What does he deserve? — frank

Exposure within his community, removal of any privileges granted him as a priest, and prosecution under the law.

What does he deserve? No punishment will repair the damage he has done.

So, now your turn - Do you have an answer for your own question? I kind of doubt you have an answer. What does that suggest?

So, now your turn - Do you have an answer for your own question? I kind of doubt you have an answer. What does that suggest? — Banno

That I don't have a handle on the finer points of justice? I don't think much in terms of deserving things myself. I was raised to be thankful for the bare minimum. Capitalism?

Do leftist understand justice a little better?

What? Is there a purpose to this digression?

What does he deserve? — frank

But there’s also the question of what he gets — if he genuinely seeks forgiveness from God, he’ll get it.

What? Is there a purpose to this digression? — Banno

When I say the molester doesn't deserve eternal torment, I seem to suggest I know enough about what justice demands that I can criticize. On closer examination, my insights are few.

But there’s also the question of what he gets — if he genuinely seeks forgiveness from God, he’ll get it. — Srap Tasmaner

Or he might hang out in Purgatory until his relatives pay the priest an indulgence. :joke:

The argument here is that religious belief is more make-believe than factual belief.

factual beliefs are practical setting independent, cognitively govern other attitudes, and are evidentially vulnerable. By way of contrast, religious credences have perceived normative orientation, are susceptible to free elaboration, and are vulnerable to special authority. This theory provides a framework for future research in the epistemology and psychology of religious credence — Banno

Did you read the paper, would you mind briefly summarizing the criteria for a factual belief as opposed to a religious one?

(I don't mean to be lazy, I just can't read on a computer screen for too long before it starts to give me a headache, and it looks like the relevant section on Van Leeuwen's definition/criteria of factual belief is 10+ pages long)

Can I ask why? Why would you search for existential meaning? Why there? The book opens with a vengeful God putting babies to the sword, advocating the stoning to death of just about anyone who has sex without his say so, demanding sacrifices etc. — Isaac

This is one of those things that you can’t understand without having done it or being around those who encourage you to do so. It is sort of like your description of the book; within one sentence you get the contents of the book entirely wrong, but feel very assured that your description would ring true with someone who has actually spent time looking for meaning in the book. Maybe if the people summing up the book said things to you like, “It is a text with which our fathers and our fathers’ fathers and our fathers’ fathers’ fathers have engaged with for generations in order to make sense of their existence and their meaning/role in the world. Within its pages, countless people, learned, wise, and daft alike, have found wisdom. Sit awhile and read. Consider what others have written and said about it. See the ways in which our people are both great and detestable, the ways in which individuals and communities act to create a place in the world even as they are fallible. What matters in these stories is not whether they happened, but that those who came before you thought them worthy of attention and passing on to the next generation.” you would be more sympathetic to those who engage with it. Meaning making is something we do - if you come to the book not looking for meaning but for reason to object, you will find what you are looking for just the same as the person looking for meaning will find what they are looking for.

Other people read something and pass along their impression of it, but that doesn’t mean you will have the same impression if you read it. Sure, you can rely upon others to find the good stuff on your behalf and more efficiently communicate it without passing along the bad stuff, but you’ll never know what you would have found had you engaged with it yourself.

We can take any book and use it as our material for meaning making. Perhaps you prefer book Z over book X. Will they both have you think about the same things in the same ways? Probably not. Is there some categorical way to say that X is better than Z for purpose W? Probably not. What the Bible has going for it (even if it is the Christian one) is that it includes many stories with many people in many situations - some which play out as we would expect and some that are radically different. It is dissimilar from other books of the same length precisely because it is not a single narrative or a single authorial voice. Furthermore, the book explicitly engages with the sorts of questions that we generally consider have existential import - how to live the good life, how to make community, why we are born and why we die.

In the end, the flavor of religion (or religious text) that you pick to engage with can be thought of as that which best satisfies your aesthetic sensibilities. Someone who was raised Christian in a Christian community may feel partial to reading the Christian Bible. Someone who was raised in China may feel partial to Confucius and Lao Tzu. Will those two people end up thinking of the world the same way? Almost certainly not, but it is likely that by engaging with material that your community deems important, the conclusions you reach (and the conversations that you have) make you more functional within the community that you live.

The Bible is what it is. I do not make apologies for it or recommend it to you. But if you want to talk about it or the people that use it in their meaning making, I suggest that you try a bit more charity and little less cynicism.

Can I ask why? Why would you search for existential meaning? Why there? The book opens with a vengeful God putting babies to the sword, advocating the stoning to death of just about anyone who has sex without his say so, demanding sacrifices etc. What is it, after reading all that, that makes you think "I bet there'll be some great existential nuggets in here, if only I can get past all the blatant misogyny and homophobia and see the bigger picture"?

