Got any idea how many hospitals and charities the Catholic Church has created worldwide?
A few times on this forum I've shared the story of Gary, a friend from church.
In college he had been a fundamentalist Christian. Surrounded every day by evidence that contradicted his beliefs, he had to maintain a blind eye all the time to filter out reality. That took a heavy toll on him so one day out of exhaustion he applied the Matthew 7:20 Test to his religion. Yes, it did so some good things like hospitals and charities, but it also did many bad things. And in presenting the Matthew 7:20 Test Jesus did stipulate that even one single bad thing produced by a religion makes the entire religion evil. So he became "a complete atheist and total humanist" (his own words) and is far more spiritually fulfilled than he had ever been as a Christian, far more than he ever could have been.
Hitler's Nazi party did a few good things too. Got people to work, supported families, took in unwed mothers and helped them raise their babies. Does that make Nationalsozialismus a good thing that's worthy of being not only preserved but also promoted?
In the Matthew 7:20 Test Jesus was very uncompromising: even just one single wicked consequence of a religion makes the whole religion wicked. Totally black and white, not one single hint of gray to it.
Your "hospitals and charities" count for nothing to Jesus.
On progressive radio regarding the recent anti-abortion anti-life advances in the USA, a caller related the story from 30 years ago of a friend whose fetus had died. She was bleeding and would have died soon if that dead fetus weren't removed. Her husband took her to the ER of a Catholic hospital and they refused to treat her because that would have been an abortion. They were literally willing to let her die in agony. Her husband had to search desperately for a hospital that would save his wife's life and thankfully succeeded.
Similarly, an acquaintance and fellow atheist and fellow Air Force veteran had been homeless. One of the charities he encountered was a Christian charity which rejected him because he would not go along with their proselytizing efforts. A Christian charity is not an actual charity but rather part of their proselytizing mission. The only charities that I donate to must be explicitly non-Christian.
Funny note on that. In Germany and Austria my friend booked us to stay at a couple Catholic monasteries that had converted one of their wings into a hotel. At one in Bavaria we looked at their chapel which had a number of donation boxes for various of their causes. I wouldn't go near the ones for their various missions, but I did make a donation to repair work on their organ -- I could not support their proselytizing efforts, but I could support music. Then a few months later on a British show the vicar took a position contrary to a character who remarked "I should have contributed more to the organ fund!" Dammit! I fell for their insidious trick!
Thank you so much for this truly beautiful story of human redemption.
Always a pleasure to share pearls of wisdom. I'll even cast them before swine (not referring to present company).
I haven't had the opportunity to use this one yet, but if asked "Are you saved?" I can honestly answer "Yes. I stopped being a Christian over half a century ago and it's the best thing to have happened to me!"
Does the Catholic Church pass the "Matthew 7:20 Test"?
Of course not! No religion nor any other human endeavor could.
That test "straight from Jesus' mouth" is actually unreasonable. A religion has to be absolutely perfect or else it's completely evil? That's impossible to live up to! Whoever put those words in Jesus' mouth hadn't thought it through.
However, citing that test is very useful to get a religious fanatic to reflect on his own gross misbehavior. Not that any of them ever would self-reflect, but we must keep trying. For that matter, it's lost on most "true Christians" because it's from the Bible, a book that none of them have ever bothered to read.
But I keep citing it in the hope that it might eventually get through to them. A pessimist must be the happiest person alive: 99.99% of the time he has the satisfaction of being right and occasionally he's pleasantly surprised.
Though we do see so many fundies and other extreme Christian types using the Test's same extreme black/white lack of reasoning all the time.
Complete bullshit, of course. If the doctors at that Catholic hospital knew the fetus was dead, they would have had no ethical objection to removing it.
All I have to go by is my memory of what the caller had said. Maybe the fetus wasn't verifiably dead yet -- or maybe it wasn't even a fetus yet but still just an embryo -- , but there was definitely no way that the mother could survive and hence neither could the embryo/fetus.
He also didn't state (nor probably knew) the reasons stated by the doctors for their refusal to act to save her life. It might have been nothing more than a strict hospital policy against any kind of abortion that they had to follow blindly. Christians are that way, you know, blindly obeying "God's Law" even when it will cost a life -- according to my rabbinic lit professor, Rabbi Kalir, Jewish morality holds that if obeying God's laws would result in the loss of a life, you must disobey God and save that life (because of that, I hold Jewish morality to be far superior to Christian "morality").
The point of his story is that the Catholic hospital would have let her die. Regardless of whatever excuses they may have given. Though I seem to recall the caller saying that it was because the procedure would have technically been classified as an abortion.
DWise1 writes:
On progressive radio
... a euphemism for a bunch of Loony Left atheists ...
Well, reality does have a definite liberal bias.
And it's a proven fact that religious fanaticism has caused far more than its share of suffering and death, something that "Loony Left atheists" oppose and try to work against.
