More thoughts on why Christianity is Fake

[Drunky]

Could it because you[/b] don't believe?

I'm not feverent.  I don't pray everyday.  Don't go to church every Sunday.  I can't quote scripture much beyond the average person.  I certainly don't witness to everyone I see.  But I do believe.

But I think that it is sad that if you are not able or refuse to believe that you feel the need to offer "proof" that Christianity does not exists.

Does the fact that people believe in a religion (Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, ad naseum) pose a threat to you?  Does your concious or insecurities betray you?

I'm not referring to Jehovah's Witnesses who go door to door asking if you have read the Book of Morman or whatever.  Those people are easily dismissed.  You can tell them you are preparing for a human/animal sacrifice and you are rather busy at the moment.  About to begin a drug/orgy bender.  You love easy jazz or even that Elvis is God and He is still alive in Arizona writing music with Jim Morrison who is his Son.

I guess my question is why do people who do not believe in a benign religion that is more or less inoffensive feel the need to attack said religion in an attempt to prove their position of non-belief as if it was a boogey man that would attack them if it was not dispelled?

Just a question.

[cajun]

I think maybe because they are insecure in their own beleifs, they attack other's beleifs to make themselves feel right.

I am not talking about people just wishing to discuss the subject open mindedly and without flaming the other guy's opinions. though unfortunitly few of those ppl seem to exist on these forums

[davidpt40]

Because that religion is offensive to non-believers.  Christianity teaches not to associate with non-believers, as they are going to hell.

Personally, I am mad that I was fed that notion that my friends and relatives were going to burn in hell forever if they didnt go to church (believe) when I was a kid.  Guess you could say I have a vendetta.

[capt. apathy]

quote_________
Christianity teaches not to associate with non-believers, as they are going to hell.
______________________

not as I read it.  there are passages that warn of associations. but mostly it's is incouraged as long as you are being a good influence on them and not non-believers dragging down your faith.

quote___________________
Personally, I am mad that I was fed that notion that my friends and relatives were going to burn in hell forever if they didnt go to church (believe) when I was a kid.
___________________

going to church is not required for salvation (even the Catholic church finaly admited that).

 believing is.  I doubt you could find any faith that would say "this is the only true path to heaven,  but if you don't believe you'll get there anyway".  

whats the point of having a religion if everyone go's to heaven regardless of belief.  there would be no reason to organise or teach the Word.  the reason we have churches out there teaching and people trying to convert people and warn them of the consequences is because the consequences are real and you go to God on his terms not on yours

[Drunky]

Originally posted by davidpt40
Because that religion is offensive to non-believers.  Christianity teaches not to associate with non-believers, as they are going to hell.  

How sad that you find that people who do believe offensive.  I must say that you must find most of the world offensive then.  Bad spot to be in.

Second, to say that Christianity says to not associate with non-believers seem a little silly.  According to the bible Jesus associated with a rather large group of "undesirables".

Originally posted by davidpt40
Personally, I am mad that I was fed that notion that my friends and relatives were going to burn in hell forever if they didnt go to church (believe) when I was a kid.  Guess you could say I have a vendetta.

What can I say about this?  How about, get over it.  If you are going to hold a vendetta about what people have told you over the years then you are going to continue to be a miserable son-of-a-squeak until you die.

Do you also hold a vendetta against every president we have held because they didn't live up to every campaign promise?  Do you hold every girlfriend up to the same scrutiny just because they said, "I love you" and then broke up with you later?

Point being is that even if you were molested by a "man of the cloth" you still do not have the self-implied right to attack other beliefs just the same others do not have the right to attack your non-beliefs...vendetta or not.

Bottom line is that I view you as a poor bastard tormented by demons that you simply will not dismiss.  Whether these demons are caused by religion is insigifacant.  Apparently you hold these torments to your chest.  Poor you.  Perhaps a therapist is in better order than persuing religious vilification.

[Animal]

I dont see what you mean by fake - do you mean that the followers dont really believe in it?

As long as their faith is 100%, then their beliefs are by all philosophical means, REAL in their universe.

It doesnt mean Christianity is the real truth, maybe it is maybe not, but whats important is that to them, it is not fake.

[-dead-]

Here's an interesting look at the origins of religion from Douglas Adams in a speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge 1998

Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point of view on an awful lot of things, but let's try to see where our point of view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he's begun to take a little charge of; he's begun to be a toolmaker, a changer of his environment with the tools that he's made, and he makes tools, when he does, in order to make changes in his environment. To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage, or whatever, and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes that favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we'll come and we'll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who's a toolmaker, doesn't have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert - he even manages to live in New York, for heaven's sake - and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn't have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says, "I'll have it off him." Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day's toolmaking. He looks around and he sees a world that pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in them - mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can't get you; in front of him there's the forest - it's got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of water - water's delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here's cousin Ug and he's caught a mammoth - mammoths are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it's fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, "Well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in," and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question that is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into, and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says, "So who made this, then?" Who made this? - you can see why it's a treacherous question. Early man thinks, "Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me, and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male." And so we have the idea of a God. Then, because when we make things, we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself, "If he made it. what did he make it for?" Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, "This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely," and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning arid thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!" This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically
hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch-out for. We all know that at some point in the future the universe will come to an end, and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but stilt not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say. Look at what's supposed to be going to happen on the first of January 2000 - let's not pretend that we didn't have a warning that the century was going to end! I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.

