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The end of Religion is inevitable?
- Thread starter Aiken_Drumn
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PPQ_Purple
Purple Cube (retired)
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But all people are. That's just the human condition. And as a bonus we actually get stupider the more of us you put together.
Core Imposter
Felon
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Religion and science are not in opposition. The belief that science somehow refutes religion is often held by those who are interested in justifying the rejection of religion. Any intelligent person can see that science has nothing to say about religion. God is not falsifiable.
The decline of organized religion can't be directly attributed to science. It is the contributions to modern life that have been made possible by science that has indirectly contributed to the decline. Just two generations ago in my family and no more than three in most our society was structured differently. Most women did not work. Their social circle was centered around the church and their neighborhood. When women began to work this shifted. Other key factors were things such as television and all the other entertainment options that seduced away time. Golf, etc.
The first churches to crumble were the mainline denominations that embrace liberal Christian theology which is more or less a philosophical proposition. And these were often the most prosperous congregations which had fewer restrictions on how they could structure their social life.
Fundamentalist churches were and are less distracted. This past Mother's Day a survey of our church revealed, in a congregation of less than 200, there were three or four families present that had four generations in attendance. Religions that have substantive doctrines are more resistant to decay.
I can't speak for other faiths but there is one assertion that I can make with confidence. Religion isn't going away.
As for the influence of religion on the masses, it's reach and influence on society, there exists a Christian doctrine that indeed teaches that in the last days there will be a great falling away. So, it appears we are right on track.
But religion will exist as long as humanity exists. Science itself has become an idol and is worshipped, as is the planet itself. People invent new religions daily.
The decline of organized religion can't be directly attributed to science. It is the contributions to modern life that have been made possible by science that has indirectly contributed to the decline. Just two generations ago in my family and no more than three in most our society was structured differently. Most women did not work. Their social circle was centered around the church and their neighborhood. When women began to work this shifted. Other key factors were things such as television and all the other entertainment options that seduced away time. Golf, etc.
The first churches to crumble were the mainline denominations that embrace liberal Christian theology which is more or less a philosophical proposition. And these were often the most prosperous congregations which had fewer restrictions on how they could structure their social life.
Fundamentalist churches were and are less distracted. This past Mother's Day a survey of our church revealed, in a congregation of less than 200, there were three or four families present that had four generations in attendance. Religions that have substantive doctrines are more resistant to decay.
I can't speak for other faiths but there is one assertion that I can make with confidence. Religion isn't going away.
As for the influence of religion on the masses, it's reach and influence on society, there exists a Christian doctrine that indeed teaches that in the last days there will be a great falling away. So, it appears we are right on track.
But religion will exist as long as humanity exists. Science itself has become an idol and is worshipped, as is the planet itself. People invent new religions daily.
Narz
keeping it real
IIRC there are stats on it you can look it up
Narz
keeping it real
Its like that experiment where the stooges (in on the experiment) guess the line length wrong and most of the actual subjects will go along even tho they know it's wrong
Any child can see most of religion is absurd but indoctrination is a powerful thing.
Bonyduck Campersang
Deity
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I would be very interested in those stats which measure an atheist's understanding of religion v.s. a believer's
Narz
keeping it real
Who Knows What About Religion
The Pew Forum’s religious knowledge survey included 32 questions about various aspects of religion: the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, world
www.pewresearch.org
Harv
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This discussion makes me think of an interview with Bart Ehrman, where he was talking about his introductory class to the New Testament. He said he would start with a list of about 10 to 12 very basic questions about the NT. Most of the kids grew up in Sunday School. His prize for whoever got all questions right was a dinner on him. He seldom had to deliver, maybe once per year.
I am curious how people do when you compare upbringing inside and outside of Sunday School, or some related religion background.
I found the source:
ehrmanblog.org
I am curious how people do when you compare upbringing inside and outside of Sunday School, or some related religion background.
