Classical

The agnostic or atheist worldview makes much more sense to me than my previous christian worldview. If I look back historically, it makes sense. After all, millions of people lived and died long before there were any of the religions we have today. If I look around me today, evolution makes sense from what I see. The religions offer nothing, as far as I am concerned. They have no explanation for anything beyond a very surface "god-did-it." The scientific explanation makes far more sense and as the evidence just keeps coming, the explanations make even more sense. No souls, no gods, no afterlife; just living cells coming together after millions of years of accumulated improvement, and eventually die.

It looks like christianity is neither an endpoint, or a starting point. It is a deadend. I got very tired of wrestling with the questions.

Big-time difference from a claim of being dead for three days.

Try my old favorite Thomas Paine here: "What is more likely, that a person should raise from the dead or that a man should tell a lie?"

Just plain dead wrong here, Seebs. I followed christian doctrine and belief for years and can say I really believed the claims, like the resurrection and miracles, etc. It was upon examination that I saw the claims were dubious.

True.

Let's face it. It's the same religion, in spite of huge doctrinal difference.

Quite true. But how do you get around "doubt and be damned" among thousands of verses? Seems to me the liberal christians are the ultimate masters of picking and choosing.

Trust me on this one. My guy knows nothing at all about his own religion.

I reject any claim that demands extraordinary proof and can't fork it over.

Like I said before, thousands of years of human experience have helped humanity form its ideas of ethics and morals. Religion has nothing to do with it. Just like the folk claiming our laws are based on the ten commandments. Give me a break! Thou shalt not kill or steal were a part of civilized law thousands of years before good old holy moses threw his stones.

Very interesting.

seebs

The scientific system doesn't offer either souls or no-souls; it makes no comments on such topics. As Gould says, non-overlapping magisteria.

I don't expect religion to offer answers to scientific questions, but then, I don't expect science to offer answers to religious questions. Science cannot tell me what is right or wrong. If I have a value judgment, science can help me figure out how to best achieve my goals... But I have to come up with the value judgment on my own.

I can't entirely blame you, but I have found that they are rewarding.

True. This is the big question. How likely is it that a person should raise from the dead? How about if that person is very unusual? I have no way of knowing whether exceptions are made, and I can't easily assign probability to it.

Fair enough... But nonetheless, I think you've adopted a methodology which would call these claims dubious, and I'm not sure I agree with the methodology.

It's certainly got core principles in common, but the claims are fairly different. To borrow a trope from an entirely unrelated subject (population genetics), the differences between Christians are often larger than the differences between Christians and non-Christians.

Well, I don't recall running into one of those.

Here's the thing. It's common to accuse liberals of "picking and choosing", and I generally find that this shows a preconception about how best to understand the Bible, or a presupposition that naive literalist readings of verses are always the "true" readings.

That's quite possible. I know many people who know nothing about it.

However, this leaves us with a problem: What if your knowledge of it is incomplete, too, so some of the things you're addressing are in fact misunderstandings?

I'm quite sure I have misunderstandings about Christianity. I assume most people do. How would we find out where they are? (More interestingly, how much of your time could you reasonably spend looking into this?)

I have not come up with a good non-circular way to determine which claims ought to have "extraordinary" proof.

I think this is very, very, unlikely. Religion has been a major part of the process.

We have two options. One is that religion really did have a significant influence. The other is that these claims are true in some way that allows us to reproduce them independently. If it's the latter, then it's interesting that thousands of years of development are leading us to results thousands of years old.

Oh, indeed. The ten commandments are clearly not the basis of Western law; we don't even use some of them, others are clearly bad as laws (though very good as morals), ... That whole thing is, I think, probably more chaff thrown off by Christian Reconstructionists.

It turns out that one of the reasons I'm hanging around here is I got a LOT of harassment when I started socializing with Republicans at ChristianForums. I think you may find it interesting to note that you are much, much, more receptive to the Gospel message than many of the posters who are nominally Christian in the Republican forum there. You may disagree with my reasons for accepting these claims, but you're much more willing to grant at least some credence to the moral claims themselves.

Rational BAC

I understand that if you are raised as a fundy it can be VERY difficult to realize and understand liberal Christianity.

But liberal Christianity really does exist. And Fundies only make up maybe 1/3rd of Christians.

Fundies just make a whole lot of noise about their particular beliefs is all.

Classical

I should clarify when I said scientific system, I also had in mind the thoughts of secular philosophers, like Betrand Russell, who make it clear that they do not believe in the soul and why.

What I am going to say next you might find peculiar. Although I am convinced that the theological god does not exist, I am not sure that there is no afterlife. I keep my mind open to the possibilities. It could very well be that what we know is actually nothing. There could be a type of existence that we know nothing of. When I first joined this forum I mentioned that the matter of ghosts intrigued me. It still does. I cannot say that I do not believe in ghosts. And if there are ghosts, then there must be some other form of existence.



