Maybe these people just think that any God worthy of the name wouldn't condem them to eternal hellfire because they are living lives of sufficient virtue already?
I think when people say this sort of thing they just mean that they already try to act morally, and would do so irrespective of whether they believed in god. I assume that if god revealed him/her/itself to us and demanded that we all pray, attend church, and suck up to him/her/it, or burn in hellfire for all eternity if we failed to do so, most of us would capitulate to god's demands.
That's some fairly impressive self-confidence. But this is coming from a woman who wouldn't expect to keep her job, let alone her immortal soul, if her boss knew what she did all day.
I think you're confusing belief in God with belief in the teachings of Christianity. I interpreted apo's comment to mean that he doesn't see any reason to believe in all the specific stuff, but he could entertain the idea of there being some sort of all-powerful being out there. But whether or not such a being exists, he would stick to his own sense of morality, which seems to work well enough.
The link doesn't take me to the place apo said this, so I've tracked it down on my own. I think he's talking about the difference a proof of the existence of god would make. Given such a proof, revelation, the moral law as laid down in the bible, which interpretation of the bible exalts these and condemns those to damnation, etc. remain unsolved. And I think he's saying that proving god exists, by a monsignior wrestling on Monty Python if need be, doesn't make those other consequences you allude to any more likely, or relevant.
I think the people who first began making that statement, in the renaissance, believed he existed, just not the way the church did. And that he would not be that petty, jealous character in any case.
If there was proof of the existance of God and clear evidance of what it wanted and of the benefits of doing what it wanted, I would probably change my behavior.
I think #1 is right. I sort of assume God's a pretty good diety who thinks it's funny when I do certain things that might normally be considered venial sins.
5, whether or not the Eurypthro problem returns depends on 6 & 7 bring up, whether, along with proof that some God exists, we also know what that God requires not to damn us to eternal hellfire. If we do know that, than the problem is stated as, "Would you do what you think is moral even if you know God disagrees and will punish you for it?" This is a new problem, as the Eurypthro problem is, to my understanding, "Is doing/abstaining from X moral because God(s) made it so, or did God(s) command doing/abstaining from X because they recognized it as moral."
Sure I'd obey God's bizarre little laws for a while, but only until the Resistence figures out how to blow him up with the super-anti-Godmification ray.
It would be the height of arrogance for an ant to say, "If I knew that Newt was holding a magnifying glass over the entrance to my home, I would wait til dusk to go back." -- He is just an ant! He can't modify his behavior that way -- he is going to carry his crumb into the hill and burn up in the focussed sunlight regardless.
This isn't really a condition that can be met, though. People who already are completely convinced that God does, in fact, exist have been arguing since the very beginning of the whole concept over what the true meaning and dictates of religion are. Knowing for certain that God exists doesn't mean we get a clearly-worded checklist of right and wrong--the ambiguity over what to do with this new-found knowledge of God's existence would remain.
5, whether or not the Eurypthro problem returns depends on 6 & 7 bring up, whether, along with proof that some God exists, we also know what that God requires not to damn us to eternal hellfire.
Well, yes. I'm assuming that part of what Silvana and Apo were saying is that even if they knew that God existed and had some sense of what it wanted that they wouldn't change their behavior. If they didn't know, then not changing makes perfect sense.
If we do know that, than the problem is stated as, "Would you do what you think is moral even if you know God disagrees and will punish you for it?"
This seems like a different claim than the one made -- there are all sorts of areas in which I have no strong moral opinions but God might. If I knew that God existed and was the God of, say, Judaism, with strong opinions about eating shellfish, I'd be right off lobster, with no moral qualms because I don't see myself as having a moral obligation to eat shellfish. I understand Apo to be saying that he would ignore any such strictures, regardless.
I admire your honesty (both LB and Idealist) in how you would react to a god showing up and saying, "OK, y'all, here's the ground rules." My opinion is that if there's a divine being who cares more about the dress code than anything else, its priorities are misplaced and its rules are stupid. It has better things to worry about. If its rules are all arbitrary and meaningless, I'm (a) probably not going to be very good at them anyway and (b), y'know, up its nose with a rubber hose.
That said, I think it's evidence of the tragic effectiveness of purely human bullying that so many religious leaders - of many if not all religions - have used Hell/etc as a way to push the potential wisdom of their own traditions out of the spotlight and replace it with fear as a tool of control. For example, that the first thing one (I certainly do this, I'm afraid) thinks of is Hell and damnation, when one thinks of Christianity, is a sad reversal of what I suspect were the core beliefs of the first Christians.
I think the hypothetical of God revealing him/her/itself is a pretty interesting one, because I don't think the actual reaction to God showing up tomorrow - even in a country where 60% of Americans say they believe Genesis is literally true - would be to obey God or worship him, but to just go completely apeshit. I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian and was taught that the Rapture was going to happen in our lifetimes, and I can tell you that even though I met dozens upon dozens of people who said they believed in God and miracles and the end of the world, and clearly believed they believed, I don't think I've ever met a single human being who actually did. Something like that falls completely outside the history of human experience, and if we woke up tomorrow to see Yahweh in the sky throwing plagues of frogs and turning the seas to blood, James Dobson would be just as shocked shitless as the rest of us.
If its rules are all arbitrary and meaningless, I'm (a) probably not going to be very good at them anyway and (b), y'know, up its nose with a rubber hose.
Which is pretty much why I stopped being a Christian a very long time ago. I figured if there was any God who actually ran a Hell, I wouldn't want to spend eternity worshiping it anyway.
Of course, being a fundamentalist Christian, I'd already been raised to believe that pretty much everyone I knew, including all my friends and a lot of my relatives, were already going to hell, so it already wasn't much fun.
That said, if a god showed up tomorrow that contradicted my religious beliefs and said I was going straight to Hell for being any of a number of things I am (gay, not in its religion, not great about doing the yardwork, whatever), I would totally give it the finger. I mean, at that point I'm boned. I'm not giving up fried scallops so it can walk around in its fancy Look At Me, I'm God And I Don't Like Scallops t-shirt. Phbthbthbth to that, I say. Even if I did, it could just change the rules tomorrow, anyway. Nope, not for me, no thanks. I'd be way too busy asking it WTF it's been for the last forever.
That's really easy to say in the absence of said being standing around with the clipboard and the bullhorn, though.
That's really easy to say in the absence of said being standing around with the clipboard and the bullhorn, though.
That's the thing. But if you buy into the hypothetical and you really know that, regardless of your views of the matter, God gets really pissed off if you eat pork or mix meat and dairy, are you going to risk eternal damnation (mixing concepts across religions, here) just for a bacon cheeseburger?
This would be great. "I, am the Lord Thy God. Bring me, a SHRUBBERY!"
But seriously, I can see taking a particular requirement and deciding that you just weren't going to even try to swing it, and God could do what he liked about it. (Being gay, if there were a God that cared about it, sure). But for scallops? As against eternity in a pit of flames? (Or, to take it more gently, as against displeasing an all powerful and all good being that just wants you to eschew shellfish?)
24: Hey, me too! Reminds me of when a friend of mine objected to my ditching Christianity by saying that, really, our purpose in life was to praise God to increase His glory, and my response was, essentially, "What, he can make the earth in seven days but he can't find a full-length mirror to admire himself in?"
26: Yes, but then, I'm particularly attached to grilling my own cheeseburgers. No, seriously, I just wouldn't have a lot of respect for any being that showed up and had that as its first priority. Maybe this is that whole Southern "up yours" (not yours yours - I mean the Holiest of Holies' own Holy Googley HooHole) thing I'm just expressing reflexively, but I really do prefer to think that I would have it sufficiently together to be one of the people saying, "Um, that's nice about the burgers and all, but can we talk cancer for a second?"
For me it would depend how punitive the God in question was about what beliefs I have.
By the standards of most mainstream Western religious faiths, I lead a moderately virtuous life. I don't drink to excess, I'm not an addict, I'm faithful to my wife, don't steal, try to treat other people with dignity, etc. And I would imagine that's the case for a great many or even most people.
However, I believe all kinds of stuff that would have fundamentalists foaming at the mouth. To pick some current button-issues for fundamentalists: that homosexuality is OK and that homosexuals ought to be able to marry, that abortion is OK at least some of the time, that what people get up to in their bedrooms is their own damn business, etc.
Further, I'm not really sure beliefs are things we have complete volitional control over in the first place.* I couldn't just choose not to believe that the world is roughly spherical and orbits the sun on a broadly elliptical path, for example. And if a God is going to punish me for what I believe, I'm screwed.
* Or at least some beliefs are not the sort of things we have volitional control over.
26: Depends on what it is. If it's something as meaningless as dietary laws, well, maybe that's not so bad - God's just Giant Evil Autistic Fucker God who stomps around getting people to make sausage JUST the way he likes it, which makes him a hideous nuisance, but one most people will put up with under a large enough penalty. But most of God's laws don't end with what to eat; he seems very particular about who you fuck, how you fuck them and when you get to fuck them, too. And then there's the times God has told his followers to kill people. If he declares Canada anathema and tells you to kill everyone there because he said so, would you grab a gun and get to it?
I think at that point -- where God was going against what God's own moral code is rumored to be -- I'd be all demanding proof that God wasn't a false idol and dropping mountains on Him if He didn't show up with some proof.
28: Really. What's its compelling reason for loving shellfish so much? If it's that all non-plant life has a soul and we're hurting them unknowingly, OK, great, that's a reason. If it's that it just really thinks they're cute and I'm stressing it unnecessarily, it doesn't have to watch me eat. I mean, I get that it could be some super-intelligent/super-wise being with priorities that don't make sense to me at first glance. No problem there. But if it's capable of appearing to me, it's capable of making me understand. Rah and I have all sorts of rules the kittens just have to follow (in theory), rules they will never understand with their tiny kitten brains, but if tomorrow they were self-aware and intelligent and understood English I would gladly explain these rules to them so they could understand that the rules benefit everyone. If this god character's so hot, it can show me as much respect as I'd show my kittens by at least offering an explanation.
Wow, you walk away from the computer for a couple of hours and everybody starts discussing your eternal soul.
The "rules" aren't the product of God, they are inventions of people, which is why they keep changing throughout history. Also, being raised Baptist, I'm all about the deathbed conversion, bitches.
Anyhow, I live a good life without needing a big paddle-wielding God to make me do that. I live by the Golden Rule and try to help people worse off than I am. Like RMP, if JHVH's all about scallops and not saying goddammit, I'm going to be terrible at following that anyhow. But no all-powerful diety could possibly give a damn about that penny-ante shit after, y'know, creating the entire universe.
So, LB, I suppose it comes down to the vengeful God you stipulate in the post is one that I absolutely don't and can't believe in.
34: Well, isn't God as provided by most major religions worse than Hitler anyway? He's condemning the vast majority of humanity to an infinite amount of suffering for a host of incredibly petty misdeeds. The fact that we're reaching for Hitler as a comparison just illustrates that we don't really have the capacity to really believe in something as hideous as God.
This discussion reminds me of the first time I read the "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter in The Brothers Karamosov.
Also: Mormon theology basically enshrines Paradise Lost with the roles reversed: Satan proposes that all souls march in a totalitarian fashion towards salvation, and Jesus proposes free agency and losing some along the way, God prefers Jesus's business plan, and then the war in Heaven gets going. Wrong and free is okay by me.
To me, the whole notion of an all-powerful being sitting around having a cow about people fucking in non-approved ways, eating shrimp, wearing cotton/polyester blends, not kissing said all-powerful being's ass sufficiently and such is impossible for me to take seriously. Nor do I understand how god can (a) send people to eternal torture for finite sins (OK, maybe I suck, but not enough to deserve eternal torture -- if I were Hitler or Bush, maybe); (b) do nothing to make clear whether he/she/it/they exist(s); (c) do nothing to make clear what variety of religion (Christianity, Judaism, Shiite Islam, Sunni Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Zeusism, etc., etc.) is correct and what rules we're supposed to follow; and yet (d) eternally punish those who guess wrong (necessarily the vast majority of humankind, since no religion has more than a third of the world's population as adherents). Ever hear of due process, god? A large proportion of humanity paints god as a total asshole, which means that I am better than god (and so are most people). How can that be?
btw, note that lots of people want crazy Andrea Yates to die because she drowned her five kids in her bathtub. Recall that the bible tells us that god had a total shit-fit and drowned every human and animal on earth other than the few that Noah managed to get onto his ark. Thus, Andrea Yates, even if she weren't nuts, would be many orders of magnitude less evil than god. Tell me again why I'm supposed to worship this guy?
43: Not all of them do, but rather perversely the most popular ones do. And isn't the hypothetical we're dealing with the "God of Judgment" model? That pretty much assumes the existence of Hell or some equivalent punishment.
Not only would I not eat shellfish (not so hard, considering) and rededicate my hoohah to His glory (harder), I think I would do some bad stuff to other people (hardest) to avoid eternal damnation. I mean, I'd worry about my ability to avoid doing bad stuff if I were being tortured for a finite amount of time by human beings--if that were never going to end? Maybe my instinctive aversion to doing the bad things would prevent me from acting in my rational self-interest; I'm not very aggressive, but if God were like, "if you blink once, a baby in Croatia is going to endure horrible torment for twenty minutes then die, if you blink twice, you're damned," , and I were sure it were true, and not a test, I'd blink once. It's eternal. It never ends!
I'd worry about what I'd do if threatened with torture on earth. I don't expect it's ever going to be an issue, but if it were, I hope I'd have a method of suicide, because once the fingernails start being pulled, I can't swear I'll stay virtuous. No good to the Resistance, like I said.
If it's really Punishment God, each and everyone of us would do whatever he tells us to do. For roughly the same reason the tortured are willing to say whatever they think the torturers want said.
40 seems right to me, and therein lies the paradox. If god exists, and I know this for a fact (let us assume I am somehow also assured of my own sanity), and god's rules involve the obey/disobey, heaven/hell dynaic, then god is essentially a totalitarian. And inasmuch as I have a pretty strong sense of justice, a pretty strong anti-totalitarian streak, and a pretty strong tendency to empathize with underdogs, I honestly find it pretty hard to see myself toeing the line under those conditions.
44, 45, 46: Again, the entire premise of this "what would you do if" hypothetical is that, as LB put it, "such a god had strong opinions about my behavior which it was willing to back up with eternity spent in lakes of molten sulfur," and how we might react to such an entity's demands. If God turns out to be, for instance, the squishily vague and friendly Unitarian God, or the Bahai God, or some cosmic teddy bear being, then knowledge of his/her/its existence isn't really much of a challenge to one's way of life and/or free will. But that's not what we're really talking about here.
OTOH, as Teo is pointing out: if we know for certain that god exists (and we are not insane), and yet there's no particular threat associated with being disobedient, then it seems to me there's a much better incentive to be good. (I'm assuming that god is basically a creator god.) It's the essence of free will: here you are, I'd prefer you to do this stuff, I'm the one that made you. I mean, likely one is going to fuck up occasionally, but if one keeps in mind that the being responsible for one's creation has these preferences, then it makes sense to try to comply with them as much as one can, out of simple decency.
52: Right. I have religious beliefs, and really do believe them (or believe I believe them, etc.), but they are also in something much more squishy than the big being with a lake of fire and a strictly enforced guest list. Anything I've said is assumed to be in the hypothetical instance of the hellfire and brimstone being of specific sects of specific religions.
52: But I don't know why there is much of an issue in your case, either. The Abu Gharib story that struck me deepest was the one about a cell full of women being close enough to hear young boys being raped; for some reason, I assumed the women were the boys' mothers. I can imagine being a parent and ultimately having a mindset that accepted my child could/would be raped repeatedly, and still behaving in a way that made it more likely. It is impossible for me to imagine having to hear it and not immediately doing whatever whoever asked me to do. I assume Punishment God can do much worse to me than that.