I found the source:
My Pop Quiz For First-Year Students | The Bart Ehrman Blog
It’s been a very long day of teaching (six hours of talking!), so something substantive for the blog will need to wait for another day. Instead, I’ll say something about what happened today. As some of you have seen by examining my syllabus, I begin my class on Jesus by…
ehrmanblog.org
Bonyduck Campersang
Deity
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Americans shouldn't countWho Knows What About Religion
The Pew Forum’s religious knowledge survey included 32 questions about various aspects of religion: the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, world
It’s actually even funnier when those same guys are slobbering over themselves in despair in politics threads about how doomed everything is and how stupid the sheeple are. Like wow there’s nothing like a first worlder who thinks he’s smart because he figured out there’s no empirical evidence for a literal Zeus in the sky. There’s also no empirical evidence that they’re smart, but interesting how belief works eh?
Bonyduck Campersang
Deity
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I'm intrigued by the 6% of atheists/agnostics who don't know what an atheist is
Gori the Grey
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I wonder if they objected to the phrasing of the question.
It called for you to identify an atheist as someone who "doesn't believe in God." Some might prefer to be able to answer "believes there is no God."
6% of atheists being verbal quibblers I can believe.
It called for you to identify an atheist as someone who "doesn't believe in God." Some might prefer to be able to answer "believes there is no God."
6% of atheists being verbal quibblers I can believe.
Lexicus
Deity
Actually, the market fairies I believe in are totally real, guys with degrees from George Mason University say so! The market fairies drop their efficiency dust on us every night!
It rather depends on the type and genre of those hypothetical 1000 books, and the purpose the reader has for reading them.
As the most immediate example I can think of, let's imagine that everyone in this conversation can see my personal library. I've been collecting books for over 50 years, and even still have a few that were given to me before that. The first book I was ever able to read for myself is a cute little children's story called Buddy Bear's Lost Growl. I was 4 when I was able to read that; my family taught me early about reading (at least in part to get me to stop pestering them to read to me). I still have that little book. I still have my mother's old school atlas from her junior high years in the 1950s. It's hopelessly out of date by now, but it's got the maps that fascinated me when all I could do was look at pictures and ask about them. That's one of the primary things that ultimately led me to this forum and the post I'm typing. Nobody becomes a Civ player without being fascinated by maps.
Some early juvenile mysteries I liked were the Bobbsey Twins, and the Donna Parker mysteries. A few years ago I found some of my old juvenile mysteries still in the collection after multiple moves, and started flipping through them. I then realized something that never occurred to my 8-year-old self: Some of those early books are horribly racist. So they're no longer in my collection, nor did I sell or donate them (not going to pass that on to some other unsuspecting kid). They're rotting in the landfill, and good riddance. Ditto with the ancient aliens crap I was into during some unfortunately impressionable years in junior high. Later on, the L.Ron Hubbard novels went into the landfill as well (they weren't his Scientology books, just inferior novels when he was still trying to make an honest living unconnected with the cult he started, but I still don't want his stuff in my collection anymore).
So of course I pick and choose what I believe, and from time to time I change my mind and have been rather horrified at what I used to read when I didn't know any better.
My book collection covers the span of the Dewey Decimal System (yes, I do have several bibles); there's not a major section that's not represented at least once. And that's just the nonfiction. The fiction is mostly SF/F, historical, mystery, and westerns, plus a few other miscellaneous books. I haven't counted lately, but the total number of books would be in the neighborhood of a couple of thousand at a conservative guesstimate (thanks, Amazon Marketplace and eBay). I don't buy books anymore - ran out of room, and they're too expensive these days anyway. But I've got a lot of choice in my reading material, and there's a lot of that I haven't read yet. It's nice not to have to worry if the public library is open if I want a book I haven't already read. There are plenty just across the hallway. And some of them get re-read for a different reason, or after a few years (or decades) when I know more about a subject and can therefore get more enjoyment from them.
Would another person take away the same things from these books as I do? I have no idea. I love complex worldbuilding in the space opera subgenre, for instance. But some other people consider those books to require too much thinking, when they just want a casual adventure story. Asimov's science essays were my bedtime reading when I was in junior high, and I read them for fun. My classmates thought I was insane; why would anyone read a science book if they didn't have to for school?
Warpus and I both love Dune, but we both take different things away from it. Or take The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I've noticed that men don't see the same things in it that women do, and there are a lot of American women who got livid at the idea of a white woman being enslaved by a religious patriarchy - not because slavery in and of itself is bad, but because the protagonist in that novel is white. How DARE Atwood intrude on something that some people assume happened only to a certain demographic of people in one country of the world in a limited span of time? So of course people are going to choose what they believe based on what they read.
I could go on all day with this...
Another anecdote. There was a guy I met in college who came up to me one day and stated that he'd been "born again" and was now Christian. Then he proceeded to try to convert me, while I was trying to do my anthropology homework. He'd throw bible verses at me, and tell me this/that/the other thing, and I'd correct him on every single one of them.
Thing is, I read the bible a long time ago, more than once. Time #1 was when I worked on a theatre production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and wanted to know the context of it. Well, that rock opera is based on the story of Joseph, in Genesis. Later, I worked on a production of Jesus Christ Superstar and had the same issue. So out came the New Testament. Then later on, I got into a series of novels called Children of the Lion, that was based partly on the Old Testament, partly on classical myths, partly on history, and the rest came from the author's imagination. That sent me back to reading the Old Testament from the beginning onward, because I wanted to know which parts of this series were based on what. I learned a lot of history, as well (Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek).
I don't claim to be an expert. But I daresay I've read more than a lot of the people who preach at me on the political pages on FB. As for my friend in college, he got rather frustrated after an unproductive couple of hours of fruitless preaching. "If you know so much about it, why don't you BELIEVE it?"
I told him that my cultural anthropology classes cover a lot of different religions and spiritual beliefs, and I don't believe any of them, either. Every civilization and society that's had a religion or faith tradition thinks theirs is the One True Faith tm, and they can't all be right. It therefore seems logical to me for reasons that don't even get near the obvious scientific and historical and common sense observations that none of them are right, at least with regard to the aforesaid science, history, and common sense observations (ie. snakes don't talk in any language humans understand unless you're a Parselmouth and Harry Potter hadn't been invented at the time Genesis was written).
Obviously many do. But then there are the ones who hysterically insist the world is only 6000 years old, and there's one woman in a city south of here who went even further - she informed me that the world is only TWO thousand years old. I told her to do the math, since that doesn't square with her own beliefs about Jesus. 2022 (at that time) - 2000 means the world would have been created when Jesus was already 22 years old (not counting the uncertainty of when the Nativity actually supposedly happened, since the astronomical and historical facts associated with that story don't even begin to agree). She then got angry with me and ranted hysterically in all-caps for the next couple of hours, and then told me to grow up. She's notorious on half a dozen pages for that sort of thing... and the scary thing is that she claims to be a teacher. Yikes. She's entitled to her own odd beliefs, but not to pass them along in a classroom.
So tell me how the penguins got to the Ark, then. How did they survive, and how did they get back to Antarctica and the other sub-Antarctic places? Did Noah take 2 of every species? Someone else brought up kangaroos. How did they get from Turkey back to Australia when the Flood was over? Did someone give them a lift? Did they develop the ability for long-distance oceanic swimming? Or were they holy kangaroos that could hop on water? I'm just getting started... (and there are whole threads about this sort of thing elsewhere in OT; you've participated in a couple of them).
"I had no need of that hypothesis."
You're going to have to define how many years you think make a "generation."
If science has become an idol, then no proper believer would have anything to do with it, since idol worship is forbidden in the Ten Commandments.This discussion makes me think of an interview with Bart Ehrman, where he was talking about his introductory class to the New Testament. He said he would start with a list of about 10 to 12 very basic questions about the NT. Most of the kids grew up in Sunday School. His prize for whoever got all questions right was a dinner on him. He seldom had to deliver, maybe once per year.
I am curious how people do when you compare upbringing inside and outside of Sunday School, or some related religion background.
I found the source:
My Pop Quiz For First-Year Students | The Bart Ehrman Blog
It’s been a very long day of teaching (six hours of talking!), so something substantive for the blog will need to wait for another day. Instead, I’ll say something about what happened today. As some of you have seen by examining my syllabus, I begin my class on Jesus by…
Okay, I wouldn't have earned a dinner. There's a lot of that I couldn't answer, or at least I was in the neighborhood but not correct. Some of it isn't actually answerable in specific numbers, such as the birth date of Jesus. There's too much conflicting data.
