Is Patricia Churchland a logical positivist? If she is then it's a surprise to me. She takes very hard-line materialist and scientific perspectives, but that's not the same thing. Eliminative materialism does seem pretty odd, but it does seem to be where strict reductionism leads. We did cover it on the philosophy course I did, but it raises all sorts of practical problems. For instance, if she's right and belief, knowledge and intentionality don't really exist, how can we talk meaningfully about religion or science (or, indeed, eliminative materialism)? It's at risk of collapsing into solipsism -- but every approach I've seen to working out how the world really is collapses into solipsism if pushed to the limit, including the scientific approaches and the religious approaches. Most people back away from solipsism not because they can show it to be wrong but because as far as anybody can tell it's not useful. As soon as you do that then you lose all claim to certainty and you are left in the state of Douglas Adams' ruler of the universe:
Man in Shack: The lord knows I am not cruel man.
Zarniwoop: Ah — you say, "the lord', so, you believe in —
Man in Shack: My cat. I call him "the lord". I am kind to him.
Zarniwoop: Alright. How do you know he exists? How do you know he knows you to be kind or enjoys what you think of as your kindness?
Man in Shack: I don't. I have no idea. It merely pleases me to behave in a certain way to what appears to be a cat. What else do you do?...Please, I am tired.
So you think that anybody who points out that an argument against religion is defective whilst recognising that non-defective arguments might exist is religious? You think that somebody who considers that religion can be an intellectually tenable position, whilst not holding that position themselves, is religious? You think that somebody clarifying that they are approaching a question from a philosophical, not a religious, viewpoint must be saying that nobody else is approaching it from a philosophical viewpoint? I can see why you dropped out of philosophy: you're failing on basic logic (and if you think that even basic logic is "mere intellectual wankery", good luck with science.)
The religious offer a few things as evidence, but the thing I (not necessarily they) think is the best evidence is experience: some religious people claim a direct experience of what they perceive to be God, and I consider it rational for them to act on that experience unless they have good reason to doubt it -- which (for those individuals) puts the burden of proof on the atheist, although plainly the experience doesn't count for much for those who haven't had it. That's why I believe that different people can rationally come to different conclusions on the issue of religion: they have different evidence available to them. And yes, I know that the subjective nature of the evidence makes it problematic from a scientific point of view (though not necessarily inadmissible, because science has its own issues over what counts as valid evidence -- if you've studied philosophy you'll be aware of the problems patching the holes in classical foundationalism or coming up with an adequate replacement). It does stand pretty much on a par with a lot of stuff in the social sciences and humanities, and whatever your views on the supremacy of science it's a fact that many major decisions in education, politics, and life in general are rightly taken on the basis of the social sciences and humanities.
I didn't cite him as an example of good theology or good apologetics, I cited him as an anecdotal example of somebody who converted to a theistic religion from agnosticism on the basis of evidence (and I don't claim that the evidence was sufficient either, merely that he considered it to exist). Try to keep up.
I am going to need some anecdotal evidence here. Who converts to a theistic religion from atheism? There is no way in hell that the evidence favors on the religious side of things.
From atheism? I don't know. From agnosticism? Well, C S Lewis was a famous case who documented the conversion in considerable detail. Malcolm Muggeridge similarly. You might not -- probably won't -- accept the evidence they cite as sufficient, but they do cite evidence and they found it adequate. I know they're not particularly recent -- I've not been paying attention to conversions recently -- but they're both post-Darwin!
Are you familiar with Monty Python's cheese shop sketch?
Yes -- I'm British.
Replace the cheese with evidence, the customer with an atheist, and the shop owner with a proponent of a religion, and you've got pretty much every debate on religion that there has ever been or ever will be.
Except that most people who convert to a religion does so because they are persuaded by the evidence (there are a few who do so in order to marry the person of their choice or some such, but I reckon those are a minority). What the debate really comes down to is (a) a confusion between "evidence" and "proof", and (b) an argument over what comprises valid evidence (an argument which is going on between scientists, never mind between militant atheists and religionists.)
