Christianity is not a Force for an Ideal Society

Christianity (like most other religions) is used in two ways: to justify all the prejudices and power imbalances of society as it stands, or to call on people to transform that society towards the image of higher ideals. Doug Muder

Even ignoring the Abrahamic misogyny of treating women as breeding chattel to carry the seed of the man which alone would disqualify Christianity as a force for social good, Christianity from the time of Paul has had the ideal of exploiting the sheep and to the extent possible the larger society for the benefit of the church leaders. The lip service to the ideals of Jesus is disgusting in its hypocrisy as nowhere in Christianity can they be found to be implemented or even recommended.

Individual Christians have been able to see beyond their faith for the good of the larger society, but in nearly all cases they have been considered heretics by their faith superiors.

Just for the record Doug, I do not consider Unitarianism, Universalism, or Transcendentalism to be Christian in any respect.

The Nuns they are a changing

Tony Auth

Pain and God

beliefnet

Pain is not necessarily bad, but pain caused by another human whether physical or mental is bad, in fact positively immoral for the one inflicting the pain.

I know these things because I am an intelligent social animal, and inflicting pain on others of your kind is a genetic prohibition.

You will note that of your 10 commandments 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are commanding not to inflict mental pain on others with certain others enumerated. And 6 commands that you not inflict physical pain. This is simply God adopting basic human morality to Herm needs. No one needs God to do this and in fact the only thing God does is carve out tribal exceptions to this basic human morality. See the rest of the Old Testament and all of Paul.

An unindoctrinated human will have not inflicting pain of any kind on others as a basic component of herm conscience which is the term we give to the genetic imperatives of living as an intelligent social animal.

Apolitical Atheists?

beliefnet

Yet I also think that atheists would do well to steer clear of American politics. American politics is corrupt, the gamboling fields of the rich and the arrogant and those with delusions of grandeur, and is little more than an offshoot of American Christianity. In other words, I think that atheists would do well to reject both politics and religion and be not only atheistical but also apolitical.
costrel

I think this is actually the case at this point. Politics is simply involved in the distribution of useless money, that is money which doesn't produce anything. The producers of the world, the teachers, scientists, engineers and manufacturers, which according to my unscientific observations are largely atheistic and apolitical seem to be able to continue to find the working money to produce. They are happy to recycle useless money into creative ads and military hardware, but this is a minor part of the useless money equation.

The "unfortunate" part of all of this is that the useless money that used to be recycled to the religious poor is now reserved for the religious rich. But the religious poor may be figuring out that they are being abused by their religion's PACs and voting against religion if not God.

On Prejudice

Prejudice.
During those years I came to understand that there is a difference between prejudice and bigotry. Prejudice is exactly what it sounds like: a pre-judgment, an opinion that you have before you learn any specific facts about the situation. Your prejudices may be justified or unjustified, they may save your life or create dangerous confrontations out of nothing.
Doug Mudder

I spent many years in Manhattan in the "bad years" '60s and '70s. My preferred mode of transportation was walking at all hours of day and night. I either needed to get control of my prejudice or fear would keep me inside. Once I learned the signs of danger from individuals or groups, I found that racial and ethnic prejudice was actually creating danger for me by ignoring the trouble signs from "my kind of people." The few times I had trouble were because I didn't "cross the street" to avoid trouble signs from my kind.

Is Homosexuality Natural in Late Adolescent Men?

I LOVE PENIS!

Facebook post of 17yo. male.
The thought occurred to me that if 17yo males didn't love penis, we wouldn't have armies, sport teams, or religions. 17yo male humans are no where near ready to assume the responsibility for family, so society provides many rituals which involve groups of 17-18yo males naked together. Society also has rules that acting out on this love of penis is not permitted but must be sublimated with male bonding into fraternities, sport teams, armies, and single sex religious orders. Historically there seems to have been some flexibility in acting out on homosexuality, but the more of hetersexual attraction at adulthood seems built in to all workable societies. Again historically this was accomplished by institutionalized rape of subjugated women, for the purpose of creating more 17yo males for the armies, and religions. (Sport teams are a relatively recent innovation in dealing with this propensity of immature males.) Fraternal orders seem to have been secular responses to religious same sex orders.

It will be interesting to see how the ERSSG will incorporate this propensity into the SSG. In part leaving the childhood society and male bonds when going away to college, and the pressures of high level studies, prevent male bonding, in fact sexual bonding of any type until near the end of studies, when both genders begin to hear the biological clock ticking loudly for the necessary reproductive phase of life.

