Mordy

Ok this is something I had always had real issues with doing this little thout experiment from my former 'days of indoctrination'. Hopefully I have the right forum, apologies to the moderators if I do not.

I call this "the paradox of the preacher", in that in ancient times and even modern times there is no way to determine which religion is true if they cannot be measured in a logical, rational, scientific and historical sense. There is no basis for comparison, as in theres no valid methods to determine who's god exists and whose god doesn't. Islam vs Christianity for example.

Now I'm going to use language and phrase it purposely from a person seriously considering christainity.

Now if this isn't clear enough, I'll try to go over it again or please re-articulate it better if you can.

Basically in the ancient world, how could anyone measure the claims of different religions at all? If they couldn't then how were ancient christians and other religious people not picking them blindly and at random according to personal taste rather then testing and measuring the claims in valid fashion?

Toto

Do you know of anyone in the ancient world who tried to measure the claims of different religions? In the late second century, "Celsus" argued against Christianity, but before that I can only think of the various Greek philosophers, who seemed to reject the claims of their religion(s) while approving of their social role.

In the ancient world, you followed a religion because either you got executed if you didn't sacrifice to the right gods, or you had a personal revelation that convinced you.

The sociologist Rodney Stark has argued that Christianity provided a lot of social benefits to its adherents in the Roman Empire. I suspect that those reasons were good enough for most people. There is no record of any Christian before the Empress Helena going to Palestine to actually look for evidence of Jesus, and Helena did not exactly conduct a scientific inquiry into the matter.

(Rodney Stark has conducted studies of how people are converted, and the sociological evidence is that people adopt a new religion for social reasons, and later learn a justification for their new beliefs.)

Or did I understand your question?

gregor2

Mr. Stark is a bit of an enigma, having recently authored a piece in a Xian publication attacking evolution and asserting that special creation is the only rational conclusion. There was some discussion of it in II E/C board back in June.

Toto

Stark is no enigma to me. He is a cult apologist who swallowed his own line. And he just got hired by Baylor.

E/C thread

Mordy

I don’t think you understood it. If you go from and look at say maybe a few centuries after say 100AD upward. Christians fought / preached to various hostile religions how? How could you 'convert' people in a “evidenciary� (meaning comparison of evidence against history, etc) way? Most Christians today say other religions are wrong because they have measured their claims against some authority, but the question for the religious person is: How do you determine if you have the right authority in the first place? I know the way we measure today didn't occur 'in the same way' in the ancient past (although I think many fundamentalist Christians at least would say that it did occur this way, and it was through "evidence" of miracles, god being with them, showing them directly, etc).

The bottom question at the end was more of an aside. I was focusing on the more modern preachers of religions that now attempt to use "reason" as the basis for choosing their religion or god over another competing religion or god. Like intelligent design for instance, the people espousing that are attempting to use reason and science as a justification and validation for false beliefs, when if you rationally think about Intelligent design practiced in a scientific fashion, it would actually overturn their religious beliefs because no longer would religion be immune or set apart from true scientific scrutiny and hence automatic rejection through rational inquiry instead of pseudo-intellectual gymnastics we allow people to perform in private.

But getting back to my islam vs. christian example. This could apply to the last few hundred years at least of Preacher vs. Preacher in the "god wars". So that is the paradox I am getting at is: How do they measure and come to the conclusion they are right?

Most people today that believe who we encounter aren't actively preaching the word of god like missionaries were doing before modern times to "save" people. I think you'd be hard pressed to find theistic evolutionists preaching, and you'd find old earth creationists and young earth creationist preaching where the more compromised and secularized theologies do less preaching as you head towards old earth creationism and theistic evolution based on the fact that their reasoning is totally comrpomised. So they wouldn't want to be exposing that to religious preachers of another faith, since they would point that out and not put up with that if those christians were trying to convine them their god and faith was wrong.

I know there are missionaries today and that they do go about preaching, but in the modern world against opposing religions how can you determine which is the better one, using my example that I quoted in the first post. This is what I mean by a paradox: they are trying to use their evidence through reason, but their reasoning is "equally" valid (or invalid as we see it). So how why and how do you pick allah over yahweh? That's the paradox, theres no valid method to determine who's religion or god is 'most true' because they all end up in equal or null determination.

Mordy

The parodox of preacher vs preacher, essentially boils down to

How do they (christianity vs. islam vs. other religions ad infinitum) measure and come to the conclusion they are right and then tell the other religious people they are wrong because they have 'come to the right conclusion' through measurment?

Peter Kirby

As Toto indicated, people don't adopt their religiosity, generally speaking, based on some kind of "measurement." I'm not even sure what kind of measurement would be involved. Can you give an example of one person who has claimed to do a measurement of religious truth and indicate how he proceeded with such?

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

If you think that the Book of Acts has any shred of history in it, early Christian preachers converted people by demonstrating the spirit in them, speaking in tongues, maybe even doing some faith healing. They might have told a story about some guy named Jesus who was crucified and rose from the dead, but there would have been no way for most of the people being preached at to check up on the facts.

If you think Stark is correct, Christians made converts by making friends with people and offering them a social support group in the very hostile and unhealthy cities of the Roman Empire.

The idea of measuring claims against a competing evangelical religion is, I think, a modern phenomenon.

While there is a long tradition in Christianity of apologetics, i.e., the justification of the faith, preachers using "reason" as an argument seems to be a product of the Enlightenment. I think if you look at modern apologetics, though, the aim is not to get you to use reason, but to counter the use of reason that might lead you to reject their religion.

<sigh> I guess I have not made myself clear. There is no paradox, and there is no real reasoning going on. People are converted for social / emotional / political reasons. Then they find a rationalization, and learn to be apologists.

If they really apply reason to the question, and honestly follow where reason leads them, they tend to end up as agnostics or atheists, as have a number of ex-preachers and ex-apologists - Dan Barker or Robert Price, for example. But if you read Christians such as William Lane Craig, you will find lawyerly arguments, but a commitment to belief over reason. If reason leads sich a Christian to the possibility that there is no God, you have to stop there and change the subject or rely on faith.

So what is your question? Do you have a question about early Christian missionary techniques? Or do you have a question about how converts rationalize one religion over another? If the latter, are you concerned about the logical arguments, or about the sociology of conversion?

Toto

The same way lawyers who are hired to defend a case use variations on logical or emotional arguments. You might as well talk about the paradox of lawyer vs. lawyer.

Amlodhi

Hello Mordy,

If I understand your OP correctly, I think that Mr. Clemens has already summed it up quite succinctly: