than by philosophers or theologians. It's not really theology but again it impinges upon it.
What do you feel like the probable origins of religion are? As a Christian obviously I believe something such as Christianity came around because it was true, but do you think all modern religions are just down the road from the original cro magnon or whatever saying ", I don't know how or why we are here and why/how the world works it must be because of the bear god's/the sun's/spaghetti monster's benevolence/hatred/whatever" and it just became a habit almost? Or do people just have a predisposition to this kind of belief?
It seems to me implausible to suggest that all existing religions have a direct historical link to the first religion (whatever it may have been) and that the existence of religion is a sort of historical accident. I think that it's far more likely that religion is intrinsic to human beings, or at least that a lot of the tendencies that are expressed in religion are so common to human beings that they can be called universal, even if some human beings don't experience them. (As an illustration, we can say that the urge to reproduce is a universal human instinct, because it's something common to all cultures and felt by most people, even though there are some people, including me, who completely lack it.) There is research being done right now on just how "naturally" religious people are, including research in countries such as China where a deliberate attempt to stamp out religion was made over several decades. The fact that attempts of this kind haven't succeeded certainly suggests that the religious impulse is very strong, although it doesn't necessarily mean it's intrinsic or natural to human beings. But I can't see any good reason for thinking that it isn't.
But what I'm questioning is whether a perfect human mind in the first sense would actually be omniscient. It seems to me that even an ideal form of something cannot overcome the inherent flaws.
Allowing for the first definition (and example), a perfect cake might be the perfect level of sweetness, but is unlikely to be at all satisfying if I look for something spicy. Being sweet instead of spicy is an inherent nature of cake, and even if you had a perfect cake, I don't think I'd want to eat it for lunch.
Similarly, wouldn't a perfect human mind, even under the first definition be extremely limited because of the problems inherent in a human mind?
In short, doesn't that seem like a wildly optimistic view of the human mind that, in it's ideal form, it would be omniscient?
Perhaps, but what are the problems you are thinking of? I can see how a cake can't be perfectly sweet
and perfectly spicy. It can only be (at most) one or the other. So perfect sweetness precludes perfect spiciness, and vice versa. But what properties are you thinking that omniscience precludes? If a human being were omniscient, what properties would that person have to lack? And which of these properties do you think should be considered perfect-making?
Just as an FYI, I recently found out about and ordered
this. It's not as comprehensive as what I was looking for before since it focuses exclusively on Orthodoxy, but it should prove to be an interesting read, especially given the decidedly non-pacifistic attitude of most Orthodox Christian rulers.
That looks interesting, especially the connection to the ancient church.
