Thanks for making me cry. I agree with Bob Wright: I'd rather vote for her.

Oh god, I think my heart just broke.

... Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust ...

Funny how it takes immediate and unmistakable evidence to convince us what the minor prophets clearly show: God can be, and often is, a serious asshole. I suppose when He made us in His image, he wasn't fucking around.

She sounds like a really forthright and thoughtful woman. It's a real pity.

4: God can be, and often is, a serious asshole.

Only the Old Testament God.

Wow, this is really quite beautiful. The God I'm used to hearing about from American public figures, politicians especially, is the middle-class wealth-building God; it's rare and amazing to hear the Christian god spoken of in such thoughtful terms.

It's strange to see actual Christianity in a political context.

Such a challenging shift away from the tres gauche 'God wants you to be rich and prosperous' so common in the US.

Out of curiosity, how many Unfogged readers believe in God? I mean a real God that saves your soul, as Elizabeth Edwards described, not a nebulous "divine force" or somesuch.

I'll lead off: Although culturally I like to think of myself as Jewish, I don't actually believe in God.

Atheist. Although I would admit to being a very Anglican atheist. Having said which, if her belief helps Mrs Edwards come to terms with her illness, good luck to her.

I consider myself an agnostic (I know, I know), but deep down don't really believe in God.

Atheist here. (That said, chag sameach, GB!)

Elizabeth Edward does break my heart. I have nothing but respect for what she's doing and saying, and I still worry and ache for their kids. Losing a mother to cancer is heartbreaking and awful and, yes, if religion can help, more power to them. I know I actually ended up saying kaddish for a few months, and keeping kosher, and a whole bunch of other things that I don't now and didn't really then even believe in. It sounds like her faith is something she can be true to even as it helps her, which I, frankly, envy.

how many Unfogged readers believe in God? I mean a real God that saves your soul, as Elizabeth Edwards described, not a nebulous "divine force" or somesuch

My belief comes a lot closer to the former than the latter, so put me as placeholder in column A.

I'm another atheist, but Elizabeth Edwards' faith is very affecting.

I call myself an atheist these days, although I go back and forth about it. I don't go back and forth about what I believe. What I believe has not changed since college. I go back and forth about whether what I believe should be called "atheism." I'm actually quite spiritual for an atheist.

The problem is that "atheist" and "theist" don't really denote metaphysical belief systems or sets of attitudes and practices. They are signs of political allegiance. Most people who identify as theists don't have particularly fixed views on metaphysics, which is after all a very abstruse field. People who identify as atheist tend to have thought more about it, but only because it is a difficult stand to take in our society.

Anglican through and through, though I have my doubts from time to time--as would anyone.

PZ has a post up lighting into Elaine Pagels' vague "divine force" version of theism. It isn't particularly fair.

Atheist with occasional moments of fuzzy thinking, here.

Athiest, unconflicted about it, and still moved by the EE passage quoted.

No real clue on what I believe. Poor EE, and I second the idea that it's very nice to see a display of Christianity that isn't reducible to 'God must love me otherwise why would I have this iPod?'

Six of ten so far willing to call themselves atheists: are we mainstream or what?

Nebulous believer of some divine power. Specifics arent really important to me.

how many Unfogged readers believe in God?

Me. And Edwards describes my own faith pretty well, here:

I'm not praying for God to save me from cancer. I'm not. God will enlighten me when the time comes. And if I've done the right thing, I will be enlightened. And if I believe, I'll be saved. And that's all he promises me.

I'm an IDP-style believer, more the former than the latter but still fuzzy around the edges. I believe that there is a Divinity up there that's too large and different from us to be neatly encapsulated in one identity and doesn't really care what name(s) we call It when we worship; having said that, I approach It having assigned it a concrete identity I can wrap my brain around. I very rarely doubt Its very real existence but I've shaken my fist at the sky on more than one occasion. The sentiment EE describes is not unknown to me.

For example, I am shaking my fist at the sky right now because the gods have stolen one of my t's.

I also appreciate Buddist thought.

Man, I'm getting sorta sick of PZ. I don't agree that he should tone it down so as not to make atheists look judgmental, as many people suggest, and I actually kind of dig the frankness with which he has pointed out that at top-couple-tiers-science, *nobody's* religious except Ken Miller and the usual smattering of oh-shit-I'm-going-to-die emeriti.

But.

He's getting really crank-y lately, and more and more robotic and frothy in his pronouncements. It's...inelegant.

Atheist. Also I'm saddenned by any parent who suffers the loss of their child, but not particularly moved by how Elizabeth reconciles her version of God with her loss.

at top-couple-tiers-science, *nobody's* religious except Ken Miller and the usual smattering of oh-shit-I'm-going-to-die emeriti.

I'd be astonished if his information was good enough to justify that claim, but maybe you all talk about this stuff more, and across more disciplines, than I think.

Yeah, also atheist. (Thankfully, not bright, which still makes me cringe.)

Although being a preacher's kid I still go a couple times a year, and sometimes get irrationally mad when people dis on religion, like a bully making fun of my sister: only I can do it, and hey- it paid the bills growing up.

Re, Edwards, very sad, and I am impressed by her, but this kind of Problem of Evil stuff always seemed like emotional epicycles to me.

Put me down in the "bad Christian" column. Two days out of three, I'm not sure I believe in God, but I don't think God particularly expects to be believed in very often.

Atheist. Although occasionally I do engage in bizarre pointless speculation about what religion I would choose if I wasn't. It passes the time...

30: There's data on this (which I'm not going to look up). A survey was done at the beginning of the twentieth century which was repeated in the same form at the beginning of the 21st (even though people had began to doubt the wording of some questions).

The results were amazingly the same in both surveys. 50% of American scientists identify themselves as believers, a significant number, but obviously less than the country as a whole. The number of believers drops off steadily as you reach the higher prestige, more theoretical end of things.

I'd be astonished if his information was good enough to justify that claim, but maybe you all talk about this stuff more, and across more disciplines, than I think.

Well, PZ's not exactly at the top tier himself, and is exactly in the tier where religion is (apparently) more common, but he's got access to a lot of anecdotia through his site.

(The usual stats quoted are the "40% of bachelor's level science are believers in a personal god, whereas only 10% of the members of the National Academy." 2000 maybe?)

My personal experience (physics, many close friends in astronomy, biochemistry, geology, and neuroscience) is that those fields at the practicing/quality research/top-ish tier are essentially 100% non-religious. I'm nervous of the Pauline Kael/Nixon effect, so I'm obviously trying to not talk about just my close friends here.

Note I didn't mention chemistry. The religious scientists I knew in college and grad school were all chemists. Dunno why just them.

The number of believers drops off steadily as you reach the higher prestige, more theoretical end of things.

Unless the number drops to zero before the number of people in the group drops to zero, I think I can still stand by my surprise.

what religion I would choose if I wasn't

Try Bob.

Devout Christian here.

Dude, there is one Bob, and only one Bob, and ogged is his prophet. You should be killed for blaspheme.

31: Oh shit, not bright! I'd rather be a Syrian Orthodox monk with monophysite tendencies than "bright". That's the worst idea since something that was a really terrible idea.

IDP - I'm skewing your figures. There's nothing odd about being an unbeliever in Europe.

Wait, PZ is attacking a historian of Gnostic Christianity by quoting Rick Warren, and he expects us to find that this means that the theologian is intellectually dishonest?

The "bright" thing is indeed the worst idea anyone's ever had.

That actual data on the belief of scientists referred to upthread is here
and here.

Sadly, behind Nature's paywall. The actual references are:

Nature 394, 313 (1998)
Nature 386, 435 (1997)

The latter link is the "four in ten scientists believe in a personal god" one, the former is the "much fewer top scientists do."

Beats the hell out of me, over here.

One of the nice things about belonging to a religion that forbids evangelism: immediate liberation from ever needing to give a shit what anyone else thinks in order to justify one's own beliefs.

I was raised Unitarian, which I think pretty much disqualifies me from ever being able to give a clear answer to this sort of question.

I was raised Unitarian, and I'm still opinionated and judgemental and self-contradictory. What's the conflict?

One of my favorite jokes of all time, stolen from Rah: did you hear about the Baptist who moved into a Unitarian town?

His neighbors burned a question mark in his yard.

Being raised Unitarian clearly gives one a muddled and contradictory view of God and a nice butt.

The tenets of Unitarianism involve squats and lunges?

What do you get when you cross a Unitarian and a Jehovah's Witness?
A knock at the door for no good reason.

Atheist here.

Rob, do there exist any similar survey data for philosophers? Based on my experience, I'd expect that philosophers are even less likely to be theists than scientists.

When I was in grad school, we had one Christian professor, and grad student who called himself a theist. (Although I think the grad student's God was basically Spinoza's God, so I'm not sure that really counts.) Everybody else was an atheist.

"grad student" s/b "one grad student"

It really depends on the university, I think. Christian philosophers cluster together at friendly departments.

friendly departments.

Oh yeah! Cue the house music.

EE brings up a point, or at least draws attention to something that's pissed me off for a long time. Often, when someone sweet and wonderful dies early in life, like EE's son, people put forth the notion that God often takes the really extraordinary ones early, because it's the only explanation for the fact that shit like this happens all the time. God's reason? He wants to "bring them back." To a very logic-oriented seven-year-old (i.e. me), this explanation tendered for why your dead mother, who was spectacular and beloved, was "taken" gets ingrained as an warning not to be too extraordinary, or God might just decide he needs you back, pronto.

Anyway, I considered EE's question, "What kind of God do I have that doesn't intervene--in fact, may even participate--in the death of this good [woman]?" about ten years ago and decided it was either no God, or a God who didn't much intervene in or direct human affairs.

Atheist. I was in chemistry grad school with a practicing Mormon, made for some interesting conversations.
43: Beats the hell out of me, over here
Sounds pretty old-testament.

53: Apart from Notre Dame, which departments would those be?

Fordham, BC, there are others if I think for a bit...

Atheist. And a cranky one at that. Though I'd be perfectly happy to live in a world where "religious" equaled people like EE.

Re: PZ, I agree that he gets a bit tedious sometimes, but his argument against Elaine Pagel is pretty justified I think.

Something like 30% of people in the U.S. believe in exactly the kind of god she's claiming is a straw man charicature.

59: Am I the only atheist who finds the straw-man caricature God more appealling and intellectually respectable than the vague, sophisticated version?

12 to 7 for atheists at the moment, with 4 difficult to classify. God seemed to be coming up on the outside for a while there, but seems to be fading into the stretch.

Godless heathen raised in the shadows of Mormonism here. There is something about being a member of the untouchable caste that helps drive that religion out of one.

59 - That's all well and good, but I'm not sure how it contradicts with the a scholar of first- and second-century Christianity's claim that "the God that [Dawkins is] debunking is not one that most of the people I study would recognize".

60: Hmm, I don't think so for me. If it was definitively shown tommorow that the god of Dobson and Falwell was the real thing, I'd take my chances in hell.

I could conceivably get on board with a floofy, benign, uber-powerful alien type overlord.

63: But Dawkins isn't arguing about what people believed 1000 years ago. He's arguing about what people believe today. Powerful, mainstream, people.

So her point is either irrelevant, or she's meaning it to apply in some way to today's version of Christianity as well.

Fair game.

Theist. But like everyone, I struggle with it.

One of the reasons I'm so turned off by the "apologetic" proselytizing of evangelicals making their case with logic and reason is that my reaction is more or less "don't you realize that if we start arguing about this strictly in terms of reason and evidence, we're quickly going to find ourselves on a slippery slope to atheism?! Is that really what you want?" Better to leave it all as unarticulable mysteries of faith.

57: Broadly speaking, almost anywhere with a strong anti-naturalist streak or strong philosophy of religion program.

60: No. There's no point in bothering to believe in something that's vague and non-committal, or at least if there is, it's not the sort of thing that I could imagine caring about.

Another atheist ex-Mormon here. Getting crankier about it. I'm moved by what EE said about her son, but I don't understand this "salvation" thing she talks about.

66: I'm not sure where that leaves them, though. Does it not present an unpalatable choice of denying plainly obvious science behind Door#1 or shrinking your divine down to the God of the Gaps behind Door#2?

There's no point in bothering to believe in something that's vague and non-committal

Your beliefs are a lot more volitional than mine, I think.

Athiest, though one day for the sake of the kids I suppose I'll join a Unitarian service. The only way you prevent your kids from signing up with some militant Youth Group is to inoculate them, right? I figure, Unitarian churches always host the good weird music shows—they can't be all bad.

That's what the strategy they're on runs them: either you end up arguing that Noah's Flood made the Grand Canyon, or you leave God as the explanation for all the stuff we don't understand.

If you instead say that God isn't a scientific hypothesis, then you can accept all of the science and avoid the Gappy God problem.

72: I've considered that, but we don't have a convenient enough Unitarian church, and anyway the kids have swimming lessons during prime church-going hours. (Give her another year or two, and Sally's going to be able to kick Ogged's ass.)

I'm both an atheist and an active Unitarian Universalist -- like snarkout and heebie-geebie above, I was raised UU. The personal God thing has never made too much sense to me, but it's one of a number of metaphors that can help to make sense of one's relationship with the universe. I'm glad it's helped EE decide what her life is and what it's for.

BTW, I pimped this diary on the Edwards blog.

Irrelevantist. I don't think about it at all except as various beliefs affecting other people and their actions.

I'm an Agnostic Deist, but some know me as Brother Sharpened Screwdriver of Desirable Balance.

75: The group's leader, known as Ogged,

Heil Ogged!

almost like 12; Functionally, I'm pretty much an atheist, but I usually answer this question "agnostic" because I don't actually care if there's a god or not, and I don't want to argue about it with people who do believe, because I don't hold it against them (unless they are scientologists).

It's a shame more Christians don't sound like Edwards when they talk about their faith.

Unconflicted atheist here, no other history.

My instinct is to agree with 60 and 67 -- if you have no reason to think there's a there there, why bother? But, speaking as an outsider, I think religion shouldn't be restricted to cosmological arguments. When people have certain experiences or feelings or beliefs (in the weak sense), they don't want to discount them out of hand, even when they have no reason to argue over knowable facts.

78: That line also cracked me up. It's like we're running a peasant rebellion here.

I find it baffling that people think faith is necessarily opposed to evidence. A lack of knowledge is not required to feel wonder at the universe and understanding and empirical evidence do not necessarily wash away awe.

I'm surprised at how many Unitarians there are here; I've never actually met someone who was raised UU. I thought about going to the Unitarian church nearby when I was in grad school and going crazy from the isolation, but I heard they sang folk songs during the service and I couldn't hack it.

73: If you instead say that God isn't a scientific hypothesis, then you can accept all of the science and avoid the Gappy God problem.

Right. I don't see anything intellectually problematic about the possibility that the universe is exactly as it appears to be -- science works fine and can be trusted -- but that the universe was created by a personal God outside the universe, with the capacity for causing events in it.