Moreover, where's the faith required in this model?
But no all-powerful diety could possibly give a damn about that penny-ante shit after, y'know, creating the entire universe.
The hypothesis was "if there was a God", not "if there was a God who prescribed/proscribed all the things Christianity/Judaism/Islam/Mormonism/religion-of-your-choice does", right?
I try my absolute best to live a moral life, which mostly involves laboring every day toward treating myself with kindness and treating other people with kindness. Hell, I plan to dedicate my whole life to helping other people not suffer while on this earth. If the all-powerful God doesn't care about that, and is going to damn me to eternal hellfire because I allowed a penis in my hoohole before going through some made-up ceremony, well, then, fuck 'im.
But, but, but it's eternal damnation! It's horrible torment from which you'll never be released. It's not about your respect for God; it's rational avoidance of pain.
In my mind, there is absolutely no reason to think that "horrible torment from which you'll never be released" is in any way possible or probable, and I almost couldn't possibly believe it under almost any circumstances, unless I and hundreds of thousands of other people received direct visits from God saying so.
60: The problem is that we probably lack the capacity to rationally evaluate the scope of eternity, and many of us might reject an offer from a hostile Punishment God without considering how irrational that rejection really is. The more I think about it the less I think I'd be personally capable of such; sickly schoolchildren have been known to beat me up pretty bad, so I'd hate to see what an angry God could do. I guess it depends on how drunk I am on Judgment Day.
The Aztecs tore the beating hearts out of prosoners to keep the world from ending. Carthaginians sacrificed their infant first borns. Lot of tough religions out there. Lot of tough implications of the creator god.
59: Because 53 said, if it's the squishy non-threatening god, then there's no motivation to change your behavior. But I think that if you knew that a creator god existed, even if it couldn't/wouldn't damn you to hell, that the mere fact of its existence--to which you owe everything--would urge compliance with its wishes far more than the threat of hell.
60: I honestly do not think I would be capable of living the rest of my life according to rules that I found unjust/totalitarian. Which isn't, I don't think, some big claim of moral superiority on my part--even under totalitarian regimes, people rebel in small ways that (thankfully) are usually overlooked. It is simply impossible to be perfect. And I think that realizing that and recognizing what the consequences are would piss me off, and I'd end up joining the Resistance with Strasmangelo.
In my mind, there is absolutely no reason to think that "horrible torment from which you'll never be released" is in any way possible or probable, and I almost couldn't possibly believe it under almost any circumstances, unless I and hundreds of thousands of other people received direct visits from God saying so.
But that's exactly it. LB's proposition was,
"if I knew of the existence of a god, and that such a god had strong opinions about my behavior which it was willing to back up with eternity spent in lakes of molten sulfur"
Under those circumstances keeping my dick to myself until marriage gets a whole lot easier.
Well, that was LB's proposition. That wasn't the original proposition to which Apostropher and I were responding.
Because the likelihood of LB's proposition being true is very very unlikely, while the proposition "there is some sort of supernatural being" is at least somewhat plausible.
Better to fry pork sausage in hell than serve in heaven, except if you have to get in the pan with them that's not so good.
I was raised Catholic and schooled by nuns, and I decided when I was 14 that I didn't believe in god or hell, and it has never seemed necessary to reconsider.
But I think we should be working on the super-anti-Godmification ray, just in case.
I'm with Tia on eternal damnation. If that shit were real... well, for starters I'd stop swearing.
But it's too ludicrous to be real. As someone said up-thread, a god who condemned the vast majority of humanity to eternal torture is worse than Hitler, and a theology that posits the existence of such a god sounds just a bit too petulant to be anything other than a human creation.
If such a being did appear to me, I'd get all Spock on its ass. "What does God need with a spaceship?"
OT: I missed most of this thread because I was at the hairdresser. On a whim, I ended up agreeing to get a shock of red-pink in the front, and it looks rad, but now I am thinking, what the hell am I doing? I work at a law firm.
But I think that if you knew that a creator god existed, even if it couldn't/wouldn't damn you to hell, that the mere fact of its existence--to which you owe everything--would urge compliance with its wishes far more than the threat of hell
I really don't think that's true. Let's imagine two scenarios. In our first scenario, God X shows up and says "Hey folks, I'm God, and there's some stuff I'd like everybody to do. If you don't do it, I'll be very sad, but there won't be any consequences." And he hands down a list of laws that sound unobjectionably moral: don't kill each other, don't steal, give to the poor, etc. In this scenario it seems like most people are either going to do have done those things anyway, or do them more now because God X will have inspired them to do so, so that all works out.
In our second scenario, God Y shows up and gives the same speech - he's handing down laws, but with no strings attatched - only the content of his laws is markedly different. Some of it consists of sexual regulation (no sex outside of marriage, no homosexuality), some of it consists of purity codes (instructions on how to handle the dead, how to approach a menstruating woman, etc.), some of it seems completely arbitrary (don't eat meat with dairy), and some of it is incredibly harsh and unjust (those who violate sexual taboos should be executed by the community). Some of these laws will be relatively easy to follow, like the dietary laws; others, like the sex laws, will be ignored a lot more because they're far more intrusive; others, like public execution of adulterers, will be monstrously unpopular.
The kinds of laws God Y wants people to live by simply won't be adopted without the threat or promise of an afterlife. If we're already inclined to follow these laws, or if they're really not much of a bother, then maybe the mere knowledge of God's existence could inspire us to adhere to them more strictly. But very few people are going to follow an arbitrary or unjust moral code if they're not getting anything out of it.
72: Don't sweat it. Funky and cool won't hurt you most firms, so long as you're doing good work.
And man, you people are all sure of yourselves. Put aside the lake of burning sulfur for a moment, and say you just know that God exists and is all-knowing and perfectly good, and has strong opinions about how you should behave which include some rules which you find unintuitive -- say, for the sake of argument, that it really does have a problem with premarital sex, or it would really like a monthly goat sacrifice.
I can't see having a problem with obedience there just because it doesn't make sense. I've had people explain things to me that didn't make sense because I wasn't bright enough to follow the explanation; I'd expect God to do the same regularly. Who's to say that the new moon goat sacrifice doesn't make sense if God says it does? Were you there when Levithan was pulled from the vasty deep? (or however the Book of Job goes.)
70: This should totally turn into a "Star Trek 5" thread. I saw that movie when I was like four and thought it was completely awesome and nobody can convince me otherwise.
This seems to me like one of those crazy "now ogged reveals how little he understands the world" posts.
Organized religions have been along for a very long time, involving many millions of sincere adherants, who sincerely believed it was wrong to lie, steal, cheat, have sex with your various neighbors, kill, sleep till noon, play with cards, eat pork, eat meat on Fridays, dance, and turn away the hungry starving masses, and yet did all of things. The reason being not that they didn't sincerely believe in eternal damantion, but that they were human.
Stanley Elkin ain't Milton, but, like a reviewer said, imagine Woody Allen writing "Job in the Afterlife."
****SPOILER ALERT******
No matter how much pain and madness He allowed, no matter how much injustice and suffering He created, should we still be grateful that...It...exists? Nah, the playpen of an angry child, the fever dream of Jerome Bixby, I will not praise the Lord in fear and trembling. Half of me is a believer, and I am even tolerant of the Aztecs and Carthaginians and Torquemada. If there is a God, He is an Evil God. I hate Him forever.
"All you have to do is love Him, Mommy." said the little girl across the river. "Don't you know how long you'll be in Hell?"
"I know." said Mimi Rogers. "I still can't love Him."
"How long, Mommy? as the girl fades away. "How long?"
..............."Forever."
74: Well, yeah, but that's the problem with the Book of Job. It's a great story, and God gets some awesome lines, but it's not all that convincing unless it happens to you. When God appears to me out of the whirlwind maybe I'll change my behavior, but since I have very little confidence that will ever happen, I see no need to stop wearing clothes made from two different kinds of cloth at this time.
73: I'm not talking about "people." I'm talking about the rhetorical "you," by which I mean, "me, and people more or less like me." I mean, shit, threats and anger don't even work on kids as well as appeals to their better feelings and affection for mama--unless you've repeatedly backed up the threats and anger with physical punishment (which we are assuming the god that threatens hell wouldn't be able to do, or else why threaten?).
74: My own "I wouldn't do it" isn't about not understanding rules; it's about following them even though one finds them repressive. Again, the child analogy: you can get them to be obedient by being strict, but then they lie and sneak around. If you're really omniscient, you find out, and they go to hell. If they really know you exist (and are omniscient), they'll figure that out, and then they'll just fight back, figuring they're going to go to hell regardless.
73: God X or Y would understand about intermittent positive reinforcement. Every so often while you were behaving yourself it would zap you with the bliss ray. When you have the bliss ray you don't need the lake of fire.
74: The problem is that if God created us, he gave us our capacity to reason and use logic, too. So if he's all, "Bring me a spotless virgin before the rising of the full moon for I am perfect and just," and this doesn't quite mesh with our notion that human sacrifices are bad, then it calls into question why God gave us a sense of morality that leads us to the conclusion that he's immoral. Either God has gone insane in the last couple billion years or you're not in fact talking to God.
If the God that shows up resembles the Christian God, there's going to be chances for *forgiveness* for all the fun you had when you should have been chaste. And all of the rules about what to wear and what to eat don't apply, and then ones that do get overrun by the forgiveness thing. Some denominations believe God asks you personally when you die, so everyone gets a pretty weighted choice to go to heaven.
So if a God shows up and says, 'Do this horrible thing or go to Hell', rationally, I'm going to say, 'you're not the God I've been told about these years, fuck off, I'm waiting for the real one.' If I'm that wrong about what I believe, I'm probably screwed anyway.
If the God shows up wanting all the Jewish rules, well, fine then, but Jewish eschatology doesn't include the whole eternal damnation thing, last I checked. What's the penalty if you don't go around smiting the Philistines? Most of the penalties seemed to happen in this world. The next you just float around being a spirit thingy in Sheol, I guess.
Who's to say that the new moon goat sacrifice doesn't make sense if God says it does?
Human powers of reason, for one. (This is one of the reasons I still find Catholicism intellectually cool.)
76: This is the nicest thing anyone's ever said about my blogging. I'm getting all choked up here.
But substantively, I'd say that the people you're talking about think they believe in God, but don't -- or at least not in the way they believe in the security guard in a bank.
81: Now you're changing the ground rules. B said nothing about bliss rays; she maintained that by merely confirming his own existence a creator god could get more people to obey his laws out of simple gratitude than a hell-based god could through negative reinforcement. Bliss rays means moving the goal posts.
89 seems like hubris to me (the second part, not the first--the first is sweet). I mean, surely a lot of faithful believers didn't really believe (how Calvinistic) but surely many hundreds of thousands of them, in fact, truly do. Otherwise we wouldn't have martyrs.
That said, though, the idea that even the truest of true believers didn't believe in the way they do the bank security guard just goes to show the impossibility of perfection, and why it is that if god really exists and is really as judgmental as some say, we're basically all fucked. (Which, to be fair, the bible does tell us.)
Okay, 76 was a little pwned by 64, but I retract my "good point" point anyway. LB is responding to the laissez-fair attitude: "yeah, whatever, God, no God, I'll behave the same" which has an implicit willfulness about it. I didn't mean (and I don't believe apo did either) that I would find myself unable to follow different, stricter rules, I meant that I wouldn't try.
So the fact that people are unable to totally refrain from pre-marital sex, or gambling, or whatever, the point is that some of them are trying, because they are scared.
88: I had an Orthodox friend who believed in reincarnation, for Jews anyway. But everybody kind of stops and pops out when the messiah shows up? It all sounded very complicated.
94: Hm. So Text's point in 76 is that people try, but fail (which is kind of my point too--or rather, that knowing that trying would be doomed to failure, and thus to damnation, I'd get pissed off and rebel), but what you're saying is, god stands in front of you and says, "see that lake of burning fire? Cover your scarlet hair, you hussy, or I shall throw you into it" and you just shrug?
89: I'm a big softie today. But I think you're requirements for sincere belief are absurdly high. There are no humans without sin (choosing whichever definition of sin we like, still there aren't any) and yet I wouldn't say there are no sincere adherants to the various religions. It's just a hell of a lot easier not to rob the bank than it is not to have sex with your sexy neighbor who wants to have sex with you, or not to lie when there are no immediate consequences, or to devote your life to others.
My understanding of my fundie friends' beliefs was that you could do a bunch of bad stuff, but were basically going to Heaven if you accepted JC as your savior. "We are sinners, all," my second fundamentalist Christian best friend named Melissa used to shrug. Maybe being sorry was necessary too. Perhaps SJ can speak to this. It wasn't actually necessary that you not do the bad things to get into Heaven. And if you're Catholic, you need to confess, right? But is there anything you can't get out of by confessing and sincerely repenting of? Thus, the people doing all those bad things don't really believe that the consequences of their actions is damnation.
I did meet a girl once who unironically referred to herself as a "heathen" and seemed to think there was a possibility she'd be damned, but wasn't moving towards changing her ways. She was the best friend of someone who comments on the personal blog of an Unfogged commenter. Maybe that commenter is reading now. (Hi!)
It's just a hell of a lot easier not to rob the bank than it is not to have sex with your sexy neighbor who wants to have sex with you, or not to lie when there are no immediate consequences, or to devote your life to others.
I guess, but it still seems like the bank guard problem. Most people don't have a problem keeping their hands of their neighbor when his wife is in the room; or not lying when they'll get caught; or doing their jobs when there's accountability. People have trouble doing right when they think they won't get busted for doing wrong. If you knew you were busted (God being omniscient and all), I'd have to think that behaving well would be easier.
Okay, I guess if your scarlet-hair scenario happened, I'd probably do something about it, at least in the immediate sense. But why is that the hypothesis? We can make it the one we want to discuss, but I don't see the point of it, which is why I've consistently rejected LB's formulation of it. Our current options are a) not believing in a God or b) believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do. Given those two options, I'd behave the same way under either.
103: Okay, but 'believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do' seems very different to me from 'knowing' there is a God. I don't really understand what's going on in most believers' heads, but I know how I'd act if I had knowledge.
"believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do"
If you believed in a God who would allow you into heaven if you were "good enough" (for some reasonable and attainable value of "good enough") and otherwise send you to hell, would it change your actions?
But you could just as easily say "I'd behave the same way under either a god-regime or a godless-regime" and mean, "I'd try as hard as I can to do what's right, and probably fail sometimes."
Saying "I wouldn't live my life any differently" doesn't necessarily entail a lack of trying.
102: But the point is the difference between immediate consequences and long-term consequences. And even when the immediate consequences are right in front of us, we sometimes screw up.
First, there's the forgiveness thing. Second, I think you overestimate our rationality when faced only with extremely long term consequences. I mean, people smoke cigarettes, ride motorcycles without helmets, ingest large amounts of animal fat, etc., knowing at least intellectually what the long term consequences are. Damnation is even further off.
People take all sorts of stupid risks where the damage won't be incurred for quite some time. We're not that rational. And when you mix in the sex drive, it's much worse.
Thinking about it, I guess you get your good point back. Looking at LB's 104, even knowledge can only get you so far. I know that if I keep smoking indefinitely I'll probably get cancer and die, which would be pretty bad, at least bad in the way that I can imagine (rather than the way I can't imagine, i.e. eternal damnation), but I haven't quit yet.
109: That makes sense. But the distinction remains: do you currently try as hard as you can to do what's right by your own lights, or by what you understand of god's lights? And if it's the former, wouldn't your behavior change if god showed up and said, "no, I don't care at all if you go to law school, but you are so not allowed to dye your hair"?
Also, I have no particular illusions that I am anywhere near as good a person I could be from Stereotypical Christian God's perspective (I say 'stereotypical' because I don't really know everything that's in the New Testament; maybe there's some verse that says you should be comfy and have an Ipod). If I were I'd spend my life in the Peace Corps, or go to Iraq to minister to the sick, or at the very least give away all my money above what was necessary for subsistence. If I knew, really knew in the LizardBreathian sense, that everything like this I did would make damnation less likely, I'd live differently.
Do I get more ice cream because I gave it back before you offered the reward?
This is instructive. People will behave in a way that they intrinsically feel is right, combined with some level of selfish behavior, like how I submitted even without the promise of ice cream.
Maybe the point is that LB is right, and I'm an arrogant bastard. I'm kind of ok with that.
Yeah, I'm not buying the 'you aren't perfect therefore you really don't believe in God' line. First off, most religions acknowledge that to be human is to foul things up; God's already cool with that.
Second, and more importantly, that's not a type of reasoning we normally accept. If I'm on a diet but I have a moment of weakness and devour a chocolate cake (or, say, half a baguette. erm.), that doesn't mean I don't value my health or don't believe the consequences. It just means I'm not perfect.
See, this is where it all falls apart for me. All the rules are clearly human inventions. Because if there is a being powerful enough to create the entire universe, then its nature is so utterly beyond us that we couldn't begin to fathom what it would have us do any more than a shark could predict wind conditions on top of a mountain. To posit the existence of something that grand that has a specific set of dos and don'ts and keep a daily scorecard for each of the X billion people over x million years inflates our own importance so wildly that it's absurd.
There may be something out there that is the essence of existence, to which we go upon shuffling off this mortal coil, but that's something so enormous that our petty goings-on here on this wet dust mote in less than a blink of its heavenly eyelid really isn't going to be of importance.
most religions acknowledge that to be human is to foul things up; God's already cool with that.
If he were cool, there wouldn't be things like being born again or confession. Or, while we're at it, original sin. Or the crucifixion. I think most religions acknowledge fallability, but I don't think that, strictly speaking, we can say it's okay with god (although obviously that depends on how liberal your theology is).
Well, people rob banks too, despite the existence of security guards. I'm not so much claiming that the fact that religious people aren't perfect means they don't believe in God, more that most of them don't seem particularly more punctilious than us heathens. I may be wrong, but I'd think the addition of some sincerely believed in fear or hope related to my moral status would make me behave more scrupulously than my own unaided efforts do; I don't see such an obvious effect among the theists I know.
It's okay with God to the extent that the religion doesn't say 'live a perfect life or be damned'. All the born again/confession/redemption bit is the get out of jail free card.
That's why it's best to go with one of the deathbed conversion sects. As long as you don't go in the flash of an eye, there's always time to hit the reset button.
And if they do, they have to sew their own scarlet As on their clothing. But if they can do that, then they get into heaven. It's all so very confusing.
126: Yeah, that's what I was saying in 100(!). No one's actions on earth actually address LB's "what if you knew you'd be damned" hypothetical, because Christianity has escape hatches.
131: Different kind of Calvinist. Anyway, maybe I've got it wrong and the Hawthorne people were some other strict assholish dissenter sect. That early American stuff always confuses me.
well it would suck to operate out of fear, right? I think most religious people would rather think they act according to what they should do, and not out of sticks and carrots. So we can all tell what's moral, regardless of faith, and all should try to act accordingly. I don't see what's wrong with that.
LB, some people are allowed to be bad Christians, too. Surely some people only go through the motions; I'm just not seeing what that's supposed to be showing.
135: Nothing's wrong with that, but LB and I, at least, are trying to have a stoned college dorm room conversation here. Like, dude, if you *knew* you were going to hell if you masturbated, really knew...I took this post like the Ogged Armageddon-like disaster post. This was an oggedian post, LB. Be proud.
God is just an imaginary friend that some people need, and even if he existed, fuck it, I'd keep on living the way I do, and if he didn't want me in his heaven, I'm sure I'd find a lot of friends in the other place.
Wait, God gives blowjobs?! I'm so confused. btw, since we're on the subject of God and his sex partner(s), do you suppose the Virgin Mary was just a "technical virgin" like the young women who take the virginity pledges and then have oral and anal sex with their boyfriends, reasoning (a la Clinton) that that's not really sex? If Mary was a virgin in the strictest sense of the word, Joseph must really have been pissed. Refusing to put out before marriage is bad enough, but refusing to put out (in any way) after marriage, and then getting knocked up and claiming God's the father, is really beyond the pale IMO.
121: Because if there is a being powerful enough to create the entire universe, then its nature is so utterly beyond us that we couldn't begin to fathom what it would have us do any more than a shark could predict wind conditions on top of a mountain
Apo's comment remind me of one of my favorite unfogged comments ever [#73]:
In the grand scheme of things, we are mites who exist for less than the blink of an eye, riding through space on a wet speck of dust. Whether you or I or Phelps (or our great-great-grandparents or great-great-grandchildren) miss our calling isn't really that important.
We will return you to your meaningless Sartrean existences following these brief messages from our corporate sponsors.
I move for an Apo book of poetry on the question of g-d's existence.
There's clearly been a lot of judeo-christian brainwashing going on here. Who said that people are inherently flawed? That's original sin. It's not anywhere near a universal principle.
Rather, I'd say that in most religions god doesn't have much to say about what I do, but rather what I do for her.
For instance, say God was one of those greek-type dieties and came to me and said, "I'm as hungry as a motherfucker. Sacrifice me one of those lambs. Maybe a few of those grapes. And make it snappy or I'll torch your ass with one of these here thunderbolts."
I'd be rounding up the sheep as fast as I could and I doubt the sanity of anyone who did differently.
I live in a community where I keep my trap shut about my lack of religion. Reading all these comments is making me feel REALLY warm-fuzzy. I'm sort of tearing up and fanning myself and thinking 'I can't believe there are so many people who aren't threatened by casual talk about the non-existence or implications of God. '
No, it's not simple observation. The observation is that people do all sorts of different things. The notion that many of those things that people often do is bad or wrong does not follow from that observation.
If I'm a shellfish god, I wouldn't care what you did to your neighbour, but it would matter a great deal what you did to my scallops.
163: No, the observation "people are flawed" is that people make mistakes, despite our good intentions. Sometimes we try to be good and kind, and sometimes we don't, but even when we are trying, we still can't always get it right.
Sure, bliss-ray = moving goalposts, but then what would you call the super-anti-Godmification ray, hmmm?
Any God real enough to convince everyone he's not a hallucination or a space alien with neat AV equipment is real enough to get torched. We have the technology!
If we fail to zap God, it will be because our will was sapped by the backstabbing diety-appeasers and the traitorous media. Failure is not an option, people!
"Original sin" is not the same as saying "people aren't perfect." It's the religious doctrine that all humans inherit a mystical "sin nature," which is not merely the propensity to do wrong but a taint of wrongness in and of itself that makes one guilty and undeserving of heaven. This, as I understand it, is why infants are baptized under Catholicism; there's no actual wrong a baby could have committed, but she's still guilty of sin by dint of the sin nature inherited from her parent.
I didn't mention it at first, because I thought it was a typo, but so many people are doing it that I have to say, "Folks, it's 'deity.' " If God is on a diet, let's hope it's a vegetarian one and not Atkins. Otherwise, when we masturbate, he might gobble us up to stave off his craving for pasta.
No, he'd rinse us off first in his God sink. I assume God would stick to his diet. Wait--is God so powerful he can make a diet too hard for him to stay on?
169: Thank you for pointing that out, Tia. Another misspelling that galls me (well, OK, they all do) is "athiest." "It's" when one means "its" might be the worst.
157, 159: Huh, I somehow was under the impression that Mary was supposed to have been a virgin forever. Being a virgin temporarily isn't much of an achievement -- everyone's a virgin at least temporarily. I guess the big deal is being a virgin and yet managing to become pregnant and give birth. These days that's not a difficult feat to achieve, what with artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. Then there's that bizarre Civil War story, beginning with a soldier who got shot in the balls; the bullet traveled on, lodging in some Southern belle's abdomen and knocking her up. Some local doc knew both of them and figured out what had happened. He introduced them, they got married and lived happily ever after, and he wrote the whole thing up for a medical journal.
Damn. Snopes says the story is bullshit. Another one bites the dust.
OT -- Fearless Leader has exercised his first veto, vetoing the stem cell research bill. Asshole. There's an outside chance of overriding the veto, so contact your Senators/Rep now.
Jesus' siblings are specifically mentioned in the Bible, Matthew 13:55-56.
Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And his brethren, James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas?
And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things?
I always think of the first two as Jimmy Christ and Joey Christ.
I was not raised Catholic, so I don't know first-hand, but my understanding is that official Catholic doctrine is that Mary remained a virgin for the rest of her life. However, several passages in the New Testament mention Jesus having siblings (specifically, brothers, who are named - I don't remember any, except that one was named Judas, but not that Judas), some specifically in the context of "his mother and brothers did X thing," leaving really no interpretation other than that Mary and Joseph did the marital wild thing. If I remember, part of the discussion around the ossuary that was found in Israel a couple of years ago (some people claim it has the bones of one of Jesus' brothers or nephews, again I can't remember) is that its authenticity would challenge Catholic doctrine on Mary's virginity.
I'm also not a Christian, so I don't have a dog in that fight.
That Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus is a doctrinal stance of the Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches. Of the early fathers of the Church, only Tertullian seems to have questioned the teaching.
The question of Mary's virginity is related to the interpretation of the New Testament references to Jesus' "brothers". Those who defend the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity point out that Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ and his disciples, lacked a specific word for "cousin," so that the word "brother" was used instead. This is also true in Hebrew and there are several places in the Old Testament that use the word "brother" to mean nephew or cousin. Others argue that Jesus' "brothers" were sons of Joseph by a previous wife -- and thus Jesus' stepbrothers, who would have been regarded as his half-brothers by the people Jesus and Mary lived alongside, who were unaware of Jesus' divinity and assumed him to be the son of Joseph. Matthew 13:56 and Mark 6:3 also mention the presence of "sisters" in addition to the "brothers."
The most prominent leaders of the Reformation, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin also defended the perpetual virginity of Mary against those who questioned it. But by the 17th century, the Catholic and Protestant churches came to see Mary as a major point of division, and Protestant theologians began arguing that Mary did not remain a virgin and that the "brothers" of Jesus were indeed his half-brothers, sons of Mary and Joseph. Today most Protestants reject the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. They find no explicit scriptural mention of Mary not having other children, and consequently, with the evidence in the Bible that she did have other children, find no scriptural basis for the doctrine of perpetual virginity. Proponents claim there is implicit evidence of Jesus being without living brothers or sisters at the time of his crucifixion in that Jesus entrusts his mother to John. They say this would not be done if a relative of Mary were able to take her into his or her own family. However, it is also said that Jesus' brothers were not believers (John 7:5) until after the resurrection (Acts 1:14), so some believe Jesus entrusts Mary to John, the beloved apostle, for that reason.
Muslims also believe that Mary remained a virgin for her entire life.
181: It wasn't discussed in grade school, except in passing by the occasional psycho nun, but I don't think Catholics believe in Mary's perpetual virginity. Although they might believe her virginity was restored when she got to heaven, for all I know.
I must say, I was raised as a Protestant, don't remember when I didn't know about Jesus' brothers, and had no idea Catholics believed otherwise. And therefore I assumed that references to "the Virgin Mary" referred to her at the time of Nativity, not as a perpetual condition. Learning otherwise puts a new complexion on things for me.
I don't know if it's still current doctrine, but back when I was reading medieval lit in college, there were a number of references to the doctrine that Mary remained physically a virgin (which I understood to mean intact hymen) even after childbirth -- that Christ passed through her without injuring her as light passes through a stained-glass window, picking up color/humanity along the way.
A friend of mine, raised as a liberal Catholic, has told of her own religious education in a way that reminds me of what JM says about her Mormonism: that the faith as experienced by the majority of its adherents was as foreign to her as it would have been to me.
When my wife taught at DePaul and Loyola, she would sometimes need to refer to the doctrine to make sense of a poem, and would make sure everyone knew transubstantiation was Catholic doctrine. The reaction of her (mostly Catholic) students was "No way!"
You mean they didn't know that the wafer and wine were supposed to have become the body and blood of Christ in a real, rather than metaphorical, sense? How could you be Catholic and not know that?
Her question and mine, never satisfactorily answered. Asked to choose whether a "symbolic" or "literal" interpretation was Catholic doctrine, almost all chose "symbolic," and were sometimes quite unnerved to find the opposite. Her closest friend, a former nun, waved her hand when told this, as if to say this disconnect was old hat.
Although they might believe her virginity was restored when she got to heaven, for all I know.
Dunno what that would entail, but John Paul II did claim that there's no sex in heaven. (Disclaimer: I am not endorsing anything else that the blog I linked to, which looks pretty weird, has to say.)
Fred, don't have my bible with me — and why not, you may ask — but I remember him referring to the passage where Jesus says something like: "In the world that is to come, we will not be husband and wife, or man and woman..." I remember liking that when I read he had said as much, some twenty-five years ago now, I think.
Actually, yeah, I was having a conversation with a guy who was raised Catholic (or so I thought, at least they went to mass on a regular basis in childhood) and we were talking about various implausible religious beliefs, and I mentioned transubstantiation, and he was like "do [the Catholics] really believe that it becomes the blood and body?"
Um, yeah.
Maybe they don't teach that to kids as much these days.
Are we talking about what Catholics believe, or Catholic doctrine? B/c they're not the same thing.
Doctrine is that Mary was perpetually a virgin, that she was herself conceived w/out original sin (otherwise somehow being inside her would make Jesus dirty) (that parenthetical is not part of Catholic doctrine, officially, though it's obviously why the w/out original sin thing matters) (imho. The second parenthetical also doesn't reflect doctrine. Nor does this one. Obviously), that Jesus was an only child, that the host (communion wafers) literally transforms itself into the body of christ, etc. etc.
As an actual Catholic, I personally believe that "original sin" is basically the same thing as "evolution means survival of the fittest, not progress towards perfection, dummy--get over your teleologies." We have wars and get cancers and kill ourselves because being at the top of the food chain doesn't mean being perfect organisms.
201: Presumably b/c being Catholic is supposed to mean "I won't pressure you for sex" and being Buddhist is supposed to mean "I'm a really together and sensitive guy"? I dunno. I think SCMT is being weird.
Catholic doctrine. I know that lots of Catholics are pretty far from the Church doctrinally -- what I find weird is the idea that lots of them don't know the basic doctrine they're differing from.
199: You know, rules like "kittens do not, in fact, live in the pantry," or "kittens do not get to climb up the screen door no matter how awesome it must be for them."
As for how it's going, they test just fine on paper but their lab work really lacks something. So far all they seem to grasp is that they are not supposed to do these things while we are watching.
I don't have a link (as I recall, this evolved over a number of comment threads), but Weiner started using 'pwned' to mean 'I said it first' rather than its more conventional meaning 'I have bested and humiliated you.' Ogged took exception to this solecism, and Weiner-pwned sprung up to fill the new meaning without creating ambiguity with pwned-pwned.
210: For cats, that's really pretty good. My mother's old cat never got 'Don't put neighbors in the hospital' down -- if yours are staying out of the pantry when directly observed, that's excellent.
209: "Does anyone have a link for the exegisis of Wiener-pwned? I know broadly but would like to be completely informed in the premisses."
Really, there should be an entire Unfogged glossary, with links. But there won't be, because it would interfere with the mechanism and point of Insider References.
You can be a Catholic just by being baptized and confirmed, technically. It's sort of like being born into a family, in a way that doesn't seem to be present in many Protestant denominations. A Catholic's Catholic short of being excommunicated, as far as the Church is concerned; an evangelical is only an evangelical insofar as she's currently practicing. (Mormonism seems to be similar.)
'Catholic' is just a bigger tent, and no one gets kicked out easily, just made to feel guilty, and a lot of people never learn all the ins and outs of the doctrine. As long as you've got the creed it's pretty much all you need, anyway.
