insulting religions

[IneedAgoldenNickname]

Hi, I've never posted on this topic before, I tend to hang out in aibu, but don't want to start a bun fight!

So, I am a liberal Christian. I firmly believe that everyone had to right to believe (or not) whatever they want, provided that belief doesn't hurt anyone else.

Earlier today I posted a lighthearted status on Facebook, which had led to me being called mindless, stupid, stuck up, thinking I'm better than everyone else. I've been told God is a c**t (sorry I hate that word so much I won't type it) and that the Bible is only God for loo roll!

I'm just really angry that people think its ok to insult me/my religion like that, when I haven't once preached or insulted others.

Obviously the easy solution would be to delete them off of Facebook, but they are people I get on with other wise.

Don't really know the point of my post, just hoping id feel better writing it down.

That's really odd. [confusesed]

Though sometimes pointing out that not all Christians are the same as evangelical christians gets people's backs up. Becuase then they can't just religion bash as simply!

Lol true

You could probably could get a PhD studying mythical monsters. Doesn't make what is studied true.

I think Ellie is doing a great job with her posts. So I'll just go wtf at the following comment by niminypiminy: RD is an able populariser of a certain brand of biology. But he is not, and has not been for some decades, a serious research scientist. because he's now employed full-time to inform and educate the public. His ideas about the role of genes have never been accepted by geneticists as a whole, and since the publication of The Selfish Gene, research has moved on. Er, where do you get this stuff??

The Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford has been held by Marcus du Sautoy since 2008. RD is retired from full time employment.

OK, was employed until 2008 - that suit you better? Where's all this stuff about the selfish gene having never been accepted by genetists and the research moving on?

[Dawkins] would also know that he is much more obsessed by the 'religion/science' conflict than nearly all Christians

You're being a bit parochial about this. In many states in the US the religion/science conflict is huge particularly on the topic of evolution. There are continuing efforts to get "Intelligent Design" (ie Biblical creationism) taught in science classes in US schools alongside evolution as an equally valid theory for the origins of life. I think at least one state (Kentucky) has voted for this. Texas is also a particular hotbed for these attempts as, for good reason or bad, Texas pretty much sets the standard for education books across the entire US.

In Turkey there is a lot of problems with evolution being seen as anti-Islamic and this has been something of an issue in some other Islamic states as well. There have been some attempts in the UK to set up schools (Vardy rings a bell) where creationism is taught in science classes. Teaching of evolution in UK faith-based schools can be very patchy already.

Just because most UK christians don't make a big song and dance about evolution - although even my mum's evangelical church seems to have a broadly anti-evolution stance from what she's said - it doesn't mean it's a complete non-issue.

I said, accepted by geneticists as a whole. Its central thesis was, and remains controversial, with geneticists holding different views about it. In the 36 years since it was published you would expect research to have moved on - particularly since in most sciences research moves so quickly that it can be out of date in months.

And you might have a look at the section on 'reception' in the Wikipedia article on The Selfish Gene for an account of some of the critics of the book, and some of the ways in which its thesis has been challenged, changed or overtaken.

LeBFG (what a very cool name!) yes, there have been lots of doctorates on mythological sea creatures in the Hebrew Bible. Once you start scratching beneath the surface, it is a really fascinating area of research. And no, none of these (as far as I know) has proven or falsified the historial reality of sea creatures, because (again, as far as I know) the kind of people who do academic research in this kind of area are much more likely to ask questions to do with the rhetoric of mythological creature stories, how they differ across different people-groups, how they develop ove time, what they symbolise, how they fit into (or not) the wider currents in thinking in the cultures of their time. People might try and research archaeological evidence, but tbh I think that most scholars recognise that to be a fool's errand.

The reason I am saying this is because it annoys me when people think of theology / divinity / Religious studies as a Mickey Mouse subject, 'unsupported waffle' as it was called upthread, when actually it's pretty rigorous and at least as hard as any other humanities subject; you'd have to know at least a couple of ancient languages to do a proper study of mythological sea creatures, you's have to be skilled in interpreting ancient literary texts , in understanding ancient cultures' anthropology, history, and lots more too.

I feel strongly that R.E. is taught so badly so much of the time in schools that many 17 yos don't consider it as a worthwhile degree subject, and the pool of applicants for universities to chooes from is to small, so that Religious studies / call it what you will is too often sidelined in universities and eventually squashed out altogether, which is a loss for society. So all of this is completely besides the point of whether God is real or not - it just so happens that I believe both in God, and in Theology etc as an academic discipline!