I believe every word of the Nicene Creed. There is a reason it is called "faith", not proof. Our understanding of the Divine is limited by our puny human minds and our inability to express properly in language for everyone to understand.

Right. I don't see anything intellectually problematic about the possibility that the universe is exactly as it appears to be -- science works fine and can be trusted -- but that the universe was created by a personal God outside the universe, with the capacity for causing events in it.

I'm not sure that's inconsistent with EE's conception of God. I think "I've had to come to grips with a God that fits my own experience, which is, my God could not be offering protection and not have protected my boy" can be read to be consistent with that. But I guess I kind of thought there was a kind of Gappy God that was described by the above, so I'm not sufficiently well-versed in the terminology to be making any sort of credible claims.

76, 79: I've toyed with abusing the word "adiaphorist," meaning "indifferent about points of theological discussion," to get across that while I agree one can't prove the negative, I don't live in fear the way "agnostic" can imply.

82: They don't have to be opposed. It's just that if your religion requires you to believe that the world is 6,000 years old, you are going to spend most of your time explaining away the phenomena. If your attitude is "look at that, God made a world somehow, let's see if we can understand it", you're less bothered by the facts science discovers because you believe that God wants you to understand the world you're living in.

I don't actually care if there's a god or not, and I don't want to argue about it with people who do believe, because I don't hold it against them

That pretty much sums up my position. Not so much that I don't know as that it just doesn't matter to me one way or the other.

Mark me down as Buddhist.

So your alter ego is Buddhist, but what about you?

86: Oh, it's not incompatible at all, I don't think -- EE sounds like she's talking about the sort of concretely existing God that I have an easier time treating respectfully, rather than the ineffable miasma stuff that just causes my facial muscles to start twitching uncontrollably.

No news to you. ..deeply religious, somewhat idiosyncratic Gaudiya Vaishnav (that is, a theist), with a strong appreciation of certain kinds of atheism and agnosticism , and partcular strains of otherireligions. When religion isn't the topic directly at hand , I apparently do a pretty good job of projecting Atheist, b/c a oommate was recently very surprised to find out I'm religious. It was kind of amusing.

In physics there are a lot of atheists, but the theists, in my experience, tend to be quiet. I did a little survey the other day and I realized that far more of my still-in-physics friends are theists than I felt; they just rarely talk about it, and I know they are theists from quiet revelations of secret church-going practices or small, private weddings that turn out to be way more religious than anyone would have guessed. If theists leaving physics has to do with their theism, I wouldn't dismiss the notion that it's also a sociological thing, not just a philosophical thing, like gender balance tapering off. There is, for instance the idea, that physics grad school is kinda hard and if you have any strong passion about something else, you are more likely to get out when the going gets hard than if you are more singularly devoted to it. By leaving physics I've contributed to those numbers, but theism was the least of my issues doing physics.

This was a very moving quote. My interpretation of tragedy has been slightly different, but I still found hers moving.

I'd read Four Trials, and there's an amazing letter in there that one of his friends wrote them after he died. . .about how kinnd Wade was to her [the writer] when no one else was. It made me cry.

you're less bothered by the facts science discovers

Cala, wouldn't you still be bothered by the overall success of naturalistic explanations, insofar as they undermine the motivations for hypothesizing along theistic lines?

88: Ah - that latter bit very accurately describes my beliefs.

"God of the Gaps" usually refers to a natural theology strategy where God is brought into explain what science can't. The classic example: evolution can explain a lot, but can it explain the eye? No? Therefore, there must be a God. We need God to explain Tricksy Phenomenon P.

The problems with this strategy are that science is good at figuring things out, so God's role keeps shrinking and shrinking, and who wants to worship a shrinky God?

94: I think if you're doing natural theology, you're pretty much on the wrong track already, and should get off and wait for the next train.

insofar as they undermine the motivations for hypothesizing along theistic lines

Not if you don't believe the gods care very much about the degree to which we observe or cater to them.

84- no, of course there's nothing "problematic" about that. I believe in God, as I said. And you can certainly fit God into the picture without distorting reason. But the point of 66 is that if one really takes a step back and looks at all the evidence available to us, and asks the basic questions anew, I don't think one would be likely to infer the existence of God. Not one who reasons well, at least. In fact, I think the best you could say is that God may be a theoretical possibility, but you'd probably set a reasonably low p on that possiblity, again based solely on the evidence we have.

I hold on to God not because the universe makes no sense without him, but because I don't like the sense it makes without him. The godless world is not the world that I want it to be. Evidence suggests that may in fact be the world in which we live, but I cling to a glorious hope, a possibility.

88: Doesn't that conflict with your 68?

What you describe in 88 is exactly why I find the vague, non-commital version of religion less aggravating and baffling.

I'm probably more atheist than anything else, but I'm not quite ready to describe myself that way.

'ašhadu 'an lā ilāha illā-llāh, wa 'ašhadu 'anna muħammadan rasūlu-llāh.

Cala, help me out. Don't I need reasons to think that God exists? What sorts of things are those? (Not being snarky.)

Seatbelt extender, Mr. Johnson?

How so? I'm not seeing the conflict. I can believe serious things about what God likes and doesn't like (and avoid the vague 'wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice nicely' stuff that drives me bonkers), and think that's completely compatible with the belief that figuring out how the physical world works is something theologians suck at.

103- because without God it's all meaningless absurdity?

75- How does that work out for you? My wife thinks we should do something like suggested in 72, but it seems like the default UU structure is Christianity (ministers, pews, church, hymns) even if there isn't much explicit god preaching. I'm Jewish by birth so I'd still find that uncomfortable and not really what I want for the kids. My wife's analogy (she doesn't post here so she can't be banned) is that UU : religion :: tofu dog : hot dog- for people who want something like it but don't like the real thing for whatever reason.

Brock, take your pick of response-strategies:
(a) it's not clear that it isn't all meaningless absurdity; 106 has the form of "reductio to unpleasantness", or
(b) the right understanding of meaningfulness is compatible with atheism.

103: Direct personal experience of the divine, or reasonable belief in the veracity of others who claim direct personal experience of the divine?

108: choosing (a), I agree. See 99.

109: again, there are other explanations that are at least euqally satisfying. Also, some of the experiences contradict some of the other experiences.

I fretted about this a lot in Jr. High and later in my freshman year of college -- the intervening years were spent on other worries. I believe God does not exist but I also have stopped thinking this is a particularly important part of my mental landscape. (That said I have a lot of time for thinking about Kierkegaard, I find his take very appealing.) WRT "atheist" vs "agnostic" vs..., I have fond memories of repeated dust-ups at Crooked Timbre -- in its first year or two of existence -- with Op/helia B. claiming the mantle of victimhood for non-believers (and IIRC for the childless).

107: I think the cultural affiliation of UU congregations varies by location -- some are churchier and some less. There's also the Ethical Culture Society, at least in NY, which I understand to be vaguely like Jewish-UU; it's a secular but structurally religiousy organization with Jewish rather than Christian historical roots.

110: the attitude you take toward "God exists" seems like it's not belief, but something else.

So your alter ego is Buddhist, but what about you?

We're both Buddhists. Our goal is to become two with the universe.

Also 109 should not be discounted, but I assumed we were trying to stay away from that. (Especially as science has reasonably good (and getting better) explanations for most "divine" experiences.)

Atheist. But one with a lot of interest in, and respect for, spirituality of the sort EE displays. I once talked to a unitarian who told me he didn't believe in a "conscious Supreme Being." I liked that a lot.

LB says: "Am I the only atheist who finds the straw-man caricature God more appealling and intellectually respectable than the vague, sophisticated version?"

When it comes to actually reading the Bible, I think Jerry Falwell is much more intellectually serious than a lot of liberal Christians I know. The Bible really does say a lot of awful stuff.

114: I think the word you're looking for is "faith."

111: I'm not sure how you establish that. Say I have a direct experience of the divine, which you don't share. How do you establish that there's an explanation equally satisfying for it than that God exists? You don't have access to the evidence.

107 - It really can depend on the congregation in question. I've experienced everything from a bunch of grizzled secular humanists to sermons reflecting process-theology Universalism.

I say "atheist", but that's mostly because I have spent twenty years, on and off, writing about Christians who combine the gentleness of serpents with the cunning of chickens. Every time I write about Richard Dawkins, I retreat, shuddering, into militant agnosticism.

I still know a couple of xians whom I really admire intellectually as well as morally; I don't understand what they see in it, but I am not prepared to write off their beliefs on those grounds. It seems to me axiomatic that the universe does not make sense and any worthwhile form of religious imagination is going to have to take account of this fact in precisely the kind of grand crazy way that EE suggests.

I notice both 'Smasher and NickS are claiming to be teh Athiest. I think they should have to arm-wrestle for the title.

there's an amazing letter in there that one of his friends wrote them after he died

If you have an Amazon account with a prior purchase, you can search inside the book. That part begins on page 174.

Huh, I really don't know where to locate myself on this spectrum. I am much more religiously observant than I was raised to be (that is, I now go to Quaker Meeting regularly), and I have a strong predisposition to a sense of humility and awe in the face of the universe. So yes, for me there is a Divine, and I'm in accord with RMP's 82 and the second half of Cala's 88.

On the other hand, I get very tetchy in the face of dogma. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God didn't scare me at 17 and doesn't scare me now.

Per Saheli, probably 85% of the people I've ever known well or worked with have no idea what I believe.

Agreed with Werdna that Dawkins is a good reason not to call yourself an atheist. (I like his science writing though.)

122: At least neither one is acting all Athier-than-thou.

I say "atheist", but that's...

I'm surprised, with all the writing you do about the Anglican church and bishops. But their cultural profile and significance is probably higher than we can appreciate here.

Could be. I'm not sure I understand that attitude, insofar as it looks like part of what it is is to be regulated by the true, which you seem to back away from in 99.

sorry, 128 to 118.

One of the reasons I decided to call myself an atheist was that I didn't see any practical difference between saying "there is no god" and "there is some god-like presence, but it doesn't give a rat's ass for humans or human values."

For me spirituality is largely a matter of coming to terms with the fact that the fundamental forces of the universe do not give a rat's ass for humans or human values.

125: Isn't that just self-hating, though? What's so wrong with Dawkins's writing on atheism?

I can't full-throatedly defend The God Delusion in every particular, but it's not that bad.

When it comes to actually reading the Bible, I think Jerry Falwell is much more intellectually serious than a lot of liberal Christians I know. The Bible really does say a lot of awful stuff.

Oh, bullshit. Of course the Bible says a lot of awful stuff; it also says a ton of stuff that stands in direct contradiction to that awful stuff. More than being harsh or loving or cruel or kind, the Bible is wildly inconsistent. Liberal Christians are more intellectually serious than fundamentalists because fundamentalists make the prima facie absurd claim that they take every word of the Bible literally. And surprise, surprise, people like Jerry Falwell don't take it literally - they cherrypick the verses the fire and brimstone stuff, or they bend over backwards to reinterpret anything that doesn't fit into their conception of the world. This is precisely what liberals do, too, only liberals are actually open about it, and embrace a theology that encourages generous reinterpretation of the text, while the cherrypicking done by fundamentalists should be heretical to their own alleged literalism.

119: oh, come on, LB. I can't directly experience others' mental states, but I can make reasonable inferences about what goes on in their heads. One migh think, hmm, we've got a moderately good account of what's going on in religious experience, and that's embedded in a larger theoretical position that's, overall, more plausible than the theist's picture.

103: Tough question. Like a good lapsed Catholic, I'm splitting the difference between "it's all just faith, no evidence needed" and "God is the best hypothesis that fits the phenomena."

A couple points to sketch this out:
1) I don't think it makes sense to believe in, in the faith sense, the existence of something demonstrated empirically. It would be weird for me to assert "credo coffee cup." I see the coffee cup. No faith needed.
2) I don't think a naturalist toolbox can decide a claim about the supernatural.

So, where does that leave me. If I were a person of faith, I would look at evidence. But I think you'd have to count the evidence of faith itself, or the evidence of a personal relationship; excluding it seems to beg the question.

Sort of like if I'm trying to prove that shivbunny loves me and isn't using me for a green card. And you say, I won't accept your proof unless you ignore everything about your personal relationship and just look at the facts. I'd say... but that affects how I look at the evidence. I can't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt; but I don't think I'm irrational to think that he loves me, and I think I would be wrong if I refused to believe it unless he could prove his love in a lab test.

It doesn't mean you're irrational for not believing me. I have access to information you don't. But within reason (hah!), I'm not violating any intellectual obligations just because I can't hold love to the standards of science.

"they bend over backwards"
I think that's one of the things they often cite as an abomination.

Can I take 134 as an answer to 133?

IDP: they are something that I am to some extent paid to write about. You don't, in this business, walk away from what you know.

And, yes, in this country, all power does ultimately derive from the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is he who anoints the monarch, from whom all secular power stems. It's our version of checks and balances.

136: no. I forbid it.

"What is so dreadful about Dawkins' writing on atheism?" His completely cavalier attitude to the empirical facts about religion.

Drat. Then you win.

Dawkins is a good reason not to call yourself an atheist

Every time I hear this sentiment it pisses me off. The only thing Dawkins is doing is evangelizing for atheism. Evangelists are frequently annoying, and not everybody is going to like them, but every system of belief has them. Moreoever, every system of belief needs them. For bona fide atheists to reject the label of atheist simply because some atheists have the temerity to actually publicly argue in support of their beliefs is absurd.

139: I would have said that he comes across as a bitter, crazed polemicist with barely a theology 101 grasp of his opponents' positions and funds his own strawman factory, but your way is nicer.

a naturalist toolbox

I've been called worse.

134: Sure, we can't bracket out the experience, but neither can we take it as non-negotiable to take the experience at face value. I'm not sure what taking faith or the relationship as evidence means, but take the shivbunny example. The two hypotheses (love vs greencard) make, we hope, different predictions, and I can check to see which set is more accurate. The atheism & theism claims should likewise make different predictions-- there's some way things should be different, if T is true and A is false, than if things are otherwise. And what I don't yet see is what the difference comes to (at least, in a way that's friendly to the theist).

It's stuff like Cala's 134 that always stymies me about faith in God. If you start by believing in nothing and only assent to the existence of things as the evidence warrants, I can't see how a belief in God is motivated. But accounts like Cala's start in the middle -- you're already in this relationship with the divine and the relationship has already provided evidence, of a sort, of the existence of the other party in the relationship. It seems question-begging, but maybe isn't.

128- I do believe it to be true. But I believe it through faith, not based on reason.

In my youth I was completely perplexed when evangelicals said things like "just believe that Jesus died for your sins and you'll be saved", or otherwise littered their speech with references to one "choosing to believe" this or that. "How can one "choose" to believe something?", I wondered. Could I just as easily "choose" to believe that the sky was orange, or that my kitchen table was made of cotton candy and not wood? It seems belief is not something one chooses at all, but rather the natural result of the brain's judgment based on the accumulation of evidence it is presented. In a sense, this is no less true for "was Jesus born of a virgin?" than "does the earth orbit the sun?" I could say I believe one thing and disbelieved another, but what I said did not affect in any way the evidence I saw, or what I consequently actually believed.