213: Reading Unfogged is really like listening to smurf conversation. To the vast majority of the population it's always going to be gibberish, but if one filters out the noise, the structure of a recognizable language becomes apparent.
Ex. "It's such a smurfy day. Can you smurf me that smurf-smurf Wolfson smurf?"
"Weiner-pwned!"
I have the sense that most of the injokes are one-off; that you don't need to know them to follow the conversation when it's about something rather than just being chatter. But I may be wrong.
I can't often follow the in-jokes and I'm here a lot. It took me forever to figure out what 'fuck to oboe' was, and I had posted on the thread it originated.
To be fair, a great many Protestants are just as clueless, often about the defining issue which created their own denomination. I was given an old-style catechism, with the Westminster Catechism, in the mid-sixties at just about the last moment that was happening. When a year later we moved to a more affluent area, it was obvious that the Presbyterian church there had never taught such things. When I get into conversations with church members today, basic historical and doctrinal issues are utterly unknown, and in my experience, many Protestants know nothing about the history, or even what their denomination's name means.
what I find weird is the idea that lots of them don't know the basic doctrine they're differing from.
Did everyone see Stephen Colbert's interview last month of a U.S. congressman, from one of the Carolinas IIRC, who wants to put the Ten Commandments up everyplace? Colbert asked him, "What are the Ten Commandments?" The guy was completely flummoxed: he came up with "don't murder; don't lie; don't steal," then gave up. (To be clear, I'm not saying the congressman in question was Catholic. I assume he was not.)
I wonder what percentage of ostensible Christians have actually read the Bible -- 1%, maybe? On the subject of "crazy shit in the Bible," the Freedom from Religion Foundation's Bible quiz is most enlightening. If people who claim everything in the Bible is true actually did what it tells them to do, they'd get locked up for the rest of their lives. For example, the Bible directs one to stone to death disobedient children, people who work on the Sabbath, women who fail to cry out while being raped, etc. Fun stuff. :P
220: "I have the sense that most of the injokes are one-off; that you don't need to know them to follow the conversation when it's about something rather than just being chatter."
I'm frequently baffled, for what little that's worth. Very little, no doubt.
Oh, and I'm particularly frequently baffled by Unfogged references; I should mention that, too.
(Also, I only occasionally click on links, because it's particularly tiresome to wait for them to load on dial-up speeds.)
225: I'm afraid that as regards smurfs conversation, I gots nuthin'.
222: "It took me forever to figure out what 'fuck to oboe' was...."
Beats me. (Does it? I have no idea.)
"Did everyone see Stephen Colbert's interview last month of a U.S. congressman, from one of the Carolinas IIRC, who wants to put the Ten Commandments up everyplace?"
So far as I can tell, given the number of blogs that linked to it: yes.
They were egregiously anti-feminist, but they were also wonderfully pacifist and squishily Marxist, so it all balances out*. Also, that one where the one smurf wants to be an astronaut but can't get off the ground and all the other smurfs dress up like aliens to convince him he's landed on another planet is like the best story ever.**
*probably not
**also probably not but I still liked it a lot
I try to keep my Bible knowledge up to speed, because I find it extremely useful when the door-to-door Christians come knocking. It really throws them when you argue back using scripture. You can see the panic in their eyes.
JM: Been reading upthread? I feel the "sect-ier" a faith is, the more likely its adherents know its doctrine; the "churchier," the less likely. Something for us Matthew Arnold buffs to chew on.
It gets complicated, though, when a faith sets up hierarchical structures of knowledge. A lot of the stuff Mormons get ragged on for--the holy underwear, each couple Gods for another world--only gets "revealed" in Temple rituals. I bet there are young Scientologists raised in the religion, if that's the right word, who first hear of the wackier inner secrets from schoolyard friends and the internet.
This comes down to the mechanisms of social control, really, and how humanely they're exercized.
Then perhaps the ignorance of Catholics about what us non-C's are actually taught about their religion is in a sense, deliberate on the part of the church? I would have thought it was more a matter of the knowledge being there, just not emphasized.
OK, in all the webbertrons lore of the Mormon church I have read, I've never heard that one. Is this something along the lines of "true believers become the God of an alternate universe?" Have I parsed that statement correctly?
No, I do think it will depend on the faith--its newness, its perceived need for retaining believers, its defensiveness, and, perhaps, the maturity of its more obscure theological points.
I have to go to bed now; tomorrow I have to make sure I don't get assigned to a very long and very nasty weapons-conspiracy-murder trial.
McManlyPants, it's complicated. But basically the exhortation to be like Jesus, for Mormons, entails a promise that, if they are truly stand-out specimens of righteousness, they can actually do what Jesus did. For some other planet.
This is a pretty distant impetus for moral action for most of the Mormons I've known. They might remember it if someone prompted them. I first heard about it on the schoolyard, and some apologetic graduate student who'd been roped into teaching Sunday School explained the thinking behind it after I brought it up. As far as I know, this theological precept hasn't really developed much in the way of a mature commentary or integration into Mormon culture.
(But then there's Orson Scott Card. A third cousin!)
I would have thought it was more a matter of the knowledge being there, just not emphasized.
In Catholicism, it's not hidden. Most of what I know was mentioned in CCD classes. But it's generally presented at a very low level; and that's because Catholic theology is fucking hard. Like, probably-a-PhD-candidate-hard.
And really, whether one can explain transsubstantiation isn't really the point of the faith. All you really need is the creed; if that's too hard, a) God loves you and died for your sins b) be nice to your fellow humans c) if it feels good, stop.
Plus, I think the Catholic Church hasn't quite realized that it has a literate laity yet; it spent a long time assuming that its adherents couldn't read or write or afford books, and I don't think it's quite awakened to some of those changes yet.
I have an unholy memory for Biblical trivia. When I was applying to colleges I applied to a conservative Bible college and I won a scholarship on an exam that explicitly tested, among the history, science, and other stuff, knowledge of the Bible. I'm sure that didn't make the Protestant founders of the school happy.
I do remember Card musing about the disproportionate number of sci fi writers who were Mormons in his Beliefnet column a few years ago. I made the connection you just alluded to, I don't remember if he made it explicit.
rules like "kittens do not, in fact, live in the pantry," or "kittens do not get to climb up the screen door no matter how awesome it must be for them."
AWWWWWW!!!!
Okay, excuse the necessary cuteness moment, please.
The Catholic hierarchy does not deliberately conceal doctrine, not by a long shot. They periodically bemoan the fact that lay Catholics don't know much about it. But as Cala said, we're baptized as infants and confirmed in middle school, so that the primary education most Catholics receive in the faith happens when they're children.
Plus, there's just more of an emphasis on practice than on doctrine. "Good Catholics" are the ones who go to mass, who volunteer at the soup kitchen and homeless shelter, who send their kids to Catholic schools, who are involved in the life of the parish. None of this requires people to know a lot about whatever weird rules the Pope is coming up with nowadays.
I think that the Ignorance-bemoaned/learned-a-simplified-version-as-children/practice more-than-doctrine pattern holds for Protestants and Jews also. The religiously informed and mature are minorities in every faith.
Orson Scott Card not only voted for Bush in the last election, but advertised such on Slate. For nerds everywhere, it was like learning that Ezra Pound supported the nazis.
Protestants generally have a greater knowledge of the minutiae of Bible knowledge, though; there's more of an emphasis on personal discovery relationship/etc. I may be confusing 'Protestant' and 'fundamentalist', though. (Ex cathedra, the lot of 'em.)
Knowing rules gets you nowhere. (1 Corinthians 13!!!!!!) On the other hand, it's good for winning arguments, if not the love, with a devout sister.
Kittens on screen doors are cute. Kittens that have climbed screen doors and don't know how to get down are really funny.
247: We should totally do a survey. It seems to me that compared to the general U.S. population we're disproportionately Jewish but about right in terms of Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Mormons. Really underrepresented as far as Hindus and Buddhists go, though.
Also, my sense of the Catholic::Protestant ratio being about right probably has something to do with my having never lived in the south.
don't be mean to the poor door-to-door missionaries. They're somebody's cousins.
I'm somebody's cousin, too. I'm never mean to them; I have a certain admiration for them, actually. Lord knows I could never go door-to-door doing that. The very thought gives me the creeping jibblies. On the other hand, they knocked on my door looking for a conversation about Jesus. I'm just accomodating them.
I don't get the feeling they get non-hostilely engaged very often, because they usually seem so surprised. I'm always polite, offer them something to drink, and whatnot. But I also know the Bible pretty well thanks to that Baptist upbringing, and if you know it well enough, almost every argument has a contradictory argument somewhere else. If you're gonna witness, you ought to come prepared.
Arguably, this blog is also lousy with ex-Mormons--three regulars? what're the odds?
Cala, Ender wasn't Mormon. His universe was, deeply, but going further might make you sad.
Some of Card's more explicitly LDS-tinged SF that remains interesting: A Planet Called Treason (republished as Treason, if I've got the sequence right) and The Worthing Saga. Both of them are very clearly working out theological problems within the LDS tradition, but both of them--especially the first--could be read by gentiles non-Mormons as simply posing interesting questions.
"I do remember Card musing about the disproportionate number of sci fi writers who were Mormons in his Beliefnet column a few years ago."
I missed that one. I can think of only a handful of Mormon skiffy writers, of whom he is, absolutely, most prominent. Do you have a link to this? (It's true I'm not keeping up currently on the last couple of crops, but still, curious.)
Maybe these people just think that any God worthy of the name wouldn't condem them to eternal hellfire because they are living lives of sufficient virtue already?
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:20 PM
I think when people say this sort of thing they just mean that they already try to act morally, and would do so irrespective of whether they believed in god. I assume that if god revealed him/her/itself to us and demanded that we all pray, attend church, and suck up to him/her/it, or burn in hellfire for all eternity if we failed to do so, most of us would capitulate to god's demands.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:22 PM
That's some fairly impressive self-confidence. But this is coming from a woman who wouldn't expect to keep her job, let alone her immortal soul, if her boss knew what she did all day.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:23 PM
I'm with you. Free will is all well and good, but if I know there is a God and I know she has certain rules for right and wrong, who am I to argue.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:24 PM
Isn't your answer to this contingent on which side of the Euthyphro paradox you fall on?
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:28 PM
I think you're confusing belief in God with belief in the teachings of Christianity. I interpreted apo's comment to mean that he doesn't see any reason to believe in all the specific stuff, but he could entertain the idea of there being some sort of all-powerful being out there. But whether or not such a being exists, he would stick to his own sense of morality, which seems to work well enough.
Apologies if I'm misinterpreting you, apo.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:29 PM
The link doesn't take me to the place apo said this, so I've tracked it down on my own. I think he's talking about the difference a proof of the existence of god would make. Given such a proof, revelation, the moral law as laid down in the bible, which interpretation of the bible exalts these and condemns those to damnation, etc. remain unsolved. And I think he's saying that proving god exists, by a monsignior wrestling on Monty Python if need be, doesn't make those other consequences you allude to any more likely, or relevant.
I think the people who first began making that statement, in the renaissance, believed he existed, just not the way the church did. And that he would not be that petty, jealous character in any case.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:29 PM
If there was proof of the existance of God and clear evidance of what it wanted and of the benefits of doing what it wanted, I would probably change my behavior.
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:29 PM
I think #1 is right. I sort of assume God's a pretty good diety who thinks it's funny when I do certain things that might normally be considered venial sins.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:34 PM
5, whether or not the Eurypthro problem returns depends on 6 & 7 bring up, whether, along with proof that some God exists, we also know what that God requires not to damn us to eternal hellfire. If we do know that, than the problem is stated as, "Would you do what you think is moral even if you know God disagrees and will punish you for it?" This is a new problem, as the Eurypthro problem is, to my understanding, "Is doing/abstaining from X moral because God(s) made it so, or did God(s) command doing/abstaining from X because they recognized it as moral."
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:38 PM
Sure I'd obey God's bizarre little laws for a while, but only until the Resistence figures out how to blow him up with the super-anti-Godmification ray.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:43 PM
"Resistence" s/b "spelled correctly"
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:44 PM
It would be the height of arrogance for an ant to say, "If I knew that Newt was holding a magnifying glass over the entrance to my home, I would wait til dusk to go back." -- He is just an ant! He can't modify his behavior that way -- he is going to carry his crumb into the hill and burn up in the focussed sunlight regardless.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:44 PM
Or something like that.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:44 PM
Are we ready for Paradise Lost or what?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:44 PM
clear evidance of what it wanted
This isn't really a condition that can be met, though. People who already are completely convinced that God does, in fact, exist have been arguing since the very beginning of the whole concept over what the true meaning and dictates of religion are. Knowing for certain that God exists doesn't mean we get a clearly-worded checklist of right and wrong--the ambiguity over what to do with this new-found knowledge of God's existence would remain.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:45 PM
5, whether or not the Eurypthro problem returns depends on 6 & 7 bring up, whether, along with proof that some God exists, we also know what that God requires not to damn us to eternal hellfire.
Well, yes. I'm assuming that part of what Silvana and Apo were saying is that even if they knew that God existed and had some sense of what it wanted that they wouldn't change their behavior. If they didn't know, then not changing makes perfect sense.
If we do know that, than the problem is stated as, "Would you do what you think is moral even if you know God disagrees and will punish you for it?"
This seems like a different claim than the one made -- there are all sorts of areas in which I have no strong moral opinions but God might. If I knew that God existed and was the God of, say, Judaism, with strong opinions about eating shellfish, I'd be right off lobster, with no moral qualms because I don't see myself as having a moral obligation to eat shellfish. I understand Apo to be saying that he would ignore any such strictures, regardless.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:45 PM
If they didn't know, then not changing makes perfect sense.
Which is why I assume that this is their argument.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:48 PM
I guess so, but then it seems trivial -- why bother saying it?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:49 PM
I admire your honesty (both LB and Idealist) in how you would react to a god showing up and saying, "OK, y'all, here's the ground rules." My opinion is that if there's a divine being who cares more about the dress code than anything else, its priorities are misplaced and its rules are stupid. It has better things to worry about. If its rules are all arbitrary and meaningless, I'm (a) probably not going to be very good at them anyway and (b), y'know, up its nose with a rubber hose.
That said, I think it's evidence of the tragic effectiveness of purely human bullying that so many religious leaders - of many if not all religions - have used Hell/etc as a way to push the potential wisdom of their own traditions out of the spotlight and replace it with fear as a tool of control. For example, that the first thing one (I certainly do this, I'm afraid) thinks of is Hell and damnation, when one thinks of Christianity, is a sad reversal of what I suspect were the core beliefs of the first Christians.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:51 PM
I guess so, but then it seems trivial -- why bother saying it?
Because people keep asking you if you believe in God, perhaps?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:52 PM
I think the hypothetical of God revealing him/her/itself is a pretty interesting one, because I don't think the actual reaction to God showing up tomorrow - even in a country where 60% of Americans say they believe Genesis is literally true - would be to obey God or worship him, but to just go completely apeshit. I was raised as a fundamentalist Christian and was taught that the Rapture was going to happen in our lifetimes, and I can tell you that even though I met dozens upon dozens of people who said they believed in God and miracles and the end of the world, and clearly believed they believed, I don't think I've ever met a single human being who actually did. Something like that falls completely outside the history of human experience, and if we woke up tomorrow to see Yahweh in the sky throwing plagues of frogs and turning the seas to blood, James Dobson would be just as shocked shitless as the rest of us.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:54 PM
I admire your honesty
I'm all about the cowardice.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:54 PM
If its rules are all arbitrary and meaningless, I'm (a) probably not going to be very good at them anyway and (b), y'know, up its nose with a rubber hose.
Which is pretty much why I stopped being a Christian a very long time ago. I figured if there was any God who actually ran a Hell, I wouldn't want to spend eternity worshiping it anyway.