I think this is very true. I have much more in common with my "liberal christian" friends than I do the fundies.

To be honest, I lost interest. I see no advantage to having religion. I am much more interested in science and exploring how evolution happened, etc. I spent my young adult life doing two things: practicing piano hours a day and studying the bible (other than schooling, of course). I want to read, read, read at this point. I see no sense in exploring christian doctrine further. I cannot will myself to believe. I do not believe and I had to face it.

Anything that involves a miracle or an invisible entity needs to have "extraordinary" proof of some sort.

From my studies, I discovered that atheist civilizations, which included much of the far east at one point, had the same basic moral codes as theistic cultures when it came to basics.

I don't see much good in the big 10 except the killing, stealing, and bearing false witness parts. Of course, I think cheating on a partner is bad, but I'm gay and cannot commit adultery.

I do not think I'm very receptive to the gospel message. I am receptive to a decent discussion like we're having.

Classical

I've honestly tried for quite some time and I don't see that there is anything compelling or attractive about it. I have gone to some very liberal services and I have been miserable, because it just seemed like a higher classed version of the same thing to me.

Well whatever lieberal christians believe, they certain don't bother me like the fundies do.

Yeah, and I wish the liberal christians would do a better job in trying to drown them out.

seebs

Sure. But all philosophers are using essentially similar methods, and I consider most philosophy untestable. (Unfortunately, it's useful enough that we are often obliged to form opinions without enough data.)

I have no particular opinion on the topic. I'm agnostic on the topic... And, unlike some other topics I'm agnostic about, I also see no reason to change my behavior based on any particular set of conclusions, so I'm not adopting a position in the mean time.

Indeed. But with that in mind, I think it's quite possible that there's aspects of Christianity that you're not going to run into (which is harmless enough; after all, most people I know don't know much of anything about most varieties of Buddhism, either); this is why there can be people who don't sound like "Christians" by the standards you're familiar with; because they're off in the unexplored parts of the faith.

I don't see why. I could start by presupposing that miracles don't happen, but... Why should I? I treat miracles pretty much exactly the same way I treat ghosts; I don't form strong opinions about them unless I'm really pushed to, and then I tend to just adopt a very weak tentative conclusion.

So, for instance, a few apartments back, my wife insisted that our apartment was haunted. She could tell me about an old lady whom, she said, used to live there; style of clothing, a couple of personality traits, and so on. I tend to assume that this is an unlikely thing for her to make up, and she's not in the habit of ascribing ghosts to everyplace she goes, so I currently, if absolutely forced to guess, would guess that her descriptions were roughly correct. Of course, it has very little effect on me.

Now, in the case of something like the Resurrection, it turns out that it may well matter whether or not it happened... But I have very poor data on it. However, I concluded that I think it's somewhat more likely that these people genuinely believed this to have happened, than that they made it up, and I don't see anything wrong with the notion of Jesus being resurrected. I think His recorded words suggest a nature unusual enough that, if there were to be a special case, I think He'd be it.

Indeed. I would point out that, if they weren't, it would actually be a point of evidence against the truth of theistic claims of an objective and universal moral standard, IMHO.

I know someone who has done a wonderful job of arguing that adultery is not restricted to "sex outside of marriage" but "failure to keep marital promises", and I would certainly think that, if you make sincere promises to a person, that counts as marriage for moral purposes.

But, as an example, I would consider it a form of adultery to abandon a spouse, or to stop loving a spouse.

I would like to argue for the "no-coveting" rules as sound, and as very good moral rules, while absolutely horrific (and indeed meaningless) social laws. I believe that coveting is the root of a great deal of social evil, and that learning not to covet would make people a great deal happier.

Well, okay. Look at it this way. If I told you to turn the other cheek in response to hostility, your response to me would not be anywhere near as hostile or derisive as the response I got when I quoted that in a Republican discussion forum a while back.

seebs

There are similarities, certainly. It depends a lot on the church.

Good!

Well, the problem is... One of the reasons we're not as obnoxious as some people are is that, uhm, we're not as obnoxious as some people are. So we don't really drown them out, we just disagree with them politely.

Rational BAC

Huzzah's for Seebs for explaining this very well.

Liberal Christians are "liberal" in the sense that ------figure it out yourself sucker------freedom of speech can give you all kinds of attitudes to accept or reject or somewhere in between.

But I don't plan to "drown anyone out".

Classical

Too bad. You are missing a good opportunity to make your religion look a little better.

In the meantime, I'll stick to secular humanism. It just makes more sense. Plain and simple.

Have a good night! :wave:

seebs

Not really. If we were out being obnoxious, I don't think we'd be making our faith look any better.