But I later realized that I wasn't being asked to believe these things through reason, but through faith. Through faith one can choose what to believe: what to "take on faith", as the saying goes. And (most Christians believe) those lacking faith can pray to receive more from God. It is somewhat hard to explain to a non-believer, but suffice to say I both genuinely believe in God and also recongize that this belief is not really based in reason, and in fact that evidence is lacking. (Although I've learned to see evidence of God everywhere and in everything, I understand that this is not a natural perspective.)

The two hypotheses (love vs greencard) make, we hope, different predictions, and I can check to see which set is more accurate.

What if, at the current state of knowledge, they don't?

Haven't we had this discussion before, with Labs similarly framing everything in naturalistic terms and then wondering what the hell is wrong with the believers? Eh? The problem this time seems to be equivocal use of "reasons." I might be able to give you an account of how I (hypothetically) came to faith: my dog had died, and moping along the water's edge, I suddenly had a feeling that he was speaking to me...etc. But that's not the kind of reason that compels belief from anyone else. It's an account of how I found myself "in" faith, but the being in it is somehow unaccountable, otherwise it wouldn't be what we call faith.

147- it was your post ogged. If you don't want us to repeat our conversations, don't post the same thing twice.

There's a lightening bolt here with your name on it, Landers.

148: Careful what you say, or you might never see Jessica Biel's ass again.

I'm sorry to hear about your dog.

Jessica Biel's ass again.

Thanks, LB; wasn't sure when I'd have a reason to post that.

Mm, think of the shivbunny example like this. We agree on the basic empirical facts: there is a shivbunny, we've been dating X amount of time, we have X amount of visits, the green card process is all but guaranteed for spouses of citizens, you can make more money in the U.S. than in Canada, his company has a job waiting for him here, whatever.

You say: the best explanation of these facts is that he really wants to live in the U.S. and can't get an H1-B. I say: no, I'm sure we're in love. You say: you can't prove your love like you can prove the facts about the green card process. Therefore, we should exclude 'love' as a reason. I say: aren't you cherrypicking the evidence by defining "evidence" as "needs a paper trail"?

So, you, chastened, say: of course your experience of love counts for something. But it doesn't outweigh all empirical evidence -- if he leaves, he's using you for a green card. Fair enough, I say.

Back to the religion example: What's the corresponding prediction about the world? I do think that there is a difference in the predictions the theist would make vs. the predictions of the atheist. Game, set, match, you say: problem of evil, suffering, bad things. That counts decisively against your belief in God.

Not so fast, I say: the problem of evil counts against my belief, but it's outweighed by (all the good experiences of God). It's not that I'm ignoring the physical evidence; it's just that it takes a lot of empirical evidence to outweigh (say) my experience of a loving, infinite personal being.

Can God create a greencard strong enough to get through any border red-tape He can build?

it takes a lot of empirical evidence to outweigh (say) my experience of a loving, infinite personal being

Really? There's some threshold of evidence that would make you say, "huh, I guess there isn't a god, after all"?

Brock, it's not how you come to believe so much as whether the attitude is one of belief. You put it this way:

I hold on to God not because the universe makes no sense without him, but because I don't like the sense it makes without him. The godless world is not the world that I want it to be. Evidence suggests that may in fact be the world in which we live, but I cling to a glorious hope, a possibility.

Up until the last half-sentence, which is a little ambiguous, it sounds like you're hoping that p, deciding to live as though p, and acknowledging that it is not the case that p. You can't do all of those things (as a rational agent) and still believe that p.

So I'm on board with the main points of this:

"How can one "choose" to believe something?", I wondered. Could I just as easily "choose" to believe that the sky was orange, or that my kitchen table was made of cotton candy and not wood? It seems belief is not something one chooses at all, but rather the natural result of the brain's judgment based on the accumulation of evidence it is presented. In a sense, this is no less true for "was Jesus born of a virgin?" than "does the earth orbit the sun?" I could say I believe one thing and disbelieved another, but what I said did not affect in any way the evidence I saw, or what I consequently actually believed.

Sounds good-- the beliefs of rational agents are regulated by considerations bearing on the truth of those beliefs. Then you add:

Through faith one can choose what to believe: what to "take on faith", as the saying goes.

And when you say this, I'm starting to get nervous about the use of "belief," since once one has control of this sort over the attitude, the attitude seems a lot less like belief and more like something else-- "acceptance" or acting-as-though-p or something. Having this attitude toward claims about God frees you from certain evidential burdens, but it seems to me that the burdens are part of belief-for-rational-agents.

But Cala, do you ever find yourself questioning the interpretation you place on that experience of a loving, infinite personal being, or whatever? "Why do I think these feelings mean this rather than that?" That's what happened to me, and it was pretty much curtains for my faith after that.

155: I think a truly horrendous experience might justifiably shake one's faith, yes.

154: No, because the red-tape was granted unto Lucifer, the son of the morning who said, "I shall delight in making supplicants from first world countries undergo a medical exam even though their country has better vaccination programs, and yea, verily, all forms shall be filled out in triplicate, even the obsolete ones."

145- It seems that the reason you can have faith is because there are things that really don't matter in your day to day material existence. If Jesus was born to a virgin, who cares? It doesn't really affect you except in your mind and in your interaction with the minds of others. If you have faith that your table is made of candy, however, reality will soon give you splinters in your tongue. You can only choose to take things on faith that will never have any impact in reality- that is, where there is no evidence and therefore reason can not play a role. Whether you think these things are important or not is left to your own judgment.

157: I never felt an experience of a personal being at all. If I did, I'd probably be able to believe.

156: FL, jesuitical distinction between "belief in" vs "belief that." Brock's talking the former, JTB+gettier is the latter, no?

Catholic here, perpetually conflicted. Mostly find myself agreeing with Cala.

I'd be interested to hear more from self-described atheists/agnostics who do the church thing for their kids. We take ours to Mass for complicated reasons; me, mostly because Catholicism is The Faith of My Fathers, because my parents sold my soul to the Vatican before I had anything to say about it, and because of my own ill-defined, weak faith; my wife (who converted to Catholicism in advance of our marriage) for other reasons I don't entirely understand. But I wince at some of the stuff they're learning, especially because it's mostly presented in a literalist, storybook fashion in a children's liturgy. Why do people with no particular religious inclination take their kids to religious services of any kind? Or I am misunderstanding just how godless UU is?

Ogged, don't blow my strategy! Once I innocuously set the terms of the debate, I will TRIUMPH!

Cala, I'm nervous about the way you walked through the example, because I don't think the claims that my character makes are analagous to the claims I've been making here. But I don't see it affecting the main point.

Are you worried at all when someone makes a move against the evidential connection between the experiences and the conclusion? For example, by explaining the experiences as the product of various psychological forces, being raised in certain ways, and so on.

160: I've been expecting that Jesuitical distinction, Cala, and I ask whether belief-in is really a species of belief.

...the red-tape was granted unto Lucifer...

Which is why they should just cut this "Michael Chertoff" crap: they're not fooling anyone. He's not even very well-disguised.

So far, 12 for "G," 9 for the intermediate category I call "/G," and 21 for "A."

162: No, not worried. But I don't think the arguments are knock-down, either.

I believe in the Gators.

Why do people with no particular religious inclination take their kids to religious services of any kind?

I don't. But if you want a good reason why, it's because AP English (and western literature generally) is a hell of a lot easier to understand if you know your biblical mythology.

Heebie, that's not very nice.

self-described atheists/agnostics who do the church thing for their kids

I have a real problem with this.

I have evidence.

170 - how come? Because it seems condescending?

They do have causal powers, I'll give them that.

Labs is trying to erode my quasi-faith with his sophistry -- during Holy Week, no less. Fortunately, the mere ability to self-identify as Catholic gives me special powers of non-reason.

168: Yeah, definitely.

Sweet, chocalately quasi-faith?

"His completely cavalier attitude to the empirical facts about religion."

What on earth constitutes "empirical facts about religion" other than the historical record of what various people actually practice and profess to believe.

People seem to have this odd notion that Dawkins (and others) need to be arguing in terms of what academics think about the philosophical exercise of theological arguments. That's not what Dawkins is interested in. He's interested in why people, today, believe things like "Evolution is False", "Dinosaurs were vegetarians" and "Contraceptives make you go to hell".

These are not fringe positions, and it matters not a whit whether they line up with historical teachings of X religion. The most powerful country on the planet is run by people who either believe, or cowtow to those who believe, in exactly the insane things I listed above.

Take care lest you become spoiled through philosophy!

Or melted!

I must destroy your Catholicism in order to bring you the glorious truth of Islam. First, however, I must work out.

Athiest. Raised by calvinist missionaries.

I agree with 117. One of my college friends when asked which strain of judaism he was said "nonpracticing orthodox." When he was eating a cheesburger in a bun during passover, he explained "I don't follow the law the rest of the year, why would I follow it this week?"

When you're ex-christian it's a little harder to explain things succinctly like "the synogogue that I don't go to is orthodox," but I find liberal squishy made-up christianity a lot more annoying than mereley insane bible-believing christianity.

I continued going to church after I stopped believing in God ('long about 12 or 13), and would have chosen to go had it been totally up to me because I had lots of friends there, and the youth group did all sorts of fun things. I suspect this is true for lots of people, and they want their kids to experience those same things.

That said, my Sunday mornings are my own, so the kids can just grow up lonely and uncultured.

175: Mom! More body of Christ, please!

The free PR that Catholics give to people such as Cavallaro, Andres Serrano and Jean-Luc Godard is a continuation of the Church's long history of arts patronage. I look forward to seeing "Piss Christ" the next time I visit the Vatican Museum.

176: Dinosaurs were vegetarians? What's the reasoning behind that? (Some of them were, of course...)

180: I understand that perfectly. The church I haven't set foot in in 18 years, except for a couple of funerals, is Baptist.

Liberal squishy made-up Christianity is annoying in an entirely different way than insane Fundamentalist Christianity.

Dinosaurs must have been vegetarian originally, because before original sin animals didn't kill each other. Iirc, humans didn't eat other animals until after the flood.

The adults teaching your kids at church are usually believers, and if you send your kids to be taught by them, you're endorsing those beliefs, by and large. I think it's a betrayal of your parental responsibility to turn around (when the kid gets older and has doubts, which can be painful, dammit) and say: "psych! I never really believed that shit either! I just thought having faith and losing it would be good for you!"

Abel made a burnt offering, pleasant in God's nostrils, without eating it?

181: I hated my youth group even before I stopped believing in God.

Most rebellious thing I ever did with regard to religion: I wore an Opus the Penguin "Sold My Soul to Rock and Roll" T-shirt to a Christian youth conference.

186: Check out Genesis 9

185 - I can see that. Not that I'm interested in taking my kids to church/synogogue/Pluckers, but I was picturing a parent who tells their child, "I personally don't believe, but I want you to be exposed so that you can make your own decision when you're a teenager."

I thought Abel burned veggies. Anyway, Abel and Cain are postFall.

190: Nope, Abel=meat, Cain=veggies. They're post-fall, but pre-flood. So there's death, but according to Genesis 9, God has still only given people plants to eat.

184: The source is the difference in the two covenants with God, the one made with Adam after the fall, and one made with Noah after the flood. The latter gives the creatures of the earth to Noah to eat. The former just says that he has dominion over the earth.

186: Even by the standards of world scriptures, the bible is a particularly incoherent document.

189.---The adults at church will be telling your kids that the unbelievers will most likely go to hell. If you profess unbelief and send your kids to that sort of church (and really, most of them do end up making some important distinctions between believers and unbelievers), your kids will grow up quietly very worried about their parents' eternal soul. That sucks; I've been there.

I want to keep talking about Lab's point, even though he is not here.

I've never been sure what a belief is, but if you use Lab's understanding, we have a lot fewer beliefs than you would think otherwise. In fact, I bet some people are Pyrrhonian skeptics entirely accidentally.

192: The other reason for the "Dinosaurs were vegetarians because there was no death" argument is from Romans 5:12 where Paul says: "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned." So, clearly, there can't have been death before the fall.

192: So, dinosaurs were immortal? Maybe I'm just not grasping where the dinosaurs belong on the biblical literalist timeline.

The claim that "dinosaur bones were put there by Satan to deceive men" seems to have so much more going for it.

196 to 195.

the bible is a particularly incoherent document

So very true.

196: I think on this version of the timeline, dinosaurs like everyone were deathless in the garden. After the fall, they could die, and they probably ate meat, too. Humans would only eat meat in defiance of God's will though.

The dinosaurs all died in the flood because they were too big to fit in the ark. For some reason, this extends to the aquatic dinosaurs and little critters like the eoraptor (The Tiny Terror of the Triassic!)

My parents, wanting me to be exposed to religion without diving into full-on indoctrination, would occasionally just take me to a church service, rather than sending me to Sunday School. Avoids all that awkward cognitive dissonance that comes with sending your kids to others for religious instruction.

196: Everything, including humans, was immortal before Adam sinned. Humans and Dinosaurs lived at the same time (in fact, Dinosaurs are mentioned directly in the bible), but they've died out as a result of the climate changes after the flood (in particular, the collapse of the atmospheric layer of water vapor created on the second day).

Atheist daughter of an Episcopalian priest. The cobbler's children, and all that.

If God is our Father, He's guilty of child abuse - Joe Haldeman

201 is a smidge smarter than the version I've heard; but really they are all fucking nuts.

Why the hating on liberal religion here? It's really annoying me.

203: If you've never read YEC propaganda you really should, just for entertainment value. Here's a random example.

Dinosaurs are mentioned directly in the bible

Bill Hicks did a funny bit about that.

Enjoy the lake of fire, fucker!

132: "Oh, bullshit. Of course the Bible says a lot of awful stuff; it also says a ton of stuff that stands in direct contradiction to that awful stuff."

The Bible's guidance on slavery, women's rights, homosexuality, eternal damnation etc. is clear and mostly uncontradicted. What contradicts the Bible is ordinary decency - a concept which, to be clear, I am entirely in favor of.

207: Though, to be fair, the bible's opinion on genocide (unlike your examples) is more nuanced.

207: I literally edited genocide out of that post after thinking it through and realizing that I couldn't defend that. I'm pretty sure I can defend the rest, though.

204: Liberal religion only gets hated on when it tries to step into the ongoing fight between liberal secularism and fundamentalist religion.

130

One of the reasons I decided to call myself an atheist was that I didn't see any practical difference between saying "there is no god" and "there is some god-like presence, but it doesn't give a rat's ass for humans or human values."

For me spirituality is largely a matter of coming to terms with the fact that the fundamental forces of the universe do not give a rat's ass for humans or human values.

I'm with Rob here to an extent. I have not, as usual, read the entire thread. However. Shame.

This "god-like presence" notion mystifies me a bit.

I self-identify as an atheist, but as noted early upthread, the terms "atheist" and "theist" are so deeply problematic that I have yet to see a workable definition. In the absence of that, this is an exercise in what? The extent to which the terms are loaded at this point, such that one may be willing or unwilling to sign on?

I choose "atheist" simply because it identifies my not entirely straightforward orientation most accurately. No supreme being, no "god-like presence" except insofar as I might be willing, for sake of certain limited discussions, to conceive of Gaia. If one looks a bit like a pagan at times, is one a theist or an atheist?

(I notice the difference between looking like a pagan, and looking pagan, harboring certain beliefs with pagan tendencies. Or theistic tendencies.)

Biographically, why atheist? Raised Roman Catholic, a bunch of top-down authority hoo-haw, meaningless ritual. It took me until all of age 14 to realize how dysfunctional all of this was. Freedom, baby.

Back to Rob's formulation in 130, though: whatever fundamental forces in the universe work in your narrative, any cosmology that supposes that they make human concerns front and center is flawed.

204: If what I was saying is 'hating on liberal religion', sorry. I'm fine with religion as practiced by lots of political liberals so long as it's reasonably concrete, the kind of religion that makes truth claims about the universe -- I find vague spirituality esthetically displeasing. No one, of course, with any actual religious views should give a rat's ass what some random atheist on the internet things of the esthetics of their beliefs.

204, 212: I second LB. It's not liberal religion, or religion as practiced by American liberals, that's offensive; it's the watered spirituality that doesn't really stand for anything that bothers me aesthetically.

193: My sister foolishly let her elder daughter go to a religious summer camp with a Baptist friend. My niece came back breathing fire and brimstone, has declared that her mother is going to hell, and has converted her younger sister.

Living as they do in hyper-RedState East Cobb County GA, my sister was afraid to reveal to her children that she's a Democrat, much less one who believes in a woman's right to chose, etc. Now she's reaping the bitter harvest as her daughters proclaim that women should stay home with their children, that contraception is immoral, that one has to be born again in order not to burn. Big hair is next.

My own Offspring was raised a godless heathen, and shows no damage. He is a pleasantly ethical human being, with a finely developed empathy for his fellow man, and that's all I could ask for. Unless I get to be Miss America, in which case I will ask for world peace.

Happy Passover, everyone! That's the kind of religion I like. Endlessly disputative, ritualistic but adaptable, and not overly concerned with metaphysics. Just like us...

Last night we had a bit of a discussion over Dayenu, the song that stops at every point along the Hebrews' escape from Egypt to say, "If He had just left us in Egypt/at the edge of the Red Sea/in the desert, wandering about it would have been enough". We pointed out that no, actually, it would have sucked to be left at each of those places. So wherefore Dayenu? Points raised included the teaching of gratitude; the de-centering of divine assistance from religion; and, complementarily, the necessity of having faith be unconditioned upon assistance.

Two Jews, three opinions. So unfogged.

The guy who writes the Bad Astronomy Blog's personal blog had a series of posts up a while ago about why he, as an astrophysicist, was a Christian. He predictably got a lot of shit from both sides, because he basically tried to have it all. PZ made a particular ass of himself there, I think, charging in with all the elegance of a deranged hobo.

I didn't see any practical difference between saying "there is no god" and "there is some god-like presence, but it doesn't give a rat's ass for humans or human values."

Agreed. So if I'm not an atheist, I'm an Epicurean. So sue me.

No one, of course, with any actual religious views should give a rat's ass what some random atheist on the internet things of the esthetics of their beliefs.

As the latter was going to hell.

It occurred to me at lunch today that, since rats are one of the most popular model organisms in medicine, there must be a lot of research into rats' asses. There are probably people who specialize in rats asses, who could truly say "I care more about a rats ass" about a lot of things.

215: We had a similar discussion, only just about the one about being left in the Red Sea. We would have been dead if he'd left us there! So no, no worshiping God after that.

Happy Peepsach

212:

I'm fine with religion as practiced by lots of political liberals so long as it's reasonably concrete, the kind of religion that makes truth claims about the universe

I assume I'm not understanding this. Otherwise it creeps me out: okay for political liberals to make religiously-based truth claims, concrete? Like what?

-- I find vague spirituality esthetically displeasing.

Not understanding this either. I gather it means something like gesturing toward spiritual beliefs, deeper meaning in life, teh universe and everything, without, say, repeating the Ten Commandments (concrete).

I should bow out. It just sounds like you're saying that you find weirdos (people you can't pin down) aesthetically displeasing, but can handle someone who identifies as a relatively mainstream church-going whatever.

193: My kids were told by a few public school teachers they were going to hell. When the kids asked us if it was true we shrugged and told them it only applied to Southern Baptists. No PTSD ensued. Near as I can tell, they've accepted Irrelevantism into their hearts, perhaps with a sprinkling of the dark side of the Force.

223: I think I'm in danger of falling in love with Biohazard.

212, 222: I think it is a lingering effect of the positivist claim that statements which cannot be empirically verified are meaningless. Now that positivism is dead, we can't relegate such hippie talk to the realm of nonsense, but we can still say we dislike it.

The God-that-makes-my-teeth-hurt religion seems to come mainly in email forwards from Catholic relatives....any religion can be stupid and hokey and not thought through. There is no correlation whatsoever between fundamentalism and seriousness or liberalism and lack thereof, and y'all are reminding me of David Brooks a bit.

My ignorance of the universe is plenty vast enough to contain any number of gods, and it's vaguely comforting to think that something that makes sense could be lurking out there amidst the unknowns and imponderables, but I don't spend time trying to figure it out. It's more like "life: complicated and painful but somehow satisfying" or "stars and galaxies: kinda cool" sort of stuff. And apparently this Jesus dude had some interesting stuff to say, which I need to look into more closely at some point. Maybe Buddha, too. But at the moment my struggles with What Does It All Mean are focused a lot closer to home than figuring out God stuff.

The God-that-makes-my-teeth-hurt religion seems to come mainly in email forwards from Catholic relatives

Your relatives forward you email about a God who makes your teeth hurt? What branch of Catholicism is this?

225: Okay, that helps a bit.

y'all are reminding me of David Brooks a bit.

Ouch! Now who's doin' the hatin'?

I wouldn't say 'liberal.' I'd say 'empty touchy-feely feel good.' If God is anti-money-changers and pro-social justice, surely it makes sense to say that rather than 'it's a vague mystical force.'

Fundamentalists annoy me for a completely different set of reasons.

The problem is not just with the contradictions in the bible, it's what people choose to place emphasis on. There are lots of things called abomination, unnatural, confustion, but coincidentally all anyone on the right cares about these days is the sex stuff. To pull the West Wing example, what about stoning people for wearing blended fabrics?
215: Implicit in the first line of Dayenu is that if god hadn't done the first thing (I believe it's "lead us out of Egypt") then it would not have been enough. This goes back to the original topic of this thread, that there is some minimal expectation that god will do something for his people, that people shouldn't just accept everything that happens and say it's god's will. Sure, we're grateful for the extra stuff, but there's also some minimal decency that a deity has to show to be worshipped.

228: God is my dentist.

I hate to break it to you this late in the game, apo, but I don't think I'd let that Uther Sapien guy anywhere near my teeth.

And, of course, Psalms 81:10.
"I, the LORD, am your God, Who brought you up from the land of Egypt; Open your mouth wide and I will fill it."

'empty touchy-feely feel good.'

See, I'm telling you, its positivism. Cala and Carnap want something verifiable, or they will make fun of you.

In fairness, I may make fun of you anyway.

Maybe it's positivism. More like, it's logocentrism of some sort, or a failure of imagination.

Or just some bad experiences with hippies who would rather show than say.

Anyway, it was LB who said the stuff about the concete and the truth-claims, first I noticed anyway; though this Cala/LB confusion has occurred before. Which is weird.

I've never been sure what a belief is, but if you use Lab's understanding, we have a lot fewer beliefs than you would think otherwise.

Helpy, you still here? Want to give me some examples?

238: Both Cala and LB said it.

239: Still here. (Really, I'm getting work done. I'm emailing a student as we speak.)

Discuss the nature of belief and other propositional attitudes here on unfogged, Helpy; students be damned.

I call them Calabreath.

Ah, it's after supper here, and soon I must go to bed, or drink another glass of Becks styling, or something like that; but to the person who said that Dawkins was describing how some Christians behave and believe today, so it was entirely unfair to claim he wasn't describing how other Christians behave and believe -- well, if he referred to "southern Baptists" or "fundamentalists" rather than "believers", I would respect him a lot more.

After all, there are an enormous number, almost certainly a majority, of atheists in the world who believe things just as stupid. I think it is incumbent on intellectuals of any sort to try out the best form of their opponents' arguments, rather than pick on the worst and silliest. What he does is exactly analogous to the Fifties Catholic arguments about "godless Communism", and just about as persuasive.

If he were to engage seriously with enemies of his own intellectual stature it would look a lot more as if he were having a theological argument, of the type that asks "if God exists, what might be true about him?".

Sometimes, trying to define what we are to each other, we'll say this is a liberal blog, or a feminist blog. We obviously don't mean every last regular commentator, we mean something about common attitudes, not so much taken for granted since we love to hash them out, but a kind of prevailing opinion.

I don't think we're ready to call this an atheist blog in the same sense as the others yet. For one thing, a lot of people haven't weighed in. But the results of today's poll have so far been rather striking, don't you think?

So you want examples of things that are no longer beliefs if you take a stricter analysis of belief?

For most people, religious and political beliefs are not propositions that they have subjected to scrutiny. They are matters of group identification. Most people who identify as creationists haven't really thought about what killed the dinosaurs. They are simply saying "I am in this red state group." The main thing they think about when they make these assertions is "What would my neighbors say if they thought I wasn't a (creationist, liberal, etc.)"

Also, I'm not sure that all the supposed beliefs we manifest in our unconscious behavior are beliefs in a strict sense. If I lean back in my chair, I might be said to believe the chair will support me. AI guys seem to talk this way a lot. But I don't really have an attitude in my mind towards the propositions "this chair will support me." I just have a habit.

I'm pretty sure you could navigate through a mediocre job in a stable society using only habits and statements of group identification. Perhaps when you started your job you had a few genuine beliefs. Also when you first launched your major personal relationships. After that, pure Pyrrho.

Base Humean!

All your base humean are belong to Cala.

a theological argument, of the type that asks "if God exists, what might be true about him?"

Isn't the answer just anything? I mean, if something as wacky as God exists, then based on the evidence we have of his existence (pretty thin, to say the least), couldn't we at this point predicate pretty much whatever we like of him?

RH-C has a very good point about belief. It is th eone articulated by Dennett in his distinction between "beliefs" (the AI thng) and "opinions", which are what the rest of the world means. Of course, when DCD talks about "religious beliefs" he means, or pretends to mean, opinions, since religious beliefs, in his sense, are impossible to eradicate.

It's less that I "hate" liberal christianity (by which I mean "the bible isn't really true as such" christianity, not christians who hold liberal political beliefs), as that I deeply don't understand it at all. You believe in a God who cares enough to send his Son to die, but not enough to actually make the main source of knowledge about himself accurate? You think that belief in God is really important, yet it's not so important what exactly you believe about God? I just don't get it. And because it seems so incoherent, I find it hard to treat it as intellectually serious.

Hmm. I'm nervous about coming across as having given an account of belief, when I meant to lay down some conditions on what it takes for an attitude to be a belief. And your cases are one sort of objection I was wondering about, namely, attitudes of less-than-ideal agents which are regulated in some belief-like ways but not others.

Maybe this is the way to go: to the extent that we think Redstater has some false dinosaur belief, rather than some other attitude toward the same proposition, we hold him accountable for rational failings when he doesn't change his beliefs on being confronted by good evidence that the content of the belief isn't true. If we interpret him differently, we say that he has some other attitude toward the same content, but he's making rational mistakes about the functional role of that attitude (for example, he asserts the content as true, even though he doesn't actually believe it). Either way we get to attribute some sort of error.

It's not as though I'm restricting beliefs to attitudes that have been subjected to certain kinds of scrutiny. That would be bad. I'm hoping there's room to say just that having a belief is partly a matter of being held to various epistemic standards, such that having the attitude at will or whatnot, indifferent to the truth of the proposition, means either you're irrational or you don't have a belief.

Okay, I can't quite get through the whole comment thread in depth having showed up way late to the game. But, always wanting to cast a vote for the underdog, IDP can lump me in the column for believers.

214: I wouldn't fret too much about the nieces. In my experience, it's not at all uncommon for new believers to go way over the top at first, caught up in the rush and all that. If they've otherwise been sensible girls up till now, odds are good they will mellow in time as they come to a deeper understanding of their newfound faith. They may even one day discover that, lo and verily, there doth indeed exist believers who vote democrat, are raging feminists, and care about the environment.

244: A liberal, feminist, atheist blog? I'm pretty sure that will be illegal in the States soon. We may have to move the servers overseas.

DaveB: I think there is a lot we can say he doesn't -- eg what Elizabeth Edwards has learnt.

I am astonished by the way in which honest Christians seem to draw bad luck on themselves. One of my most admired is a woman who has suffered, successively, from osteoporosis (developing when she was very young), cancer, and heart disease. Her daughter was born with an incurable metabilic defect, and died, aged 20, after almost a lifetime of pain and suffering, and two kidney transplants, one from her husband. Her son wrote a bitter and well-reviewed memoir about what it had been liked to be neglected in favour of such a demanding sister. Then he married, at last, a woman he had loved since university, when she had run off with a shit and had his baby.
The new wife became a priest, and her daughter became a heroin addict, who had her own baby three months before her new sister was born ... I think that if these things have happened, the god you find credible is not one who makes nice things happen for his servants.

I'm not sure how that follows, Commenter. I'm a small-u universalist, so I won't presume to speak for anyone who holds to more orthodox Christian beliefs, but it seems to me like the incarnation and resurrection, coupled with Christ's act of redeeming humanity from original sin, makes the act of copy-editing the New Testament seem kind of unimportant. Plenty of mainline Christians understand that what you get in the New Testament is various groups of the disciples' followers writing down what those who had come into direct contact with Jesus said about his life; it doesn't seem like a stretch to say that some degree of human error creeps in there, or that different groups chose to emphasize different things.

249: Everything I've heard about Dennet's recent book makes me think I'd like it. I'm especially attracted by this "belief in belief" idea, which strikes me as spot on.

250: I think the idea is that all the various books of the Bible were written in distinct historical and literary contexts and should be read and understood as such. Simply reading the thing cover to cover like some sort of life instruction manual strips the thing of its depth.

Beyond that (and this is decidedly a minority position, I think), believing that the Bible is not, cover to cover, literally true does not necessarily mean it's not "accurate." By which I'm trying to drive at the distinction between "fact" and "truth." Just like Shakespeare [or whoever--insert favorite canon or non-canon author here] conveyed much truth about the human condition in works that were never meant to be read literally, so too the scriptures can convey much truth about our relationship to God without being pure fact-based reporting.