There's a great 'big picture' message in the Lord of the Rings too, but very few babies being put to the sword by the main protagonist - and it's got fight scenes. — Isaac

Initially, let's disabuse ourselves of the notion that ancient religion typically stoned people, at least not for the past 2000 years. If you want to use the biblical accounts as evidence that the stoning actually occurred, you would be taking a literalist approach to the OT and would be accepting is historicity. To prove the actual existence of stoning, you need a real historical source, not the OT.

The rabbinic view of the death penalty made its use so limited, that it was de facto impossible to ever occur. For example, the person who was committing the crime must have been instructed at the time he was committing it of the possibility of the death penalty and he'd have to acknowledge understanding it. The Talmud lists the last death penalty as having occurred in 28 CE. The exact date is debated, but we're looking at an ancient religion that was not quite as barbaric as you're suggesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Judaism

Regardless of that, you've asked a few questions I'll respond to:

Why I would search for meaning is in itself a teleological question, asking for what purpose would I make such an inquiry, which presupposes that meaning matters. So my initial question back to you would be why do you seek meaning in my behavior unless you're assuming meaning matters. But, to answer your question more directly, I want to understand the meaning of life because it's personally important to me for likely the same reasons it's been important to milliions of people over the past thousands and thousands of years.

I think Frankl answered this question better than me, describing the significance of the "will to meaning."

https://medium.com/mind-cafe/7-viktor-frankl-quotes-to-motivate-you-to-find-your-purpose-2ece0c64f1d8#:~:text=It%20was%20based%20on%20Frankl%E2%80%99s%20observation%20that%20those,find%20meaning.%20He%20called%20it%20%E2%80%98will%20to%20meaning%E2%80%99.


I look to the bible for meaning because there is a rich tradition over the millennia of scholars using it as a means to derive meaning and purpose. I can benefit from those efforts and that wisdom by reading what they've said. I also grew up in a Jewish environment, so the wisdom from that tradition comes to me with a higher degree of credibility than other sources, which is why people typically remain in the traditions they were raised in.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the book opens with God putting babies to the sword. That's not how it opens.

In any event, you are not limited to using the Bible to search for meaning. You could use the Koran, the Book or Morman, the New Testament, Dianetics, Lord of the Rings, Winnie the Pooh (which was attempted in The Tao of Pooh), or even Green Eggs and Ham to find meaning and inspiration. I'm not claiming that all other traditions are wrong, but will admit to multiple paths to finding meaning. I do think if you choose the Lord of the Rings as your primary source of inspiration, you're going to be limited in terms of the scholarship you can rely upon for your learning and there won't be much of a community you can share your beliefs and discussions with. There's also the possibility you won't take your mission quite so seriously, as it's doubtful your identity will tied to the belief system of Lord of the Rings as perhaps a Christian's identity is tied to her belief. If your quest is the search for meaning, and you honestly have found it through the Lord of the Rings in a comprehensive way, I'd find it unusual, but I wouldn't think it impossible.

None of this is meant to excuse any bad conduct on the part of any religious group. Subjugation on the basis of gender, sexual abuse, physical abuse, or any other criminal behavior is criminal whether in the name of religion or not.

Or he might hang out in Purgatory until his relatives pay the priest an indulgence. — frank

When I was a kid, we used to pray for the souls in purgatory. Have they brought back indulgences?

Anyway, after twenty pages of the iniquitous punishment God doles out, I thought for a change people could be offended by God not being nearly harsh enough.

Taking that back to the OP, the upshot is that religious belief is categorically distinct from factual belief. The result is that belief in eternal damnation is not a factual belief so much as an imaginative act. As such belief in hell does not appeal or respond to truth or evidence. — Banno

But this comment again literalizes the metaphysical content of the religious document. Yes, you are correct, the world was not created in 6 days, there was no ark that housed the entire world's creatures, and the sea did not part. There therefore is no actual hell. To the extent some accept these simple literalist notions, you've made your point that they are the thoughts of the unsophisticated or those who were raised in such insular environments, they cannot fathom there might be another perspective. You've put as many nails in that coffin as you need to.

Let's move then away from the metaphysical and to the ethical and existential and disregard the literalism you fall back on. We're looking for meaning, purpose, good, and evil and the meaning of life well lived, none of which are described as "factual beliefs" in the way you're using that phrase.

religious belief is categorically distinct from factual belief. — Banno

This is one of those comments that sounds really good to someone that thinks of religion as that which is left over after everything else is carved away, but really strange to someone that thinks of all beliefs as occurring within a religious paradigm. Liberalism (and “secularism” in general) has done a great job at letting Christians understand religion to be something private and particular, but much of the rest of the world tends to understand that religion is all encompassing and pervading all aspects of thought.