Nim - kind of irrelevant... Steven Jay Gould's 'punctuated equilibrium' hypothesis was also (correct me if I'm wrong) not widely accepted in his field but he could still write interesting books on a range of scientific and other issues.

OT, but it does actually annoy me somewhat that RD didn't seem to devote enough of his energies to the much-needed issue of 'The public understanding of science' while he held that position - I fear he rather contributed to certain people misunderstanding it even more.

Having a PhD or not is a red herring. It's entirely possible for very educated people to believe and do daft things. Being clever doesn't mean you always use your brain all the time. (I'm very highly educated, and yet I enjoy The X-Factor. I know some incredibly intelligent people who are renowned in their fields and yet can't manage simple tasks in other contexts.)

niminypiminy - you asked me if I'd "define what a fact is." Not sure why, but I'll have a go - it's knowledge or experience based on evidence, i.e. not necessarily something which is undisputed (let's face it, some people would argue the Earth is flat and that green is blue just for the hell of it), but something where the weight of evidence is overwhelming and it fits current theories. The fact of the law of gravity, for example.

I'm not sure you have quite correctly represented what I was trying to say about Dawkins. He is, after all, not "just" an evolutionary biologist. His remit goes a bit further. After all, he held a very high-profile position, the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science (my italics) - and so it is part of his job to ensure people support what they believe to be true by demonstrating suitable evidence.

(Whether evolution and natural selection are compatible with belief in God is something of another red herring - it's compatible, after all, with belief in Thor, Zeus, the Great Green Arkleseizure, or any other fictional deity of your choice.)

I agree entirely, DadonIce, that people who are very intelligent at one thing can be terrible at another. That's how I acount for the absolutely dire philosophical thinking in The God Delusion, tbh. Sorry to have another pop at Dawkins, poor chap - but he does set himself up for it.

Hs anyone read Quentin Skinner on 'the cult of the fact'? Not a religious man as far as I know but an amazingly astute historical / philosophical thinker.

I think most scientists would agree that facts are allowed to be refined when new evidence comes in. The definition I gave above allows for that. It's, kind of, how this Science stuff is meant to work, you know?... (There is even an anecdote in "The God Delusion" which illustrates this - it's about RD being at a conference where an eminent geneticist was delighted to have his theory disproved by a colleague presenting a paper with new evidence.)

How it doesn't work is by asking us to believe random stuff where there is no evidence for it.

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They alter the facts to fit their theories, rather than their theories to fit the facts.

I like to see people with Special Needs who believe in God.
Their faith is often very strong.
Delving and analysing much of the bible is certainly not a necessity.

I must read Skinner on the cult of the fact - he is a brilliant man.

The point of me asking DadonIce to define a fact is that this is a very slippery concept indeed. We could take your definition 'knowledge or experience based on evidence' and unpack that in all sorts of ways. We might say 'how do we know that the thing we experience is necessarily happening in the world outside our head?', as Decartes did, or we could posit that there are some kinds of knowledge that are innate, or a priori, and some that are created in the mind through an interaction with the world, as Kant did. We could ask how we know what counts as evidence, and how we assess different ways of interpreting evidence.

I could go on. But the point is that the kind of common-sense empiricism that insists that facts are what is supported by the weight of evidence is vulnerable to some of the basic questions about the nature of knowledge that philosophers have been asking for centuries. And these aren't irrelevant, airy-fairy debates - they are questioning how we can know anything for certain, which makes them very basic issues indeed.

So when someone says that science deals with facts, we have to ask ourselves what a fact is - and the answer turns out to be a great deal more uncertain than we thought.

Agree, Millionyears. I don't think for one moment that you need a degree to believe, or for belief to be valid. I think it is up to each person to give the best of themselves in love to God; love the Lord your God with all your mind...but what that means to each person is different.

Having recently been listening to some lectures on philosophy, some philosophers seem to do some pretty dire (or in some cases plain pointless) philosophical thinking too . (Are we allowed to insult philosophies... this notion has set a sort of Pythonesque sketch running in my head ... I'm easily amused sometimes )

I have heard some of their testimonies.
And they are at least as moving as anyone elses I have heard.

Holfernesshead I have one of those type of degrees you linked to (outs self). They teach religions from an anthropological/sociological/historical point of view. At no point are you expected to believe any of it.

In my experience, most of the students who started out on my course with any kind of religious belief were firm atheists by the end. There's nothing like being presented with the stark facts, put in their cultural, historical and political context. It tends to remove the glamour and let you see the vested interests behind.