Actually, R H-C, I think "belief in belief" is one of the weakest parts of the book. Is it supposed to mean more than Gibbon's delicious line about all forms of religion being equally true to the people, false to the philosophers, and useful to the magistrates? I know it invites us to think of ourselves as "magistrates", which is gratifying. But beyond that, where does it go?

255: If I'm reading Commenter and well, myself, correctly, it's not that anything other than strict literalism is bad; strict literalism is crazy talk when applied to a book that contradicts itself. Catholicism and most of the major Protestant sects aren't literalists and haven't been literalists for some time because strict literalism leads you to say stupid things.

But the other end of that spectrum is the one where Jesus' message, whatever it was, boils down to 'just make yourself happy.' Believe in God, believe in no God, whatever, it's all happy. And that's a nice sentiment, but -- and here I'm just speaking about my personal tastes -- it really doesn't seem to rise to the level of a faith worth bothering with. I could live with it, but not live for it, and if that's the option, my Catholic agnosticism serves just as well.

251: I don't have a worked out conception of belief either. Also, I don't want to give the impression that I think only red staters substitute group identification for belief. Everyone does it. Also musical taste.

I see what you are saying about a belief being something that must be held to a standard. Certainly that is better than saying a belief actually has gone through a certain process of scrutiny, which is what I had.

But I'm still not sure this "should be held to a certain standard" is enough. For most people and most apparent beliefs, it is actually kind of pointless to hold them to standards. They aren't going to change their minds, or even hear you. Does this mean they are irrational, or don't really have beliefs? I suppose it is six of one or half dozen of the other.

It means I get to say mean things about them on my blog.

255 would certainly make sense if we were talking about small things. But we're not, see 207. The Bible's teachings on many issues are completely immoral, not just copy-editing errors.

If you just want to keep the life and teachings of Jesus, and through out everything else, then who is Father and what is He like, and why did he allow such a blatantly immoral and terrible portrayal of himself in the Old Testament? And why didn't Jesus say that the Old Testament was crap? And why did God let Paul take over his church, if Paul was so totally wrong?

Not to change the subject or anything, but I finally clicked through and read the Edwards article (much more important to read all the comments first), and damn, that is an impressive human being. I'm agnostic about her husband, but she appears to be remarkably wise and at peace for one whose terminal diagnosis is so recent.

Just like Shakespeare [or whoever--insert favorite canon or non-canon author here] conveyed much truth about the human condition in works that were never meant to be read literally, so too the scriptures can convey much truth about our relationship to God without being pure fact-based reporting.

Sure--I can appreciate the whole message of "be careful about that jealousy thing" in Othello regardless of whether a Moor ever killed his own wife back in the day. Likewise, I can sign on to the Bible's message that charity and forgiveness is good without believing that Jesus literally walked on water. However, the stuff about man's relationship with God doesn't have much meaning if you don't read it literally--either you believe that accepting Jesus is the path to salvation, or you don't, in which case the Bible is a big morality fable. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't have much to do with God.

I'm trying to get at less issues like "did Jesus actually walk on water, or is that just a story to signify some larger truth?" and more things like "how can you believe in the God of the Bible and believe that genocide is always wrong?" And if you do believe that, then why didn't Jesus care that God is depicted in the Old Testament as supporting the occasional genocide?

Comparing most of the Bible to Shakespeare in terms of its insight on life, seems totally ridiculous to me. Sure there's some good stuff here and there in the Bible, but most of it is genuinely terrible. And despite it's superiority, I don't see people going to Shakespeare worshipping meetings every sunday.

I don't see people going to Shakespeare worshipping meetings every sunday.

There are many who think this should be the function of English departments.

262/265 - Now you're into actual questions of theology and doctrine. The generally accepted answer is that Jesus represented a "new covenant" -- one replacing the Old Testament laws of the Mosaic Covenant, etc., with a new way of salvation. The extent of this transformation was a bitterly disputed question among early Christians, down to the questions of whether Christians should keep kosher and practice circumcision, and is just the sort of thing that Elaine Pagels, mentioned upthread, knows a lot about.

266: In philosophy, we do not worship Shakespeare, but instead fellate idols of Kripke.

But isn't there a difference between things like keeping kosher and practicing circumcision and stuff like "genocide is always wrong" vs. "sometimes it is wrong to let a few of the people you're supposed to wipe out live"?

Plus, Paul is in the New Covanent and he hates women and gays. And God let him take over his church.

260, 251:

substitute group identification for belief

This strikes me as an interesting working definition for inauthenticity. Just playing with the idea, really. I'm not sure I'd want to get engaged in it.

Frankly, pressing hard on propositional attitudes seems a formula for tearing one's hair out at this point: Does someone believe that p? Or simply endorse p? Or just assume that p (out of habit, as Rob's example of leaning back in the chair)?

Yes, there are important distinctions to be made, but doesn't it seem that the vocabulary is becoming impoverished?

Just musing, not in battle stance by any means.

269: Yeah but, he was just jealous of Mary Magdalen who got to carry Jesus' child. Dan Brown told me so.

Wait, we fellate idols of Kripke? I thought...I mean, he said...damn, fooled again.

doesn't it seem that the vocabulary is becoming impoverished?

Actually, the differences between types of endorsement are helpful here, to me at least. You can endorse a proposition as true, or as useful, or...etc. I think what a lot of the touchy-feely people are doing is sort of saying "isn't it lovely to think so?" to selected parts of the NT.

either you believe that accepting Jesus is the path to salvation, or you don't, in which case the Bible is a big morality fable

Well, no.

IN DEFENSE OF SQUISHY CHRISTIANITY:

(1) It would be unrecognizably un-Godlike to deny salvation (whatever that is) to non-Christians. It's a big world, even leaving out those pre-Jesus millenia.

(2) So it seems that *some* accommodation must exist, unless God is just an asshole about these things. Maybe an opportunity in the afterlife, whatever. In fact, as a Christian, I think I am duty-bound to hope for the *possibility* of salvation for all. I thus reject God's assholery.

(3) That leaves me with the possibility that Christianity is not a unique path to salvation. Jesus says, "I am the way, no man comes to the Father but through me." But what does "coming to the Father through Jesus" mean? Could one perhaps do so even without ever having heard of Jesus? Maybe so, if we read the gospels without the accretion of dogma that makes it almost impossible for us to read the actual words on the page.

(4) So why be a Christian? Because I grew up with it. Because that's my spiritual language. I am interested in Zen and Taoism, but I'm not "fluent" in them, to run w/ the metaphor.

(5) One of the good things about Zen is that it suggests that enlightenment is a lot more about what you *do* than about what you think. I think this fits with the gospels rather well. Certainly, a God who attached any importance to our belief in the Trinity would've taken a bit more care to, you know, actually have the Bible say something about it. And so on.

270 & 258: I wouldn't bother to figure out what kind of propositional attitude counts as a belief, were it not for so many religious people telling me how important it is to believe in something. This is what I thought Dennett was talking about when he talked about belief in belief. Not the magistrates idea that religion is useful, but this popular feeling that if you don't belong to some religion creed or another, you are unhinged and immoral.

I see a lot of people out there trying to convince *themselves* that they believe in something, just to be assured that they are a good person. This is really different than cynically using another's credulity. A lot of this stuff about being born again seems to be one upmanship about how to best hold a propositional attitude. The whole thing is frankly weird.

Shorter 274: "I know more about God than Jesus did. Yet I still believe that Jesus is God."

I know more about God than Jesus did. Yet I still believe that Jesus is God

Oh, for crying out loud.

Shorter Unfoggetarian: I'm an atheist, but my understanding of Christianity is superior to that of Christians.

--So that wasn't actually shorter, shoot me.

Here's a defense of squishy religiosity that gets more to Cala and LB's problems:

I know, you are afraid that if you acknowledge the existence of a vague divine spirit, you will, by law, be forced to listen to NPR's Sound and Spirit. But look, that law is rarely enforced. And, you know, if you would just stop being so defensive about your self image, you'd realize the show isn't so bad. I know, they rarely play a song all the way through, but it can relax you while you do the dishes. Someone on the NPR-hate thread described it as "Unitiarians on ecstasy", but is that so bad? One of the moms in my child care co-op is a Unitarian, and she is really hott. I'd have fun tripping on ecstacy with her.

if you would just stop being so defensive about your self image, you'd realize the show isn't so bad

Naah, it's not us, it's the show. The three seconds I spend listening to it before hitting the button on my car stereo is, to me, sufficient proof of that.

Seriously though, where do you get your point (1)? Nothing could be more God-like. See the flood. See the Egyptian's first-born. See "Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated." Read Paul's epistle to the Romans. And see the very words of Christ that are of issue here.

See the flood. See the Egyptian's first-born. See "Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated." Read Paul's epistle to the Romans. And see the very words of Christ that are of issue here.

No, see, now you're taking the Bible literally.

Nothing could be more God-like. See the flood.

I said, "salvation," not "protection from floods, genocides, drunk drivers, and those annoying biting insects."

The problem of the Tanakh vis-a-vis the Gospels struck people very early on -- rightly, I think. Short answer: if I cared to take the Tanakh as a literal or reasonably accurate portrayal of God, then I would presumably become a Jew.

Paul: good guy, smart, didn't have all the answers.

"The very words of Christ that are at issue here." It's a long thread -- help a brother out, would you?

Paul: good guy

You'll get a fair amount of disagreement on this statement.

I had assumed that the bit you were quoting at the beginning of your comment was a reference to Jesus's words that "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man comes unto the Father except through me." (Forget the reference off the top of my head, somewhere late in the Gospel of John, chapter 14 perhaps?)

"salvation," not "protection from floods, genocides, drunk drivers, and those annoying biting insects."

*Tweet* False parallel! The Flood wasn't just any natural disaster.

You know what's funny about religious intolerance founded on reason? It's not actually any prettier or more fun to watch than religious intolerance based on faith.

You'll get a fair amount of disagreement on this statement.

I think basing one's op of Paul on what he says about women, for ex, is sort of like doing the same re: Aristotle.

I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man comes unto the Father except through me.

Right. And this means what, concretely? You're right, John 14:6, and it's certainly open to interpretation.

Verse 21: "He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him."

You know what's funny about religious intolerance founded on reason? It's not actually any prettier or more fun to watch than religious intolerance based on faith.

Amen. Leaving aside that we are entitled to be a little skeptical of "reason" when it evangelizes (as someone upthread described Dawkins as doing).

… and manifest myself to him.

This is known as Jesus' "open trenchcoat" policy.

277: "Shorter Unfoggetarian: I'm an atheist, but my understanding of Christianity is superior to that of Christians."

I think the assumption underlying any debate is that each side has a differing a point of view. If Anderson's views on Christianity are, by definition, superior to those of atheists, well, there's not much for an atheist do except shut up.

But ...

The question is: What is the justification for cafeteria Christianity? In the contest between "Biblical/Historical Jesus" and "Personal Jesus," the Biblical account has more credibility for reasons that seem obvious to me. And the Biblical account is straightforwardly, explicitly awful in many places.

To take the easy example: Biblical Jesus is very clear on the idea that anybody who disputes His views needs to be tortured for eternity. That's a lot worse than stoning people for mixing fabrics (or whatever the West Wing example was).

Of course, if the only two choices are Personal Jesus and Biblical Jesus, I'm all in favor of Personal Jesus.

But those aren't the only two choices.

Here's my defense of my own squishy religiosity (Catholic in my mind, but anyone with whom I discussed this would insist that I'm an athiest):

Anderson's basically right, that one's religious affiliation provides one with a sort of language of morality and faith. I'd add to that that "god" exists, obviously, in the same way that "human rights" or "the public sphere" exist--it is a term we use to encompass and name a set of phenomena and beliefs that really do shape the material world we live in.

That doesn't make god a big guy in the sky (for my part, I think that the idea of an intentional god is totally fucking bizarre and childish). But it's not quite saying that there's no such thing as god, either. And the reason for "believing" it, rather than just being an athiest, is that it seems to me that it's true.

275:

The whole thing is frankly weird

This wins the thread.

There's a wide gulf between squishy religiosity and pluralism.

All this yap about how if you read the Bible literally you couldn't possibly be a decent human being, or how without literal belief in God you can't really be a Christian gives the game away too quickly. Literalism is no more at the core of religious practice than realism is at the core of literary practice. There are a hundred different ways its been done and a hundred different ways to do it. Even the people who argue for literal interpretations are doing so from an historically situated position, where literalism is being used for political and social ends. It concedes too much to them to allow that the naked text of the Bible, minus two to four millennia of interpretation and lives lived, is really all that prominent in what religion stands for.

Again, this is why being a Jew is so much easier. As a friend of mine pointed out at Seder, the Old Testament God is monotheism with a single god as wacked out as any single polytheistic deity. Jehovah, for example, just plum forgets that he left the Hebrews in Egypt, and is only reminded -- the word is reminded, IIRC -- by their cries. Big oops!

282 is exactly the opposite of how I think about it. The Old Testament god is what we have to work with, but we get the ol' interpotato gun and fire away. The identity is about ethnicity, continuity of tradition, mythology, ethics, and discussion. Metaphysics and literal history are way down on the list. That's not universal, but it is widely recognized as valid.

Man, that Jehovah is a nutter.

Biblical Jesus is very clear on the idea that anybody who disputes His views needs to be tortured for eternity.

Then please quote Biblical Jesus on the subject.

In my own atheist period, I know I fell prey to an assumption that the fundamentalists were right about Christianity; and since I knew I couldn't be one of them, I figured I couldn't be a Christian.

However, seeing how wrong they manage to be about everything else, I eventually decided that being stupid is not a prerequisite for being a Christian (pace Paul's implication that it at least helps).

I wouldn't dream of reading Plato the way these people read the gospels; why should I bring any less sophistication to the gospels than I would to Plato?

--I like B.PhD.'s comparison to "human rights," though I'm willing to entertain an intentional, but inscrutable, God. I can't make liberalism work without some axiom about natural rights, and maybe that's metaphysical.

There's a wide gulf between squishy religiosity and pluralism.

Please explain?

I take pluralism as the acknowledgement that *any* religious belief is equally worthy of respect, which I don't accept. Is that what you mean by it?

293: True enough. I hate Sound and Spirit too, and I find squishy nice-nice people irritating. But ime, my aesthetic squirrelishness is my problem--often, ime, the squishy nice-nice people really are genuinely good and sincere human beings, and if I work on reining in my emotionally defensive inner adolescent, they can be really good friends. And they're often more actively trying to do good than my own cynical lazy-ass self.

IIRC, it isn't so easy to find statements of Jesus about eternal damnation. You definitely get stuff like the wheat being seperated from the chaff and the chaff burnt, but that's harder to interpret. Paul is totally unambiguous on the issue (yet another reason why Paul is evil), but I think Anderson is right here and Politcalfootball is wrong (though my Bible knowledge is getting old at this point, so I might be forgetting something).