Is religious belief that Jesus (or some substantially similar character by whatever name) walked the earth? Is that factual belief? In what way do the claims about Jesus render a belief vis-a-vis his existence religious and non-factual? Is the belief in existence of Jesus the sort of thing that responds to evidence?

Do you, perhaps, mean that personal revelation is non-responsive to truth or evidence? Is it that the existence of hell is not currently subject to the typical forms of scientific inquiry that make it non-evidential? I just don’t understand the move to make religious belief of a different category than other sorts of belief. We have our experiences and our minds and they interact in some way that ends up in talk of beliefs.

While I know that you won’t equate knowledge with belief, if someone says, “I believe X”, it doesn’t matter what the content of X is - to the extent we care about their belief, we will respond with the same sorts of questions about how they came to that belief and whether they have warrant to maintain it (even if they are doxasist involuntarists as suggested earlier) in light of A, B, and C. Saying, “I believe religious X” doesn’t change the conversation in the slightest around how/why that belief is maintained, it just gives you additional information about the belief being discussed.

Christian doctrine has no particular urgency for me, but how real Christians live does — they’re people, after all, and fellow citizens, and quite likely my political enemies. I think that might explain why I’ve approached this discussion as I have. — Srap Tasmaner

That makes sense. I suppose the matter is more pressing in some places than others. Not a lot of radical Evangelicals here in Cornwall.

Why is the former more likely? — Seppo

I thought I'd explained that (or at least why I think that), but I did tuck it away in some parentheses, so 'll just highlight it.

parsimony again, if I can explain their behaviour with beliefs we could share, rather than incommensurable ones, I'll do so — Isaac

I basically don't see any reason to jump to a weird incommensurable belief when their behaviour can be explained using perfectly commensurable beliefs. It's just a pragmatic thing.

It strikes me as equally plausible that either they accept the doctrine that one is justified by faith (and so belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ is sufficient for salvation regardless of what evils one has engaged in, including child abuse) and so they don't believe they are risking eternal punishment by engaging in child abuse/rape — Seppo

Plausible, yes, but that kind of comes under the category of my (1), just with better post hoc justification. The point in my (1) was that they don't believe they will be condemned for eternity for committing the act in question. What they do in fact believe instead wasn't really relevant at the time. Interesting take on that though. I would make Lewis' argument more compelling becasue the last thing we want is dangling a story in front of people whereby they can get away with child abuse.

...or that their decision to engage in child abuse simply isn't a rational one involving any calculation of the relevant risks (either of legal repercussions, or eternal punishment) at all. — Seppo

Here I disagree. I don't think 'rational' enters into it. I believe that my cup is in the kitchen. I don't engage in any rational thought process to work that out, it's 'already there' as a conclusion in no doubt. It's still a belief. I get that some belief (such as punishment) might just not become relevant if one doesn't link up the consequences, but I think a priest, in a cassock, in a church, with a choirboy is going to have a hard time forgetting about his religion. That's some poor memory.

there certainly appear to be plenty of Christians who do behave as if they genuinely believe that unbelief can/will result in eternal punishment, going to great lengths to try to convert friends and loved ones and displaying apparently genuine concern over the fate of non-believer's eternal souls. — Seppo

Again, I'm only looking to see if the behaviour can be explained by more commensurable beliefs. I've seen the same enthusiasm for getting people to drink (in drinking cultures, such as student halls, or male sports fans) "Come on! Have a drink, it's Friday...etc", or even getting people to watch the latest Netflix series. When people have made a commitment to something which involves either strong abstinence, or strong abandon of such, there's an equally strong incentive to pull others in, as both abstinence and indulgence are harder to cope with in communities who do not join in (problems of temptation and moral approbation respectively).

What role do you think cognitive dissonance plays in all this? I think maybe you've missed a fourth option that the expressed beliefs are put by the wayside contextually, no matter how hard one's current conduct contradicts the suppressed belief. I don't think there's anything about belief that requires such a contradiction to be felt without also feeling the connection between one's horrible actions and one's noble beliefs - suppressing the connection between the two seems precisely a form of dissonance. — fdrake

Yes, I'd forgotten that. I'm suspicious of certain forms of cognitive dissonance though. It's not going to be easy to explain why without going into great detail about my theories of beliefs systems, but I'll try to be brief. Say if someone had a belief that one should exit the house by the back door, and also a belief that one should exit the house by the front door, and contextually they continued to switch between the two with a suppressive dissonance each day. If we model beliefs as propositions then we have a model including dissonance - but as merely propositions, where's the tension? At t1 the proposition is x, at t2 the proposition is y. Tension arises when we expect a person to act according to these propositions (and they can't act according to both). So we could look at what it is that they act as if were the case. They act as if it were the case that sometimes the back door and other times the front door were the most appropriate doors to exit the house by. Now we have a statement of their belief which is consistent with their behaviour. What we now need is an understanding of they post hoc rationalise that belief. In the case I described (and the priest, in your case), it's their post hoc rationalisation that's flawed. Instead of rationalising a perfectly consonant story involving context, they've rationalised it as two stories which cannot both co-exist in a unified narrative.

