As Above, So Below - the religion thread (formerly: People of California, beware)

What the...?



Thank goodness I'm not high.

It... just... keeps... banging... the drum... *bang*... *bang*.... *bang*...

Not sure if most of "moderate Christians" are anti-gay. I was raised Catholic and I stay Catholic, but a lot of my friends are gay and I never really agreed with that point of the "Church's social sciences" or how it's called. There are a lot of points where I disagree and really I learnt to stray away from the Catholic hierarchy (which I believe is evil as a construct, though not all priests are evil, some of them are actually very smart and quite brilliant).

I don't actually believe that science and religion are mutually exclusive. I know a lot of people do and that's perhaps a major point the atheists make, but when I look at it personally, I don't think the concept of God creating the world and everything, and the concept of evolution mutually disagree. I learnt to actually compare the "days of week" with the scientific vision of evolution, if we see the creation of world as a big metaphor (contrary to some of members here, probably, I don't believe that the Bible is in *any* way literal, except when referring historical facts like wars).

I think it was the thing about The Bible.

Kudos!

I wonder why you'd consider yourself a Catholic though. You have mentioned before that you didn't know about transubstantiation, and now you deny papal infallibility. These are two central dogmas of the Catholic Church. Wouldn't it make more sense to just declare yourself a Christian, a follower of Christ, instead of the church?





If read literally, the Bible do in fact say many things contrary to science. You'd have to twist and cherrypick the Bible pretty dramatically to make them agree.

But if you take the Bible not as a science book, but a book that's about spirituality and man's relation with God, that's a much more healthy attitude, that will no doubt cause less cognitive dissonance. Some Christians say that God wrote two books: The Bible and Nature. Science is reading the latter book. The former book is all about man's encounter with God, but what it says about nature is irrelevant, as it's skewed by primitive understanding.

Peter

As a note to anyone that might have been offended by the Keanu "meme" I posted, it wasn't intended as a serious point at all. I just thought it was rather funny! In no universe do I think every religious person is an asshole.

I'd find it just as funny if the joke was turned around on itself and aimed at atheists.

Indeed, I should say it wasn't a point directly intended for any MT members. Note that I didn't actually apologise for any offense incurred... although it sort of looks that way. (For once I actually wasn't trying to start another heated debate, I just thought it was rather clever and funny.)

I'd like to know too. D isn't posting at MT as much as he used to, you'll have to jump in and point him this direction as soon as he's looking active again.

Not offended at all. The Bible is a very controversial book in many ways, but still a very good historical source for the history of Israel (in fact a basic source in that regard, I think).

I think the biggest problem, I witness on this very board too, is that there seems to be no point of agreement between any theist and atheist. Yes, the big problem is that religion above all is a very emotional subject and emotions don't connect well with pure (especially if formal!) logic and myself, to be honest, I am quite angry about the level of the logic course I had on the university on my first year, to the point of regretting that it's too late to take such a course on my PhD studies.

Theists seem to completely ignore this thread, though in many cases, I think they would give a necessary balance to the whole thing. It's easy to attack religion, but those attacks can get pretty acerbic at times. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with a Christian, even Catholic (while Catholics are almost never creationist, they often take the official social views of the Church and in some cases, I don't know what's worse), perspective, except the very controversial social views, which I tend not to agree with.

The key thing is a question, what does it mean to be a moderate Christian? Here's another problem: Moderate people rarely share their views with the public.

Very astute observation, Pawel.

....I guess dressing as a woman doesn't help either.

At FSM a thread like this would have been exceptionally fortunate to last until July 8th 2008.

Yeah.

...copy/paste?