288: I think we all have the right to be skeptical of anything anyone else believes, regardless of our own beliefs. I think that's good and healthy. When anyone starts to tell another that what they believe is obviously wrong, however... well to be honest it squicks me out. None of us knows what's in another's heart. We're not always certain of our own. We may disagree about the policy or political or social applications of those beliefs - I may respect the sincerity of Christian belief in a social conservative but I disagree openly and completely with how many of them would apply those beliefs to society - but to say to one another, "No, the contents of your beliefs, your mythology itself is wrong," it crosses a line.

Perhaps the gods revealed something to me when I took up my current faith. Perhaps God revealed something to you in yours. Perhaps one of us is wrong, perhaps both of us, perhaps God revealed to each of us what was appropriate to each of us. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I don't believe faith and knowledge are directly opposed but neither do I confuse them for one another. I believe, but that belief falters sometimes in a way knowledge does not. It's a different thing, and in that difference it leaves room for what some call doubt and I call caution. I believe in what I believe; I believe that my gods are real and true. I am, however, cautious to acknowledge that I do not have all the answers, that sometimes I wonder if I really believe and that sometimes I believe when I wish I didn't.

I think much of this debate gets confused because we as a society are confused about religions. People often look to religions to provide answers and explanations including those who seek to criticize or examine those answers & explanations. I think religions are shit at answers and explanations. I think religions are much better at prompting questions and we have to find the answers ourselves. Why did God make Paul the leader of the church? Beats me; I'm not a Christian and don't particularly care but maybe there are lessons there for Christians who try to see the Pauls of their own churches and question why they get power over others. Maybe God is the world's lamest DM, throwing one incoherent random encounter after another in our path and giggling to himself. Religions tell us otherwise but religions are terrible at telling us things and only useful insofar as we use them to examine our own world and our own lives in it.

Crap, that reads like a squishy manifesto, but whatever. I'm hungry and I'm going to go eat.

often, ime, the squishy nice-nice people really are genuinely good and sincere human beings

Yeah, that's what I hate about them!

I would probably be a better person if I were squishy nice-nice, but I'm not ... so maybe Rob is right and the problem is me, not Sound & Spirit. But given the choice between losing my entire sense of self & listening to an NPR show, my choice is clear, parables about seeds which must die notwithstanding.

Adding to Unfoggetarian's rebuttal re: Jesus & damnation, PoliticalFootball said Jesus said "anybody who disputes His views needs to be tortured for eternity." But IIRC, when Jesus talks in sheep/goats, wheat/chaff mode, he's addressing how people behave, not whether they signed the Nicene Creed on the dotted line. Counterexamples welcome.

296: By "pluralism" I mean the claim that there is more than one equally valid path to salvation. It doesn't have to be all, but it's definitely more than one. ("Inclusivism" would be the weaker claim: that one path is right, and the rest of the paths are right insofar as they reflect the good bits of that path.)

You can hold either of those positions without being squishy.

I like a McManly Pants.

301: I think the definition of "squishy" here is itself squishy. And what do we mean by "salvation," while we're at it?

300: Dude, I was agreeing with you.

Why did God make Paul the leader of the church?

Is there a Roman Catholic in the house? Cleanup on comment 299!

Crap, that reads like a squishy manifesto, but whatever.

Well, I'd rather be a Squish than a Bright ... Liked your comment. I can't respect the beliefs of anyone who can't admit that he or she might be completely mistaken. How's that?

--Off into the real world of feeding my own personal flock ... they like pizza.

300: Dude, I was agreeing with you.

Okay, trying to leave, but yes of course you were, sorry if I implied otherwise. That's what I meant when I said I was "adding" to your rebuttal -- building on it. Sorry I wasn't clear!

266: In philosophy, we do not worship Shakespeare, but instead fellate idols of Kripke.

Oh, so that's what's going on here.

His designator's rigid, if nothing else.

Maybe God is the world's lamest DM

No, that would have been me. I could only get one friend to play with me; he named all of his characters after bodily functions and eighties jazz-rock bands, and our games consisted of me killing off his characters and making him beg for restoration, long into the night.

295: "Then please quote Biblical Jesus on the subject."

This is what I mean when I talk about liberal Christians sometimes failing to be serious readers of the Bible. Falwell wouldn't have any trouble answering that question. Me, I had to use a searchable Bible.

For a quick sample, Matthew 5, verses 28-30:

"I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell."

That's pretty straightforward, and there's plenty more like it. Jesus was all about hellfire.

You know, though, this people you l0ve dying horrible, untimely deaths thing seems like a pretty basic design problem in the human condition, but a goodly dollop of tragedy here and there often really does add a certain depth and complexity to life that can be valuable when it doesn't destroy you outright. Her tragedies are part of the reason that Elizabeth Edwards lives a richer life than some Chet who's never suffered anything worse than rain on his golf day. Possibly God, if he exists, is onto something.

Apropos the discussion at hand:

From Brooke McEldowney's A Locutionary Field Guide to Earth:

Faith: Noun
The unknowable promoted to the irrefutable;
Doubt in exile;
The child's comfort;
The fanatic's trigger

I'd be curious to know what 'hell' has been translated from in that passage.

And, "plenty more"? Really?

310: Yeah, I did a similar search after I commented above. There are several uses like that. But as Anderson points out, they're all tied to sinning, not to belief. Furthermore they're all phrased in terms of danger of hell, and thus are all consistant with a more universal "God loves you and will save you from your sins" belief. See this page for more details. I'm certainly not saying that I agree with the interpretation there, but I can't call it intellectually unserious.

In my experience, most fundamentalist christians also don't know the Bible very well, which is even more embarassing. Nothing more ridiculous than someone who believes the Bible is the inspired word of God and hasn't read it recently, or hasn't memorized anything beyond John 3:16.

Nonetheless, despite 314, I stand by my claim that the God of the Old Testament and the Apostle Paul are evil.

311: Guantanamo as a life-enrichment camp? Seriously, no one I know who's ever been through serious stuff has wanted to go another round so as to get deeper and more complex.

316: Wanting more of it ain't the same as recognizing that your life was changed and your understanding deepened by going through it. And note the caveat that sometimes have more tragedy than they can take and are just shattered by it.

Mark 16 has some comments about belief:

15 He said to them, "Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.
16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.

I was raised in deeply committed Evangelical Christian household and after I became an atheist in high school my father (a preacher) told me he was glad that I at least wasn't becoming a Unitarian or United Church of Christ member or some other form of liberal Christian.

This attitude is why I both respect and feel bad for liberal Christians in America. They are viewed as charting a middle ground between secularism and "true" Christianity by both fundamentalists and atheists, and so commonly even more disliked by both.

318: Even many otherwise ordinary literalists are willing to admit that the latter half of Mark 16 is not authentic, so I would hesitate to place much weight on it (sorry no references, but there were at three evangelical bible schools near where I grew that viewed this as an open question).

"Authentic"? The whole bloody thing is a mish-mash of non-contemporaneous writing, translated and redacted and re-translated, somewhat like the child's game of Telephone.

Growing up in the household of a Biblical archaeologist makes one cynical...

Wanting more of it ain't the same as recognizing that your life was changed and your understanding deepened by going through it.

Sure. Here's where I like Nietzsche's line -- "How could I not be grateful to my whole life?" You either accept who you've become & what's befallen you, interpreting it into a coherent whole ... or else you repudiate part of your past, which is to repudiate yourself.

We should hope that people who suffer are able to do this kind of thing, w/out wishing it for them or for ourselves.

322: I think there's more to it than that, but it's a long way from a coherent argument so I'll drop it. Certainly on board with the not wishing it part.

I have a very clear picture of and beliefs about the God I definitely don't worship. I don't know if I can answer therefore whether I believe in Him or not.

I don't recommend this position. I'm pretty sure that the only reason I'm not an atheist is I know it would make me happier.

313: My understanding - and here I'm talking a bit over my head - is that the Hell of the new testament is Hell, but the hell of the Old Testament is Gehenna. Not the same thing.

My understanding (reinforced by a quick Google check) is that Orthodox Judaism doesn't buy into the idea of Hell - that Hell, understood as the Lake of Fire, the place of eternal torment, is a function of the New Testament and was a Christian innovation in theology.

And yeah - I could summon more examples, but why? Jesus is on the record on this subject. Is there a counter-example? An example of Jesus deriding Hell as a concept?

The New Testament is really clear on the existence and purpose of Hell - to punish those who dispute Jesus' rules. I'm not sure I get this distinction folks are making between thoughts that are opposed to the rules and actions that are opposed to the rules. Surely Jesus' entire point in the example I cited was to obliterate the distinction, sin-wise, between thoughts and actions. What else could that passage mean?

Gehenna sounds like it would be full of foreigners.

Hell is a fairly pointless subject of theological dispute, IMHO.

If there's an eternal place of torment, then either it's somehow consistent with the goodness of God, or it's not, in which case there is no hell (or else God isn't good, contra hypothesis).

The consistency is inconceivable to me, tho that is scarcely an objection, God being God. The only kind of sense it makes is if those who are in hell choose to be there (not "choice" in the Jack Chick sense, please); I think C.S. Lewis has some thoughts on those lines.

Regardless, a Christian can certainly hope & pray that no one will be sent to hell, or that everyone there will be allowed to repent & leave. Which to me is pretty much all a Christian needs to think about regarding hell. YMMV.

Gehenna sounds like it would be full of foreigners.

Italians, is what I hear.

It's a damn shame we don't have a single hardcore fundamentalist, biblical-literalist commenter here at unfogged. Some of them can be fun to argue with.

most fundamentalist christians also don't know the Bible very well, which is even more embarassing

But it does provide fantastic humor potential.

321: Well, sure, like almost every ancient text we have, it is not that difficult to question the historical accuracy of the Bible. So what. That is surely not reason to stop studying them.

More importantly, since most Bible scholars claim that Mark is the earliest of the gospels and so probably the most accurate account we have of the life of Jesus (although some like John), it seems unfair to ignore the fact that most scholars also agree that the part you quoted is a later addition.

317: Yeah. My version of the saying is, "That which doesn't kill me is setting me up for what will".

265: (Re: Shakespeare worshipping meetings)

But here's the thing. Midsummer Night's Dream isn't *about* Shakespeare; it's *by* Shakespeare. So to the extent one views the Bible as written by mere mortals, comparing the Bible to Shakespeare (or whatever other author) is hardly "ridiculous." It's only when the Bible is viewed as the divine Word of God (a common enough view in some sectors) that the comparison is inapt. I don't worship Matthew, Mark, Luke or John any more than I do Goethe or Steinbeck or Rowling.

I've read a good chunk of the Bible in my day, and I can't remember a single book in which the author claimed "I am writing down verbatim the exact word dictated to me by God." (I know, I know, I've met plenty of the evangelicals who take this view.) Accepting that it contains accounts written by ordinary mortals, I fail to understand why it should be so shocking that it might contain some mortal biases and incongruities.

"Anglican through and through, though I have my doubts from time to time--as would anyone."

+1

"Rob, do there exist any similar survey data for philosophers? Based on my experience, I'd expect that philosophers are even less likely to be theists than scientists.

When I was in grad school, we had one Christian professor, and grad student who called himself a theist. (Although I think the grad student's God was basically Spinoza's God, so I'm not sure that really counts.) Everybody else was an atheist."

I was a philosphy major at a sorta xtian school, and it was known as the bad place that created a few atheists out of every class, and where most of the druggies were.

I think basing one's op of Paul on what he says about women, for ex, is sort of like doing the same re: Aristotle.

So what's your point?

"I hold on to God not because the universe makes no sense without him, but because I don't like the sense it makes without him. The godless world is not the world that I want it to be. Evidence suggests that may in fact be the world in which we live, but I cling to a glorious hope, a possibility."

Yeah, this.

My reason for religion also has a lot to do with the writings of tolkien and lewis, and the music of arvo paart and renaissance polyphonic choral stuff.

I think having some preexisting constructs lying around is useful. Rituals are really good for the soul.

333: There is Paul writing (in II Timothy 3:16, I believe) that "all scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in rightousness." And now that there are searchable bibles you can search for these things, you don't have to have them memorized.

Anyway I feel like the end of this conversation has gone:

me: "Most of the Bible is evil and wrong"

believer: "There's no reason to take it literally, it's beautiful and teaches us great important things about the world."

me: "Um, I didn't say it was factually inaccurate, I said it was morally bankrupt. How does a nonliteral reading get you out of that?"

338: Isn't that how these things always end?

There is Paul writing

I've always liked how the key verse for the uniform goodness of Scripture is a letter of Paul's that almost nobody thinks Paul actually wrote.

"Most of the Bible is evil and wrong"

Well, isn't allegorization, for example, a common response to a text that, literally taken, is evil and wrong, but is for whatever reason too important to discard? At least, that's what Susie Sontag wrote in "Against Interpretation."

The Bible is flawed, which means that no, you can't take it as the literal, inerrant Word of God. What bothers me is the attitude, which you may not share, of "well, in that case, you can't be a Christian."

That seems to me like saying you can't be a Platonist unless you believe that everything in Plato is literally true and exactly what Plato wrote.

Yeah, see, most of these searchable Bibles aren't in the original language and don't come with any sort of sophisticated exegesis of the language used. You quote a version that says "God-breathed" which certainly many people read as "dictated verbatim" or something similar. I'm more familiar with the versions that say "God inspired" which is certainly a different meaning. Paul saying "God breathed every word that wound up in this collection" is a far bigger claim than Paul saying, "The various authors in this collection were inspired by God." And of course, you are quoting Paul for how he thought the Bible should be read. I don't worship Paul, and while I might find some of his insights useful, being a Christian does not mean I am required to accept every word he says.

Honestly, I agree that much of the Bible is pretty offensive -- at the very least as it has been translated and understood. There are plenty of places in the NT where Jesus seems to be saying the same thing: "The OT says 'eye for an eye.' I say 'turn the other cheek.'" And so forth. He takes the hardcore "faithful" to task from what he appears to suggest is a pervasive and maybe willful misreading and misuse of the scriptures.

I never said the Bible was "beautiful" -- though there are sections that I think truly are. I did say it *can* teach us great things -- at least if we're willing to approach it with the same sort of critical thought we approach other texts with. The way I read your comments, you seem to take the position that a Christian must treat the Bible as pure and perfect and infallible -- in essence, something like a fourth leg of the trinity. I realize I'm probably not being terribly mainstream here, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to be a Christian and still view the Bible as merely *a* book (or, more accurately, collection thereof).

Maybe it's just hunger making me cranky, but it seems to me you are simply looking to hear, "Lo. you're right, the Bible is evil. I guess I'll renounce my childish faith now," rather than genuinely being open to trying to consider and understand how different Christians might read the scriptures, and especially the more objectionable parts, in a way that is in fact reconcilable with genuine decency.

Paul didn't put the collection together. He had some letters, but he's dead before a lot of it is written down. So fine, Paul says "all true scripture is God-inspired." That's nice, but if we chucked the true scripture in the rubbish bin, it would be God-inspired and in the trash.