It's an approach which is a necessary model for my further work, so for me it's quite an embedded commitment, but (as an aside entirely) it has proven to have some useful therapeutic applications, so not entirely academic.

This theory explains why religious belief is inured to rational discourse.

Your mooted paedophilic priest (as if that would ever happen) keeps his religious beliefs and his beliefs about little boys in different boxes in his mind. — Banno

Interesting piece (but see by response to fdrake above for my concerns about the pragmatism of seeing beliefs as 'boxable' at all). I think this ties in with what I was arguing about religious belief being more like a token than an treatment of states of affairs, but I think it's more complex that that. Religion seems to be a mixture of several different type of belief propositions.

Some undoubtedly (in my mind) is mere token. Propositions with little to no belief content (no tendency to act as if...), we can see that in some manifestations of eternal damnation, but I think it's be a mistake to lump all religious belief into this type. Some is clearly analogous to non-religious irrational beliefs (such as sentimental values, ritual behaviour, good luck charms etc). Much is associated with externalising narratives for conflicting desires (one is internal 'base', the other must come from God). Some are re-reinforcement labelling (adding a more powerful narrative to 'authorise' otherwise challenged activities - slavery, misogyny clerical power etc) Here we're not really dealing with particularly foundational beliefs, but rather just strategy beliefs (if I do x, it will get me y).

It's a real mess. But then so are the secular so...

This is one of those things that you can’t understand without having done it or being around those who encourage you to do so. — Ennui Elucidator

I don't see any evidence for these kinds of assumptions, but I'll take it on advisement.

It is sort of like your description of the book; within one sentence you get the contents of the book entirely wrong — Ennui Elucidator

I quoted directly from the book. It's in English, right?

Maybe if the people summing up the book said things to you like, “It is a text with which our fathers and our fathers’ fathers and our fathers’ fathers’ fathers have engaged with for generations in order to make sense of their existence and their meaning/role in the world. Within its pages, countless people, learned, wise, and daft alike, have found wisdom. Sit awhile and read. Consider what others have written and said about it. See the ways in which our people are both great and detestable, the ways in which individuals and communities act to create a place in the world even as they are fallible. What matters in these stories is not whether they happened, but that those who came before you thought them worthy of attention and passing on to the next generation.” you would be more sympathetic to those who engage with it. — Ennui Elucidator

Yeah, I probably would. But that assumes that any of that is actually true. You're no less ascribing motives and models of people's approaches. No less constructing a narrative about religion and it's place in society. I'm not disputing that other narratives are available. I'm asking why someone chose one over the other.

We can take any book and use it as our material for meaning making. Perhaps you prefer book Z over book X. Will they both have you think about the same things in the same ways? Probably not. Is there some categorical way to say that X is better than Z for purpose W? Probably not. — Ennui Elucidator

You don't think that not having instructions to stone girls to death is an advantage? I'd say any book which didn't have such instructions had an advantage over one which did. This is the question I'm asking. If "We can take any book and use it as our material for meaning making" then why on earth choose one which contains such horrific misogyny, homophobia and abuse?

It is dissimilar from other books of the same length precisely because it is not a single narrative or a single authorial voice. — Ennui Elucidator

Seriously? Have you never read an anthology?

Furthermore, the book explicitly engages with the sorts of questions that we generally consider have existential import - how to live the good life, how to make community, why we are born and why we die. — Ennui Elucidator

But this is the point. It doesn't. It says we should stone girls who've had sex outside of marriage. That's not, under any decent person's morality, "how to make community". So barely a quarter of the way in, you have to already know how to make a community so that you know that instruction isn't to be taken literally. But if you already know, then what are you reading the book for?

if you want to talk about it or the people that use it in their meaning making, I suggest that you try a bit more charity and little less cynicism. — Ennui Elucidator

Why? Or more accurately, why specifically? Do you think your responses are being charitable to those here who believe Christianity is a misogynist, homophobic crock of shit? I don't think so (nor do I particularly expect them to). It's more of the special pleading we saw earlier - Christianity ought to be properly understood before engaging with it. I'm a psychologist (academic, not clinical). I have theories about things like beliefs, perception and the role of social narratives (my general fields). Should I demand the same from anyone engaging in those areas on these threads? That they should all thoroughly read my papers and books before engaging (and when doing so read all my critics and supporters analysis to make sure they've understood it right)? That, further, they should all attend a few of my lectures, really engage in my belief system, perhaps work for a while in my research team, get a feel for what it's like to believe what I believe about the role of social narratives in belief formation. Then, and only then, can they comment on what I say I believe about it?