[-dead-]

he later goes on to to say:

But here's the interesting thing. I said I wanted to ask, "Is there an artificial God?" and this is where I want to address the question of why the idea of a God is so persuasive. I've already explained where I feel this kind of illusion comes from in the first place; it comes from a falseness in our perspective, because we are not taking into account that we are evolved beings, beings who have evolved into a particular landscape, into a particular environment with a particular set of skills and views of the world that have enabled us to survive and thrive rather successfully. But there seems to be an even more powerful idea than that, and this is the idea I want to propose, which is that the spot at the top of the pyramid that we previously said was whence everything flowed, may not actually be vacant just because we say the flow doesn't go that way.

Let me explain what I mean by this. We have created in the world in which we live all kinds of things; we have changed our world in all kinds of ways. That's very, very clear. We have built the room we're in, and we've built all sorts of complex stuff, like computers and so on, but we've also constructed all kinds of fictitious entities that are enormously powerful. So do we say, "That's a bad idea, it's stupid - we should simply get rid of it?" Well, here's another fictitious entity - money. Money is a completely fictitious entity, but it's very powerful in our world; we all have wallets, which have got notes in them, but what can those notes do? You can't breed them, you can't stir-fry them, you can't live in them, there's absolutely nothing you can do with them that's any use, other than exchange them with each other - and as soon as we exchange them with each other, all sorts of powerful things happen, because it's a fiction that we've all subscribed to. We don't think this is wrong or right, good or bad; but the thing is that if money vanished, the entire cooperative structure that we have would implode, but if we were all to vanish, money would simply vanish too. Money has no meaning outside ourselves; it is something we have created that has a powerful shaping effect on the world, because it's something we all subscribe to.

I would like somebody to write an evolutionary history of religion, because the way in which it has developed seems to me to show all kinds of evolutionary strategies. Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living in the same environment - for example, the race between the Amazonian manatee and a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the manatee, and the more silica in the reed, the stronger and bigger the manatee's teeth get. One side does one thing and the other counters it. As we know, throughout evolution and history, arms races are something that drive evolution in the most powerful ways, and in the world of ideas you can see similar kinds of things happening.

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack, then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is "Here is an idea or a notion that you re not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? Because you're not!" If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument, but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down, you are free to have an argument about it, but if on the other hand somebody says, "I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday," you say, "Fine, I respect that." The odd thing is, even as I am saying that, I am thinking, "Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?" but I wouldn't have thought, "Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics," when I was making the other points. I just think, "Fine, we have different opinions." But the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's (I'm going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say, "No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief, but no, we respect it.

It's rather like, if you think back in terms of animal evolution, an animal that's grown an incredible carapace around it, such as a tortoise-that's a great survival strategy because nothing can get through it; or maybe like a poisonous fish that nothing will come close to, which therefore thrives by keeping away any challenges to what it is. In the case of an idea, if we think, "Here is an idea that is protected by holiness or sanctity," what does it mean? Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour Party or the Conservative Party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the universe began, about who created the universe, no, that's holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we've just got used to doing so? There's no other reason at all, it's just one of those things that crept into being, and once that loop gets going, it's very, very powerful. So we are used to not challenging religious ideas, but it's very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally, there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.

There's a very interesting book - I don't know if anybody here's read it - called Man on Earth, by an anthropologist who used to be at Cambridge, called John Reader, in which he describes the way that ... I'm going to back up a little bit and tell you about the whole book. It's a series of studies of different cultures in the world that have developed within somewhat isolated circumstances, on islands or in a mountain valley or wherever, so it's possible to treat them to a certain extent as a test-tube case. You see therefore exactly the degree to which their environment and their immediate circumstances have affected the way in which their culture has arisen. It's a fascinating series of studies. The one I have in mind at the moment is the culture and economy of Bali, which is a small, very crowded island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly efficient food and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively small space, but it's hugely labour-intensive and requires a lot of very, very precise cooperation amongst the people there, particularly when you have a large population on a small island needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it, because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is, and what their role in life is. It's all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined, and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very; very productive with their rice harvest. In the seventies, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, "Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other." So they started, and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly the rice harvest plummeted again, and the Balinese said, "Screw it, we're going back to the temple calendar!" and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It's all very well to say that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is stupid-they should be able to work it out more logically than that. They might just as well say to us, "Your culture and society work on the basis of money and that's a fiction, so why don't you get rid of it and just cooperate with each other." We know that's not going to work!

So there is a sense in which we build meta-systems above ourselves to fill in the space that we previously populated with an entity that was supposed to be the intentional designer, the creator (even though there isn't one) and because we-I don't necessarily mean we in this room, but we as a species-design and create one and then allow ourselves to behave as if there was one, all sorts of things begin to happen that otherwise wouldn't happen.

