The reason I think all of this discussion is relevant is because some of us who grew up as “Christians” are having a hard time accepting the Bible as inerrant truth and are searching for a place to fit in. We believe in the core tenants of Jesus’ teachings and we may even have faith that in fact he is the savior. But we internally understand (and sometime agonize) that our other beliefs (or perhaps questions on beliefs) don’t permit full entrance into the “Christians” club. I think we just want someone well schooled in theology to validate our way of thinking and say you have just as much of a chance at salvation as does any “Christian” (or ideally any religion).

The more I read the OT and the more I research the historical accuracy of those events the more I’m left scratching my head. And I’m having a heck of a time finding a group that shares my faith and my beliefs.

I was probably better off back when mindlessly I thought babies should be baptized, if you just go to religious class they’ll let you eat this little wafer and you’re good until next weekend, and that God actually cared if your football team won the big game and you scored 3 touchdowns.

But somehow I have to think that God really does demand the we dig deeper, ask the hard questions, and be prepared that the answer may not be in agreement with how the western “religious mainstream” interpret the bible.

Thanks for the thought provoking thread.

One sect will beat you with the carrot and another sect will beat you with the stick. Both are dogma.

I enjoyed the discussion. It left no bruises.

Thanks for following up!

I don’t blame you for not staying on my road 100%. I haven’t decided myself, yet, whether religious belief is particularly susceptible to dogmatization. Thanks to the books that were laying around the house when I was young, I am deeply familiar with Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, and am all-too-aware of how it came to resemble a fundamentalist religious cult (complete with a sexual scandal at the top of the organization). It wasn’t Heaven’s Gate or FLDS nuts but it was about as close as you can get without breaking any actual laws.

It should go without saying that ideologies which have no essential or specific religious component can be perverted to terrible ends. In fact this, with citations to Mao and Stalin, is one of the favorite arguments of fundies who take offense at the proposition that Christian churches have countenanced slaughter. I think it’s a bit grotesque to get into a pissing war over such things when both pans of the scale are piled with millions of corpses.

I am conscious, too, of the fact that scientific teachings can be dogmatized. The saving grace appears to be that the better educated you are in science, the more you learn about the sorts of events that Thomas Kuhn writes about. You learn to be critical, even self-critical, and acquire some humility. (At the very worst, the field is self-correcting due to the Planck Effect: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” This has got to be more difficult to accomplish in belief systems in which eternal life, eternal truths, and even papal infallibility.)

Then, too, I keep running into people who’ve been to seminary of whom I could say the same. Some of the best conversations I’ve had on religion in my life have been with people who have received advanced degrees in the subject from religiously-affiliated schools.

Shorter version: my apprehension about religion in general is in significant measure a bellyfeel and I want to be frank about that.

I guess what I’m after is an anti-ideology serum. Or, failing that, an ideological phenolphthalein which I can use to determine which thought systems are going to lead to human misery rather than the common weal.

Your statement “religious belief as we’re experiencing it today is causing a significant number of large social and political problems around the globe” is an interesting one, and deserves a bit of attention.

I suspect that by “religious belief” you are thinking of “religious fundamentalism”, as manifest in certain quarters of at least three religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. And, if we are to take that more limited view of the problem, I agree 100%.

It might be hard to see, but there is a global liberal religious left, and in many countries (especially in South America and certain parts of Europe) it is more powerful than the fundamentalist religious right. But even outside those narrow confines, there are plenty of people — even fundamentalists — that are inspired by religion to do good.

The other interesting trend is that “religious belief as we experience it today” is certainly on the way out, and perhaps one could even say that religious belief itself is on the way out. However, religion is on the rise in the world, so the conclusion must be that the shape of religion is changing, and I think for the better. We are seeing the last bitter defensive crouch of a certain side of several religions that is fading. I hope that within my lifetime, creationism museums will be a thing of the past, but not because of the demise of religion.

Let me just storm in here, two weeks (plus) after the thread shut down.

You’re coming off as a bit of an evangelical skeptic. That is to say, argumentative with hints of proselytization.

Whether or not John is an atheist is not the most important thing about his world-view. I say this as a militant atheist myself–”militant” in the sense of Dawkins and Hitchens, in these sense that religious belief as we’re experiencing it today is causing a significant number of large social and political problems around the globe.

But those negative consequences don’t spring directly from a belief in God. A person can believe in God, or even in the divinity of Jesus. These positions do not ineluctably lead to any creed of political or moral consequence, or to any particular form of social or political conduct.

That is precisely why fundamentalist evangelicals demand subscription to a much larger package.

I do admit to a bit of Manicheanism; I do see the world as largely arranged into a two-sided struggle. The labels I attach to the good guys and the bad guys shift as I make inevitable concessions to a more complex reality, but one conflict I don’t see as essential is theism vs. atheism.

I have a much bigger problem with someone who denies the capacity of science to illuminate meaningful facts–even truths–about the universe around us than I do with someone who embraces that power. A person who rejects the Abrahamic God in favor of magic crystals is, on an individual basis, just as opposed to human intellectual maturation as a Bible-thumping creationist.