I think that's daft. I think if I say something here about social narratives, in perfectly cogent English, people are free to tell me it's bollocks (or not) on the basis of what the English words mean in the context I said them.

Initially, let's disabuse ourselves of the notion that ancient religion typically stoned people, at least not for the past 2000 years. If you want to use the biblical accounts as evidence that the stoning actually occurred, you would be taking a literalist approach to the OT and would be accepting is historicity. To prove the actual existence of stoning, you need a real historical source, not the OT. — Hanover

Happy to do that, I don't think I really had such a notion in the first place... but consider it disabused.

my initial question back to you would be why do you seek meaning in my behavior unless you're assuming meaning matters. — Hanover

To better predict your future behaviour (though not you personally, of course, I doubt we'll ever meet - a general picture suffices).

I look to the bible for meaning because there is a rich tradition over the millennia of scholars using it as a means to derive meaning and purpose. — Hanover

How would you know? That there's a rich tradition of trying, is indisputable, but how would you measure their success? After all, if there was a rich tradition of trying and failing, you'd want to steer clear of that particular book for your task, no?

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the book opens with God putting babies to the sword. That's not how it opens. — Hanover

It was a rhetorical device, I just mean it's quite early on in the book, Hosea I believe.

In any event, you are not limited to using the Bible to search for meaning. — Hanover

Indeed. So why the Bible (given it's got such horrific aspects to it)? It seems your answer is about tradition, am I reading that right? It's a book with a long tradition of being used that way and that helps you personally to use it that way, yes?

Here's another way (Dostoevsky logic) to bring some sense of sanity/reasonableness to the finite offense - infinite punishment asymmetry:

If God (doesn't exist) is rejected, anything is permissible. "Anything" is the key word (limitless possibilities = $\infty$ offenses on the cards, ladies & gentlemen). The appropriate response/punishment has to be, proportionately, $\infty$).

If anything is permissible there's no such thing as justice.

When I was a kid, we used to pray for the souls in purgatory. Have they brought back indulgences? — Srap Tasmaner

I did. I started a religion where your relatives will be punished for their sins in an infinite tickle box. You have to pay me $8.95 to get them out.

I haven't read the entire thread so forgive me if the following observation has already been mentioned.

There are passages in the Bible which indicate that God has predetermined each man to his particular fate. Indeed many Christians believe this to be the case and I have personally known believers who considered themselves "blessed" to have been chosen to be believers. Of course this line of thinking means that the non-believers were also predestined to be non-believers. Considered in this respect, it appears that God has created certain men specifically to burn in hell for eternity. It puts a strange twist on this question of the moral character of Christians. Conversion would be more akin to waking up to a predetermined fate.

Regardless, there is a perverse rationality at play for Christians who try to convert non-believers, because they genuinely believe said non-believers will suffer eternal punishment. At least there is a rationality there, but the Christians who believe in eternal damnation and yet don't bother trying to convert others would seem to be more morally reprehensible.

I’m not sure what to say next that would have any value as philosophy, so I’ll give a couple examples.

A very nice piece of qualitative sociology is Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her method is to try to come up with a sort of ‘story behind the beliefs’, and it’s interesting stuff. It’s another way you might try to deal with inconsistency you perceive that your subjects don’t.

There’s a preacher I know slightly, has a small church in semi-rural Georgia, and like a lot of communities theirs has a noticeably larger immigrant population than it used to, mostly from Mexico I think. Some of his longtime parishioners came to him to say they didn’t really like what he’d been doing, letting in all these new folks. “Which ones do you want me to chase off?” he asked, and they got all embarrassed, we didn’t mean that, it’s not like it, but he stood his ground, and told them it’s exactly like that. “Who do you want me to turn away?” (You might think the shame would be enough, but casual racism has been so normal here for so long that it’s tough to get around. What did the trick, he told me, was that he’s known some of these people since they were born, so he could say, “These people are new to our community and they come to us because they need a little help. As I recall, you’ve needed a little help now and then too.” And then he can remind them of such times in their lives. Putting it like that, he told me, he could see the light go on, and they could see that these new folks weren’t really so different from them.)

I don’t think you have to be a Christian to be this virtuous, but it’s a fact that being Christian is his way of being virtuous, and I think it would be just as big a mistake to say he’s virtuous despite being Christian. What about his parishioners? Aren’t they Christians too, but bad? I think they’re just not quite as far along as their pastor, and Christians do very much talk about being a Christian as a struggle to be the sort of person God wants you to be, not something anyone’s ever finished with. As it turns out, a lot of evangelical pastors have found their congregations changing, becoming more political and less religious, in a sense, and not all of them are handling it quite as well as my guy. A lot are quitting because they’re exhausted.

I quoted directly from the book. It's in English, right? — Isaac

No you didn’t and it’s not in English, but translation will suffice.