The Future of the Religious Right

beliefnet

As the religious right is systematically destroying the education and hence competitiveness of their children in the secular world. They will end up in religious enclaves with no visible means of support. This is known as bad luck.

Scientific inquiry, and human rights for all will continue to flourish outside those enclaves. It may take a while, but probably not long as they have made half of the country's population their enemy. Politically this is suicide. But in the USA politics has been irrelevant for the productive sector since Regan, and the religious and the rich can fight over the scraps.

Jesus, Theistic Humanist

Beliefnet

So what do you think was "out of the box"?
Ken

In the context of the time The Two Great Commandments were downright radical.

In the first he gives God back to the individual, taking mediation for God away from the priesthood. Once God is "Thy God" God can be anything you want Herm to be. True, your conditioning at that time will insure that He is a magical supernatural alpha, but he is your magical supernatural alpha, and he cares about you not the priests.

The second is as radical. Love your despised minority neighbor as thyself. If this isn't radical humanism I sure don't know of a better definition. Sure it is theistic humanism but then I know a lot of theistic humanists today. They have no problem with reconciling the love of God with the love of mankind just like Jesus told them to do.

This may in fact be the salvation of Christianity in a modern cosmopolitan world. "You are going to Hell" or "You are a slut" just isn't going to cut it any more. All of the reasonable Christians I know today have taken God away from the Church and the pastors and priests and have a personal relationship with "The God within" which allows them to interpret God's wishes in accordance with their own conscience.

Shh, don't tell them this is the slippery slope to giving up on God entirely.

We can forget the Beatitudes they were so out of the box that according to some they are stupid, impractical and out of the box today.

Oh yeah, that stupid turn the other cheek bit. Turns out that tit for two tats is optimal in many game theory scenarios.

On Apologies. Limbaugh Attempt.

In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke,”

Too little, too late. Maybe something like

As an unadulterated prick with no personal redeeming values I must think of all women as sluts or prostitutes or I have no hope of ever getting laid. As it is, porn is the usual solution as the porn pushers don't care who pays the bill. The attack was not on Ms. Fluke but on all women. I appologize for using her as an example.

just might have a possibility of qualifying as an apology to Ms. Fluke. There is nothing he can do about the assault on all women.

Atheism Elevator Speech

Atheism is simply figuring out a way to "Live a life worth dying for"* without supernatural help in the form of Gods or afterlife concierges. I may study myths of all kinds as well as science and fiction for wisdom that may help, but ultimately I too speak only for myself in the hope that others that are important in my ERSSG might learn.

*The late Forrest Church, Universalist theologian.

Uncertainty in Unbelief.

beliefnet

I, a life-long, wholly dedicated believer in God and one who thinks he has a reasonable basis for that belief, do not think that I have enough information to come to an absolute and accurate conclusion regarding the matter.
ctcss

At some point a thorough investigation having found nothing concludes that there is nothing to be found. In your quote you are in effect admitting that you have found nothing but hints and rumors of something valuable perhaps eternal life that keeps you chasing these hints and rumors in the hope that there will be a there there at least after you die.

I have no problem admitting I am not certain the hints and rumors of a life after death are all false. Since they all require different rituals and understandings of the mediator of that life after death, the only conclusion is that they are all false, and pursuing any one is chasing an invisible pink unicorn and destined to be a waste of time.

As a result I do not claim there is no God, I just live as if none of them are of any value. In addition I live my life as if there is no reasonable way to achieve an afterlife but to live this life as if it will be the only important criteria for any afterlife concierge. This has the immeasurable added value of insuring that if there is no afterlife, everything I do in this life is significant. Which puts responsibility for everything I do right where it belongs: on me. No savior, no one to do it over for me, no one to blame.

Cradle Atheists

beliefnet

I am not sure if I've really met any "cradle atheists."
Larosser

You probably wouldn't know it if you had. Most cradle atheists pay no attention to religion and only do what is necessary to comply with the mores of the community. My father as an example played mental golf in church and the only comment we might get on the whole service would be "I wish the minister would stay with his boring sermon topics, I only got 12 holes played today."

My mother's family is atheist and incidentally feminist back to my great grandmother who was the matriarch. Most went to church as a social necessity, this was the midwest, but chose a Unitarian Church if available and a Congregational Church if not. That way when people asked where you went to church you had an answer, and whatever church was chosen had a decent choir, we were musical as well as atheist. The matriarch wrote children's stories and songs which were read and sung by all of us as children. Typically a g-greatgrandaughter changed a mildly derogatory (today) racial reference in one of her songs that was taught to the g-g-g-g-grandchildren.

