Senate Creationism (Now Discussing: Creation Museum)

You forget, though, that the Creation Museum's stance is that those people have sold out God and Christianity

 

If the Vatican stance is not one of literal creationism, we should probably take note. I was a big fan of the Pope when he presented Bullseye, and I didn't see him slip up once in all those years. He may well be infallible.

 

Here's what I think...faith is something which does not require proof. If you believe in God and you believe in creation, well you can go on believing that regardless of what scientists say. There shouldn't be any reason for science and religion to come into conflict. But fundamentalists insist on fighting this war against science anyway because...well I guess because they're prideful ***holes who refuse to tolerate people believing something different from them.

 

Faith as the modern meaning of that word is defined, indeed requires no proof because it is premodernist thought. It asserts a divinely revealed conclusion first which cannot be controverted. Proof in support is nice but strictly speaking unnecessary and evidence against is either wrong or maliciously placed by another - be it Satan leaving the fossils there or God himself being mischievous by creating the light on its way here from Orion's Belt. But faith in the sense of requiring intellectual commitment to a set of concepts as such is a relatively recent and very, very odd variation compared with the majority of the Abrahamic faiths' history.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half: You caused a slow boil. I was traveling via public transit today, and to pass the time, I was carrying a historical account of a man constructing a whaling vessel. A strange notion took me, and I closed to book neatly to think on it. During a discussion of someone building a Noah's Ark theme park, you had jokingly quoted the Lord in his "count up the cost" comment. It was probably because they were both about building boats?

In any case, I thought of it again. At first, my lips just spread into an enormous, insuppressible smile. I thought it looked ridiculous, and so I covered my mouth for modesty. But then I began to shudder. My hand first, then up the arm, then my whole body was just convulsing. I couldn't hold it in any longer. I just started cackling. With loud, hysterical abandon. Almost screaming. I could hardly stay seated in my chair. Then I thought of how absurd it must have looked to the other passengers. My whole mind was lost in the swirling, sublime hilarity of the whole thing. Several minutes are just lost to me entirely, and by the time I came back to myself I was a good way through the trip.

So, thanks for that.

 

wocky is still the best poster

 

By this measure, Rogue1-and-a-half is a prophet, for he managed to induce in the Wock a state of ekstasis.

 

Wocky, that is probably the weirdest post I have ever been tagged in.

 

HBO's Questioning Darwin

Both vids in this article are worth watching.

 

Hilarious sub-title for the first video. But hearing Timmo yell at people doesn't make atheism look good.

 

This is such beautiful poetry that puts tears in my eyes.

 

yeah that guy was creepy and annoying. the trailer looked interesting but i didnt like that all the creationists they had were american and the darwin expert was english. well, i dont mind that in and of itself -- its pretty fair. what bothered me was more that there should have been at least one australian accent among the creationists

 

Well, there's always been religious zealots throughout history. I think what's new here is the rise of science in our society. Science provides this sort of "alternate view" of the world, and whereas the religious non-zealot can go on thinking "hmm, that's nice but I think I'll go on believing what I believe", the zealot decides that he absolutely cannot abide the existence of the alternate view...and he either doesn't understand the harm that would be done when the integrity of science isn't maintained, or he doesn't care.

 

But it hard to really get enthused about a cause when it's just creepy, hirsute nerds yelling at people about how superior they are for "believing" in evolution.

Plus the guy totally had rape eyes. There has to be a network of those guys out there, the Society for the Dissemination of Rapey Eyes (SDRE) or something.

 

I have a creepier video called Donut Hole.

 

Well, not exactly.

For our starting example, consider Augustine, originator of the doctrine of Original Sin: lived in c. 400, through the sack of Rome -- and he said you had to have regard to the science of the period or have the scriptures appear foolish.

The Abrahamic faiths for the majority of their history had a much stronger emphasis on the ineffability of existence, that there were certain truths that either were incapable of being known or were only capable of expression without words. They also had a much stronger emphasis on the idea that one found meaning in the interpretation of religious texts, not that one was prescribed a meaning by the texts. One of the oldest precepts of Judaic religious practice, for example, was a simple question: "What is Torah? It is the interpretation of Torah." Torah being, of course, the received law given to Moses by God. There was a much, much greater acknowledgment that human existence may of itself be defined by the search for meaning, and a strong emphasis that the search was best served by the doing of good works to others and in spiritual discipline - without orthopraxy, i.e. right action, attending to spiritual discipline, orthodoxy -- right belief -- was meaningless.

(Once can see echoes of this in Christ's constant emphasis on doing good as opposed to sitting around debating a word in the Torah, and indeed in the concept of the vision quest or initiation in early cultures. Initiation invariably was an exercise in both social and spiritual development, a spiritual experience that was meant to ordain a man as ready to join fully in the life of his community. There is a vein in current psychology (see Steve Biddulph and other masculinity authors) that suggests our young men and children generally are starved of both male role models and appropriate initiationary rituals, and it shows in higher-than-expected suicide rates among the young and serious risk-taking activities in late teens. The argument is that our men lack the role models to teach them how to be adults and then an appropriate rite of passage to tell them at a deep and meaningful level that they are now adults and expected to behave so. This is not a call to start chopping off bits of penises, I might add - I don't know what the appropriate cultural rite of passage now would be. I'm not a sociologist.)