Read the first story and show me the babies put to the sword. Or the second or the third or the fourth or the…. You get my point. Find the first story that supports your sentence and demonstrate that is how the book “opens”. Sentiment is great and all, but when verifiable claims about the book, it would be nice if those claims were accurate.

Yeah, I really don't want to be read as implying that no good can come out of religion. I've heard other stories like your pastor, but then people (as you have done) will say " of course the secular folk have done much good to", so I find it hard to see Christianity as playing any role here other than a narrative, a way of being kind, a story to explain the struggle, the need to help others, the falling back into bad habits, the group identity, the value of a spiritual leader... But one narrative among many, yes?

So we can look at those narratives and question how good they are at what they do. When people want to feel part of a group, want to find some meaning to the whole charity, forgiveness, compassion thing...do we want them reaching for Christianity as their story (the one with all the misogyny, homophobia and abuse in it too), or would we rather they reach for something a little less fraught? Less at risk of leading people astray.

See the trouble with narratives (post hoc though they are) is that we don't like to have too many of them. So there's a tendency to view other things through the same story. If people use a Christian narrative to make sense of their feeling of belonging, compassion, charity... they're more likely to reach for it to make sense of their feelings of othering and disgust at something like homosexuality, more likely to reach or it to make meaning of their sense of fear when people live less retrained lives (sex outside marriage, experimenting with drugs etc). It's not such a good story to have around to help people make sense of those aspects of their lives because it's answers there are not so friendly.

Maybe I'm being unrealistic in assuming we've any control at all over the prevalence of such a powerful narrative as Christianity, but narratives have been changed before

I quoted directly from the book. It's in English, right? — Isaac


No you didn’t and it’s not in English, but translation will suffice. — Ennui Elucidator

I'm no bible scholar. If my quotes are inaccurate I'm happy to be corrected.

Read the first story and show me the babies put to the sword. — Ennui Elucidator

“Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.” (Hosea 13:16)

Or the second or the third or the fourth or the…. You get my point. — Ennui Elucidator

Not really, no. These things are in the bible - or at east the version I'm looking at

“A priest’s daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death.” (Leviticus 21:9).

“But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.” (Deuteronomy 22:20-21)

“If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die.” (Deuteronomy 22:25)

Why? Or more accurately, why specifically? Do you think your responses are being charitable to those here who believe Christianity is a misogynist, homophobic crock of shit? I don't think so (nor do I particularly expect them to). It's more of the special pleading we saw earlier - Christianity ought to be properly understood before engaging with it. I'm a psychologist (academic, not clinical). I have theories about things like beliefs, perception and the role of social narratives (my general fields). Should I demand the same from anyone engaging in those areas on these threads? That they should all thoroughly read my papers and books before engaging (and when doing so read all my critics and supporters analysis to make sure they've understood it right)? That, further, they should all attend a few of my lectures, really engage in my belief system, perhaps work for a while in my research team, get a feel for what it's like to believe what I believe about the role of social narratives in belief formation. Then, and only then, can they comment on what I say I believe about it? — Isaac

This is a bit like going in a circle. The audience that already finds the book meaningless finds it meaningless (or even evil). You don’t have to talk about it or advance any new proof to convince them of their position. Unless you are just sitting around having a laugh fest with your friends about how stupid the book is, I’m not sure what you get from taking another pass at the book. It isn’t even like this is Mystery Science Theater 3000 where you take crap source material and add some funny context that makes the crap you are reading somehow worth it. If the book sucks and has no value to you, great. As the saying goes - don’t yuck my yum.

If, however, you wish to speak to people that find meaning in the book, you have to speak to them about the book in ways that they will relate to. Everyone gets that in the first hundred lines or so god has destroyed the world by flood because god did a shit job of creating it in the first place. It is what the words say and you aren’t going to get far in denying that it says what it says. The argument is not about what it says, but what it means; what the value is in including that story both on its own and within the greater context/s of the book. If you aren’t willing to engage with the material on that level (be it as “because this is the unerring word of god as related to *** and then written down, copied, and translated from then till now under the guidance of god” or “because that was a cultural creation story of the region of the people who told the story and the editors/codifiers of the book had to include to maintain legitimacy” or any other such attempt to understand the material), you aren’t having a conversation with the people that find meaning in it.

There is no special pleading about pointing out ingroup and outgroup dynamics and the general context in which messages are more likely to be received positively (or accepted as the case, if you prefer). You don’t have to understand Christianity to reject it. You could be wrong or right in your rejection, but that is your choice. You don’t have to understand Christianity to say things like, “The Catholic Church in the 20th century willfully hid evidence of priests sexually abusing children” or that the Catholic Church has exercised its political influence and wealth to limit women’s ability to exercise reproductive choice. There are lots of facts about Christianity (or at least specific groups/actors) that can be understood without engaging with meaning in the Bible. Decontextualizing text is not, however, something that fits into the bucket of “facts” quite the same way.