Socialization was the responsibility of all, and morality was taught on the street as the responsibility of all adults. I remember quite clearly an incident when I was visiting an uncle as a child, and a store clerk overpaid the change by a few cents. My uncle returned the few cents, without a fuss but asked me if I would have done the same. I said sure, a few cents makes no difference, but a few dollars would be different. His comment "Dollars or cents, WE do not steal." WE was clearly "Our kind of people." To this day, I cannot download copyrighted content because "WE do not steal." In everything from sexuality to race relations to ordinary politeness the lesson was always the same "WE do not do it that way." If I wanted to be a part of WE and there was really no choice, there was no choice. In the family free will was a joke. We were encouraged to think rationally about everything, but there were a few rational conclusions that were mandatory. If we came to the wrong conclusions we were shown the logical errors in our reasoning.

What is an Atheist?

beliefnet

An atheist is a person who does not believe in God, gods or goddesses. Some atheists have considered the reasons, such as they are, that theists present for the existence of gods and have reached the conclusion that the evidence and arguments of theists are lacking. Other atheists are atheists because they've simply never adopted any belief in gods.
steven_guy

As a minimalist definition where one size fits all, it works just fine. Nonetheless a Budddhist atheist has a complete paradigm covering all the important aspects of living and dying. It simply does not include God concepts.

But it seems to me that if an atheist cannot deal reasonably with those important aspects of living and dying but simply says God answers are wrong, hesh is missing the essence of atheism, which is building a valuable life that does not depend in any way on God concepts positively or negatively. There are of course off the shelf belief systems that are atheistic, skepticism and Secular Humanism as a couple of examples, but it seems to me that they are still negative systems, denying God rather than offering reasonable alternatives that do not involve God.

Atheist Communities.

beliefnet

If we define community as "a free and voluntary gathering of individuals with shared goals and interests -- of persons who have not so much been forced together as have chosen to associate with one another" (Harris, p. 138), then secular people, whether urban or rural, will probably belong to a number of different communities that are based on their values, political stances, hobbies, interests, and ways of living.

The reason that such people overwhelmingly live in large polyglot cities is the richness of the groups of like minded people that are available. My wife and I were early adopters of a dual income, dual parenting, atheist life style. In Manhattan I found many groups where we were not considered odd or unusual and had a choice of groups of every interest to choose from with a compatible philosophical viewpoint.
Just as an example, of hundreds of community choruses, and church choirs to choose from I joined a group whose board chose Bob DeCormier, a radical left folk arranger (Harry Belefonte, the Weavers, and Peter Paul and Mary) as its (classical) music director. Sure we sang the popular religious works, but as an example the Verdi Requiem was always dedicated by the music director to the performers of the Requiem at the Terezin Concentration Camp most of whose performers died at the Death Camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka et al.

Our children went to a left wing private school. Our Museum memberships were the Modern and Natural History as well as the mandatory Met. But even at the Met the groups we attended were intellecual groups. Please note the absense of atheism as a unifier. It probably was a fact that most of the people involved were atheist, but the political tenor of the times was that it was never mentioned, but assumed by all even the theists.

On Nietzsche

beliefnet

I have never been a Nietzschean, atheist or otherwise. That said, Nietzsche was one of the first to articulate the fact that if God is dead atheists are going to have to step up to the plate and create a godless world worth living in. As I see the world by and large atheists are doing just that. Theistic solutions just don't work any more, and the frantic political activity in the US is a desperate denial of that fact. Prominent atheists are almost irrelevant in the remaking of a modern world, it is the ordinary atheists quietly doing what is necessary to remake the world that are the Ubermenschen.

It is not incidental that the religious destruction of the ideal of an educated population has opened the way for the Chinese and Indians to leapfrog with the example the US provided. Fortuantely there is still a large part of the population that values education, and the religious can always work in the service industries these people use to support their educated life style. The fact that these are minimum wage jobs at best is God's will.

On Athiest Priests.

beliefnet

I was part of a Requiem sung for a good Catholic friend. There was no hypocrisy there, for the duration of the requiem I was a believer helping other believers send their loved one to herm Lord Jesus Christ. My beliefs or lack of them had absolutely nothing to do with the performance. I was a human being helping other human beings deal with their grief.

A very good Catholic friend asked me to pray with him in a berievement situation. He knew I was an atheist, but he also knew that I knew his God. We were on our knees together in a chapel praying for the gift of strength for him to deal with the situation. Was I being a hypocrite or was I helping a friend in a difficult situation? He was the one that told me that atheist prayers are more valuable to God as they are always sincere.