I'm certain that genuine decency and christianity of some sort are not mutually exclusive. I can't see how the genuine decency would be traceable to the bible, though. You can argue whether or not it's actually in spite of the text, or that's basically a wash.

Di Kitomy, have you ever used blueletterbible.org? It's really nice. You can search it, look for other use of that verses Strong's numbers, read verses in Hebrew or Greek, compare modern translations, and read the history of exegesis on each verse. Sometimes they even have maps.

I'm coming very late to this thread, so forgive if someone already recommended.

Di Kotimy, not Di Kitomy. Not enough caffeine today.

at a certain point, doesn't logical incoherence fortify a book against being morally repugnant? The very difficulty in putting a coherent worldview on the Bible forces us not to read it as saying anything straightforwardly evil.

341: Let me repeat and expand on my question in 250 which is where this all started. Do you believe in a God who cares enough to send his Son to die, but not enough to actually make the main source of knowledge about himself even vaguely accurate and morally nonrepulsive? If not, then what do I have wrong? If so, how is that coherent?

I just don't get it. If the bible is mostly bullshit, and no better than Shakespeare, then why be a Christian?

347: Do you believe in a God who cares enough to send his Son to die, but not enough to actually make the main source of knowledge about himself even vaguely accurate and morally nonrepulsive?

Well, how would God "make" this happen? By ensuring that only approved books entered the canon, and by ensuring that no textual corruption ever occurred?

God might as well appear at the Macy's parade and announce the Millenium.

Now, that may be the sensible thing for God to do. But obviously, God either has other ideas, or doesn't exist. So here we are, in a fallen world, with evil dictators, callous bourgeoisies, and corrupt texts of often-mysterious import.

I would submit that nonetheless, the basic tenets that Jesus taught are clear enough that we would all much rather dispute theological issues than go out and actually practice them.

--Anyway, the significance of Jesus's death is itself problematic -- from what little soteriology I've gleaned, *how* the death on the cross "saves" anyone is not terribly clear, to where Anselm of Canterbury, 1000+ years after the event, could come up with a new theory for instance.

But I'm not talking about small textual corruptions, sigh.

Do I basically understand that you're saying you think Jesus was a good guy and his basic moral teachings are good things, and that's all that Christianity means to you? And that when Jesus talks about God he doesn't mean anything at all like the God of the Old Testament or of the letters of Paul?

God might as well appear at the Macy's parade and announce the Millenium.

That would totally rock.

I know I'm coming way late to this party, but God did not require Jesus to die on the cross, we did/ do. Humanity requires proof of God's love. That proof is satisfied by the sacrifice of his Son, as a lamb is sacrificed. Jesus' willingness to act as that sacrifice provides the salvation.

Pearls before swine, TLL. Swine that will be roasted into delicious Hell bacon for consumption by the saved.

351 is a perfect example of something that you can't possibly believe unless you think that large swaths of the old testament (sacrifices and their role) and most of the writings of Paul are not just a little corrupt but total complete nonsense. And that's not even getting into the epistle (from some unknown person) to the Hebrews.

Hell bacon

I think I just heard apostropher get religion and I'm sitting all the way on the other side of town.

Do I basically understand that you're saying you think Jesus was a good guy and his basic moral teachings are good things, and that's all that Christianity means to you?

No. The gospels could be clearer on the nature of Jesus's divinity, but the claim is certainly there, and scarcely any more ridiculous than belief in God itself.

And that when Jesus talks about God he doesn't mean anything at all like the God of the Old Testament or of the letters of Paul?

He means *something* like the OT God -- not Shiva, for instance. But assuming that God's teachings to the Hebrews had been corrupted over time, it's scarcely implausible that Jesus would have some jarringly different things to say about God than the OT might lead us to believe.

As for Paul's letters, I think Paul obviously had *some* sort of divine experience -- see Garry Wills's new book for instance. But I admit to assigning the gospels far more importance than the rest of the Bible put together. Paul didn't follow Jesus around for years, and while Paul was remarkably willing to step out of his Jewish skin in some respects, I think he's often closer to the OT understanding of God than to the gospels.

So if I have to be an orthodox Christian to be a Christian, then I guess I'm not a Christian. But I fail to see the point of the Reformation if we were just supposed to trade one dogmatic church-bound interpretation of Christianity for another.

353. I freely admit that my personal beliefs are heavily influenced by Archbishop Spong (who incedentally, baptised my daughter that w-lfs-n was perving on previously). Much of the Bible must be seen and read as myth.

---And, since this thread's length & patience-level may be nearing its end, allow me to say how fun and profitable it is to get to talk to anyone about this stuff, and many thanks?

Working in a Mississippi law firm does not leave much room for water-cooler discussions about the nature of Christianity.

356: But even as myth that's not what the old testament says. Sigh. You don't have to believe the flood actually happen to realize that--as myth--it's a story about God killing almost all of humanity for their sins.

"Let me repeat and expand on my question in 250 which is where this all started. Do you believe in a God who cares enough to send his Son to die, but not enough to actually make the main source of knowledge about himself even vaguely accurate and morally nonrepulsive? If not, then what do I have wrong? If so, how is that coherent?"

Speaking solely for myself and not all of Christendom... I believe in a God who can hardly be reduced to a single "main source of knowledge about himself." A God who expects us to do a little thinking for ourselves, to compare the perspectives shared by the biblical authors with what we perceive in our own consciences with what our friends andfamily share with us, with 1000 other things. I don't like when people presume to know me perfectly based on a collection of things other people have said about me and I presume God feels much the same. I believe in a God who cares enough about us that s/he doesn't need to rigidly control all the information to which we are exposed. Yea, verily, I believe in a God who may even be pleased that I read Unfogged, seething in heathen wantonness though it may be. (That last bit, just snark -- not really calling anyone here a heathen... )

"I just don't get it. If the bible is mostly bullshit, and no better than Shakespeare, then why be a Christian?"

First, I didn't say it was mostly bullshit, only that I think it needs to be read with a sense of context and literary tradition and even a healthy dose of acknowledgment that the mortal writers were not divine and infallible. More importantly, it's not a question for me of whether the Bible is better than Shakespeare. I actually quite like Shakespeare and find vast, vast portions of the Bible bore me to tears. But for this humble Christian, it is not the book that is important, it's the God discussed from multiple perspectives therein. I'm not really sure how to articulate this, but I'm basically saying I see no need to deify the Bible itself in order to be a Christian. And I see nothing incoherent about having a faith that is not bound and fettered to a book.

Commenter, I'm not quite sure what you want here, but why isn't it possible for the Christian to say, yes, the God of the New Testament is the same God as the God of the Old Testament, but our understanding of what God is and wants from humans has evolved over time.

We start out thinking of God as just the Hebrew patron. All the other tribes have gods, but their gods want human sacrifice (point for Yahweh!) and our does the job all of theirs do. This relationship evolves and becomes more complex. The big news with Jesus is that God doesn't want the sacrifices. God wants us to come back and be loving and loved.

So why doesn't God just do that? The story as TLL recounts isn't all that common: human beings are things that feel guilty when they do bad things, and we couldn't accept someone just saying 'I wipe the slate clean.' We need to feel like we've atoned. The sacrifices were always just for our benefit; God doesn't give a crap about two turtledoves. God says, "enough already. Here's the ultimate sacrifice. You cannot do better than this. Would you come home and be happy already?"

357: And on that note, let me add that I am impressed that the God thread has grown to proportions normally reserved for the sex threads. That is something indeed!

I'm giving up, there's no way to convince you people that I'm saying anything other than that every word of the Bible is literally true.

361: Cala, I really like how you've put that. It's perhaps suggesting that the central theme of the Bible, culminating in Jesus' life and death, is that we are just plain not getting God. From now on, that's the quote I'm putting on posters at football games: "Would you come home and be happy already?" Cala 361. =)

I'm giving up, there's no way to convince you people that I'm saying anything other than that every word of the Bible is literally true.

Not at all. You just seem to think that the consequence of *denying* that proposition is "Jesus was a good guy and his basic moral teachings are good things, and that's all that Christianity means to you," and some of us are rejecting that dichotomy.

Like I said upthread, the alternatives aren't fundamentalism or atheism, though it's very easy (living in America, let alone the South) to think that.

So if you're feeling frustrated that we're not listening, check first & make sure that *you* are listening?

We don't think you're saying that. We think, or I think, that you're saying your options are a) every word of the Bible is literally true and there's sum pretty horrible words in thar or b) iany other interpretive option renders you incoherent. People are arguing that they don't believe a) and that b) is false.

362: I certainly have not understood your position to be thus and have tried very hard to make clear that I was not addressing it as such. But we are clearly talking past each other at this point. So, hey, go home and be happy already.

358. The Old Testament is full of God's retribution. And that is the whole point of the new Covenant. SCMT, make mine a BLT, please.

Hrm, 360 is somewhat reasonable. But I still think it misunderestimates just how bad the OT God is. It also baffles me why God would be so bad for so long at telling people what He wants.

One of my friends seems (he wouldn't describe it this way) to believe that not only has our understanding changed over time, God himself has gotten to be a better God over time. He used to be all angry and impatient, but he's gotten nicer and better in his old age. This strikes me as a pretty reasonable reading.

Would you come home and be happy already?

cf: The Prodigal Son.

363: Awww. And I think that's one of the central messages: we've lost sight (or maybe couldn't understand) what this God person was and what God's relationship was supposed to be. How many times does Jesus just ignore highly ritualistic bits of the law and respond with a variation of 'God's interested in your heart, not your rituals'?

And it doesn't mean that God doesn't care about your heart, or your actions -- moneychangers in the temple got their butts kicked -- but that whatever the Law was, we've fundamentally misunderstood its purpose.

If I was able to believe I think I'd be happier.

Cala, I really like how you've put that

Me too. Jesus as sacrifice always suggested to me that God had forgotten what he said in Isaiah -- to heck with sacrifices, people, act right!

365 on the other hand is exactly what was annoying me. The bad things in the Bible aren't little things, they're actually most of the Bible. Whether you read them literally or as myth.

God himself has gotten to be a better God over time.

That is pretty much what Jack Miles argues in his Christ sequel to God: A Biography - it follows well from his "strictly literary" reading, tho I can't agree with it religiously.

368: That's just the point. It's the Ultimate New Deal, really.

369: The prodigal son story always pissed me off a little bit as a teenager because it was SO DAMN CLEAR the eldest daughter son deserved a party but it was always the little sister brother that screwed up and got a car party.

374.---The presence of the older brother (totally not required for the narrative) is what makes it such an interesting parable. He's there exactly to elict your response: "Hey, it's not fair that the fuck-up gets forgiven!" Maybe it's not fair in stupid human terms, but God's justice is beyond piddling human fairness.

Has anyone else been following the blogging the Bible on Slate? Sort of a Cliff notes with editorial comment for the intertubes.

Why is it that when God is nice to the prodigal son it's "God's justice is beyond piddling human fairness" but when God's all go slaughter all of the Amalichites that's "oh, that can't be what God really meant because it's totally inconceivable to me that God could want that."

but when God's all go slaughter all of the Amalichites that's "oh, that can't be what God really meant because it's totally inconceivable to me that God could want that."

That is a problem for the OT -- Mark Kleiman posted some reading-group notes on that a while back -- but it doesn't sound very consistent with the gospels, which indeed is one reason we're taken aback by it.

377: Short answer: New Testament/Old Testament (about 4 or 5 hundred years, or the difference in sensibilities between Shakespeare and Shaw). I've never really understood why Xians regard the OT as canonical, rather than useful background material.

377. I am in no way a Biblical scholar, and not to go all Protocols of the Elders on you, but there is more than a little Jewish propaganda in the OT, and some ex post "God said it was OK" about how the land of Canaan became the property of the Hebrews. Sort of like what would happen if all other records were destroyed and the only document about American history was written @ 1950, discovered 300 years later.

379. I've never really understood why Xians regard the OT as canonical, rather than useful background material.
So they could bash fags, Duh!

372: Okay, how 'bout this. It's not a choice of "literal" vs. "myth." The third option is stories told from an author's perspective. Vast portions were undoubtedly intended by their authors to be read literally, methinks, much as stuff written in the NYT or WSJ or (dare I say?) spewed by the folks at Fox is intended to be taken literally. But that doesn't mean we should just take it as such. We need to look back and see what the biases of the authors are, understand that every story is told from someone's perspective, and see if we can't develop a richer understanding of the big picture from the pieces filtered through all these different lenses. At least one major significance of all the various nastiness in the OT is that, knowing that perspective people had of God, perhaps we understand a little more fully why some of the religious elite responded so violently to Jesus.

As for 368, maybe it's not that God has been so bad at telling people what he wants, but that we've been so bad at understanding it. I mean, I suppose we could say that our difficulty understanding each other on this thread is a result of our human failings in expressing ourselves, but I think it's also in large part a result of our human failings in understanding. We come to the table with preconceived notions and it is very hard to discard those enough to see the other perspective fairly. No less so -- and perhaps more so -- when we are struggling to understand God.

Oh man, Politicalfootball was so right, Jesus does say some people are going to spend eternity in hell in the last section of Matthew 25. (Though it's actions-based, not beliefs-based.) Sorry for doubting you Politicalfootball.

It also offends my notion of fairness to punish someone eternally for something wrong that they did. How do you decide that the Prodigal Son is an example of God's justice being better than your view of fairness, but that eternal punishment is actually not what Jesus had in mind? It seems to me that you should think "oh, eternal damnation offends my notion of fairness, but God's justice is so much more deep and wonderful than human fairness so it must be just."

377: You seem to have a problem with thinking that the Christian could hold that: some things are meant to be taken literally, and some things are meant as allegory, and some are just histories of what happened. It's not an all-or-nothing game.

So they could bash fags, Duh!

Was this a major talking point at the Council of Nicaea?

The religion I am not practicing doesn't have hell.

(At least not for you lot.)

385. No, I think they were more worried about how to co-opt the Godess cult, so "Immaculate Conception" was, uh, born.

386: But, IIRC, it does have hell for you, right? So we're both going to hell in the religions we're not practicing. Comity!

Jesus does say some people are going to spend eternity in hell in the last section of Matthew 25.

Yah, that's what I was referring to re: sheep/goats, above. Actions, not beliefs as PolFoot had it. I too find that a disturbing passage -- it could be an interpolation, but then the hermeneutic circle comes up: how do we know Jesus wasn't like this? Because of other passages. But how do we know that this passage isn't equally valid? And around we go. (I am not a fan of the Jesus Seminar "well *I* wouldn't do that" school of higher criticism.)

Still, two things: the point is obviously to behave like the sheep, not the goats, and we may certainly hope that the goats will be spared regardless. Any theology based on *one* parable is a bit suspect.

Docentism!

For some reason I'd misremembered the sheep and goats as being in Revelation. This is what happens 8 years out of a religion, it starts running together. I just looked it up to find a good NT example of the Bible saying something evil, and was surprised to see that it was Jesus's words.

389: Yeah.

Why the hell didn't that link work?

