Comment

Comment by doone yesterday

Even Atheists Stereotype Atheists

APR 23 2014 @ 4:44PM

Theo Hobsons wonders if atheists can offer a satisfying approach to ethics, arguing that “when God is rejected, the stakes are gulpingly high; the entire moral tradition of the West is put in question.” That dubious line of reasoning brings to mind a study Tom Jacobs recently flagged, which found that “the way Americans view non-believers remains extremely negative”:

After reading a description of someone committing an immoral act, participants in five experiments “readily and intuitively assumed that the person was an atheist,” University of Kentucky psychologist Will Gervais reports in the online journal PLoS One. “Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups.”

The findings suggest our instinctive belief that moral behavior is dependent upon God—as ethical arbiter and/or assigner of divine punishment—creates a belief system strong enough to override evidence to the contrary. It leads people many to look at non-believers and reflexively assume the worst.

Comment by doone on Sunday

American Is A Christian Country

APR 20 2014 @ 1:27PM

At least when it comes to demographics:

Max Fisher unpacks the above chart from a Pew study, which shows that the US is “lower than most Western European countries [in religious diversity] and 68th in the world overall”:

Maybe the most surprising thing here is that most of the US’s religious diversity comes not from religious minorities, who in total are only 5.3 percent of the population, but from the 16 percent of Americans who are unaffiliated. Part of that has to do with the fact that, for all of the US’s racial diversity, many of those racial minority groups tend to Christian: most African-Americans, certainly most Latinos, and a significant share of Asian-Americans.

Now compare the US to France and you’ll see two things: that France has almost twice as many unaffiliateds, as a share of … overall population, and eight times as many Muslims. This comparison also gets to a shortcoming in Pew’s metric, though. Something this data does not show is intra-Christian diversity: the US has lots of different Christian groups, whereas French Christians are overwhelmingly Catholic. Diversity between Catholics and Protestants alone has been hugely important for US religious history. While Americans may not be super-diverse along broader religious categories, that intra-Christian diversity has been a real challenge in the US, and one that the country has done an unusually good job of dealing with.

Emma Green connects these findings to another Pew study on religious violence, noting that “some of the least religiously diverse countries also experience some of the most religious violence”: 

Comment by doone on Sunday

Turning The Nones Toward Faith

APR 20 2014 @ 9:09AM

Damon Linker argues that it won’t happen until religion “comes to grips with and responds creatively to the fact of pluralism”:

[P]erhaps the most daunting obstacle to getting the nones to treat traditional religion as a viable option is the sense that it simplifies the manifest complexity of the world. Yes, we long for a coherent account of the whole of things. But we don’t want that account to be a fairy tale. We want it to reflect and make sense of the world as it is, not as we childishly wish it to be.

The tendency toward oversimplification is a perennial temptation for all forms of human thinking, but it’s especially acute in matters of religion … There is a whole, and it can be grasped. But it is a complex whole. A pluralistic whole. A differentiated whole shot through with contradiction and paradox. This is something that modern men and women intuitively understand, even if they’ve never read a word of the great philosophical pluralists (Daniel Bell, Isaiah Berlin, and Michael Oakeshott), and even if they choose to devote their lives to fighting it in a futile and self-defeating embrace of fundamentalism.

Comment by doone on April 12, 2014 at 7:24am

For almost 1,500 years, the New Testament manuscripts were copied by hand––and mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions. Religious and biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself are the results of both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes.

In this compelling and fascinating book, Ehrman shows where and why changes were made in our earliest surviving manuscripts, explaining for the first time how the many variations of our cherished biblical stories came to be, and why only certain versions of the stories qualify for publication in the Bibles we read today. Ehrman frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultra–conservative views of the Bible.

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why Paperback

by Bart D. Ehrman 

Comment by doone on April 12, 2014 at 7:23am

A few books about Jesus

New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church.

The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells the story of an idea that shaped Christianity, and of the evolution of a belief that looked very different in the fourth century than it did in the first.

A master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, Ehrman reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty, Creator of all things. But how did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? In a book that took eight years to research and write, Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his death—alive again—did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today.

Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God.

How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee Hardcover

by Bart D. Ehrman 

Comment by Hope on April 9, 2014 at 4:57pm

Comment by Hope on April 5, 2014 at 2:28pm

Religious insanity,, what else is new..

Comment by doone on April 3, 2014 at 3:04am

New Law in Saudi Arabia Labels All Atheists as Terrorists http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/04/01/a_new_terrorism_law_in_saudi_arabia_targets_atheists_and_dissent_of_all.html … lol.

Comment by Suzanna Smart on April 2, 2014 at 7:19am

It's just another way to be punished for threatening their way. I personally think the "morality police" are terrorists, keeping everyone on their toes. I haven't got over them jailing people for suspecting them of being gay yet.

I hear you can be gay, drink alcohol and do anything else you like just so long as your a prince of really rich, apparently wealthy people are incapable of being amoral.

Comment by doone on April 1, 2014 at 5:29pm

That is really bad, Hope.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• …
• 167
• Next ›
• Page