Somehow in your book this never-ending and epic failure on the part of the religious is instead converted into "logical positivism" being "comprehensively dealt with in the middle of the last century." To the atheist this instead looks like the religious shoving their fingers in their ears and yelling LALALAICAN'THEARYOU, which of course isn't a way of comprehensively dealing with anything.
You're not looking hard enough if you have me amongst the religious. I'm amongst the philosophers, which is probably worse around here (in my defense it was my minor on that degree, not my major). That means I like to point out the bullshit whichever side is producing it. On/. it's usually the militant atheists, but elsewhere I provide the same service to the religionists. For instance, I regard Dawkins' The God Delusion as being at the intellectual level of a grade-school debating society, but I've written and had published reviews of three responses to it (The Dawkins Delusion, Deluded by Dawkins and The New Atheists, all of which I criticized for being every bit as superficial and being just as defective in facts and logic.
Faith isn't necessarily the cornerstone of religion. Defining religion is notoriously problematic, which is why the same thing can be a "religion" in places where it gets them a tax break but not a religion where that lets it gets taught/practiced in schools. And anyway, "faith" is another word for "trust", which most scientists exercise in some areas of their life without finding that they are compromising their scientific principles by so doing. It's incompatible with certain views of science, in particular the dogma that science explains everything there is ("scientism", which meets which meets quite a few of Nineham's characteristics of a religion, commonly used in the social sciences) but not with more moderate (and dare I say more scientific) views of science.
I wondered about that. The usual technique there is to only offer one modestly-sized print, and to then sell premium prints. In this case the deal includes 11 prints, but there's still a chance to try to sell premium products such as the 30" x 12" framed family montage I have over my mantlepiece, which cost £300 (about $500). That was at the studio, wasn't a hard-sell and eight years down the line we are still glad we made the purchase. Given that this photographer is going into the homes, the chance of a hard sell is greater.
In fact, if you look at the small print of the offer it does say "subject to availability", so at any point if the photographer felt that take-up was too high he could have called a halt and said "no more available". He doesn't have to set a limit with Groupon; according to a recent consumer affairs program on UK TV it's not unusual for people to buy Groupon vouchers and have them declined by the business because of oversubscription.
Perhaps you could try looking at the quoted part in the message I responded to? As an aside, I have yet to see an argument against religion on/. that has not been based on logical positivisism (which shows a poor level of debate from the anti-religionists, because those arguments were pretty comprehensively dealt with in the middle of the last century but there are more recent arguments against religion that are still subject to debate.)
In the end, it always comes down to belief without evidence -- That's the definition of faith after all. That is not scientific, it's not logical, and it's not reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
As ShakaUVM has pointed out, that is not the definition of faith, at least not as it is usually interpreted in practice within religions. Rather, it's taking a decision based on incomplete evidence because complete evidence is not available (and possibly a decision is forced). In the original Star Trek, how many times was Spock forced into such a situation? He always considered it "illogical" to take a decision based on incomplete information, but since failure to take a decision would usually have resulted in the destruction of the Enterprise whereas a decision based on incomplete evidence and balance of probabilities gave a chance of survival the "leap of faith" was actually the rational (if not logical) choice.
Try walking into a Christian church and telling them Jesus is dead.
Try it around here and some would agree with you, some would disagree and still others would want to define terms. It seems that you only have a limited Christian experience.
Only a fool (or a logical positivist, which is the same thing) thinks that science can study anything, and only scientifically proven things can matter.
How do you know whether something matters, when there's not even any evidence that it's *real*?
Does the Flying Spaghetti Monster's plan for us matter?
It's fascinating how many people cling to logical positivism despite the fact that all of it's original proponents abandoned it for good reason and it was thoroughly demolished (notably by Popper but by quite a few others too) as a consistent position. The simplest demolition is simply to point out that logical positivism claims to exclude metaphysics but is itself a metaphysical position (Popper was more subtle, arguing that the distinction between science and metaphysics is a social construct and so is not objective).
What makes him read a phrase in the Bible stated as a fact and say to himself "that's a parable" or "that's the reveled truth"?
The moderates tend to view the Bible as a human document, and so treat it on the same basis as any other human document. For example, poetry is less likely to be literal than prose. There are certain styles of writing which are known to have been figurative, so when they occur it makes sense for them to be read figuratively. For the rest, they decide pretty much as they would decide any other testimony, such as deciding which news reports or political candidates to believe, which person would make the best spouse and so on. "Rationalizing prejudices"? Well, yes, but no more so than everybody else does when making important decisions. What marks the moderate is that they don't spout their conclusions as certainty, so they find more intellectual likeness with agnostics (actually, I see them as a sort of agnostic) and moderate atheists than they do with fundamentalists and militant atheists -- they tend to be suspicious of anybody who seems more certain than they have grounds to be.
There isn't an atheist in America who hasn't been soaked in Christian idiocy their entire lives - moderate, fundamentalist, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, the whole whacked out ball 'o wax. We know exactly what you tools believe in. You NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT. You even have 24/7 television networks spewing the stupidity 365 days a year.
It's news to me that the moderates do, but I don't get US TV. What is for sure is that the intellectuals don't, because real discussion of the real issues (from either side) would be too difficult or too boring for most people so they'd never get funding.
[quote]Well, I shouldn't say you NEVER shut up about it, because whenever the fundies attempt to do something pig ignorant, like this latest example of stupidity in Texas, the "moderate" Christians who supposedly represent a "majority" go completely silent. In spite of their alleged "majority" status, they seldom if ever seem to be capable of halting the relentless march back to the Dark Ages.
You need to get out more. There's no shortage of moderate Christians condemning this idiocy, but they don't go around saying "I condemn this because I'm a moderate Christian", they go around saying "I condemn this because it's idiocy." (And even non-moderate Christians condemn the idiocy -- did you miss the bit about the Papal spokesman pointing out that ID is not science?) If they're not "capable of halting the relentless march back to the Dark Ages" it's for the same reasons that the atheists and agnostics are not. It's because those on the march take no notice of them and because extremists always get more attention than moderates.
There is every condradiction between being a christian and a scientist. You cant be selective with your rational thinking and the application of the scientific method. Pretty much any belief in any part of the bible is a contradicion of science and rational thinking. If you belive that jesus is the son of god (and that is what a christian is) then that makes your thinking process very flawed.
The many (a minority, true, but still many) distinguished scientists who are also religious beg to differ, and I suspect John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins know more about science than anybody on/., and John Polkinghorne probably knows more about religion too. Yes, some forms of religion are incompatible with science, and they tend to be the noisier forms so they tend to be all that the anti-religious know about. But there are other forms of religion, some of them are much more nuanced, and require no compartmentalisation at all to be compatible with science.
As Mathinker has pointed out, it's only literal belief in the Bible that is problematic for the scientist, and many Christians don't believe in it literally. Also you haven't supported your assertion that "If you belive [sic] that jesus [sic] is the son of god [sic] (and that is what a christian [sic] is) then that makes your thinking process very flawed", and it's hard to see how you can without assuming what you are trying to claim, because (a) not all Christians would accept that definition of Christian, and (b) there are very many different thinking processes that have led people to conclude that Jesus is the son of God (and many different understandings of the phrase son of God), and I doubt you (or I) know all of them. How can you know a thinking process is flawed without knowing what that process is unless you already take as given that the conclusion is wrong?
A point that Martin Luther made, for what it's worth. And although there is a serious problem with where morality comes from, religion doesn't help with the problem either way -- something Plato worked out (in the Euthyphro dialog), so it's had time to work its way into the popular perception.
Yet what percentage of people in prison are religious, what percentage of mass murderers were/are religious, and what percentage of serial killers are religious?
A more useful figure would be "what percentage of people in prison were religious before they went to prison". The numbers might say more about the parole system than about religion.
It's mindboggling. And i'm very glad i don't have to live in that country.
Given the point about it possessing the largest quantity of the most dangerous weapons in the world, there's a lot to be said for living where they're not pointing.
I know theoretically the Church has been cool with evolution since at least the 50's. However that didn't stop me from getting yelled at by a priest because I talked about it during a CCD class when I was a kid in the late 70's and got ratted out by the CCD teacher. (I guess that means at least 2 people working in some capacity for the RCC in my personal experience were creationists. So I have to think it was still quite common at that time to be a creationist even if you were a Roman Catholic. Before anybody asks I didn't get yelled at for simply talking, I got yelled at for bring up evolution which these 2 had a hair across their ass about.)
I'm not sure 2 counts as "quote common", although it probably was -- and still is -- in some parts of the church. But the fact that some adherents are idiots doesn't say anything about the belief as a whole. Some agnostics are idiots too, as are some atheists. Here in the UK you're more likely to get flamed by an atheist teacher for bringing up religion in school than you are to get flamed by a religious teacher for bringing up evolution. And the "no discussion, just accept what we say" approach in schools is just as destructive whichever side it comes from.
I think "ethics and philosophy and maybe even logic" is too narrow, because religion has a much wider cultural impact than that. In the UK there is an emphasis on considering the same topic across many disciplines (so, for instance, in the same term as the climate in a particular region is being discussed in geography, climate figures for that region will be used for the statistics part of the maths class). I think the same approach is needed for religion. It's a great case-study in science for how to decide whether something is scientific or not, it forms part of ethics (because of the debate between deontic, consequentialist and virtue ethical systems), it should come up in sociology because of it's effect on cultures, it should come up in English literature because you need to know about it to understand much classic literature, it should come up in art because you need it to understand the development of art and it should come up in history because of it's effect on the way the world has been shaped (not just by being the cause of wars). Agree with it or not, it's something one needs to know about if you want to understand the world you're living in.
Grammar is not essential for communication, unless you need to get logical about something.
Good luck trying to explain that you've already been to the shops in Chinese (which doesn't strictly have a past tense) or explaining who hit who in German (where it's not the word order that matters but the grammatical way the words change).
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Is Patricia Churchland a logical positivist? If she is then it's a surprise to me. She takes very hard-line materialist and scientific perspectives, but that's not the same thing. Eliminative materialism does seem pretty odd, but it does seem to be where strict reductionism leads. We did cover it on the philosophy course I did, but it raises all sorts of practical problems. For instance, if she's right and belief, knowledge and intentionality don't really exist, how can we talk meaningfully about religion or science (or, indeed, eliminative materialism)? It's at risk of collapsing into solipsism -- but every approach I've seen to working out how the world really is collapses into solipsism if pushed to the limit, including the scientific approaches and the religious approaches. Most people back away from solipsism not because they can show it to be wrong but because as far as anybody can tell it's not useful. As soon as you do that then you lose all claim to certainty and you are left in the state of Douglas Adams' ruler of the universe: ...Please, I am tired.
Man in Shack: The lord knows I am not cruel man.
Zarniwoop: Ah — you say, "the lord', so, you believe in —
Man in Shack: My cat. I call him "the lord". I am kind to him.
Zarniwoop: Alright. How do you know he exists? How do you know he knows you to be kind or enjoys what you think of as your kindness?
Man in Shack: I don't. I have no idea. It merely pleases me to behave in a certain way to what appears to be a cat. What else do you do?
So you think that anybody who points out that an argument against religion is defective whilst recognising that non-defective arguments might exist is religious? You think that somebody who considers that religion can be an intellectually tenable position, whilst not holding that position themselves, is religious? You think that somebody clarifying that they are approaching a question from a philosophical, not a religious, viewpoint must be saying that nobody else is approaching it from a philosophical viewpoint? I can see why you dropped out of philosophy: you're failing on basic logic (and if you think that even basic logic is "mere intellectual wankery", good luck with science.)
The religious offer a few things as evidence, but the thing I (not necessarily they) think is the best evidence is experience: some religious people claim a direct experience of what they perceive to be God, and I consider it rational for them to act on that experience unless they have good reason to doubt it -- which (for those individuals) puts the burden of proof on the atheist, although plainly the experience doesn't count for much for those who haven't had it. That's why I believe that different people can rationally come to different conclusions on the issue of religion: they have different evidence available to them. And yes, I know that the subjective nature of the evidence makes it problematic from a scientific point of view (though not necessarily inadmissible, because science has its own issues over what counts as valid evidence -- if you've studied philosophy you'll be aware of the problems patching the holes in classical foundationalism or coming up with an adequate replacement). It does stand pretty much on a par with a lot of stuff in the social sciences and humanities, and whatever your views on the supremacy of science it's a fact that many major decisions in education, politics, and life in general are rightly taken on the basis of the social sciences and humanities.