I have a much bigger problem with someone who feels LGBT people should disfranchised or disadvantaged than I do with someone who sees them as politically as social on par with boring straight people. Whether someone serves the agenda of oppressing gays due to a sincere belief in the moral assessment of some passage in Exodus, or due to a political calculation to win an election, that stance is reprehensible.

None of this is to say that I don’t think religious belief isn’t correlated with reactionary politics and anti-intellectualism. I do think they are correlated–but much, much more so with some religious traditions than with others. Once you zoom out to encompass all forms of religious belief I think your coefficient of correlation is getting pretty small.

All this is to say, accept your intellectual allies where you find them. If you want to make the world a better place, focus on the essential. If you could wave a magic wand–he said ironically–and delete the notion of God from everyone’s heads overnight, the world would not look all that different tomorrow. Most people’s intellectual processes are not terribly coherently constructed. Most people are not Wittgenstein. Most people have patterns of thought and feeling which they follow unconsciously. Cynically, I suspect the people who do the most damage to human culture and civilization in the name of God don’t actually spend very much time thinking about God, or what He wants. By contrast, they have very clear ideas about what *they* want and are focused and motivated on achieving it.

A bit of that same focus would serve atheists and secularists well. Christians like John and my friend Stuart Parker are not the opposition. And, selfishly, I get a lot more value out of in-depth conversations exploring my differences with them than I would from being able to count them as teammates in the Infidels Football Club.

Which isn’t to say there’d be NO satisfaction in the latter. ;-)

PS: I would love to see more technical posts, especially on Haskell!

No offense taken. I completely understand why you have the impression you do. I live in Kansas, where I think there is much the same culture in a way.

“Christian” is a very broad label. The church as a whole is incredibly diverse, and sadly also incredibly fractured. I’m not sure, but I think you’re describing a set of Christians known as fundamentalists. I disagree with a lot of what they say, though I must say that I know some of them personally and have known them to be good, well-meaning people. Some are open-minded, though I grant that the position that there are certain non-negotiable aspects of religion makes it hard to see that (and it isn’t always there, in truth.)

I would caution you, however, against drawing conclusions about Christianity as a whole, or even protestants as a whole, based on your experience in one area. Christianity in Virginia probably looks a lot different than it does in Portland, Rome, or Istanbul. Or even Kansas, in some ways.

I proceed to your second paragraph with some hesitation. I will try to give you honest answers, but with the disclaimer that questions about “what do you believe” have often led to division and exclusion, and ultimately are, to me, of secondary importance.

Yes, I think the Jesus of the Bible was indeed a very good and wise teacher. I think that his example — often called the Way — of inward transformation, right relationships with others, peace and justice work, etc. is a model that is vivid and moving to us today.

As to the questions about omnipotence and the like — my most honest answer is that “I don’t know for sure, nobody can, and that we must find a way to live life given these facts.” If we accept the possibility of an existence of some sort more than the physical reality that meets our eyes — and I believe we must — then we have to accept the possibility of things that are real but which we cannot understand. The very concept of omnipotence seems to boggle the mind, and I don’t know that a human mind can really understand what it means.

To get right down to it, I don’t think it matters what shade of omnipotence God is, what his exact involvement in our creation/evolution was (if any), or the precise nature of the relationship between Jesus and God. These are all things that the human race is ill-equipped to answer anyhow.

The fortunate thing for us is that literal facts aren’t the only, or even best, ways of learning valuable truths. As I’ve pointed out before, we can learn from Shakespeare and Mozart. Here is where the Bible (and other sources) shine. If you read it with an eye not for a history lesson, but for what we can learn from a beautiful and moving story, what inspiration we can draw, then there is where it is at its most powerful and valuable. If we venerate Homer for the Iliad and the Odyssey and how they still speak to use today about the human condition, how much more moving must be the Bible, assembled over centuries, telling the stories of a people? It is far more an epic than Homer, and calls us to a higher purpose more effectively.

I owe this thinking in large part to Marcus Borg’s eye-opening book The Heart of Christianity. He strongly suggests that we not worry ourselves so much about the factual debate, because it really isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. If we have made the right changes in ourselves and in our world, what does it matter if we are slightly mistaken about some obscure theology?

Harvey Cox added insight to that, pointing out that until the Romanification of Christianity, the earliest Christians didn’t agree about probably any of the questions you posed (even about what should go in the Bible), and it wasn’t a big problem for them until church leaders started getting real power. In short, this concern over belief seems to me to be a human invention rather than a divine one.

Thank you very much for your kind words and interesting comments.

So, do you just think of Jesus as a very good teacher? Do you believe that God is omnipotent, that he created us, that our ancestors sinned against him, and that Jesus died so that we can reunite with God? If you believe these things, why do you then reject some other factual claims? If you don’t, then why read the Bible? You could probably look into other religions, or even make up your own religion.

Again, thanks for your openness and the thought-provoking discussion. You’ve changed my impression of Christians.