As I mentioned, I've joined a few atheist groups on FB. I left one of them, because I really don't enjoy the online company of upper-income American women who insist that "if Trump wins, I'm moving to Canada" and never consider that there could be any alternative viewpoints on that or anything else. They have the resources to stay and try to make their country better. It's not like they're in a literal war zone and need asylum like the Ukranians did.
However... atheists don't come in a hive mind. My views agree with some, but not others. I don't have the turn of mind that says it's okay to burn churches, for example. So there are going to be some who disagree on the precise definition of atheism.
The one thing we have in common is the lack of a belief in a deity/spirit. Atheism is not a religion or a faith. It annoys me greatly when people here insist that it is, and I've told StatsCan off in the comment section of the federal census for listing atheism under the question of religious identification.
Joij21
🔥Hail Satan!🔥
Prove it.
Harv
Emperor
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Actually I had some information confused when I read the article. He said he did not offer a dinner on this quiz, but he said only two students got more than two correct. He did not say how many students were given that quiz. I suspect you would have scored above average on such a quiz, along with many people on CFC.
This might also be a general issue with the ability to take quizzes and the ability to match the questions with "correct answers." People from CFC might be very skilled with this and the people on the receiving end of the quiz respond like deer.
Core Imposter
Felon
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Let me take a shot at these:This discussion makes me think of an interview with Bart Ehrman, where he was talking about his introductory class to the New Testament. He said he would start with a list of about 10 to 12 very basic questions about the NT. Most of the kids grew up in Sunday School. His prize for whoever got all questions right was a dinner on him. He seldom had to deliver, maybe once per year.
I am curious how people do when you compare upbringing inside and outside of Sunday School, or some related religion background.
I found the source:
My Pop Quiz For First-Year Students | The Bart Ehrman Blog
It’s been a very long day of teaching (six hours of talking!), so something substantive for the blog will need to wait for another day. Instead, I’ll say something about what happened today. As some of you have seen by examining my syllabus, I begin my class on Jesus by…
- How many books are in the NT? 66 books in the bible, 27 in the NT
- In what language were they written? Greek or Aramaic
- In what century were they written? There is a lot of debate about this. Some date Revelation to about 90 but Ehrman would argue for a much later date
- Name the Gospels of the NT Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
- Name three Gospels from outside the New Testament? The only one I can remember offhand is the Gospel of Peter
- What does the word “Gospel” mean? Good news.
- According to the Gospels, who baptized Jesus? Who carried his cross? Who buried him? John, Simon, and I should know this- Joseph of Arimathea?
- In about what year did Jesus die? What year was he born? 3 or 5 and 33 years earlier, much in dispute
- The author of the Gospel of Luke wrote two books. Name two of them. Luke and Acts
- What is normally thought to have been the occupations of (a) Matthew and (b) Luke? Tax collector and doctor.
- Which of the following were Jews? John the Baptist, Alexander the Great, Jesus, Pontius Pilate, Simon Peter, Tacitus, the Apostle Paul. John, Jesus, Peter, Paul.
- What is the shortest verse in the New Testament? Jesus wept.
I could say that this quiz is the initial effort of Ehrman to tear down the faith of his students but really you are sorting apples and oranges. Most kids are being taught doctrines in Sunday School whereas Ehrman is teaching a secular class. The non-canonic gospels are not being taught in Sunday School.
Lexicus
Deity
True, a vaguely-defined god is not falsifiable. However, science is pretty clear that a dead man cannot come back to life. We also know that the account of creation in Genesis cannot literally be true because, for example, it has land plants appearing before sea creatures when really the first sea animals predate land plants by nearly 200 million years.
Core Imposter
Felon
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I have a doctrine that accounts for that but it is a hypothetical.
Actually, I think the average OT poster is an information junkie, to some extent. Like Johnny Five in the Short Circuit movie, we crave "input". So even if we don't believe it or it's not immediately relevant to our personal lives, we tend to absorb the information.
That said, I've been finding a bunch of crossword puzzle/word puzzle magazines that I bought 40 years ago. Last night, during the commercials for the Survivor finale, one of the crossword puzzles I did was a Bible-themed one. I don't usually get stumped on those, though I'll admit to a couple of errors and had to correct it.
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