I didn't cite him as an example of good theology or good apologetics, I cited him as an anecdotal example of somebody who converted to a theistic religion from agnosticism on the basis of evidence (and I don't claim that the evidence was sufficient either, merely that he considered it to exist). Try to keep up.
I am going to need some anecdotal evidence here. Who converts to a theistic religion from atheism? There is no way in hell that the evidence favors on the religious side of things.
From atheism? I don't know. From agnosticism? Well, C S Lewis was a famous case who documented the conversion in considerable detail. Malcolm Muggeridge similarly. You might not -- probably won't -- accept the evidence they cite as sufficient, but they do cite evidence and they found it adequate. I know they're not particularly recent -- I've not been paying attention to conversions recently -- but they're both post-Darwin!
What it is is confirmation bias among those who are looking for evidence to support their belief. Scientists fall prey to this as well
So I see :-)
Are you familiar with Monty Python's cheese shop sketch?
Yes -- I'm British.
Replace the cheese with evidence, the customer with an atheist, and the shop owner with a proponent of a religion, and you've got pretty much every debate on religion that there has ever been or ever will be.
Except that most people who convert to a religion does so because they are persuaded by the evidence (there are a few who do so in order to marry the person of their choice or some such, but I reckon those are a minority). What the debate really comes down to is (a) a confusion between "evidence" and "proof", and (b) an argument over what comprises valid evidence (an argument which is going on between scientists, never mind between militant atheists and religionists.)
Somehow in your book this never-ending and epic failure on the part of the religious is instead converted into "logical positivism" being "comprehensively dealt with in the middle of the last century." To the atheist this instead looks like the religious shoving their fingers in their ears and yelling LALALAICAN'THEARYOU, which of course isn't a way of comprehensively dealing with anything.
You're not looking hard enough if you have me amongst the religious. I'm amongst the philosophers, which is probably worse around here (in my defense it was my minor on that degree, not my major). That means I like to point out the bullshit whichever side is producing it. On /. it's usually the militant atheists, but elsewhere I provide the same service to the religionists. For instance, I regard Dawkins' The God Delusion as being at the intellectual level of a grade-school debating society, but I've written and had published reviews of three responses to it (The Dawkins Delusion, Deluded by Dawkins and The New Atheists, all of which I criticized for being every bit as superficial and being just as defective in facts and logic.
Faith isn't necessarily the cornerstone of religion. Defining religion is notoriously problematic, which is why the same thing can be a "religion" in places where it gets them a tax break but not a religion where that lets it gets taught/practiced in schools. And anyway, "faith" is another word for "trust", which most scientists exercise in some areas of their life without finding that they are compromising their scientific principles by so doing. It's incompatible with certain views of science, in particular the dogma that science explains everything there is ("scientism", which meets which meets quite a few of Nineham's characteristics of a religion, commonly used in the social sciences) but not with more moderate (and dare I say more scientific) views of science.
I wondered about that. The usual technique there is to only offer one modestly-sized print, and to then sell premium prints. In this case the deal includes 11 prints, but there's still a chance to try to sell premium products such as the 30" x 12" framed family montage I have over my mantlepiece, which cost £300 (about $500). That was at the studio, wasn't a hard-sell and eight years down the line we are still glad we made the purchase. Given that this photographer is going into the homes, the chance of a hard sell is greater.
In fact, if you look at the small print of the offer it does say "subject to availability", so at any point if the photographer felt that take-up was too high he could have called a halt and said "no more available". He doesn't have to set a limit with Groupon; according to a recent consumer affairs program on UK TV it's not unusual for people to buy Groupon vouchers and have them declined by the business because of oversubscription.
