Huh? Why? It stands on its own, and doesn’t conflict with anything further. In fact, the part about misuing religion because we’re afraid we’ll lose our SUVs when we die ties in with the second post.
I really have no idea what you are trying to get at.
It’s the liberal variant of Christianity. It always amazes me that people don’t choke on the irony.
Liberal - We demand tolerance and open-mindedness, a respect for different idea and cultures. Unless you disagree with us on a subject we don’t want deviation on and you happen to be predominantly white and/or male, then you’re a bigoted, fascist asshole.
Christians - We believe in tolerance, peace, and love. Christ died to set you free, to redeem your sins. If you don’t believe in him, you will burn in hell for all eternity in an ocean of fire and pain. Oops, my one hour on Sunday is up, time to hop in the SUV, help further destroy what He created, and then tomorrow, it’s back to making as much money as I can and donating 5% of it per year to soothe my guilty conscience.
Isn’t Christianity really about there being no way into heaven except through Jesus? At its core it’s all about accepting Jesus as your lord and savior. Jesus is very love and peace, but love and peace doesn’t get you into heaven.[/QUOTE]
And how does one follow Jesus?
It’s the liberal variant of Christianity. It always amazes me that people don’t choke on the irony.
Liberal - We demand tolerance and open-mindedness, a respect for different idea and cultures. Unless you disagree with us on a subject we don’t want deviation on and you happen to be predominantly white and/or male, then you’re a bigoted, fascist asshole.
Christians - We believe in tolerance, peace, and love. Christ died to set you free, to redeem your sins. If you don’t believe in him, you will burn in hell for all eternity in an ocean of fire and pain.
Once again, you really have me pegged.
But he also said both were true, whereas some creationists differentiate the two by saying one doesn’t exist. Which was Tim’s point.
Here you are saying that our “cushy lives” make us “self-centered and consumerist” and that makes us pine for an afterlife.
I believe that religion in the U.S. is less about belief and faith, and more about the desperate attempt to find some mystical way to assure ourselves that we will be driving our SUVs around in heaven for all eternity. I truly believe that religion for most people is inspired by fear, caused by the concern that if I’m wrong, I might go to hell, so why not (Pascal’s Wager, essentially), and self-importance causing fear that we won’t get to live forever in some form.
Here you are saying that we’re so stressed about the idea that we won’t have luxury items for eternity that we go into denial and believe in the afterlife out of fear.
And what I said was this:
The desire for eternal life is a 5000 year old desire that simply cannot be simplistically explained by appeals to SUV cravings and the quest for more iPod accessories.
We’ve been interested in the afterlife for the entirety of human history and your post explicitly ties this desire to a modern cultural trait that is extremely recent in human history.
If you don’t understand why this is the stupidest attempt to explain human religious beliefs in the history of the internet then I don’t know how to make it any clearer. You can’t explain a 5000 year old human desire by appealing to something that happened 50 years ago.
I’ll try to put this in a single sentence:
The belief in an afterlife is not caused by Amazon.com or your local Chevy dealer.
QED.
This is fun. Everybody make up a strawman for the person you imagine you are debating, and then have at them! I’m going to go for a nazi or a phrenologist. I like my debates easy.
I’m not sure slyfrog gets to have two of them, though, that doesn’t seem fair.
Dobzhansky was a great scientist, a very religious man, and (despite Shift6’s obvious sarcasm) one of the strongest proponents of evolution in the twentieth century. I’m sure he’d be horrified to find out that creationists now use the concept of micro-evolution as a way to deny evolution itself. Check out his essay Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
The worst part about creationism is that it doesn’t just spread ignorance regarding biology; it’s part of a generalized right-wing assault on the scientific method itself. Once you’ve damaged the public’s confidence in science and scientists, you not only get to put creationism into public schools, you can also roll back all kinds of environmental laws and avoid making tough decisions about national energy policy. It’s just pencil-necked “scientists” and their so-called “theories” on one side, and cold hard corporate cash (which trickles down to everyone, right???) on the other.
Wait, what?
Don’t sail around the world Chris, you’ll fall off…
Just because they didn’t have a scientific explanation doesn’t seem much of an issue; it’s fairly easy to notice that touching corpses and rotating your crops are good things. Religions that order you to cavort with the dead would seem to have a comparative disability in epidemics. :)
Look for his scat and where he’s rubbed his head on tree trunks?
Right. And that wouldn’t be considered hate speech if aimed at racial minorities at all.
I’ve lived here for the past ten years.
So you’re saying that equating a person with a deer is not silly, but hateful. Here’s some more racist jokes you might want to try:
“Q: How do you keep a black person from sleeping?
A: Wall up the entrance to his den before winter starts!”
“Q: What do Chinese women think is the sexiest part of a man?”
A: The rigidness of his protective shell!"
“Q: What did the Mexican say to the ice cream man?
A: (make an elephant noise)”
Just because they’re stupid doesn’t make them not racist. Go tell those jokes to a gathering of African-American, Chinese, or Mexican people. I’m sure you’ll have them rolling in the aisles.
Yeah, I don’t remember hearing all sorts of “really intelligent” racism
My point is that it seems like nearly every ideology under the sun, political and religious, enjoys the irony of promoting itself as the peace, light, and tolerance group, unless you happen to disagree with them, in which case you should die and burn in hell.
Shift, I didn’t say creationists coined the terms, but used them to create a false separation. Your sarcastic reply was completely off the mark.
Yeah, except we didn’t understand the value or need to rotate crops in recent times (there’s a reason there’s a statue in tribute to the Boll Weevil in a town in Alabama) and as late as the 1870s people were calling Lister and Pasteur idiots for their theories of germ-sourced cross-contamination, etc. You’d think people would have noticed that cleaning your surgical instruments would reduce fatalities and infections but they argued against such theories for a long time. I never really noticed a number of the laws of the Old Testament in light of their practical scientific application until I read a paper when I was in grad school pointing them out, and starting reading them in that light. I.e., what if you wanted to protect a big group of people who were going to be wandering the countryside for a few decades and couldn’t tell them about germs, agriculture, certain types of foods that were more likely to result in problems, etc.
So the problem, in my mind, is that a lot of religious people (and I use the term religious in a perjorative sense) like to pull out of those rules and be very selective about them for today. But if one rule you like is next to the one on not eating certain things that were more likely to cause a problem, you can’t pick one and ignore the other, IMO. You either have to say God meant all of these for us today or none. Basically, Jesus always referred to the 10 commandments as the moral guide and never all of the other rules.