For example, now that access to safe abortions is being threatened in the USA, many state legislatures are busy passing laws banning abortion in all cases, including to safe the life of the mother. And they are writing those laws for religious reasons. Specifically for the purpose of their Christian beliefs (actually for the purpose of playing to their religious fanatic constituents).
How did you come up with this idiotic interpretation of Scripture?
By having actually read the Bible.
You should try it some time.
DWise1 writes:
Your "hospitals and charities" count for nothing to Jesus.
A Bible dunce has spoken ...
How so?
The Matthew 7:20 clearly states that it is impossible for a good tree to being forth wicked fruit, but rather any wicked fruit is evidence of a wicked tree which should be cut down and thrown into the fire (Jesus' own words, according to Scripture).
It doesn't matter how much good a religion does, because even a single wicked consequence of that religion defines that religion as wicked, erasing all the good that it may have ever done.
Wow! Quite a taunting little video...does even Dredge deserve it?
Most especially Dredge (AKA Sludge).
These things have been explained to him repeatedly for many months, yet he just keeps on posting the same stupid BS nonsense. He is being most stubbornly willfully stupid about everything, reverting to stupid taunts repeatedly. IOW, he is a typical troll serving his stupid little troll-god (not to be confused with any actual version of the "Christian God" despite Sludge possibly thinking that his god is the same).
That video offers Sludge too much respect, vastly more respect than he deserves.
Also, I hope no one also thinks of me in this context.
At least you will try to engage in actual discussion. Sludge never has and never will. He is far less than a bottom-feeding troll. You are not, regardless of how frustrating you can be at times.
With regard to creationists versus science, I've heard Aron Ra used this term a number of times regarding creationist projection of their own malfeasance onto scientists:
quote"It's yet another case of the pot calling the silverware 'black'."
Are you extrapolating that Evidence would "exist" even without humans? (Or Monkeys)
Yes, of course! Every action has consequences independent of any observer. Photosynthesis produces carbohydrates and oxygen. Alpha and bravo fires consume carbohydrates and produce heat, carbon dioxide, and other compounds. All that happens regardless of whether there is an observer or not. The decay of radioactive elements produces daughter elements, chains of them even, all without any need for any observer.
What we do need an observer for, as well as mental processes such as exist in the human mind, is to recognize those products as evidence.
IOW, evidence exists completely independent of humans, but we do need the human mind (or minds of comparable intelligence) to recognize evidence for what it is and for what it can tell us.
In an attempt to save face, I will place the blame for my mistake on a lack of coffee.
If coffee is what it takes to avoid stupid mistakes then there is hope for you yet. I suggest you up the dosage a notch and enjoy the coffee-klatsch that is EvC.
Good advice, but utterly useless in Sludge's case. His willful stupidity is far too profound for any hope of a cure for him.
Scene from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Lou Grant arrives at work in a cheerful happy mood, which alarms all his co-workers. He explains that he'd been out drinking all night and was still drunk.
Sue Ann Nivens sidles up to Lou and asks him whether if he had drunk enough he might actually like her. He ponders the question for a second and says, "Sure!" After she leaves very elated, he adds, "There's not enough booze in the world!"
These things have been explained to him repeatedly for many months, yet he just keeps on posting the same stupid BS nonsense. He is being most stubbornly willfully stupid about everything, reverting to stupid taunts repeatedly ... He is far less than a bottom-feeding troll.
Those accusations are grossly unfair and lack empathy, compassion and understanding.
It was a very fair and factually accurate assessment of your conduct.
As for "empathy, compassion and understanding", you do not even remote rate the first two and we understand what you are and what you are doing far too well.
Yesterday at my sister's she discovered a young lizard in her living room. I was able to capture it whereupon I took it out to the front yard and released it in the hedge where it could continue with its life. Despite their being fundamentalist Christians, my sister and her family were delighted at a life having been saved (the saving of a life is much more a Jewish thing; now if I could get them to return to Pharisee teachings like the Golden Rule we just might be able to start making some progress).
That small lizard was deserving of empathy and compassion. An evil creationist (pardon the redundancy) scum-sucking bottom-feeding willfully stupid lying troll such as yourself deserves absolutely no empathy nor compassion. For that matter, that small lizard had vastly more humanity than you troll ever could have. As far as we can tell, you may be nothing more than an extremely perverted ELIZA.
I'm just a stumbling, bumbling idiot trying to survive and make sense of a baffling world.
That is a deliberate lie! :
If you were actually trying to "make sense of a baffling world", then you would be trying to learn something. Instead, you are doing the exact opposite through your persistent willful stupidity.
You fucking evil liar!
My latest struggle is trying to get my tiny little fragile egg-shell mind around the claim that science can't prove anything.
Yet another fucking lie!
You are nothing but an evil creationist scum-sucking bottom-feeding willfully stupid lying troll.
Or to refer to Markus Lycus' assessment of your gross inability to ever improve yourself through learning:
quoteBut you'll never learn, you'll be a eunuch all your life.