The scholars of the Jesus Seminar apparently agreed "by common consent" that the historical Jesus did not utter the actual parable in question in Matthew 25, nor that it represents a paraphrase of his actual ideas.

A little late on the Jesus Seminar bit, I see -- Anderson's objection is well taken.

If you believe the Jesus Seminar, then there's not much religion left in the life of Jesus, just some good moral advice. So I don't think their criticism is all that relevant. According to the Wikipedia page their rejection of the eschatological teachings of Christ (which is what is relevant in this example) is nonetheless their most contraversial move among secular scholars.

A little late on the Jesus Seminar bit

Never too late -- "no one expects the Jesus Seminar!"

331: Whether one believes in Markan primacy has little to do with my point. The longer ending to Mark has traditionally been accepted as a canonical part of the gospel; it was so defined by the Council of Trent. Hence, the argument is not whether the passage was added later, but whether the Church deemed it to reflect the truth as expressed to mankind by God/Jesus /Holy Ghost [see Council of Trent, Sixth Session, Ch VIII, specifically "And whereas the Apostle saith, that man is justified by faith" et seq.] - that belief was necessary for redemption ["justification"], good works -rather than sin - following naturally therefrom.

375: one could argue* that the older brother is essential to the narrative, is indeed the very point of the story.

*Best link I could find on very short notice, sorry. But you get the basic idea.

400 comments, and still no one's cured cancer or sorted out the God thing. What the hell's wrong with you people?

400: It takes a minimum of 1436 comments to cure cancer or sort out the God thing. We came so very close, once.

Perhaps...a loophole?

Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 04-4-07 5:31 PM
-------------------------------------------------

1436

We are all made of stars!

Comment for TinkerbellElizabeth Edwards!

and still no one's cured cancer

Classic Onion: 6,000 Runners Fail to Cure Cancer

If they couldn't do it, sitting on our asses in front of keyboards ain't gonna do it either.

Now, the God thing, I feel a breakthrough coming on ... another 300 comments & I think we'll have a winner.

Everybody - even the steadfast Unfoggetarian - seems to have bought into the idea that the New Testament is more fundamentally decent than the old one. Someone needs to describe to me some Old Testament concept that is crueler or more arbitrary than Christian Hell.

And to take one more stab at the subject of anti-Jesus actions vs. anti-Jesus beliefs, I'll repeat this passage, Matthew 5, verses 28-30:

"I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell."

Folks have been falsely accusing me and others of demanding literalism. Not so ! I'm just suggesting that if you are going to accept the moral authority of the Bible, you have to accept the actual moral teachings of the Bible.

What is Jesus saying here? Is he saying that under some circumstances, you should literally gouge out an eye? Well, frankly, I think that's what he's saying. But let's allow a more figurative interpretation. The clear meaning of this passage is that:
1 - Improper thoughts are not different from improper actions. The concept of a thought crime is explicitly endorsed here.
2 - Not only acting inappropriately, but thinking in a way that Jesus doesn't find appropriate, is something that is rightly punishable by eternal torture.
3 - Lust is an example of the sort of thought crime that requires maximum punishment.

Tell me how this passage can have *any* meaning if it doesn't have the meaning that I describe. And go ahead - find me something in the Old Testament as barbaric as Jesus's words here.

PF, in what plausible sense could your right eye "cause" you to sin? Do you think Jesus was a student of Aristotle's Physics?

So much for the literal meaning. As for thoughts vs. actions, I think Jesus is concerned about thoughts because they *lead* to actions. If you tell yourself it's okay to *think* about fucking so-and-so all the time, so long as you're not doing it ... well, that's likely to have some kind of bad effect on your actions.

This passage should be read alongside the many others where Jesus rejects the idea that I can outwardly comply with the Law & therefore be righteous before God. I concur with Paul here -- it's part of Jesus's message that we are *all* sinners, and no one can deny that by saying "hey, I've never DONE such and such."

As for Jesus on lust, well, you are free to disagree with him, but he has an awful lot of theological & philosophical company on the subject. It's not like Christianity invented this notion.

Jesus is concerned about thoughts because they *lead* to actions.

I disagree pretty strongly with this. "Has already committed adultery in his heart" seems to me to state fairly clearly that "sin" is at least as much a negative internal state of being as it is a way of doing bad things externally. That living "in bad faith" is equally bad to acting sinfully.

PF's description of this as "thought crime" seems off to me -- I don't see Jesus saying in that passage, "I tell you that I hold in contempt anyone who looks at a woman lustfully." (My familiarity with the Gospels is not complete but I'm not aware of Jesus talking in very explicit terms about Christian hell -- I sort of thought the notion of damnation preceded the Church and was built up by the Church, without any real help from JC.)

"If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away" seems to me like a bizarre choice for literal reading. But building on such a reading, you could probably come up with a play called OEdipus Christ, which might be well worth any coherence you would have to sacrifice to get there.

weiter dazu. And, so weiter.

(Why the fuck don't I read the Gospels already? They're only what, a couple of hundred pages total. I know them only in bits and pieces, which is less than completely satisfactory.)

409: They're even shorter than you think, and you're probably familiar with every page of them, just not in order.

The Gospels are all re-runs.

408: Like I said before, the choices aren't between "literal" and "squish." What I've taken from that passage: a) God cares about intent as well as outcomes b) if you are having sinful thoughts (hateful, lustful, genocidal, suicidal, whatever), you have a responsibility to change and c) mere external obedience isn't enough.

Gouging out your eye and cutting off your hand is extreme. It's supposed to be. I can't imagine a situation where your eye was literally causing you to sin, and I'm not sure Jesus' audience would either; it's pretty reasonable to think that it's hyperbolic. (But we know from horror movies, that if your hand does start to go and kill people, you are supposed to knife it.)

406: I'm content to let your post stand as an example of what I'm talking about: Some Christians work very hard to avoid the clear language of the Biblical Jesus, instead substituting their own judgments about right and wrong. And to say it again: I think this is a good thing. One hopes that some moral progress has been achieved in the last few millenia.

As for the question of how the possession of eyes can "cause" lust, well, I think it would be presumptuous of me to try to discuss that deeply spiritual matter on a blog hosted by ogged. Sort of like walking into a synagogue and pretending to be a learned rabbi. I must defer to the expert.

a play called OEdipus Christ

And William Donohue would have a new hobbyhorse to ride.

One hopes that some moral progress has been achieved in the last few millenia.

One hopes in vain. The only progress made has been in the sophistication of the rationalizations for doing evil.

405: After reading the passage on blueletterbible.org (thanks for the tip AWB!) I'm with the crowd that this is an example of Jesus saying, "Hey, don't think you're so righteous because you never commited adultery; if you've looked at a woman lustfully, you're as guilty as anyone else." (And I'm no scholar, but if we view "looking at a woman lustfully" as the equivalent of "viewing a woman as nothing more than an object for your sexual gratification," then I can certainly understand why God/Jesus might object to the "thought crime" of lust... )

Of course, having pulled up that verse, I read on to see that anyone who divorces his wife causes her to become an adulteress and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. This is a somewhat distressing thought, personally, and is hard to reconcile intellectually with my heretofore comfortable understanding of Jesus as the guy who spurned the rigid legalistic approach to things.

Di Kotimy, just speaking up for the heathens, ya'all should just jump in and swim around for a bit the heath is fine.

My question for the sensibly religious is how does your god differ from Spinoza's? Do you see god as an active force that is responsive to prayer, for instance?

See my problem comes in exactly when people start bringing things like that into the equation. The whole idea of intercessory prayer really sort of weirds me out when I think it through. For instance, why should ones recovery from cancer be at all contingent on another person "Praying for Jesus to help"?

What sort of god would let a little girl die of leukemia because I did not specifically ask for him to save her?

Oops, let me go get a mop for that bitter I spilled all over the floor.

405: I've been very clear that Paul (on whose teachings most of historical christianity has been based) is also very reprehensible. The Old Testament has some good bits along with the reprehensible ones (just as the New Testament does). I don't want this veering into anti-judaism.

Errr, to clarify, it's not that I want to focus on anti-Christianity, and that anti-Judaism is worse. Just that if there aren't any Jews here defending themselves we shouldn't have the athiests and the squishy Christians beat up on the Jews.

418 -- your last statement does not apply to Ben, surely?

He's the exception that proves the rule.

416: Hey, I have no problems with the heath or the heathen. Some of my best friends...

BitchPhD said it nicely above -- it's not a matter of whether the water seems warm, it's about what seems to me to be true. Alas, what seems to be true is ill-defined and terribly squishy, but I'm okay with the idea that I have only the faintest clue -- though a glass, darkly, as it were.

Intercessory prayer weirds me out a bit, too, for the reasons you note. And when my more deeply religious friends eagerly tell me that they've prayed for me in a difficult spot, my first reaction is generally, "Yeah, that was probably much easier than doing something concrete... "

Oh, wait, I think I just slipped in all that bitter you spilled.

I read on to see that anyone who divorces his wife causes her to become an adulteress and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. This is a somewhat distressing thought, personally ...

Me too, being married to a divorced woman & all.

I have seen this interpreted as applying to a onesided system where it's pretty much always the man "putting away" the woman by divorcing her, so that Jesus is criticizing a particular kind of divorce, not "divorce" in general. -- Those of you who know more Jewish law/history than I do, i.e. "all of you," chime in?

That said, those verses are ones that I reflect on when I see fundies raging vs. gays. Jesus never mentions homosexuals, but if you feel like taking him literally, then he's pretty clear on divorce. We have some Republican candidates whom it would be particularly attractive to discuss this passage with, on live TV if possible.

a play called OEdipus Christ

I'll wait for the musical, Oedipus Christ Superstar.

The number where Jesus finds out that Mary Magdalene is THAT Mary should be a show-stopper.

Oedipus Christ Superstar.

I was having a hell of a time not humming the relevant songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when the story came up at the seder I went to Tuesday.

416- I think it would be hard to take the Bible seriously at all and not think there's something valuable about intercessory prayer, even if we acknowledge that the value isn't, and can't be, anything so simple as "God will do as you ask." I think both that it has some value and that I have no idea, and am not meant to know, precisely what that value is.

And the rest of this comment would have been much more relevant 3 days and 300 comments ago, but I didn't think to include it then, and the conversation has now moved on. But I'll note it anyway. About a decade ago I was well-acquainted with a relatively prominent, and rather intellgient, evangelical biblical-literalist, who believed (among many other things) that the universe was about 6,000 years old, and that evolution didn't occur. The interesting bit is that, and I had very many discussions with him on this so I'm sure I'm not misrepresenting him, he didn't think there was anything fundamentally wrong with even a hard literalist such as himself believing in "long creation" -- the idea that the "six days" of Genesis were metaphorical, and that evolution actually occurred (guided by the hand of God, of course). Even the Bible notes repreatedly that God's time is not our own: "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." (Everyone thinks there are some metaphorical portions of the Bible; the literalists just think they are fewer in numbers than do the rest of us.) He acknowledged the "theological problems" that were presented by evolution -- namely, the idea of death before the Fall -- but thought these too could be worked around while maintaining fidelity to a fair and literal interpretation of the Scriptures. But, and this is the interesting bit, he didn't believe in evolution because he was convinced that the evidence, fairly judged on its own terms, pointed against it. So why do virtually all scientists accept it as true? Because they're all committed athiests who reject the possibility of God out of hand (read: will not incorporate God into their scientific theories), and of course if you exclude the possibility of God then evolution is the most likely explanation of earth history. But if you accept that God might exist, and might act in our world, and then look at the evidence with an open mind, you'll see that the geological and biological evidence available to us actually fits better with a theory of a six-day creation 6,000 years ago (and later global flood) than thousands of millenia of gradual evolution.

That was his worldview. And this was, again you'll have to trust me, a reasonably intelligent man. It probably didn't help that the only things he'd ever read about evolution were along the lines of Darwin's Black Box, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, and Understanding the Times (that last one being his guidebook to virtually all intellectual matters). He didn't feel the need to read much beyond these, as, much like Fox News, these sorts of materials are designed (well-designed!) to give the unsophisticated reader the impression that he is receiving a fair and balanced picture of both sides of the issue, when of course that is in truth far from the case.

The broader point of this comment is that, in my experience, and again I plead as my only source my personal familiarity with the type, most Americans who reject evolution do so on exactly this basis. It's not that they believe it absolutely incompatible with their faith, it's that they've been led to believe that it is only really a "good" scientific theory if you reject the tenets of faith a priori. And, while I'm at it, this isn't only true for evolution, it's true for a lot of right-wingery. Is global warming a problem we should do something about? Well, although the Bible does say some things about "subduing the earth", it could hardly be called a fundamental tenet of Christianity that humans must produce maximal carbon emissions. But if the only things you've ever read on the subject are The Skeptical Environmentalist", Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media, and books of that ilk (or, perhaps more commonly, have never read any books on the subject at all, but have seen fair and balanced debates on Fox News on the issue, with panels consisting of the authors of these books and no one else), it's quite understandable that you'd both think yourself well-informed and reject any idea that global warming is mankind's problem. (See, for example, the comments to this post*, in which I am the commenter "Tom".)

*Which, for reference, were supposed to be comments to this post. Which is probably not the best example in any event, but I don't feel like digging for something better right now.

To follow up on Brock's point, if evolution is true even if you're not a God-hater, then why are the evolutionists so afraid of kids learning about the alternatives?

I think one of the big reasons that so many people don't believe in evolution is that they don't know anyone who actually understands it. In a church with a lot of creationists, the most well-educated creationist can usually make a more convincing argument for creation than anyone any of those poeple knows could make for evolution. The creationist arguments are bullshit, but you need to know a reasonable amount to understand why.

That's exactly right. For being basically an entirely religious issue, it's interesting to realize how little it has to do with religion per se and how much it has to do with the general disinformation campaign of the right-wing machine.

most Americans who reject evolution do so on exactly this basis.

Thirded. Kids don't learn Darwinism in high school, so how "scientific" can it be?

(I thought the back-to-back Andrew Lloyd Webber references had killed this thread for sure, but Brock's great comment soared past that hurdle.)

I don't know how many of you young'uns remember back to the ancient days of "Bulletin Boards" and 1200 baud modems, but I used to participate in a creationism bulletin board. I ran across a creationist geologist once. He said that in his work, he used the science stuff, but he believed that the Bible represented what really was going on.

I know what they say about a foolish consistency, but people like this frighten me.

"Participate" as a gadfly or "participate" as a participant?

The creationist mindset is fascinating.

Well, I eventually got kicked off - accused, if I remember correctly, of violating the rules of the board by saying the Bible wasn't literally true. Although I don't remember the precise accusation, I remember quite clearly that the accusation was false - that in fact, the reason I got kicked off was for something I had, by asking questions, enticed the creationist geologist to say. I remember quite clearly that the moderator was unable to identify my offending post.

I used to be fascinated by the creationist mind, but with the turn this country has taken over the last ten years or so, I am now appalled and frightened by it. Every day it seems that I read or see something that inspires the phrase "fear and loathing."