One example of this is the shift in the meaning of the word "believe". I'll let Karen Armstrong take over here--

“Until well into the modern period,” Armstrong contends, “Jews and Christians both insisted that it was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible literally, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation.” Myths were symbolic, often therapeutic, teaching stories and were never understood literally or historically. But that all changed with the advent of modernity. Precipitated by the rediscovery of Aristotle and the rise of scholasticism in the late middle ages, rational systematization took center stage, preparing the way for a modern period that would welcome both humanistic individualism and the eventual triumph of reason and science.

The early modern world was astir with cultural renewal, technological innovation, and religious reformation. The printing press captured the oral tradition on the written page, and the printed word became a matter of depersonalized, static precision. Henceforth, all religious quarrels (both those between Rome and the reformers and those amongst Protestant sects) would be suffused with an ever-increasing need to define oneself and one’s dogmatic opinions in relation to the (often heretical) other: as the Reformation proceeded, Protestantism began to morph into a bewildering number of sects, each with its own doctrinal bias, its own interpretation of the Bible, and each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on truth. There was now a clamor of religious opinion in Europe.

Systems of thought were privileged over rituals, because it was felt necessary to initiate a litmus test for inclusion (and exclusion). Doctrinal alignment, therefore, differentiated between the faithful and the apostate, the saint and the heretic. Further, due to perceived abuses of clerical mediation, reformers sought more direct, unmediated access to God. Turning from its core as a religion of practice, the reformers became a garrulous bunch, a word-centered movement allergic to gratuitous ritual, a religious tradition wholly indebted to the power of language and the need to define. “Inevitably, this orgy of acrimonious doctrinal debate would affect the traditional notion of “belief,” pushing intellectual orthodoxy to the fore” where it remains today for much of Christianity.

Advances in the sciences further distracted Christianity from its practical core. While Judaism and Islam continued—and continue to this day—to be religions of practice, Christianity morphed into a religion of doctrine, the only major religion in the world to do so. Scientific advances during the modern period either invalidated or made literal the myths of the Christian tradition. Logoi (reason) superseded the truths of mythoi (myths) whereas the two had stood alongside each other as separate but equal paths to the truth.

Before long, mathematicians and physicists were the experts of theological discourse, for it was reason and the sciences alone which could speak about God. In the age of Descartes and Newton, science became the master of theology; scientific rationalism was what Newton called the “fundamental religion.” Theological assertions were imbued with certainty and necessity: “Theology was not only becoming aridly theoretical,” but it was also “in danger of becoming idolatrous.” The keys to the church had been handed over to the science lab, or so it seemed.

 

That seems like pretty strained logic. Not in the least because he seems to present sectarian diversity as having emerged from the advent of modern thought. That's pretty wildly ahistorical, ignoring the huge array of different opinions and bitterly divided sects that were present in early Christianity and Judaism. The former's divisions can even be seen in some of the New Testament writings. Who exactly where they arguing with, when they made such strenuous emphasis on whether Jesus came in the flesh or not, or whether there should or should not be a resurrection, or whether or not the Torah ought to obeyed?

 

You'd have to ask Karen Armstrong about that, or better yet interrogate her book The Case for God. I can't summarise an 800 page text in a single webpage on this subject.

 

That's the problem theology has in communicating ideas. It's typically rambling, aimless and obscure.

I read a copy of 'The Expository Times' the other day, each abstract was just a wall of nonsense, each article/essay attempted to obscure any sense of meaning. One particular article on the origins of morality completely ignored anything secular except for 4 or 5 obviously cherry picked medical/scientific sounding studies that the author claimed supported his position, but didn't clearly state what that position was or give any quotes from those studies... Even theological essays written by atheists often ramble aimlessly and avoid stating anything clearly. Intellectual dishonesty or impairment, IMO.

 

Mmm, doesn't that sorta sum up what I said though? When science arrived on the scene and gave us this non-Biblical narrative, there were those who reacted by claiming the Bible's literal truth, and those two reacted by acknowledging the Bible's truth is unknowable. For the literalist the Bible must be true and other views cannot be tolerated. Whereas for the "ineffable truthists", if the Bible's truth can't be entirely comprehended by man then why bother fighting over it...the only thing to do is wait for God to return eventually and sort things out.

 

One aspect has made me very curious. Why is it that Catholicism and other sects of Christianity seem to be the dominant belief system in several societies?

 

Yeah, all those creationists comments just stand for themselves as ludicrous. I really didn't need that guy to yell profanities at ear-splitting volume to know that those people were idiots. Sometimes the most effective way to critique things is to just let them (attempt to) stand on their own "merits."

 

Forced conversion of the masses, whether by fear, coercion or indoctrination.

 

Money and means of reach, Internets. They could convert more people more easily, and that swelled the power base for each round of conversions at swordpoint.

 

Plus you don't have to remove your foreskin to be a member of the club. That is the real reason Christianity took hold.