I see no problem with an atheist priest suspending disbelief to perform his offices for the benefit of his parishioners. Since there is no God to care anyway, what is the difference if the priest complies sincerely with the rituals for the believers in his parish. If their belief in the myth helps them get through the week, what is the problem with an atheist facilitating that belief? He is simply a human being helping other human beings, not judging them.

Alex and Kevin Black - Amazing Grace

Fantastic even for a proud papa and grandpa.

Moral Rules, Community Standards and Conscience.

beliefnet

If we are to make any sense of this topic, Morality, we must distinguish between moral behavior and moral rules. Moral behavior is concerned with how we treat each other and how we treat other animals. When we mistreat someone, we should feel guilt or remorse. When we hear of someone mistreated, we should feel moral outrage. These feelings are innate and instinctive. We refer to these instincts that enable us to discern right from wrong as Conscience.
onefreespirit

There is a third distinction that must be considered: Community moral imperatives which preceed the moral rules. This is where the intersection of reason and moral outrage result in a workable community. And where workable communities may be in considerable conflict.

As an example consider the food animals. At one extreme is the community exemplified by PETA. At the other is the community of trophy hunters that waste the food that may be subsistance for other carnivores or even their poorer neighbors. In the middle we have a mixture of rules, and community standards for the ethical treatment of food animals. The rules basically are concerned with humane slaughter. Community standards which are rapidly and rationally evolving concern the treatment of food animals while alive. There is a local university where the community standard is that free range meat is the only meat served in campus eating places. It is served side by side with soy based products for the PETA crowd. If you want cheap feedlot meat products you must go off campus, and being seen in a feedlot or manufactured food establishment may result in community scorn at the very mildest. Most of the local off campus eateries must comply with the free range ethic to survive.

Was Jesus Extraordinary?

beliefnet
As you know I use the Jefferson Bible as my main source for the details of the ministry of Jesus, mixed with my own analysis of the synoptics prior to discovering the Jefferson Bible. My childhood Unitarian statement of belief read in part "Unitarians believe in the fatherhood of God, the leadership of Jesus, and the progress of mankind (sic) ..." I did not believe it then either but obviously it made an impression.

I read the entire KJV Bible in middle school, gagging then as now on everything past Acts. I did better on the OT as useful myth than anything past John as Christian lies from beginning to end. It wasn’t until my abortive attempt at a philosophy major in the university that I was able to even study the end of the NT with any intelligence. It never said anything of use in the study of Jesus.

Two of my earliest lessons from Jesus that indicated to me that he was extraordinary for his time and place were the cleansing of the Temple, and the forgiveness of the whore. The first was a very public and radical break with the top down Jewish prevailing faith of the time. In effect equivalent to Ginsberg’s Howl for my generation. “You [the Pharisees and the Jewish establishment] have turned my Father’s house…” Note: Not the house of God, but the house of the personal God of Jesus. The very idea of God belonging to an individual and not the Jewish establishment that was the social structure of Jesus and his peers was just wild and crazy. The fact he wasn’t killed on the spot was testimony to the power of his personality and vision. The possibility exists that the "Occupy the Temple" movement was at his back.

The intervention in the stoning of the whore was not only a radical break with the law, but one of the earliest recognition of the humanness of even the lowest of women in ancient literature. In effect his statement “Let he [the human person] who is without sin, cast the first stone [at this female human person.]” Perhaps there were other instances of the treatment of ordinary women as human beings in ancient writings, but they were few and far between, and none that I am aware of that take on a group of angry men doing their lawful job.

The Sermon on the Mount, impractical as it was for actual living at the time, was again the gift of God to the ordinary people of the culture who would have been ignored by the priests and the religious establishment except as butts in the seats offering their hard earned pittances to the priests, er, God.

The summation of the Two Great Commandments particularly in light of his recent inhospitable treatment at the hands of a Samaritan and his subsequent use of a Samaritan as his example of the neighbor he was talking about still gags Christians, let alone the Jews of his culture. I find it significant that “Progressive Christians” have retreated to the Two Great Commandments as the essence of their faith in God and humanity.

All of this attributed as best we can discern to one insignificant itinerant preacher living off the “coins in the hat” as did most of the itinerant preachers who are lost in the sands of time seems to me extraordinary.

"The Book of Goddesses: Robert Paterson has arrived!!!

Even more spectacular than I anticipated. The idiom of the Goddess believers in the unique idiom of Rob Paterson, is incredibly beautiful and respectful.

Buy it at iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby or wherever but buy it you will be glad you did.

Thanks once again Rob.