You Guys Need to Communicate! (thoughts from an ex evangelical Christian)

With bullets?In the last two centuries we've experienced remarkable, drastic upheavals in our factual understanding of the world. We developed evolution to explain the origins of species. We overturned Newton's singular efforts with the ideas of an even greater mind, Einstein. Quantum mechanics suborned our concept of the universe as a great deterministic clockwork with the knowledge that, at the most basic level, randomness is king.And these aren't esoteric debates occurring in ivory towers and between the dessicated pages of journals nobody reads; the battlefield of these revolutions is our very homes and workplaces, our schools and hospitals, for every one of us has had our lives irrevocably altered by the technologies these revolutions ushered in.And yet, as strident and divisive these scientific revolutions were, and often still are, I can't think of a single instance where a shot was fired or blood drawn in anger. Wittgenstein's poker is the most belligerent example that comes to my mind. Had it been a religious argument, there's no doubt in my mind that Popper would have been empaled.Religion's defenders like to pop up with the old canard that "we'd find other reasons to kill each other", but when I read a story like the Chinese farmer who bought two girls to sell as brides and then realized he could double his price by murdering them in a ditch and selling them as "spirit brides", a traditional local religious practice, I really wonder about that. No, I think religion gives people motivation to kill each other that they simply wouldn't have otherwise.

No, but I'd call it pretty stupid if he tried to argue that position based on the fact that it says "Allah" in the Qur'an a bunch of times, as Buz just did.Is it just that you can't see ridiculous arguments when they're being offered by your coreligionists?

Do they call it "brainwashing"? No, of course not. But if you think these religious traditions aren't teaching parents that they need to inculcate anti-skeptic attitudes intentionally before their children are old enough to question them, then that can only be because you've never set foot in such a church, and you're completely ignorant of what the culture of Christian fundamentalism is like.The idea that you need to get these attitudes into your children before a certain age is very prevalent. They don't call it "brainwashing", of course, but they don't conceal the fact that they want to insert these attitudes into children before they're old enough to get conflicting messages from society.

Wha...?Second grade exists, Jar. I spent a school year there. I'm not sure what you think is "unserious" about the idea of second grade.

Right, but nobody ever wrote books on how to "teach" children about Santa Claus in such a way that, years later, they'll instinctually act to protect that belief from scrutiny.That is true of Christianity at that age, though, Jar. I know because I've seen the materials and had them used on me. That's Josh McDowell's main revenue stream - generating apologetics material for children to leave them with a sort of "shell" against the skepticism they're likely to encounter in college, etc.It's widespread and pernicious, Jar, and you're being characteristically obtuse about it.

Do you think he's not embraced by mainstream Christianity? Or that the RCC doesn't have it's own such figures?Do you think that in 2000 years of Catholicism, they never figured out how to improve adult retention rates by starting young?Indeed, I'm quite aware of your attempts to portray fundamentalism in America as a fringe movement representing a fraction of organized Christianity; in a country where one of the longest best-selling novels among adults is Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series, that's a transparently ludicrous and self-serving fantasy.

It's only as benign as any other attempt to suborn critical thinking. Which is not something I would consider benign at all. Who said you haven't? Now who's misrepresenting?

I am what? I still don't see where anyone, least of all myself, asserted you don't criticize Josh McDowell and his ilk. ...?I hope you're following along with this, because you've lost me. You never said I claimed what? I misrepresented what, exactly?Are you putting me on, or what? Lol! Yeah, that's right, Jar. I'm a "fundamentalist atheist."Like I said, nobody has claimed that you haven't. If you have a quote from myself, or others, asserting that you don't speak out against folks like Josh McDowell, now would be the time to provide it.Either that or stop asserting that one of us said that. Honestly your response here is far from sensical. What facts? That's fascinating, but there are no second-grade Jesuits. And several people, including myself, had experiences in Catholic school that were apparently the opposite of yours, which supports schraf's point - your attempt to misrepresent the scope of her remarks (and therefore the weight of your counterexample) notwithstanding. So, your assertion is, essentially, that critical thinking skills are universal among teens and adults? That they all "figure it out" and... what? If they all figure it out, why do so many people wind up in the exact same religion as their parents, that they grew up in?

Then why are you replying as though I did?Does that strike you as an effective debate technique? Rebutting statements that your opponents didn't make? Then what the fuck are we talking about?

But you do call yourself Christian? I think Harris actually does speak to that point:

quote:

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Here, I do not merely refer to twenty-megaton displays of religious mendacity of the Ted Haggard variety. I mean the daily and ubiquitous failure of most religious people to admit that the basic claims of the their faith are profoundly suspect. How likely is it that Jesus was really born of a virgin, rose from the dead, and will bodily return to earth to judge us all? How reasonable is it to believe in such a concatenation of miracles on the basis of the Gospel account? How much support do these doctrines receive from the average Christian's experience in church? It seems to me that honest answers to these questions should raise a tsunami of doubt. I'm not sure what will be "Christian" about any Christians left standing...

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What if, tomorrow, a blue-ribbon panel of archaeologists and biblical scholars demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Gospels were ancient forgeries and that Jesus never existed? Would this steal the ground out from under your spiritual life? It would be a shame if it would. And if it wouldn’t, in what sense is your spirituality really predicated upon the historical Jesus?

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I think there's a point there - if you really have integrated skepticism and doubt into your Christianity, then surely you've come to the conclusion that the miracles and divinity of Jesus - even the very authenticity of the statements he's supposed to have made - aren't supported by any evidence; and if that's so, in what sense can you be said to be a "Christian"?Nobody's saying, of course, that reasonable people burn their Bibles. Obviously there's a vast weight of historical and cultural significance there, and perhaps even some human wisdom. And it doesn't have to be true to have merit; any more than Romeo and Juliet has to be a true story to tell us something true about love.But once we're at the point where the Bible is just another human text with some wisdom in it, what sense does it make to restrict one's reading to only the Bible, or to set it superior to other religious texts?And if you're not doing that; if the Qu'ran and the Bhagavad Gita are held as much in your esteem as the Bible is, then, again, in what sense are you specifically a Christian?

You mean, why would an Internet forum dedicated to the exploration of the conflict between science and religion not represent an accurate, unbiased cross-section of humanity as a whole?How many people here speak Chinese or Hindi as their native languages? In a world where the Earth's human population is concentrated in China and India, wouldn't a truly representative sample predominantly include many more speakers of those languages - instead of, as this sample is, being totally comprised of speakers of English?Furthermore - what percentage of the world's population do you think have access to computers and the internet? A hint - it's a lot less than 100%, which is obviously how many of the EvC sample have such access.And does the term "self-selected sample" mean anything to you?From your question, I get the feeling you've never in your life thought about statistical sampling and how a truly random sample - an accurate cross-section - is generated. There are a hundred obvious answers to your question. There's no way that the population here at EvC forum could possibly be mistaken for any kind of truly representative cross-section of "the planet."