Perhaps you could try looking at the quoted part in the message I responded to? As an aside, I have yet to see an argument against religion on /. that has not been based on logical positivisism (which shows a poor level of debate from the anti-religionists, because those arguments were pretty comprehensively dealt with in the middle of the last century but there are more recent arguments against religion that are still subject to debate.)
In the end, it always comes down to belief without evidence -- That's the definition of faith after all. That is not scientific, it's not logical, and it's not reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
As ShakaUVM has pointed out, that is not the definition of faith, at least not as it is usually interpreted in practice within religions. Rather, it's taking a decision based on incomplete evidence because complete evidence is not available (and possibly a decision is forced). In the original Star Trek, how many times was Spock forced into such a situation? He always considered it "illogical" to take a decision based on incomplete information, but since failure to take a decision would usually have resulted in the destruction of the Enterprise whereas a decision based on incomplete evidence and balance of probabilities gave a chance of survival the "leap of faith" was actually the rational (if not logical) choice.
I don't agree. What number? A 100? A 1000? 1001 is a religion? 1000 is a cult?
Ever heard of the sorites paradox?
Try walking into a Christian church and telling them Jesus is dead.
Try it around here and some would agree with you, some would disagree and still others would want to define terms. It seems that you only have a limited Christian experience.
Only a fool (or a logical positivist, which is the same thing) thinks that science can study anything, and only scientifically proven things can matter.
How do you know whether something matters, when there's not even any evidence that it's *real*?
Does the Flying Spaghetti Monster's plan for us matter?
It's fascinating how many people cling to logical positivism despite the fact that all of it's original proponents abandoned it for good reason and it was thoroughly demolished (notably by Popper but by quite a few others too) as a consistent position. The simplest demolition is simply to point out that logical positivism claims to exclude metaphysics but is itself a metaphysical position (Popper was more subtle, arguing that the distinction between science and metaphysics is a social construct and so is not objective).
What makes him read a phrase in the Bible stated as a fact and say to himself "that's a parable" or "that's the reveled truth"?
The moderates tend to view the Bible as a human document, and so treat it on the same basis as any other human document. For example, poetry is less likely to be literal than prose. There are certain styles of writing which are known to have been figurative, so when they occur it makes sense for them to be read figuratively. For the rest, they decide pretty much as they would decide any other testimony, such as deciding which news reports or political candidates to believe, which person would make the best spouse and so on. "Rationalizing prejudices"? Well, yes, but no more so than everybody else does when making important decisions. What marks the moderate is that they don't spout their conclusions as certainty, so they find more intellectual likeness with agnostics (actually, I see them as a sort of agnostic) and moderate atheists than they do with fundamentalists and militant atheists -- they tend to be suspicious of anybody who seems more certain than they have grounds to be.
Oh, please, get off the cross. We need the wood.
There isn't an atheist in America who hasn't been soaked in Christian idiocy their entire lives - moderate, fundamentalist, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, the whole whacked out ball 'o wax. We know exactly what you tools believe in. You NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT. You even have 24/7 television networks spewing the stupidity 365 days a year.
It's news to me that the moderates do, but I don't get US TV. What is for sure is that the intellectuals don't, because real discussion of the real issues (from either side) would be too difficult or too boring for most people so they'd never get funding. [quote]Well, I shouldn't say you NEVER shut up about it, because whenever the fundies attempt to do something pig ignorant, like this latest example of stupidity in Texas, the "moderate" Christians who supposedly represent a "majority" go completely silent. In spite of their alleged "majority" status, they seldom if ever seem to be capable of halting the relentless march back to the Dark Ages.
You need to get out more. There's no shortage of moderate Christians condemning this idiocy, but they don't go around saying "I condemn this because I'm a moderate Christian", they go around saying "I condemn this because it's idiocy." (And even non-moderate Christians condemn the idiocy -- did you miss the bit about the Papal spokesman pointing out that ID is not science?) If they're not "capable of halting the relentless march back to the Dark Ages" it's for the same reasons that the atheists and agnostics are not. It's because those on the march take no notice of them and because extremists always get more attention than moderates.
There is every condradiction between being a christian and a scientist. You cant be selective with your rational thinking and the application of the scientific method. Pretty much any belief in any part of the bible is a contradicion of science and rational thinking. If you belive that jesus is the son of god (and that is what a christian is) then that makes your thinking process very flawed.