Of course, being a fundamentalist Christian, I'd already been raised to believe that pretty much everyone I knew, including all my friends and a lot of my relatives, were already going to hell, so it already wasn't much fun.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 6:59 PM
That said, if a god showed up tomorrow that contradicted my religious beliefs and said I was going straight to Hell for being any of a number of things I am (gay, not in its religion, not great about doing the yardwork, whatever), I would totally give it the finger. I mean, at that point I'm boned. I'm not giving up fried scallops so it can walk around in its fancy Look At Me, I'm God And I Don't Like Scallops t-shirt. Phbthbthbth to that, I say. Even if I did, it could just change the rules tomorrow, anyway. Nope, not for me, no thanks. I'd be way too busy asking it WTF it's been for the last forever.
That's really easy to say in the absence of said being standing around with the clipboard and the bullhorn, though.
Also, 22 gets it exactly right.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:01 PM
That's really easy to say in the absence of said being standing around with the clipboard and the bullhorn, though.
That's the thing. But if you buy into the hypothetical and you really know that, regardless of your views of the matter, God gets really pissed off if you eat pork or mix meat and dairy, are you going to risk eternal damnation (mixing concepts across religions, here) just for a bacon cheeseburger?
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:07 PM
I totally would. Faith as big as a mustard seed? You gonna see some calamoving of some big ass mountains.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:09 PM
not great about doing the yardwork
This would be great. "I, am the Lord Thy God. Bring me, a SHRUBBERY!"
But seriously, I can see taking a particular requirement and deciding that you just weren't going to even try to swing it, and God could do what he liked about it. (Being gay, if there were a God that cared about it, sure). But for scallops? As against eternity in a pit of flames? (Or, to take it more gently, as against displeasing an all powerful and all good being that just wants you to eschew shellfish?)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:12 PM
24: Hey, me too! Reminds me of when a friend of mine objected to my ditching Christianity by saying that, really, our purpose in life was to praise God to increase His glory, and my response was, essentially, "What, he can make the earth in seven days but he can't find a full-length mirror to admire himself in?"
26: Yes, but then, I'm particularly attached to grilling my own cheeseburgers. No, seriously, I just wouldn't have a lot of respect for any being that showed up and had that as its first priority. Maybe this is that whole Southern "up yours" (not yours yours - I mean the Holiest of Holies' own Holy Googley HooHole) thing I'm just expressing reflexively, but I really do prefer to think that I would have it sufficiently together to be one of the people saying, "Um, that's nice about the burgers and all, but can we talk cancer for a second?"
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:17 PM
I totally would. Faith as big as a mustard seed? You gonna see some calamoving of some big ass mountains.
I'd will that last two inches onto my penis so it'd be exactly one foot.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:18 PM
For me it would depend how punitive the God in question was about what beliefs I have.
By the standards of most mainstream Western religious faiths, I lead a moderately virtuous life. I don't drink to excess, I'm not an addict, I'm faithful to my wife, don't steal, try to treat other people with dignity, etc. And I would imagine that's the case for a great many or even most people.
However, I believe all kinds of stuff that would have fundamentalists foaming at the mouth. To pick some current button-issues for fundamentalists: that homosexuality is OK and that homosexuals ought to be able to marry, that abortion is OK at least some of the time, that what people get up to in their bedrooms is their own damn business, etc.
Further, I'm not really sure beliefs are things we have complete volitional control over in the first place.* I couldn't just choose not to believe that the world is roughly spherical and orbits the sun on a broadly elliptical path, for example. And if a God is going to punish me for what I believe, I'm screwed.
* Or at least some beliefs are not the sort of things we have volitional control over.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:18 PM
26: Depends on what it is. If it's something as meaningless as dietary laws, well, maybe that's not so bad - God's just Giant Evil Autistic Fucker God who stomps around getting people to make sausage JUST the way he likes it, which makes him a hideous nuisance, but one most people will put up with under a large enough penalty. But most of God's laws don't end with what to eat; he seems very particular about who you fuck, how you fuck them and when you get to fuck them, too. And then there's the times God has told his followers to kill people. If he declares Canada anathema and tells you to kill everyone there because he said so, would you grab a gun and get to it?
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:18 PM
I think at that point -- where God was going against what God's own moral code is rumored to be -- I'd be all demanding proof that God wasn't a false idol and dropping mountains on Him if He didn't show up with some proof.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:24 PM
Let's get right down to it: if God were Hitler, what would you do?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:26 PM
That's where you need the anti-Godmification ray.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:27 PM
It wouldn't be a God I'd recognize, so I think my options would probably be a) headbutt b) become smote.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:29 PM
28: Really. What's its compelling reason for loving shellfish so much? If it's that all non-plant life has a soul and we're hurting them unknowingly, OK, great, that's a reason. If it's that it just really thinks they're cute and I'm stressing it unnecessarily, it doesn't have to watch me eat. I mean, I get that it could be some super-intelligent/super-wise being with priorities that don't make sense to me at first glance. No problem there. But if it's capable of appearing to me, it's capable of making me understand. Rah and I have all sorts of rules the kittens just have to follow (in theory), rules they will never understand with their tiny kitten brains, but if tomorrow they were self-aware and intelligent and understood English I would gladly explain these rules to them so they could understand that the rules benefit everyone. If this god character's so hot, it can show me as much respect as I'd show my kittens by at least offering an explanation.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:29 PM
Wow, you walk away from the computer for a couple of hours and everybody starts discussing your eternal soul.
The "rules" aren't the product of God, they are inventions of people, which is why they keep changing throughout history. Also, being raised Baptist, I'm all about the deathbed conversion, bitches.
Anyhow, I live a good life without needing a big paddle-wielding God to make me do that. I live by the Golden Rule and try to help people worse off than I am. Like RMP, if JHVH's all about scallops and not saying goddammit, I'm going to be terrible at following that anyhow. But no all-powerful diety could possibly give a damn about that penny-ante shit after, y'know, creating the entire universe.
So, LB, I suppose it comes down to the vengeful God you stipulate in the post is one that I absolutely don't and can't believe in.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:30 PM
So, LB, I suppose it comes down to the vengeful God you stipulate in the post is one that I absolutely don't and can't believe in.
Agree entirely. Also, LB's going to hell.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:32 PM
34: Well, isn't God as provided by most major religions worse than Hitler anyway? He's condemning the vast majority of humanity to an infinite amount of suffering for a host of incredibly petty misdeeds. The fact that we're reaching for Hitler as a comparison just illustrates that we don't really have the capacity to really believe in something as hideous as God.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:33 PM
This discussion reminds me of the first time I read the "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter in The Brothers Karamosov.
Also: Mormon theology basically enshrines Paradise Lost with the roles reversed: Satan proposes that all souls march in a totalitarian fashion towards salvation, and Jesus proposes free agency and losing some along the way, God prefers Jesus's business plan, and then the war in Heaven gets going. Wrong and free is okay by me.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:35 PM
To me, the whole notion of an all-powerful being sitting around having a cow about people fucking in non-approved ways, eating shrimp, wearing cotton/polyester blends, not kissing said all-powerful being's ass sufficiently and such is impossible for me to take seriously. Nor do I understand how god can (a) send people to eternal torture for finite sins (OK, maybe I suck, but not enough to deserve eternal torture -- if I were Hitler or Bush, maybe); (b) do nothing to make clear whether he/she/it/they exist(s); (c) do nothing to make clear what variety of religion (Christianity, Judaism, Shiite Islam, Sunni Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Zeusism, etc., etc.) is correct and what rules we're supposed to follow; and yet (d) eternally punish those who guess wrong (necessarily the vast majority of humankind, since no religion has more than a third of the world's population as adherents). Ever hear of due process, god? A large proportion of humanity paints god as a total asshole, which means that I am better than god (and so are most people). How can that be?
btw, note that lots of people want crazy Andrea Yates to die because she drowned her five kids in her bathtub. Recall that the bible tells us that god had a total shit-fit and drowned every human and animal on earth other than the few that Noah managed to get onto his ark. Thus, Andrea Yates, even if she weren't nuts, would be many orders of magnitude less evil than god. Tell me again why I'm supposed to worship this guy?
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:35 PM
He's condemning the vast majority of humanity to an infinite amount of suffering for a host of incredibly petty misdeeds.
I'm not sure all Christian sects take this view of Hell and/or how you get there.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:35 PM
40: Two major religions, at most.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:36 PM
You know, the hypothesis of god does not necessarily support the hypothesis of an after life. Just sayin'.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:38 PM
B gets it.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:39 PM
43: Not all of them do, but rather perversely the most popular ones do. And isn't the hypothetical we're dealing with the "God of Judgment" model? That pretty much assumes the existence of Hell or some equivalent punishment.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:42 PM
Is it? I'm not sure exactly what the hypothetical we're dealing with is.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:43 PM
Not only would I not eat shellfish (not so hard, considering) and rededicate my hoohah to His glory (harder), I think I would do some bad stuff to other people (hardest) to avoid eternal damnation. I mean, I'd worry about my ability to avoid doing bad stuff if I were being tortured for a finite amount of time by human beings--if that were never going to end? Maybe my instinctive aversion to doing the bad things would prevent me from acting in my rational self-interest; I'm not very aggressive, but if God were like, "if you blink once, a baby in Croatia is going to endure horrible torment for twenty minutes then die, if you blink twice, you're damned," , and I were sure it were true, and not a test, I'd blink once. It's eternal. It never ends!
I'd worry about what I'd do if threatened with torture on earth. I don't expect it's ever going to be an issue, but if it were, I hope I'd have a method of suicide, because once the fingernails start being pulled, I can't swear I'll stay virtuous. No good to the Resistance, like I said.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:44 PM
If it's really Punishment God, each and everyone of us would do whatever he tells us to do. For roughly the same reason the tortured are willing to say whatever they think the torturers want said.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:45 PM
40 seems right to me, and therein lies the paradox. If god exists, and I know this for a fact (let us assume I am somehow also assured of my own sanity), and god's rules involve the obey/disobey, heaven/hell dynaic, then god is essentially a totalitarian. And inasmuch as I have a pretty strong sense of justice, a pretty strong anti-totalitarian streak, and a pretty strong tendency to empathize with underdogs, I honestly find it pretty hard to see myself toeing the line under those conditions.
Satan is my homie.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:48 PM
44, 45, 46: Again, the entire premise of this "what would you do if" hypothetical is that, as LB put it, "such a god had strong opinions about my behavior which it was willing to back up with eternity spent in lakes of molten sulfur," and how we might react to such an entity's demands. If God turns out to be, for instance, the squishily vague and friendly Unitarian God, or the Bahai God, or some cosmic teddy bear being, then knowledge of his/her/its existence isn't really much of a challenge to one's way of life and/or free will. But that's not what we're really talking about here.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:49 PM
OTOH, as Teo is pointing out: if we know for certain that god exists (and we are not insane), and yet there's no particular threat associated with being disobedient, then it seems to me there's a much better incentive to be good. (I'm assuming that god is basically a creator god.) It's the essence of free will: here you are, I'd prefer you to do this stuff, I'm the one that made you. I mean, likely one is going to fuck up occasionally, but if one keeps in mind that the being responsible for one's creation has these preferences, then it makes sense to try to comply with them as much as one can, out of simple decency.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:53 PM
I think 52 is wrong for the reasons alluded to in 53.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:54 PM
And the kitty agrees with me.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:54 PM
52: Right. I have religious beliefs, and really do believe them (or believe I believe them, etc.), but they are also in something much more squishy than the big being with a lake of fire and a strictly enforced guest list. Anything I've said is assumed to be in the hypothetical instance of the hellfire and brimstone being of specific sects of specific religions.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:55 PM
52: But I don't know why there is much of an issue in your case, either. The Abu Gharib story that struck me deepest was the one about a cell full of women being close enough to hear young boys being raped; for some reason, I assumed the women were the boys' mothers. I can imagine being a parent and ultimately having a mindset that accepted my child could/would be raped repeatedly, and still behaving in a way that made it more likely. It is impossible for me to imagine having to hear it and not immediately doing whatever whoever asked me to do. I assume Punishment God can do much worse to me than that.
Moreover, where's the faith required in this model?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 7:59 PM
Apo's basically outlined my opinion here:
But no all-powerful diety could possibly give a damn about that penny-ante shit after, y'know, creating the entire universe.
The hypothesis was "if there was a God", not "if there was a God who prescribed/proscribed all the things Christianity/Judaism/Islam/Mormonism/religion-of-your-choice does", right?
I try my absolute best to live a moral life, which mostly involves laboring every day toward treating myself with kindness and treating other people with kindness. Hell, I plan to dedicate my whole life to helping other people not suffer while on this earth. If the all-powerful God doesn't care about that, and is going to damn me to eternal hellfire because I allowed a penis in my hoohole before going through some made-up ceremony, well, then, fuck 'im.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:02 PM
54: How is it wrong? I thought the scenario LB presented pretty straightforwardly involved hellfire.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:03 PM
But, but, but it's eternal damnation! It's horrible torment from which you'll never be released. It's not about your respect for God; it's rational avoidance of pain.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:05 PM
In my mind, there is absolutely no reason to think that "horrible torment from which you'll never be released" is in any way possible or probable, and I almost couldn't possibly believe it under almost any circumstances, unless I and hundreds of thousands of other people received direct visits from God saying so.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:08 PM
60: The problem is that we probably lack the capacity to rationally evaluate the scope of eternity, and many of us might reject an offer from a hostile Punishment God without considering how irrational that rejection really is. The more I think about it the less I think I'd be personally capable of such; sickly schoolchildren have been known to beat me up pretty bad, so I'd hate to see what an angry God could do. I guess it depends on how drunk I am on Judgment Day.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:15 PM
The Aztecs tore the beating hearts out of prosoners to keep the world from ending. Carthaginians sacrificed their infant first borns. Lot of tough religions out there. Lot of tough implications of the creator god.
Non serviam, nobadaddy. I spit in Your face.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:35 PM
59: Because 53 said, if it's the squishy non-threatening god, then there's no motivation to change your behavior. But I think that if you knew that a creator god existed, even if it couldn't/wouldn't damn you to hell, that the mere fact of its existence--to which you owe everything--would urge compliance with its wishes far more than the threat of hell.
60: I honestly do not think I would be capable of living the rest of my life according to rules that I found unjust/totalitarian. Which isn't, I don't think, some big claim of moral superiority on my part--even under totalitarian regimes, people rebel in small ways that (thankfully) are usually overlooked. It is simply impossible to be perfect. And I think that realizing that and recognizing what the consequences are would piss me off, and I'd end up joining the Resistance with Strasmangelo.
And Satan.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:43 PM
In my mind, there is absolutely no reason to think that "horrible torment from which you'll never be released" is in any way possible or probable, and I almost couldn't possibly believe it under almost any circumstances, unless I and hundreds of thousands of other people received direct visits from God saying so.
But that's exactly it. LB's proposition was,
"if I knew of the existence of a god, and that such a god had strong opinions about my behavior which it was willing to back up with eternity spent in lakes of molten sulfur"
Under those circumstances keeping my dick to myself until marriage gets a whole lot easier.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:44 PM
Well, that was LB's proposition. That wasn't the original proposition to which Apostropher and I were responding.
Because the likelihood of LB's proposition being true is very very unlikely, while the proposition "there is some sort of supernatural being" is at least somewhat plausible.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:46 PM
Better to fry pork sausage in hell than serve in heaven, except if you have to get in the pan with them that's not so good.
I was raised Catholic and schooled by nuns, and I decided when I was 14 that I didn't believe in god or hell, and it has never seemed necessary to reconsider.
But I think we should be working on the super-anti-Godmification ray, just in case.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:48 PM
I think I've been on the internet too long. At first glance, I read "nuns" as "anus".
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:49 PM
schooled at the Mineshaft!