If you want to talk about why someone reads a story about god destroying the world because god does a shit job at creating the world, you can’t just keep reading the words as if they, in their isolation, will answer the question. Foisting your opinion of what the words mean (e.g. “It is a literal telling of mythic history and the dinosaurs prove that the story is untrue and the Bible is a lie!”) does not mean anything to someone who cares about the story because your meaning is so far from theirs. But again, discussing meaning in the book is a separate activity than evaluating the role of Christianity in society or the behavior of individual Christians. Sure, understanding their meaning as they do might help you explain their behavior better, but since you aren’t interested in understanding that meaning, you aren’t really that interested in using it for explanatory purposes.

For what it is worth, one can be charitable both to the Christian finding meaning in the Bible and the secular-Christian rejecting the Bible. One can find merit in both positions (and even agree with one or the other) without willfully misrepresenting one position or the other. Texts can (and do) support multiple understandings.

What you perhaps misunderstand about what I am writing is that I am not suggesting that meaning is contained within a text or that authors can convey specific meaning in words. What you intend when you write your articles is entirely independent of what I understand when I read them. We may have overlap in behavior (and therefore presume that there is overlap in meaning) in response to the written words, but each time someone reads (or remembers) text, they are constructing meaning for themselves. There is good reason to believe that if I want to know what YOU meant when you wrote your article, that I need to know lots of things about you (your influences, your other writings, what you have said about what you wrote, etc.) in order to more (or most) closely approximate your meaning. But then I may not care a lick about you and be contented with understanding your writings independent of any awareness of things about you. Both methods lead to an interpretation of your writings, but one cannot objectively say which is right and which is wrong, just that they are different.

I am simply pointing out to you that someone interpreting the Bible can understand it to mean something different than you do. You cannot dictate to people that the Bible MEANS something because you say so. If you want to engage with their meaning (be it to describe or critique), you need to identify their meaning in the first place rather than supplanting it with your own.

Taking that back to the OP, the upshot is that religious belief is categorically distinct from factual belief. The result is that belief in eternal damnation is not a factual belief so much as an imaginative act. As such belief in hell does not appeal or respond to truth or evidence. — Banno

This seems a difficult way to say that belief-in is categorically different from knowledge-of.

Knowledge-of would appear to be a rigorous standard: there must be a something that is known and in exactly the sense that neither the knowledge nor the thing known are only private and incapable of exhibition/demonstration.

And this would appear to render belief-in a state of deficiency. But perhaps that too quick. Matters of fact alone may be the furniture of the world, but not its account. Neither story nor science arises from matters of fact alone. It would seem that belief-in is the missing ingredient. If fact the engine, then belief the lubrication, the oil, that allows both its parts and itself to move.

In any good science belief-in is obscured and buried by the facts, diminished to a vanishing point. And this leads to the great illusion that things are as they seem-to-be, which of course as a practical matter and for the most part is true. As if we live in a painting, but able to forget and forgetting our world painted and we painted it.

But even as belief, even when disguised and clothed in science, is necessary for that science as the ground for the possibility of that science, so it is also necessary for matters of life not themselves matters-of-fact, and thus themselves not subjects of or reduceable to a possible science.

The beliefs of science become transmuted into laws. As such anchored, rigid, fixed. If we use the term ethics to cover all of that in life which seems irreducible to any science, then we see that beliefs concerning ethics generally cannot become laws in a scientific sense, and indeed usually and for the most part are not anchored or rigid or fixed, but instead float more-or-less freely in sea of possibility and changing actuality. And these become not laws, but rules. Rules for games and games change. And to be sure, the scientist finds his laws so that he may know more about the facts of the world. But people make their ethical rules in accordance not with how things are, but how they think they should be and should not be.

And for all human history, and apparently prehistory, the ground for the possibility for an applied ethics has been belief in and appeal to an other, a God of some kind, the quiddities of which subject to continual refinement, not always improvement, and depending on the social/cultural sophistication of the believers.

And so quite right, categorically different, which being recognized imposes the necessity - for understanding's sake - to remember that criticism of one in terms of the other is a plain mistake, and for both to stay out of each other's houses.

But one narrative among many, yes? — Isaac

I can’t help but think so, yes.

When people want to feel part of a group, want to find some meaning to the whole charity, forgiveness, compassion thing...do we want them reaching for Christianity as their story (the one with all the misogyny, homophobia and abuse in it too), or would we rather they reach for something a little less fraught? — Isaac

When I was young, I thought the main problem with Christianity was that it wasn’t true — just a culturally transmitted delusion, wishful thinking and fantasy. I’m a bit more inclined to see it now as you describe here, with the caveat that the narrative Christians use to structure their world may not be the one in the Bible, or in the Catechism, no matter what they say. It’s connected to the Bible, but in a great number of different ways, and it’s complicated. I think that’s fine. We all agree there isn’t just one narrative in the Bible to start with, so why pretend it’s simple and people have a simple relationship to it?