The many (a minority, true, but still many) distinguished scientists who are also religious beg to differ, and I suspect John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins know more about science than anybody on /., and John Polkinghorne probably knows more about religion too. Yes, some forms of religion are incompatible with science, and they tend to be the noisier forms so they tend to be all that the anti-religious know about. But there are other forms of religion, some of them are much more nuanced, and require no compartmentalisation at all to be compatible with science.
As Mathinker has pointed out, it's only literal belief in the Bible that is problematic for the scientist, and many Christians don't believe in it literally. Also you haven't supported your assertion that "If you belive [sic] that jesus [sic] is the son of god [sic] (and that is what a christian [sic] is) then that makes your thinking process very flawed", and it's hard to see how you can without assuming what you are trying to claim, because (a) not all Christians would accept that definition of Christian, and (b) there are very many different thinking processes that have led people to conclude that Jesus is the son of God (and many different understandings of the phrase son of God), and I doubt you (or I) know all of them. How can you know a thinking process is flawed without knowing what that process is unless you already take as given that the conclusion is wrong?
A point that Martin Luther made, for what it's worth. And although there is a serious problem with where morality comes from, religion doesn't help with the problem either way -- something Plato worked out (in the Euthyphro dialog), so it's had time to work its way into the popular perception.
Yet what percentage of people in prison are religious, what percentage of mass murderers were/are religious, and what percentage of serial killers are religious?
A more useful figure would be "what percentage of people in prison were religious before they went to prison". The numbers might say more about the parole system than about religion.
It's mindboggling. And i'm very glad i don't have to live in that country.
Given the point about it possessing the largest quantity of the most dangerous weapons in the world, there's a lot to be said for living where they're not pointing.
I know theoretically the Church has been cool with evolution since at least the 50's. However that didn't stop me from getting yelled at by a priest because I talked about it during a CCD class when I was a kid in the late 70's and got ratted out by the CCD teacher. (I guess that means at least 2 people working in some capacity for the RCC in my personal experience were creationists. So I have to think it was still quite common at that time to be a creationist even if you were a Roman Catholic. Before anybody asks I didn't get yelled at for simply talking, I got yelled at for bring up evolution which these 2 had a hair across their ass about.)
I'm not sure 2 counts as "quote common", although it probably was -- and still is -- in some parts of the church. But the fact that some adherents are idiots doesn't say anything about the belief as a whole. Some agnostics are idiots too, as are some atheists. Here in the UK you're more likely to get flamed by an atheist teacher for bringing up religion in school than you are to get flamed by a religious teacher for bringing up evolution. And the "no discussion, just accept what we say" approach in schools is just as destructive whichever side it comes from.
I think "ethics and philosophy and maybe even logic" is too narrow, because religion has a much wider cultural impact than that. In the UK there is an emphasis on considering the same topic across many disciplines (so, for instance, in the same term as the climate in a particular region is being discussed in geography, climate figures for that region will be used for the statistics part of the maths class). I think the same approach is needed for religion. It's a great case-study in science for how to decide whether something is scientific or not, it forms part of ethics (because of the debate between deontic, consequentialist and virtue ethical systems), it should come up in sociology because of it's effect on cultures, it should come up in English literature because you need to know about it to understand much classic literature, it should come up in art because you need it to understand the development of art and it should come up in history because of it's effect on the way the world has been shaped (not just by being the cause of wars). Agree with it or not, it's something one needs to know about if you want to understand the world you're living in.
This isn't a reputable newspaper that tries to make sure they will increase profits if they cause people to get killed by releasing information
FTFY.
Did you understand Yoda?
Grammar is not essential for communication, unless you need to get logical about something.
Good luck trying to explain that you've already been to the shops in Chinese (which doesn't strictly have a past tense) or explaining who hit who in German (where it's not the word order that matters but the grammatical way the words change).
THE MAN isn't going to be able to track you to with a drycleaning RFID tag unless he's from Hogwart's...
Damn wizards. I knew all along they were working for The Man.