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:54 PM
I'm with Tia on eternal damnation. If that shit were real... well, for starters I'd stop swearing.
But it's too ludicrous to be real. As someone said up-thread, a god who condemned the vast majority of humanity to eternal torture is worse than Hitler, and a theology that posits the existence of such a god sounds just a bit too petulant to be anything other than a human creation.
If such a being did appear to me, I'd get all Spock on its ass. "What does God need with a spaceship?"
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 8:55 PM
Death before dishonor!!!
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:03 PM
OT: I missed most of this thread because I was at the hairdresser. On a whim, I ended up agreeing to get a shock of red-pink in the front, and it looks rad, but now I am thinking, what the hell am I doing? I work at a law firm.
This could be problematic.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:03 PM
But I think that if you knew that a creator god existed, even if it couldn't/wouldn't damn you to hell, that the mere fact of its existence--to which you owe everything--would urge compliance with its wishes far more than the threat of hell
I really don't think that's true. Let's imagine two scenarios. In our first scenario, God X shows up and says "Hey folks, I'm God, and there's some stuff I'd like everybody to do. If you don't do it, I'll be very sad, but there won't be any consequences." And he hands down a list of laws that sound unobjectionably moral: don't kill each other, don't steal, give to the poor, etc. In this scenario it seems like most people are either going to do have done those things anyway, or do them more now because God X will have inspired them to do so, so that all works out.
In our second scenario, God Y shows up and gives the same speech - he's handing down laws, but with no strings attatched - only the content of his laws is markedly different. Some of it consists of sexual regulation (no sex outside of marriage, no homosexuality), some of it consists of purity codes (instructions on how to handle the dead, how to approach a menstruating woman, etc.), some of it seems completely arbitrary (don't eat meat with dairy), and some of it is incredibly harsh and unjust (those who violate sexual taboos should be executed by the community). Some of these laws will be relatively easy to follow, like the dietary laws; others, like the sex laws, will be ignored a lot more because they're far more intrusive; others, like public execution of adulterers, will be monstrously unpopular.
The kinds of laws God Y wants people to live by simply won't be adopted without the threat or promise of an afterlife. If we're already inclined to follow these laws, or if they're really not much of a bother, then maybe the mere knowledge of God's existence could inspire us to adhere to them more strictly. But very few people are going to follow an arbitrary or unjust moral code if they're not getting anything out of it.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:10 PM
72: Don't sweat it. Funky and cool won't hurt you most firms, so long as you're doing good work.
And man, you people are all sure of yourselves. Put aside the lake of burning sulfur for a moment, and say you just know that God exists and is all-knowing and perfectly good, and has strong opinions about how you should behave which include some rules which you find unintuitive -- say, for the sake of argument, that it really does have a problem with premarital sex, or it would really like a monthly goat sacrifice.
I can't see having a problem with obedience there just because it doesn't make sense. I've had people explain things to me that didn't make sense because I wasn't bright enough to follow the explanation; I'd expect God to do the same regularly. Who's to say that the new moon goat sacrifice doesn't make sense if God says it does? Were you there when Levithan was pulled from the vasty deep? (or however the Book of Job goes.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:11 PM
70: This should totally turn into a "Star Trek 5" thread. I saw that movie when I was like four and thought it was completely awesome and nobody can convince me otherwise.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:13 PM
This seems to me like one of those crazy "now ogged reveals how little he understands the world" posts.
Organized religions have been along for a very long time, involving many millions of sincere adherants, who sincerely believed it was wrong to lie, steal, cheat, have sex with your various neighbors, kill, sleep till noon, play with cards, eat pork, eat meat on Fridays, dance, and turn away the hungry starving masses, and yet did all of things. The reason being not that they didn't sincerely believe in eternal damantion, but that they were human.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:15 PM
The Living End
Stanley Elkin ain't Milton, but, like a reviewer said, imagine Woody Allen writing "Job in the Afterlife."
****SPOILER ALERT******
No matter how much pain and madness He allowed, no matter how much injustice and suffering He created, should we still be grateful that...It...exists? Nah, the playpen of an angry child, the fever dream of Jerome Bixby, I will not praise the Lord in fear and trembling. Half of me is a believer, and I am even tolerant of the Aztecs and Carthaginians and Torquemada. If there is a God, He is an Evil God. I hate Him forever.
"All you have to do is love Him, Mommy." said the little girl across the river. "Don't you know how long you'll be in Hell?"
"I know." said Mimi Rogers. "I still can't love Him."
"How long, Mommy? as the girl fades away. "How long?"
..............."Forever."
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:17 PM
74: Well, yeah, but that's the problem with the Book of Job. It's a great story, and God gets some awesome lines, but it's not all that convincing unless it happens to you. When God appears to me out of the whirlwind maybe I'll change my behavior, but since I have very little confidence that will ever happen, I see no need to stop wearing clothes made from two different kinds of cloth at this time.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:17 PM
74 -- but what about the ants? What about the ants?!!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:18 PM
73: I'm not talking about "people." I'm talking about the rhetorical "you," by which I mean, "me, and people more or less like me." I mean, shit, threats and anger don't even work on kids as well as appeals to their better feelings and affection for mama--unless you've repeatedly backed up the threats and anger with physical punishment (which we are assuming the god that threatens hell wouldn't be able to do, or else why threaten?).
74: My own "I wouldn't do it" isn't about not understanding rules; it's about following them even though one finds them repressive. Again, the child analogy: you can get them to be obedient by being strict, but then they lie and sneak around. If you're really omniscient, you find out, and they go to hell. If they really know you exist (and are omniscient), they'll figure that out, and then they'll just fight back, figuring they're going to go to hell regardless.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:18 PM
73: God X or Y would understand about intermittent positive reinforcement. Every so often while you were behaving yourself it would zap you with the bliss ray. When you have the bliss ray you don't need the lake of fire.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:19 PM
I don't mean to be such a pedantic ass, I just think we're not all rational actors with regard to eternal damnation and the compulsions of our gonads.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:21 PM
2nd half of 80 pwned by 76.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:21 PM
74: The problem is that if God created us, he gave us our capacity to reason and use logic, too. So if he's all, "Bring me a spotless virgin before the rising of the full moon for I am perfect and just," and this doesn't quite mesh with our notion that human sacrifices are bad, then it calls into question why God gave us a sense of morality that leads us to the conclusion that he's immoral. Either God has gone insane in the last couple billion years or you're not in fact talking to God.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:22 PM
Text raises a very good point.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:22 PM
I don't mean to be such a pedantic ass
Intentional fallacy alert!
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:22 PM
85: Hey! 76 was totally pwned by the second half of 64!
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:24 PM
What a tangled web we weave.
If the God that shows up resembles the Christian God, there's going to be chances for *forgiveness* for all the fun you had when you should have been chaste. And all of the rules about what to wear and what to eat don't apply, and then ones that do get overrun by the forgiveness thing. Some denominations believe God asks you personally when you die, so everyone gets a pretty weighted choice to go to heaven.
So if a God shows up and says, 'Do this horrible thing or go to Hell', rationally, I'm going to say, 'you're not the God I've been told about these years, fuck off, I'm waiting for the real one.' If I'm that wrong about what I believe, I'm probably screwed anyway.
If the God shows up wanting all the Jewish rules, well, fine then, but Jewish eschatology doesn't include the whole eternal damnation thing, last I checked. What's the penalty if you don't go around smiting the Philistines? Most of the penalties seemed to happen in this world. The next you just float around being a spirit thingy in Sheol, I guess.
Who's to say that the new moon goat sacrifice doesn't make sense if God says it does?
Human powers of reason, for one. (This is one of the reasons I still find Catholicism intellectually cool.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:27 PM
76: This is the nicest thing anyone's ever said about my blogging. I'm getting all choked up here.
But substantively, I'd say that the people you're talking about think they believe in God, but don't -- or at least not in the way they believe in the security guard in a bank.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:27 PM
Please to insert the words where they are needed.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:28 PM
Hail Satan!
Sorry. Just felt like it needed to be said.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:28 PM
81: Now you're changing the ground rules. B said nothing about bliss rays; she maintained that by merely confirming his own existence a creator god could get more people to obey his laws out of simple gratitude than a hell-based god could through negative reinforcement. Bliss rays means moving the goal posts.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:30 PM
89 seems like hubris to me (the second part, not the first--the first is sweet). I mean, surely a lot of faithful believers didn't really believe (how Calvinistic) but surely many hundreds of thousands of them, in fact, truly do. Otherwise we wouldn't have martyrs.
That said, though, the idea that even the truest of true believers didn't believe in the way they do the bank security guard just goes to show the impossibility of perfection, and why it is that if god really exists and is really as judgmental as some say, we're basically all fucked. (Which, to be fair, the bible does tell us.)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:33 PM
Okay, 76 was a little pwned by 64, but I retract my "good point" point anyway. LB is responding to the laissez-fair attitude: "yeah, whatever, God, no God, I'll behave the same" which has an implicit willfulness about it. I didn't mean (and I don't believe apo did either) that I would find myself unable to follow different, stricter rules, I meant that I wouldn't try.
So the fact that people are unable to totally refrain from pre-marital sex, or gambling, or whatever, the point is that some of them are trying, because they are scared.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:33 PM
92: Right. Even the electrically-shocked baby monkey clings to the wire mama. Because it's his mama.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:34 PM
88: I had an Orthodox friend who believed in reincarnation, for Jews anyway. But everybody kind of stops and pops out when the messiah shows up? It all sounded very complicated.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:37 PM
94: Hm. So Text's point in 76 is that people try, but fail (which is kind of my point too--or rather, that knowing that trying would be doomed to failure, and thus to damnation, I'd get pissed off and rebel), but what you're saying is, god stands in front of you and says, "see that lake of burning fire? Cover your scarlet hair, you hussy, or I shall throw you into it" and you just shrug?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:37 PM
89: I'm a big softie today. But I think you're requirements for sincere belief are absurdly high. There are no humans without sin (choosing whichever definition of sin we like, still there aren't any) and yet I wouldn't say there are no sincere adherants to the various religions. It's just a hell of a lot easier not to rob the bank than it is not to have sex with your sexy neighbor who wants to have sex with you, or not to lie when there are no immediate consequences, or to devote your life to others.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:38 PM
AHHHHH! "Your requirements."
I am going to hell for that one.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:39 PM
My understanding of my fundie friends' beliefs was that you could do a bunch of bad stuff, but were basically going to Heaven if you accepted JC as your savior. "We are sinners, all," my second fundamentalist Christian best friend named Melissa used to shrug. Maybe being sorry was necessary too. Perhaps SJ can speak to this. It wasn't actually necessary that you not do the bad things to get into Heaven. And if you're Catholic, you need to confess, right? But is there anything you can't get out of by confessing and sincerely repenting of? Thus, the people doing all those bad things don't really believe that the consequences of their actions is damnation.
I did meet a girl once who unironically referred to herself as a "heathen" and seemed to think there was a possibility she'd be damned, but wasn't moving towards changing her ways. She was the best friend of someone who comments on the personal blog of an Unfogged commenter. Maybe that commenter is reading now. (Hi!)
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:40 PM
I mean, maybe the commenter on the personal blog. I assume the Unfogged commenter will be reading sooner or later.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:41 PM
It's just a hell of a lot easier not to rob the bank than it is not to have sex with your sexy neighbor who wants to have sex with you, or not to lie when there are no immediate consequences, or to devote your life to others.
I guess, but it still seems like the bank guard problem. Most people don't have a problem keeping their hands of their neighbor when his wife is in the room; or not lying when they'll get caught; or doing their jobs when there's accountability. People have trouble doing right when they think they won't get busted for doing wrong. If you knew you were busted (God being omniscient and all), I'd have to think that behaving well would be easier.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:42 PM
Okay, I guess if your scarlet-hair scenario happened, I'd probably do something about it, at least in the immediate sense. But why is that the hypothesis? We can make it the one we want to discuss, but I don't see the point of it, which is why I've consistently rejected LB's formulation of it. Our current options are a) not believing in a God or b) believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do. Given those two options, I'd behave the same way under either.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:45 PM
103: Okay, but 'believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do' seems very different to me from 'knowing' there is a God. I don't really understand what's going on in most believers' heads, but I know how I'd act if I had knowledge.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:49 PM
"believing in God the same way other people on Earth currently do"
If you believed in a God who would allow you into heaven if you were "good enough" (for some reasonable and attainable value of "good enough") and otherwise send you to hell, would it change your actions?
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:51 PM
But you could just as easily say "I'd behave the same way under either a god-regime or a godless-regime" and mean, "I'd try as hard as I can to do what's right, and probably fail sometimes."
Saying "I wouldn't live my life any differently" doesn't necessarily entail a lack of trying.
So in other words, give me back my "good point."
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:51 PM
Oh, and importantly, where part of "good enough" was something that doesn't mesh with your current moral beliefs, and is perhaps somewhat against it?
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:52 PM
102: But the point is the difference between immediate consequences and long-term consequences. And even when the immediate consequences are right in front of us, we sometimes screw up.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:52 PM
I'd try as hard as I can to do what's right, and probably fail sometimes.
That is in fact what I'd do, and it is what I already do, which is why I said I wouldn't change my behavior.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:55 PM
106 was to various silvana posts.
This is to 102:
First, there's the forgiveness thing. Second, I think you overestimate our rationality when faced only with extremely long term consequences. I mean, people smoke cigarettes, ride motorcycles without helmets, ingest large amounts of animal fat, etc., knowing at least intellectually what the long term consequences are. Damnation is even further off.
People take all sorts of stupid risks where the damage won't be incurred for quite some time. We're not that rational. And when you mix in the sex drive, it's much worse.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:55 PM
well now I've been pwned by B, so all is even.
Silvana, we totally agree now, so just give me back the "good point" and we can have ice cream.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:57 PM
Thinking about it, I guess you get your good point back. Looking at LB's 104, even knowledge can only get you so far. I know that if I keep smoking indefinitely I'll probably get cancer and die, which would be pretty bad, at least bad in the way that I can imagine (rather than the way I can't imagine, i.e. eternal damnation), but I haven't quit yet.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:57 PM
109: That makes sense. But the distinction remains: do you currently try as hard as you can to do what's right by your own lights, or by what you understand of god's lights? And if it's the former, wouldn't your behavior change if god showed up and said, "no, I don't care at all if you go to law school, but you are so not allowed to dye your hair"?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:58 PM
Also, I have no particular illusions that I am anywhere near as good a person I could be from Stereotypical Christian God's perspective (I say 'stereotypical' because I don't really know everything that's in the New Testament; maybe there's some verse that says you should be comfy and have an Ipod). If I were I'd spend my life in the Peace Corps, or go to Iraq to minister to the sick, or at the very least give away all my money above what was necessary for subsistence. If I knew, really knew in the LizardBreathian sense, that everything like this I did would make damnation less likely, I'd live differently.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 9:59 PM
Do I get more ice cream because I gave it back before you offered the reward?
This is instructive. People will behave in a way that they intrinsically feel is right, combined with some level of selfish behavior, like how I submitted even without the promise of ice cream.
Maybe the point is that LB is right, and I'm an arrogant bastard. I'm kind of ok with that.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:00 PM
Ugh, Tia, you've just proved the fundies right: everything that's wrong with the world is because we sinners don't really believe. Take it back!
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:00 PM
hooray! ice cream!
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:01 PM
Yeah, I'm not buying the 'you aren't perfect therefore you really don't believe in God' line. First off, most religions acknowledge that to be human is to foul things up; God's already cool with that.
Second, and more importantly, that's not a type of reasoning we normally accept. If I'm on a diet but I have a moment of weakness and devour a chocolate cake (or, say, half a baguette. erm.), that doesn't mean I don't value my health or don't believe the consequences. It just means I'm not perfect.