I get the reformist impulse — Jefferson, the Enlightenment slave-owner — made his own version of the gospels where he snipped out all the supernatural bits to present Jesus of Nazareth as a guy worth listening to, not a divine presence. There’s lots of ways to snip. But I wonder if maybe it isn’t better not to. Maybe it is better to learn from a book with some prickly parts and some rough edges. If there was nothing in it to reject — or at least to have to wonder pretty hard about — you’d have a religion where everyone did believe everything in The Book exactly as it is written, and that starts to look like not such a great idea. I think it might actually be good for Christians that their book is such a mess. (Back to the rough ground, you know.)

The book opens with a vengeful God putting babies to the sword, advocating the stoning to death of just about anyone who has sex without his say so, demanding sacrifices etc. — Isaac

It was a rhetorical device, I just mean it's quite early on in the book, Hosea I believe. — Isaac

I'm no bible scholar. If my quotes are inaccurate I'm happy to be corrected. — Isaac

Not really, no. These things are in the bible - or at east the version I'm looking at — Isaac

You want to dictate what Christians think based upon your reading of the Bible, but you don’t even know what you said within a few posts in this conversation. The Bible “opens” with Genesis. You have yet to quote a Genesis story. Your claim (rhetorical or otherwise) was wrong. You can’t even concede you made an obvious error.

Think of how this sounds to someone that thinks the Bible is a meaningful book. You say it has no meaning, but you don’t even know how to a) make an accurate claim about what is written or b) be corrected. I get that religion seems really important and like every opinion should matter (whether informed or ill-informed), but it doesn’t work that way. If you wan to critique Christian meaning, learn what it is. If you want to critique Christian behavior, learn what it is. Critiquing one is not the same as critiquing the other. Nothing here is special pleading.


P.S. For what it is worth, I refer you to hermeneutics and biblical hermeneutics. It will provide some more insight about multiple interpretations from the same text if you are otherwise unfamiliar. You might also notice that literalism is thought about as dumb as it gets.

If I'm asking anything of Christians it's that they take part in the usual social game of post hoc rationalisation that everyone else plays. — Isaac

But they refuse to do so. Now what?

- - -

Christians, or anyone else, have to justify themselves to whatever extent the situation requires. If you put up a sign and say, "I only admire people that don't admire an evil god," and a Christian walks over to your table and says, "I want you to admire me, but I worship an evil god," then the Christian is obliged to justify themselves as qualifying under your criteria. — Ennui Elucidator

You can hold up your sign all day long, for years, and no Christian will come along. IOW, the situation you describe doesn't happen in real life. Christians don't care if you admire them or not, they don't care about your standards of respect. They don't seek your admiration, nor your respect. If anything, they want you to obey them, to submit to them.

People operate in a social sphere and are subject to all of the same conditions as anyone else. When discussing social interactions and the negotiation of power, justification is a basic means by which one person attempts to accomplish their purpose. You can't just exempt yourself from justification to another because you think some claim of yours is sacrosanct - the other person dictates the rules for what is required for them to cooperate.

Except that Christians (and religious/spiritual people in general) don't care about this silly little expectation of yours. They very much do exempt themselves from justification.

Discussing your own personal conduct (which is what both Lewis and Banno do) is not the same as establishing what governments can or should do. A "human right" to religion is a claim made against states, not individuals.

On the contrary, it is from Christians that I have heard the idea brought up first; I hadn't thought of it before.
For example, a Christian lady once defended her case this way in a discussion, namely that she has the constitutionally granted rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The rest of us then had no choice but to shut up and respect her constitutionally granted rights.

You are capable of acting and making moral judgments independent of the state and in opposition to that state, be it secular or not.

Unless you live in a state that is only nominally secular.

It would be great if you could talk about your judgment rather than hypothesizing about the judgment of some nondescript moral agent cum state actor.

I think religion/spirituality is the triumph of Social Darwinism. I don't admire the religious/spiritual, or the Jehovah worshippers, but I acknowledge that they have devised an evolutionarily advantageous way of life.

Look at us, talking about them, giving them our headspace and forum bandwidth for free. While they don't care about us. They surely know something we don't!

- - -

Maybe that second question is somewhat out of the scope here. But to me, the answer is exactly what Lewis is driving at, because I'd hazard the answer would be "well that's obviously allegorical because if it wasn't, it'd be awful" — Isaac

Would it?

Whom would a group of people who is intent on surviving and prevailing worship?
Someone very powerful, someone who can grant them victory, someone who can grant justification for their struggle for survival and power.
In short, someone like Jehovah.