[-dead-]

Cont. from previous

Let me try to illustrate what I mean. This is very speculative; I'm really going out on a limb here, because it's something I know nothing about whatsoever so think of this more as a thought experiment than a real explanation of something. I want to talk about feng shui, which is something I know very little about, but there's been a lot of talk about it recently in terms of figuring out how a building should be designed, built, situated, decorated, and so on. Apparently we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it. So, if a dragon wouldn't be happy in the house, you have to put a red fishbowl here or a window there. This sounds like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsense - there aren't any dragons, so any theory based on how dragons behave is nonsense. What are these silly people doing, imagining that dragons can tell you how to build your house? Nevertheless, it occurs to me that if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on that goes like this: we all know from buildings that we've lived in, worked in, been in, or stayed in, that some are more comfortable, more pleasant, and more agreeable to live in than others. We haven't had a real way of quantifying this, but in this century we've had an awful lot of architects who thought they knew how to do it, so we've had the horrible idea of the house as a machine for living in, we've had Mies van der Rohe and others putting up glass stumps and strangely shaped things that are supposed to form some theory or other. It's all carefully engineered, but nonetheless, their buildings are not actually very nice to live in. An awful lot of theory has been poured into this, but if you sit and work with an architect (and I've been through that stressful time, as I'm sure a lot of people have), then when you are trying to figure out how a room should work, you're trying to integrate all kinds of things about lighting, about angles, about how people move and how people live-and an awful lot of other things you don't know about that get left out. You don't know what importance to attach to one thing or another; you're trying, very consciously, to figure out something when you haven't really got much of a clue, but there's this theory and that theory, this bit of engineering practice and that bit of architectural practice; you don't really know what to make of them. Compare that to somebody who tosses a cricket ball at you. You can sit and watch it and say, "It's going at seventeen degrees," start to work it out on paper, do some calculus, etc., and about a week after the ball's whizzed past you, you may have figured out where it's going to be and how to catch it. On the other hand, you can simply put your hand out and let the ball drop into it, because we have all kinds of faculties built into us, just below the conscious level, able to do all kinds of complex integrations of all kinds of complex phenomena, which therefore enable us to say, "Oh look, there's a ball coming; catch it!"

What I'm suggesting is that feng shui and an awful lot of other things are precisely of that kind of problem. There are all sorts of things we know how to do, but don't necessarily know what we do, we just do them. Go back to the issue of how you figure out how a room or a house should be designed, and instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, "How would a dragon live here?" We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve, but we know how organic creatures live. We've never seen a dragon, but we've all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, "Well, if a dragon went through here, he'd get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn't see that and he'd wave his tail and knock that vase over." You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here, and lo and behold, you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.

So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it's worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it's worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water, because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move farther and farther into the field of digital or artificial life, we will find mote and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn't an actual God, there is an artificial God, and we should probably bear that in mind. That is my debating point, and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!

[Siaf__csf]

It's not the religions themselves..

It's the way people use the religion as an excuse to run thier own agendas. To put themselves above others with the righteousness of the true believer.

To justify thier deeds - bad or good - with thier religion.

It's sickening.

[X2Lee]

in the bible God says"you are either for me or against me"
I think thats the answer....

[X2Lee]

Originally posted by -dead-
he later goes on to to say:

Do you think anyone reads these huge posts?
HARRR!!!!! I read the header then saw the text.
Figured all them big words you had little to say and nothing to contribute.

[capt. apathy]

Quote________________________ ________________
It's not the religions themselves..

It's the way people use the religion as an excuse to run thier own agendas. To put themselves above others with the righteousness of the true believer.

To justify thier deeds - bad or good - with thier religion.

It's sickening.
_____________________________ ________________

I have to agree with that. but you can't blame it on Christianity.  this happens just about any time you get a group together for any purpose.  you will always have someone who twists it for there own purpose.

the thing is that if you look at what the Bible says, you will find that it speaks out against these types of things.

like your point about holding yourself above others.

the Bible says ( I'm para-phrasing because I'm the worst at quoting chapter and verse)  -
"you get to heaven on faith, not works, so none should boast"

basically you are not saved because you deserve it (none do). you are saved out of Gods mercy for you.  you did nothing to earn it, it's a gift, and all you have to do is accept it.

nowhere will you find that you should treat others badly because you are so much better than them.

[-dead-]

Originally posted by X2Lee
Do you think anyone reads these huge posts?
HARRR!!!!! I read the header then saw the text.
Figured all them big words you had little to say and nothing to contribute.

Guess you'll never find out, then. Surprised you managed to read the bible with that attention span problem of yours.

[Rasker]

It's too bad that some people seem to use God as a weapon, i.e., If you don't believe as I do in every respect, then *my* God will send you to eternal and infinite punishment.  On the *other* hand, some orthodox atheists will subject you to ridicule for *any* deviation from their set of beliefs, others will send you to the Gulag or the killing fields.  I believe we'll all find out the ultimate truth eventually, and I don't think God will punish you for guessing wrong in matters of theology