To put a scientific slant on this, I have always been surprised that the practice of religious beleif as a human behaviour isn't studied more. It has been a defining aspect of human kind for the vast majority of human existance, but it is barely studied. Just a thought.

Nim - to be sure, words like 'fact' (or moreso 'truth') need clarity. Subjective and objective - and even 'subjective' realities may also be objectively verifiable ... to take an example I came across recently, some people really can see 'auras'. That doesn't mean that anybody really has an aura in any objective physical sense - another observer or a machine would not detect any photons - but the person doing the looking is experiencing some sort of synaesthesia and it can be experimentally shown that if they say they're seeing blue around another person, they are - something really is happening inside their brain. (not sure I explained that well, something I was reading recently that I thought was kinda cool).

"I like to see people with Special Needs who believe in God.
Their faith is often very strong."

That is not surprising, assuming that you are talking about cognitive problems rather than a missing foot.

I recently read My Stroke Of Insight, by a brain scientist (woman) who writes about her stroke and subsequent recovery, and what she has learned about the brain and how we think.

She describes waking up one morning with a headache and experiencing a wonderful religious feeling of happiness and being one with the universe. This is the start the stroke, where bleeding takes place in the left hemisphere of her brain. Her recovery and reacquisition of most cognitive skills takes 8 years.

The book is fascinating but to make a long story short, it is not surprising that a feeling of religious peace, zen, confidence in the purpose of it all is common in people with cognitive problems as these are often housed in the left hemisphere.

niminy - all that is probably fair enough, but, (do other people here agree?) we have to have some kind of meaningful, commonly-accepted dictionary definition of "facts", or all discussion about them is meaningless. I could assert that the existence of pink unicorns is a fact. You and I know this isn't true, and you can't disprove it, but that doesn't actually make it true. And where we have gaps in our knowledge - which we can happily accept - that doesn't mean we have to fill them with myths and legends about gods. We can, obviously, and it is great fun and even enriching to our culture to do so, but it doesn't make them any more real. Put another way - what's the justification for believing in gods (and I mean all gods, not just the Judeo-Christian model) as opposed to not doing so?

I can't really get into arguing philosophy, I'm afraid, as I have not studied it. But that doesn't stop me from being pretty confident in my atheism as the existence of omipotent deities - especially one who'd be remotely interested in our little doings on our grain of sand at the edge of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy - is just so ridiculously unlikely. Not impossible - nothing is technically 100% "impossible" if you accept that the universe is infinite - but just very, very unlikely indeed. I take the Occam's Razor position on such things.

Ethel - ITA - people are beginning to study it, fascinating area indeed. I guess that religious behaviour couldn't begin to be properly studied until there was the possibility of doing so disinterestedly.

Amillion .......... And they are why it is possible that atheists can still become Christians at some point in their lives
Ellie imo is in the second category. She may not realise this herself, but perhaps she does, and that is sort of the point she is trying to make

The points I am trying to make, Amillion are fairly unambiguous, I would think. I don't believe that your god exists for good and sound reasons. I am not against it any more than I am "against" the Easter Bunny. You do understand that there are actually quite a few people who genuinely do not believe what you do, right? Well, I am one of them. If that changes, you will be the very first to know. But in the meantime, kindly do not presume to know me better than I know myself - you don't.

Holo Your point? It's Oxford & Cambridge so it must be OK? I don't agree. Yes, it's still unsupported waffle.

Theology falls at the first fence - it cannot even manage to prove the existence of the thing it's claiming to be studying. It can say whatever it likes, but there's simply no way to know whether it's correct or not. Theology is lots of people saying what they think is true, and then claiming expertise. They are not expected to actually demonstrate that they're right - but we're just meant to believe them?

Bible studies is a valid subject (the Bible exists, whatever we personally think about it) as is History of Religion etc - but "the study of god" is on a par with the "study of the King of the Fairies".

Amillion (again).......Ellie, the study of anything somewhat relies on other peoples povs being correct

^As I have said on MN before, God cannot be proved in a scientific way.
People have to come to God by faith. The definition of faith is believing in something that cannot be proven.
So anyone that is trying to find God by science, will never be able to do it^

Do you realise the degree to which you've contradicted yourself?

Yes, the study of something does rely on other people's POVs being correct. How are you determining whose POV is correct then if you cannot offer any evidence (scientific or otherwise) to determine who, actually is correct (if anyone)?

Speculative things (which god, I'm afraid, is) are interesting to discuss. But 3/4 years of study, letters after your name & automatic respect for your "expertise" for merely speculating? Nah. Sorry.

Buggering off again.

(I'm a laydee, btw, Amillion)