On preview, what text said.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:01 PM
you get lots and lots of ice cream, and I decided that before I read 115, which means that we will be provided with an even greater abundance.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:03 PM
Between ice cream, chocolate cake, and baguettes, I choose the lattermost. Can I get some of that as the comity prize, text?
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:03 PM
My understanding of my fundie friends' beliefs
See, this is where it all falls apart for me. All the rules are clearly human inventions. Because if there is a being powerful enough to create the entire universe, then its nature is so utterly beyond us that we couldn't begin to fathom what it would have us do any more than a shark could predict wind conditions on top of a mountain. To posit the existence of something that grand that has a specific set of dos and don'ts and keep a daily scorecard for each of the X billion people over x million years inflates our own importance so wildly that it's absurd.
There may be something out there that is the essence of existence, to which we go upon shuffling off this mortal coil, but that's something so enormous that our petty goings-on here on this wet dust mote in less than a blink of its heavenly eyelid really isn't going to be of importance.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:04 PM
And presto! -- there goes another evening spent on Unfogged instead of assembling furniture.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:05 PM
most religions acknowledge that to be human is to foul things up; God's already cool with that.
If he were cool, there wouldn't be things like being born again or confession. Or, while we're at it, original sin. Or the crucifixion. I think most religions acknowledge fallability, but I don't think that, strictly speaking, we can say it's okay with god (although obviously that depends on how liberal your theology is).
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:05 PM
Well, people rob banks too, despite the existence of security guards. I'm not so much claiming that the fact that religious people aren't perfect means they don't believe in God, more that most of them don't seem particularly more punctilious than us heathens. I may be wrong, but I'd think the addition of some sincerely believed in fear or hope related to my moral status would make me behave more scrupulously than my own unaided efforts do; I don't see such an obvious effect among the theists I know.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:05 PM
124: Well, sure. Most religious people just go through the motions. Which gets us back to that whole rich camel who won't do its own mending thing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:08 PM
It's okay with God to the extent that the religion doesn't say 'live a perfect life or be damned'. All the born again/confession/redemption bit is the get out of jail free card.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:08 PM
Which gets us back to "My Humps".
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:08 PM
Unless you're Calvinist or something.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:08 PM
That's why it's best to go with one of the deathbed conversion sects. As long as you don't go in the flash of an eye, there's always time to hit the reset button.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:09 PM
Calvinists don't hump. It's bad and sinful.
And if they do, they have to sew their own scarlet As on their clothing. But if they can do that, then they get into heaven. It's all so very confusing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:10 PM
Calvinists don't hump. It's bad and sinful.
I thought changing the rules to your advantage was the whole point of Calvinball.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:11 PM
129: See, I'm thinking that a god who actually cares about sin is not going to be fooled by your plan, Apo.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:11 PM
126: Yeah, that's what I was saying in 100(!). No one's actions on earth actually address LB's "what if you knew you'd be damned" hypothetical, because Christianity has escape hatches.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:11 PM
131: Different kind of Calvinist. Anyway, maybe I've got it wrong and the Hawthorne people were some other strict assholish dissenter sect. That early American stuff always confuses me.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:12 PM
well it would suck to operate out of fear, right? I think most religious people would rather think they act according to what they should do, and not out of sticks and carrots. So we can all tell what's moral, regardless of faith, and all should try to act accordingly. I don't see what's wrong with that.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:13 PM
And from way back, of course Silvana, I can arrange for a baguette.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:14 PM
LB, some people are allowed to be bad Christians, too. Surely some people only go through the motions; I'm just not seeing what that's supposed to be showing.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:14 PM
There is a God.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:17 PM
135: Nothing's wrong with that, but LB and I, at least, are trying to have a stoned college dorm room conversation here. Like, dude, if you *knew* you were going to hell if you masturbated, really knew...I took this post like the Ogged Armageddon-like disaster post. This was an oggedian post, LB. Be proud.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:19 PM
It was, and an oggedian thread. I feel all warm and fuzzy. Really, really fuzzy.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:27 PM
That's only because you're one of those man-hating, hairy feminists.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:31 PM
Ironically, I actually did bother shaving today.
Not my back, though.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:32 PM
Shaving is for pussies.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:32 PM
Well done!
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:33 PM
Or the alternate t-shirt slogan, "I'd shave my pubes, but I haven't got the balls."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:34 PM
134: No, they were indeed Calvinists, Puritans specifically. Later known as Congregationalists, now part of the UCC.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:35 PM
If you want to talk about ball-shaving, talk to apostropher.
Just imagine what kind of google search I had to do to find that thread.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:42 PM
Shit. Link should be here.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:43 PM
146: Woot! I was right! (Little dance of joy.)
Um, I mean, of course I was.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 10:45 PM
God is just an imaginary friend that some people need, and even if he existed, fuck it, I'd keep on living the way I do, and if he didn't want me in his heaven, I'm sure I'd find a lot of friends in the other place.
Posted by Adam Ash | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 11:08 PM
If God told me I wasn't allowed to shave my balls, I could probably comply with that restriction.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 11:14 PM
What if he said you had to?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-18-06 11:21 PM
God doesn't like hairs in his teeth, apo.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 12:02 AM
God doesn't like hairs in his teeth, apo.
Wait, God gives blowjobs?! I'm so confused. btw, since we're on the subject of God and his sex partner(s), do you suppose the Virgin Mary was just a "technical virgin" like the young women who take the virginity pledges and then have oral and anal sex with their boyfriends, reasoning (a la Clinton) that that's not really sex? If Mary was a virgin in the strictest sense of the word, Joseph must really have been pissed. Refusing to put out before marriage is bad enough, but refusing to put out (in any way) after marriage, and then getting knocked up and claiming God's the father, is really beyond the pale IMO.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 12:23 AM
151 - 153 made me laugh out loud.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 12:38 AM
121: Because if there is a being powerful enough to create the entire universe, then its nature is so utterly beyond us that we couldn't begin to fathom what it would have us do any more than a shark could predict wind conditions on top of a mountain
Apo's comment remind me of one of my favorite unfogged comments ever [#73]:
I move for an Apo book of poetry on the question of g-d's existence.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 12:58 AM
re: 154
I thought most people -- except Catholics -- now believed that they had other kids too. Joseph was gettin' some.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 1:00 AM
What if he said you had to?
Then we'd be back to me not behaving any differently.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 1:30 AM
but refusing to put out (in any way) after marriage, and then getting knocked up and claiming God's the father, is really beyond the pale IMO.
Mary was knocked up when they got married. Whether she and Joseph had children was not discussed in Catholic school, at least.
92: Sure, bliss-ray = moving goalposts, but then what would you call the super-anti-Godmification ray, hmmm?
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 6:51 AM
There's clearly been a lot of judeo-christian brainwashing going on here. Who said that people are inherently flawed? That's original sin. It's not anywhere near a universal principle.
Rather, I'd say that in most religions god doesn't have much to say about what I do, but rather what I do for her.
For instance, say God was one of those greek-type dieties and came to me and said, "I'm as hungry as a motherfucker. Sacrifice me one of those lambs. Maybe a few of those grapes. And make it snappy or I'll torch your ass with one of these here thunderbolts."
I'd be rounding up the sheep as fast as I could and I doubt the sanity of anyone who did differently.
Posted by guilty | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:29 AM
That's original sin.
Or the result of simple observation.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:33 AM
I live in a community where I keep my trap shut about my lack of religion. Reading all these comments is making me feel REALLY warm-fuzzy. I'm sort of tearing up and fanning myself and thinking 'I can't believe there are so many people who aren't threatened by casual talk about the non-existence or implications of God. '
Posted by heebie_geebie | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:38 AM
No, it's not simple observation. The observation is that people do all sorts of different things. The notion that many of those things that people often do is bad or wrong does not follow from that observation.
If I'm a shellfish god, I wouldn't care what you did to your neighbour, but it would matter a great deal what you did to my scallops.
Posted by guilty | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:39 AM
No, it's not simple observation.
Flawed does not equal either bad or wrong. It equals imperfect.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:43 AM
163: No, the observation "people are flawed" is that people make mistakes, despite our good intentions. Sometimes we try to be good and kind, and sometimes we don't, but even when we are trying, we still can't always get it right.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:45 AM
Sure, bliss-ray = moving goalposts, but then what would you call the super-anti-Godmification ray, hmmm?
Any God real enough to convince everyone he's not a hallucination or a space alien with neat AV equipment is real enough to get torched. We have the technology!
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:55 AM
If we fail to zap God, it will be because our will was sapped by the backstabbing diety-appeasers and the traitorous media. Failure is not an option, people!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:59 AM
"Original sin" is not the same as saying "people aren't perfect." It's the religious doctrine that all humans inherit a mystical "sin nature," which is not merely the propensity to do wrong but a taint of wrongness in and of itself that makes one guilty and undeserving of heaven. This, as I understand it, is why infants are baptized under Catholicism; there's no actual wrong a baby could have committed, but she's still guilty of sin by dint of the sin nature inherited from her parent.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:04 AM
I didn't mention it at first, because I thought it was a typo, but so many people are doing it that I have to say, "Folks, it's 'deity.' " If God is on a diet, let's hope it's a vegetarian one and not Atkins. Otherwise, when we masturbate, he might gobble us up to stave off his craving for pasta.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:18 AM
to get at the carbs in the resulting product?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:29 AM
No, he'd rinse us off first in his God sink. I assume God would stick to his diet. Wait--is God so powerful he can make a diet too hard for him to stay on?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:34 AM
I believe God subsists on a diet of worms.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:40 AM
'deity.'
Yikes. I knew that and still managed to do it twice. Though if we kill It with the anti-Godmification ray, maybe diety would work.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:40 AM
diet of worms
Very nice.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:41 AM
And Atkins-friendly!
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:43 AM
169: Thank you for pointing that out, Tia. Another misspelling that galls me (well, OK, they all do) is "athiest." "It's" when one means "its" might be the worst.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 1:22 PM
157, 159: Huh, I somehow was under the impression that Mary was supposed to have been a virgin forever. Being a virgin temporarily isn't much of an achievement -- everyone's a virgin at least temporarily. I guess the big deal is being a virgin and yet managing to become pregnant and give birth. These days that's not a difficult feat to achieve, what with artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. Then there's that bizarre Civil War story, beginning with a soldier who got shot in the balls; the bullet traveled on, lodging in some Southern belle's abdomen and knocking her up. Some local doc knew both of them and figured out what had happened. He introduced them, they got married and lived happily ever after, and he wrote the whole thing up for a medical journal.
Damn. Snopes says the story is bullshit. Another one bites the dust.
OT -- Fearless Leader has exercised his first veto, vetoing the stem cell research bill. Asshole. There's an outside chance of overriding the veto, so contact your Senators/Rep now.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 1:43 PM
Crud. I meant to link to this story about Bush's veto.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 1:47 PM
Jesus' siblings are specifically mentioned in the Bible, Matthew 13:55-56.
Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And his brethren, James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas?
And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things?
I always think of the first two as Jimmy Christ and Joey Christ.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:07 PM
OT -- Fearless Leader has exercised his first veto, vetoing the stem cell research bill. Asshole.
Good. We're heading into election season. I hope he keeps this up.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:09 PM
I was not raised Catholic, so I don't know first-hand, but my understanding is that official Catholic doctrine is that Mary remained a virgin for the rest of her life. However, several passages in the New Testament mention Jesus having siblings (specifically, brothers, who are named - I don't remember any, except that one was named Judas, but not that Judas), some specifically in the context of "his mother and brothers did X thing," leaving really no interpretation other than that Mary and Joseph did the marital wild thing. If I remember, part of the discussion around the ossuary that was found in Israel a couple of years ago (some people claim it has the bones of one of Jesus' brothers or nephews, again I can't remember) is that its authenticity would challenge Catholic doctrine on Mary's virginity.
I'm also not a Christian, so I don't have a dog in that fight.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:09 PM
Also, in Acts, Jesus' mother and brothers pray for him after he has ascended.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:10 PM
Damn, apwned.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:10 PM
179: Heh, my ignorance is revealed yet again. Thanks, apo.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:11 PM
Here we go, Wikipedia to the rescue:
That Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus is a doctrinal stance of the Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches. Of the early fathers of the Church, only Tertullian seems to have questioned the teaching.
The question of Mary's virginity is related to the interpretation of the New Testament references to Jesus' "brothers". Those who defend the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity point out that Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ and his disciples, lacked a specific word for "cousin," so that the word "brother" was used instead. This is also true in Hebrew and there are several places in the Old Testament that use the word "brother" to mean nephew or cousin. Others argue that Jesus' "brothers" were sons of Joseph by a previous wife -- and thus Jesus' stepbrothers, who would have been regarded as his half-brothers by the people Jesus and Mary lived alongside, who were unaware of Jesus' divinity and assumed him to be the son of Joseph. Matthew 13:56 and Mark 6:3 also mention the presence of "sisters" in addition to the "brothers."
The most prominent leaders of the Reformation, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin also defended the perpetual virginity of Mary against those who questioned it. But by the 17th century, the Catholic and Protestant churches came to see Mary as a major point of division, and Protestant theologians began arguing that Mary did not remain a virgin and that the "brothers" of Jesus were indeed his half-brothers, sons of Mary and Joseph. Today most Protestants reject the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. They find no explicit scriptural mention of Mary not having other children, and consequently, with the evidence in the Bible that she did have other children, find no scriptural basis for the doctrine of perpetual virginity. Proponents claim there is implicit evidence of Jesus being without living brothers or sisters at the time of his crucifixion in that Jesus entrusts his mother to John. They say this would not be done if a relative of Mary were able to take her into his or her own family. However, it is also said that Jesus' brothers were not believers (John 7:5) until after the resurrection (Acts 1:14), so some believe Jesus entrusts Mary to John, the beloved apostle, for that reason.
Muslims also believe that Mary remained a virgin for her entire life.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:14 PM
181: It wasn't discussed in grade school, except in passing by the occasional psycho nun, but I don't think Catholics believe in Mary's perpetual virginity. Although they might believe her virginity was restored when she got to heaven, for all I know.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:19 PM
I must say, I was raised as a Protestant, don't remember when I didn't know about Jesus' brothers, and had no idea Catholics believed otherwise. And therefore I assumed that references to "the Virgin Mary" referred to her at the time of Nativity, not as a perpetual condition. Learning otherwise puts a new complexion on things for me.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:20 PM
185: crushed beneath the weight of Wikipedia!
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:22 PM
I don't know if it's still current doctrine, but back when I was reading medieval lit in college, there were a number of references to the doctrine that Mary remained physically a virgin (which I understood to mean intact hymen) even after childbirth -- that Christ passed through her without injuring her as light passes through a stained-glass window, picking up color/humanity along the way.
Christians are weird.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:23 PM
A friend of mine, raised as a liberal Catholic, has told of her own religious education in a way that reminds me of what JM says about her Mormonism: that the faith as experienced by the majority of its adherents was as foreign to her as it would have been to me.
When my wife taught at DePaul and Loyola, she would sometimes need to refer to the doctrine to make sense of a poem, and would make sure everyone knew transubstantiation was Catholic doctrine. The reaction of her (mostly Catholic) students was "No way!"
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:35 PM
No. Really? No.
You mean they didn't know that the wafer and wine were supposed to have become the body and blood of Christ in a real, rather than metaphorical, sense? How could you be Catholic and not know that?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:37 PM
Her question and mine, never satisfactorily answered. Asked to choose whether a "symbolic" or "literal" interpretation was Catholic doctrine, almost all chose "symbolic," and were sometimes quite unnerved to find the opposite. Her closest friend, a former nun, waved her hand when told this, as if to say this disconnect was old hat.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:43 PM
Although they might believe her virginity was restored when she got to heaven, for all I know.
Dunno what that would entail, but John Paul II did claim that there's no sex in heaven. (Disclaimer: I am not endorsing anything else that the blog I linked to, which looks pretty weird, has to say.)