In my case I attended Sunday school and Episcopal church with my mom, but my dad was an atheist. I learned all the biblical stories and at 12 I took classes for confirmation. I was really fascinated with ancient history and so I read the bible that year also. My Santa Claus fantasy had already primed my skepticism, but the absurdities in the bible were so obviously fiction, that I declared my atheism to my parents on the day I was forced to go through confirmation.
You just brought up the situation that I was wanting to present in my planned reply to Phat's Message 3007 addressed to Dredge:
Phat writes:
When you had your confirmation on the road to becoming a "good" Catholic, did you compile evidence before allowing yourself to believe?
Up to the point of confirmation, kids are just putting in their pew time (when Mike Doonesbury's daughter wanted to stop going to church, he nixed it with "Kids have to put in their pew time."), learning the words to say and the motions to go through, all with just whatever reasons they can gather through osmosis and Sunday School. As a result, they develop some vague idea of what they are supposed to believe mostly without having to think about it much.
But with confirmation classes, they have to start studying what they are supposed to believe and the doctrine behind it. For perhaps the first time in their church experience, they have to start thinking about their beliefs and why they hold those beliefs. Part of that, as in your case, may involve actually reading the Bible for the first time.
I would think that confirmation would be a very dangerous time for one's faith. For one thing, now they're having to actually think about it. For another, the actual teachings will undoubtedly conflict with the childish ideas that they had developed through their pew time, such that they suddenly realize that what they had always thought was so, isn't -- they have to shed their long-held beliefs for new ones. And, of course, they may come to realize that what they are supposed to believe just does not make any sense. Going through the confirmation process would be a key time for one to lose their faith rather than to strengthen it.
Unfortunately, many Protestant churches don't have any form of confirmation. Kids growing up in those churches can very easily grow to adulthood without ever having to learn what they are actually supposed to believe. These were described in a book, Stupid Ways and Smart Ways to Think About God (I've mentioned it on this forum before), which described many adults as holding childish ideas about God precisely because they had formed those ideas as children and they then never revisited them to bring them up to a more mature level. In those churches, only a few kids would be motivated to actually read the Bible in order to discover what they are supposed to believe.
That was my case. I attended a non-denominational main-stream Protestant church for years with our neighbors and chose to be baptized around age 11. Then a year later I decided I should get serious about this religion stuff so I started reading the Bible. Made it well into Genesis, past Sodom and Gomorrah (but I don't remember about Lot being gang-raped by his daughters). I found what I was reading so unbelievable that I realized: If I cannot believe what I'm supposed to, then I should just leave quietly.
My mistake was that I had made the naïve assumption that I was supposed to read the Bible literally, which thinking back I now don't think that that was part of our church doctrine. Ironically, half a decade later (c 1970) I encountered the Jesus Freaks and they were very emphatic about biblical literalism, the very thing that had turned me into an atheist.
My advice to theistic parents who don't want their children to become atheists (I hold that theism is something you need to grow out of, not be forced out by stupid beliefs like biblical literalism or YEC): Never leave your child alone with a Bible!
You're finally catching on to him/it. His goal and purpose is completely contrary to any kind of discussion, but rather it is to stop any kind of discussion.
Unfortunately, that is the same goal and purpose of creationists. The only difference here is one of degree where Dredge takes his trolling further than most other creationists.
For most Christians, GOD is Jesus. Jesus is God's character. And I don't see Him doing Evil things.
To paraphrase from Saint Gump: "Evil is as evil does."
But it runs far deeper than that simple formulation.
Do you remember Nixon and Watergate? I mean did you personally live through that time? (Personal confession: in college I worked two summers in West Germany, 1973 and 1974, so I was in a kind of news black-out for Nixon's final days in 1974) Nixon's basic defense for everything was: "If the President does it, then it cannot be against the law." Dershowitz' defense of Trump in his second impeachment was basically that the President could anything he fucking well wants to and it would not be illegal -- basically the Nixon defense of 1974. But our lesson from 1974 was supposed to be that nobody, not even the President of the United States of America, is above the law.
So theists will argue that God is Good and anything God does and tells us to do is good. So all the genocides in the Old Testament were all good and moral just because God had commanded them. In modern times, assassins of abortion providers felt completely justified to commit their atrocities because "God had commanded it" -- despite the only reference in the entire Bible, New and Old, is to commit an abortion in this particular situation (you suspect that it might not be yours) and OBTW here are instructions for performing that required abortion (somewhere in Numbers 5 -- you're the Bible geek so you find it).
The fundamental problem is that morality is a product of society, not of religion.
OK, so maybe what the Bible describes was acceptable morally at that time, but society has evolved considerably since then. As has morality itself. What in biblical times was considered moral is no longer moral in our modern sense. Therefore, "moral" stances in the Bible are now looked upon as horrific atrocities.
What "God" was doing in ancient times as being "good" is now viewed by almost everybody as being absolutely evil.
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