ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

Easter isn't a federal holiday here.

Which, it weirds me out that in spite of this, "Good Friday" is one of the days on which the US securities markets are closed.

Part of what is frustrating about the new fundamentalism in the US is their assumption that this is what Christians have always been like. It's probably impossible for us to understand how, say, 10th century Christians understood their faith (finally got around to reading Veyne's 'Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths', which was awesome, though mostly for it's questions rather than it's answers).

It's not surprising, then, that they also think that Islamic fundamentalism is what Islam was always about rather than an odd 20th Century offshoot.

Like I said earlier, I live in the Bible Belt, work mostly for low-income blacks and Latinos, and draw fundamentalists like flies. At least at work I can tell them that my agency forbids me to talk about religion (not true, but they don't know any different).

xp THAT is a very interesting point.

omg we have a church hi 5

I'm all for starting the ILTMI Church of St. Deeper. Should we start it in Illinois or Florida?

Let's just say it's a state of mind that we carry around with us. And tell no one about.

Darn, I was looking forward to seeing what the steeple looked like.

would look like, I should say.

These are some mighty temporal concerns for this particular thread.

don't know why, as proposer, the church wouldn't be based in connaught tbh

The US/UK divide is pretty weird. I've never met a "prickly atheist" in my entire life. It seems to me that the vast majority of atheists in the U.S. don't talk about it, or call themselves "agnostic" because they think that sounds better. Polling seems to support this. From wikipedia: "A 2008 Gallup poll showed that a smaller 6% of the US population believed that no god or universal spirit exists. The most recent ARIS report, released March 9, 2009,...1.6% explicitly describe themselves as atheist or agnostic, double the previous 2001 ARIS survey figure." So apparently less than a third of atheists in the U.S. even realize that they're atheists.

Sorry, I think I must have been expressing myself badly last night (which is highly likely, I was kind of drunk). My point about real world concerns was not that this was the domain of religion, but rather that the debate between theists and atheists is a distraction from real problems. And yes, religious groups are part of this problem, and have a lot to answer for in these areas, and should be held to account whenever possible.

I think I see the problem here. The "extreme, hardcore, obnoxious, whatever" atheists are not debating the existence of god. They're debating the value of religion. In my opinion, religion is the primary problem in the world, and dismissing that by simply saying "eh, I don't have time for that. I'm worried about real problems." is not a valid argument. And talking about the problems of religion is not an ad hominem argument against the existence of god because, again, we're not debating the existence of god.

The US is still very much a frontier country in spirit, even now, and frontiers tend to hold on to old habits longer. Also, we're an enormous country and new attitudes take a long time to filter out to the hinterlands (yes, even now).

The US doesn't have a monarchy or very good universal health care or other institutions that would support a secular society as well as other advanced countries, so I think we're stuck with religious institutions providing those things, and places with even less than that are stuck more, but I don't really see this as a problem provided they don't derive their authority and mandate from scripture.

I've never met a "prickly atheist" in my entire life.

In my opinion, religion is the primary problem in the world, and dismissing that by simply saying "eh, I don't have time for that. I'm worried about real problems." is not a valid argument.

yeah you're about as far up your own asshole as you can get

And you're not judgmental at ALL.

who said i wasn't?

saying "religion is the primary problem in the world" is just deluded lala-land bullshit, sorry.

The real problem of the world is... people.

I'll grant you it's a leap of faith to:
1) speculate that people would be less likely to be shitty to each other if they were not able to justify this shittiness as divinely inspired, and
2) that it's possible to remove this justification as a global behavior

but I think these are experiments worth trying.

http://oregonmag.com/Jihad_ElmoPuppet.jpg

Anyone who has dealt with children realizes that justifications can always be invented for any action, and the lack of "divine inspiration" as an invocation to fall back on would not be even a blip on the path to some other rationalization.

I dunno -- it seems like the parents who pull the "because I said so" and the kids who keep asking "why"

aimless, obviously there's a lot of truth to that, but i'm not sure what i'm supposed to do with it. when i see some of the disgusting acts that have been perpetrated in the name of religion i have a hard time sitting back and saying "oh well, would have happened anyway"

how would you guys characterize the jenny mcarthy vaccination thing? I'd characterize it as religious even though as far as I can tell there isn't any overt church doctrine involved.

it's religious in the same way pyramid schemes are

let's get rid of religion and start murdering each other for the sake of science instead. progress!

I'd characterize it as religious even though as far as I can tell there isn't any overt church doctrine involved.

That doesn't make a lick of sense. If you mean zealotry, say zealotry, but quit using words wrong.

ugh, I promised myself I wouldn't post on this thread other than my 12-word manifesto up top. Dang it!

would you accept superstitious? "jenny mcarthy hates vaccinations with a superstitious fervor" doesn't flow as well.

you can be a zealot about a logical cause, imo, but the anti-vaccination crowd jump through hoops to avoid logic

Accuracy is more important than flow imho.

I don't feel she's a zealot, though, cause it's really normal to be concerned about your kid.

hey no you know what's better? let's start killing people off in foreign lands for control of natural resources and financial self-interest! it sure beats that evil religion stuff!

'Religious fervour' isn't the same as 'religious'. The former is a clear metaphor ingrained in the English language. The latter, while its meaning can be debated, isn't a metaphor but rather an attribution of fact.

(Thus: words. You're using them wrong.)

what is McCarthy's religion, BTW?

scientologist right?

"being concerned about your kid" and "believing a non-scientific explanation to crazed extents to explain a condition your child has" are different things, imo

oh. um.. maybe I take it back that the church had nothing to do with the vaccination thing.

Is it ok to characterize it as religious now, now that scientology is involved in a murky way? I'm not sure what's different about it. Also complicating this is Scientology's quasi-status as religion.

How's Scientology involved? McCarthy isn't scientologist afaik. They have some weird stances on autism, but none on vaccination that I know of.

Zeal for a cause, blind adherence to something you hold as an article of faith, and the desire to eliminate all opponents who refuse to be converted to your way of thinking are, sadly, not confined to religious zeal, religious faith or religious conversion. They are universals in human nature.

mh i'm pretty sure she is or at least has "dabbled"

ok i guess actually the connection is that jim carrey is DEF into it

lol although he denies it

whatever, sorry, i don't think it's informing her vaccination thing in any case

hey no you know what's better? let's start killing people off in foreign lands for control of natural resources and financial self-interest!

Don't forget to send missionaries.

people would be less likely to be shitty to each other if they were not able to justify this shittiness as divinely inspired... experiments worth trying

I can't figure out how to phrase this without sounding like a crusading anti-communist cardinal or bishop, but this experiment was given a pretty good try out in a variety of communist countries in the period between 1920 and 1990. No noteworthy drop in interpersonal shittiness seems detectable in a result.

the result

Also, I haven't seen anyone on this thread actually argue that "people would be less likely to be shitty to each other if they were not able to justify this shittiness as divinely inspired" but go ahead and keep tilting at strawmen.