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:49 PM
5:
No, because being loved by the gods is still a pathos of piety (or whatever value property turns your crank).
Posted by yeti | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:53 PM
Fred, don't have my bible with me — and why not, you may ask — but I remember him referring to the passage where Jesus says something like: "In the world that is to come, we will not be husband and wife, or man and woman..." I remember liking that when I read he had said as much, some twenty-five years ago now, I think.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 2:55 PM
195: Matthew 22:23-33
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:08 PM
Actually, yeah, I was having a conversation with a guy who was raised Catholic (or so I thought, at least they went to mass on a regular basis in childhood) and we were talking about various implausible religious beliefs, and I mentioned transubstantiation, and he was like "do [the Catholics] really believe that it becomes the blood and body?"
Um, yeah.
Maybe they don't teach that to kids as much these days.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:10 PM
Dude, everyone pretends to be Catholic when hitting on women. That or Buddhist.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:13 PM
Way, way late -- this:
Rah and I have all sorts of rules the kittens just have to follow (in theory),
from 37, struck me as the funniest thing I've ever heard a cat-owner say. How are those rules for the cats working out for you?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:13 PM
Theoretically, I think.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:14 PM
Dude, everyone pretends to be Catholic when hitting on women. That or Buddhist.
What? Why?
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:22 PM
Are we talking about what Catholics believe, or Catholic doctrine? B/c they're not the same thing.
Doctrine is that Mary was perpetually a virgin, that she was herself conceived w/out original sin (otherwise somehow being inside her would make Jesus dirty) (that parenthetical is not part of Catholic doctrine, officially, though it's obviously why the w/out original sin thing matters) (imho. The second parenthetical also doesn't reflect doctrine. Nor does this one. Obviously), that Jesus was an only child, that the host (communion wafers) literally transforms itself into the body of christ, etc. etc.
As an actual Catholic, I personally believe that "original sin" is basically the same thing as "evolution means survival of the fittest, not progress towards perfection, dummy--get over your teleologies." We have wars and get cancers and kill ourselves because being at the top of the food chain doesn't mean being perfect organisms.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:27 PM
201: Presumably b/c being Catholic is supposed to mean "I won't pressure you for sex" and being Buddhist is supposed to mean "I'm a really together and sensitive guy"? I dunno. I think SCMT is being weird.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:31 PM
Catholic doctrine. I know that lots of Catholics are pretty far from the Church doctrinally -- what I find weird is the idea that lots of them don't know the basic doctrine they're differing from.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:31 PM
We're talking about the discovery that many Catholics don't appear to know basic doctrine, not what they privately believe.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:33 PM
LB and I chose very similar language to explain, I note.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:35 PM
201: I was kidding. I just like the idea of guys slipping on crucifixes and stuffing rosaries into their pockets to impress the layd-eez.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:38 PM
Ah, but I did it first, rendering you Wiener-pwned.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:38 PM
I know. Does anyone have a link for the exegisis of Wiener-pwned? I know broadly but would like to be completely informed in the premisses.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:42 PM
199: You know, rules like "kittens do not, in fact, live in the pantry," or "kittens do not get to climb up the screen door no matter how awesome it must be for them."
As for how it's going, they test just fine on paper but their lab work really lacks something. So far all they seem to grasp is that they are not supposed to do these things while we are watching.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:44 PM
I don't have a link (as I recall, this evolved over a number of comment threads), but Weiner started using 'pwned' to mean 'I said it first' rather than its more conventional meaning 'I have bested and humiliated you.' Ogged took exception to this solecism, and Weiner-pwned sprung up to fill the new meaning without creating ambiguity with pwned-pwned.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:44 PM
210: For cats, that's really pretty good. My mother's old cat never got 'Don't put neighbors in the hospital' down -- if yours are staying out of the pantry when directly observed, that's excellent.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 3:46 PM
209: "Does anyone have a link for the exegisis of Wiener-pwned? I know broadly but would like to be completely informed in the premisses."
Really, there should be an entire Unfogged glossary, with links. But there won't be, because it would interfere with the mechanism and point of Insider References.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:08 PM
213: It could be a secret.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:16 PM
You mean the glossary, with links, exists but its existence, and location are a secret?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:23 PM
You didn't know?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:24 PM
You can be a Catholic just by being baptized and confirmed, technically. It's sort of like being born into a family, in a way that doesn't seem to be present in many Protestant denominations. A Catholic's Catholic short of being excommunicated, as far as the Church is concerned; an evangelical is only an evangelical insofar as she's currently practicing. (Mormonism seems to be similar.)
'Catholic' is just a bigger tent, and no one gets kicked out easily, just made to feel guilty, and a lot of people never learn all the ins and outs of the doctrine. As long as you've got the creed it's pretty much all you need, anyway.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:26 PM
217: Catholicism is quite similar to Judaism in this way.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:31 PM
213: Reading Unfogged is really like listening to smurf conversation. To the vast majority of the population it's always going to be gibberish, but if one filters out the noise, the structure of a recognizable language becomes apparent.
Ex. "It's such a smurfy day. Can you smurf me that smurf-smurf Wolfson smurf?"
"Weiner-pwned!"
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:38 PM
Oh dear. Is it that bad?
I have the sense that most of the injokes are one-off; that you don't need to know them to follow the conversation when it's about something rather than just being chatter. But I may be wrong.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:40 PM
220: Well, who doesn't like the smurfs? Crabby old wizards, that's who.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:41 PM
I can't often follow the in-jokes and I'm here a lot. It took me forever to figure out what 'fuck to oboe' was, and I had posted on the thread it originated.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 4:55 PM
To be fair, a great many Protestants are just as clueless, often about the defining issue which created their own denomination. I was given an old-style catechism, with the Westminster Catechism, in the mid-sixties at just about the last moment that was happening. When a year later we moved to a more affluent area, it was obvious that the Presbyterian church there had never taught such things. When I get into conversations with church members today, basic historical and doctrinal issues are utterly unknown, and in my experience, many Protestants know nothing about the history, or even what their denomination's name means.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 5:01 PM
what I find weird is the idea that lots of them don't know the basic doctrine they're differing from.
Did everyone see Stephen Colbert's interview last month of a U.S. congressman, from one of the Carolinas IIRC, who wants to put the Ten Commandments up everyplace? Colbert asked him, "What are the Ten Commandments?" The guy was completely flummoxed: he came up with "don't murder; don't lie; don't steal," then gave up. (To be clear, I'm not saying the congressman in question was Catholic. I assume he was not.)
I wonder what percentage of ostensible Christians have actually read the Bible -- 1%, maybe? On the subject of "crazy shit in the Bible," the Freedom from Religion Foundation's Bible quiz is most enlightening. If people who claim everything in the Bible is true actually did what it tells them to do, they'd get locked up for the rest of their lives. For example, the Bible directs one to stone to death disobedient children, people who work on the Sabbath, women who fail to cry out while being raped, etc. Fun stuff. :P
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 5:03 PM
I see that my efforts to redirect this thread into a discussion of the awesomeness of the smurfs have been perhaps too subtle.
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 5:11 PM
Dude, the smurfs are totally awesome, if completely anti-feminist. I went through quite a smurfs phase in my childhood.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 5:32 PM
220: "I have the sense that most of the injokes are one-off; that you don't need to know them to follow the conversation when it's about something rather than just being chatter."
I'm frequently baffled, for what little that's worth. Very little, no doubt.
Oh, and I'm particularly frequently baffled by Unfogged references; I should mention that, too.
(Also, I only occasionally click on links, because it's particularly tiresome to wait for them to load on dial-up speeds.)
225: I'm afraid that as regards smurfs conversation, I gots nuthin'.
222: "It took me forever to figure out what 'fuck to oboe' was...."
Beats me. (Does it? I have no idea.)
"Did everyone see Stephen Colbert's interview last month of a U.S. congressman, from one of the Carolinas IIRC, who wants to put the Ten Commandments up everyplace?"
So far as I can tell, given the number of blogs that linked to it: yes.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 5:43 PM
They were egregiously anti-feminist, but they were also wonderfully pacifist and squishily Marxist, so it all balances out*. Also, that one where the one smurf wants to be an astronaut but can't get off the ground and all the other smurfs dress up like aliens to convince him he's landed on another planet is like the best story ever.**
*probably not
**also probably not but I still liked it a lot
Posted by strasmangelo jones | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 5:45 PM
Ohmigod that is totally my favorite smurf story, too.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 6:30 PM
what percentage of ostensible Christians have actually read the Bible
Here's one that hasn't, to hilarious effect.
I try to keep my Bible knowledge up to speed, because I find it extremely useful when the door-to-door Christians come knocking. It really throws them when you argue back using scripture. You can see the panic in their eyes.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 6:56 PM
That's why they hate us, Apostropher. Because you had to have your fun. Thanks for W's second term.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 6:58 PM
Aw, don't be mean to the poor door-to-door missionaries. They're somebody's cousins.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 7:46 PM
JM: Been reading upthread? I feel the "sect-ier" a faith is, the more likely its adherents know its doctrine; the "churchier," the less likely. Something for us Matthew Arnold buffs to chew on.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 7:51 PM
It gets complicated, though, when a faith sets up hierarchical structures of knowledge. A lot of the stuff Mormons get ragged on for--the holy underwear, each couple Gods for another world--only gets "revealed" in Temple rituals. I bet there are young Scientologists raised in the religion, if that's the right word, who first hear of the wackier inner secrets from schoolyard friends and the internet.
This comes down to the mechanisms of social control, really, and how humanely they're exercized.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:10 PM
Then perhaps the ignorance of Catholics about what us non-C's are actually taught about their religion is in a sense, deliberate on the part of the church? I would have thought it was more a matter of the knowledge being there, just not emphasized.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:15 PM
234: each couple Gods for another world
OK, in all the webbertrons lore of the Mormon church I have read, I've never heard that one. Is this something along the lines of "true believers become the God of an alternate universe?" Have I parsed that statement correctly?
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:21 PM
I have, but I'm the kid on the schoolyard.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:23 PM
No, I do think it will depend on the faith--its newness, its perceived need for retaining believers, its defensiveness, and, perhaps, the maturity of its more obscure theological points.
I have to go to bed now; tomorrow I have to make sure I don't get assigned to a very long and very nasty weapons-conspiracy-murder trial.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:24 PM
Good luck portraying yourself as a prejudicial lunatic, JM.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:27 PM
238 was to 235.
McManlyPants, it's complicated. But basically the exhortation to be like Jesus, for Mormons, entails a promise that, if they are truly stand-out specimens of righteousness, they can actually do what Jesus did. For some other planet.
This is a pretty distant impetus for moral action for most of the Mormons I've known. They might remember it if someone prompted them. I first heard about it on the schoolyard, and some apologetic graduate student who'd been roped into teaching Sunday School explained the thinking behind it after I brought it up. As far as I know, this theological precept hasn't really developed much in the way of a mature commentary or integration into Mormon culture.
(But then there's Orson Scott Card. A third cousin!)
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:33 PM
I'm going to plead hardship. Without going into particulars, I think I should have a good case. Thanks for the good wishes!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:35 PM
I would have thought it was more a matter of the knowledge being there, just not emphasized.
In Catholicism, it's not hidden. Most of what I know was mentioned in CCD classes. But it's generally presented at a very low level; and that's because Catholic theology is fucking hard. Like, probably-a-PhD-candidate-hard.
And really, whether one can explain transsubstantiation isn't really the point of the faith. All you really need is the creed; if that's too hard, a) God loves you and died for your sins b) be nice to your fellow humans c) if it feels good, stop.
Plus, I think the Catholic Church hasn't quite realized that it has a literate laity yet; it spent a long time assuming that its adherents couldn't read or write or afford books, and I don't think it's quite awakened to some of those changes yet.
I have an unholy memory for Biblical trivia. When I was applying to colleges I applied to a conservative Bible college and I won a scholarship on an exam that explicitly tested, among the history, science, and other stuff, knowledge of the Bible. I'm sure that didn't make the Protestant founders of the school happy.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:43 PM
Don't tell me Ender was Mormon. I will cry.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:44 PM
I do remember Card musing about the disproportionate number of sci fi writers who were Mormons in his Beliefnet column a few years ago. I made the connection you just alluded to, I don't remember if he made it explicit.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:46 PM
rules like "kittens do not, in fact, live in the pantry," or "kittens do not get to climb up the screen door no matter how awesome it must be for them."
AWWWWWW!!!!
Okay, excuse the necessary cuteness moment, please.
The Catholic hierarchy does not deliberately conceal doctrine, not by a long shot. They periodically bemoan the fact that lay Catholics don't know much about it. But as Cala said, we're baptized as infants and confirmed in middle school, so that the primary education most Catholics receive in the faith happens when they're children.
Plus, there's just more of an emphasis on practice than on doctrine. "Good Catholics" are the ones who go to mass, who volunteer at the soup kitchen and homeless shelter, who send their kids to Catholic schools, who are involved in the life of the parish. None of this requires people to know a lot about whatever weird rules the Pope is coming up with nowadays.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 8:46 PM
I think that the Ignorance-bemoaned/learned-a-simplified-version-as-children/practice more-than-doctrine pattern holds for Protestants and Jews also. The religiously informed and mature are minorities in every faith.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:02 PM
Pardon my availability heuristic, but is this blog not lousy with Catholics? For these purposes I count our dear Jesuit ogged.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:04 PM
Orson Scott Card not only voted for Bush in the last election, but advertised such on Slate. For nerds everywhere, it was like learning that Ezra Pound supported the nazis.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:06 PM
Protestants generally have a greater knowledge of the minutiae of Bible knowledge, though; there's more of an emphasis on personal discovery relationship/etc. I may be confusing 'Protestant' and 'fundamentalist', though. (Ex cathedra, the lot of 'em.)
Knowing rules gets you nowhere. (1 Corinthians 13!!!!!!) On the other hand, it's good for winning arguments, if not the love, with a devout sister.
Kittens on screen doors are cute. Kittens that have climbed screen doors and don't know how to get down are really funny.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:07 PM
247: We should totally do a survey. It seems to me that compared to the general U.S. population we're disproportionately Jewish but about right in terms of Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Mormons. Really underrepresented as far as Hindus and Buddhists go, though.
Also, my sense of the Catholic::Protestant ratio being about right probably has something to do with my having never lived in the south.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:12 PM
don't be mean to the poor door-to-door missionaries. They're somebody's cousins.
I'm somebody's cousin, too. I'm never mean to them; I have a certain admiration for them, actually. Lord knows I could never go door-to-door doing that. The very thought gives me the creeping jibblies. On the other hand, they knocked on my door looking for a conversation about Jesus. I'm just accomodating them.
I don't get the feeling they get non-hostilely engaged very often, because they usually seem so surprised. I'm always polite, offer them something to drink, and whatnot. But I also know the Bible pretty well thanks to that Baptist upbringing, and if you know it well enough, almost every argument has a contradictory argument somewhere else. If you're gonna witness, you ought to come prepared.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:15 PM
Arguably, this blog is also lousy with ex-Mormons--three regulars? what're the odds?
Cala, Ender wasn't Mormon. His universe was, deeply, but going further might make you sad.
Some of Card's more explicitly LDS-tinged SF that remains interesting: A Planet Called Treason (republished as Treason, if I've got the sequence right) and The Worthing Saga. Both of them are very clearly working out theological problems within the LDS tradition, but both of them--especially the first--could be read by
gentilesnon-Mormons as simply posing interesting questions.(I'm going to bed any minute now, I swear.)
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 07-19-06 9:17 PM
"I do remember Card musing about the disproportionate number of sci fi writers who were Mormons in his Beliefnet column a few years ago."
I missed that one. I can think of only a handful of Mormon skiffy writers, of whom he is, absolutely, most prominent. Do you have a link to this? (It's true I'm not keeping up currently on the last couple of crops, but still, curious.)
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