Okay. Rewind. What’s on your mind?
Heretics to some…
A religion that evolves denies the truth of its own establishment.
One day god is immutable, the next - meh! not so much. God was just wrong in the past, and now magically he has come round to our way of thinking, and everything is okay.
This is what it is all about…
“The Nietzschean view of religious people neglecting the Earth in favor of some afterlife heaven is outdated.”
“Progressive Christians are paying attention to the woes of the planet and are acting positively in its favor.”
There is only one ‘woe’ that the erf and the people of it are facing. Well there’s two. One is an extraterrestrial threat (meteor, radiation blasts, etc), and the other is the capitalist.
Now N was right but the significance of his point was made far better by Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, and other left-wing atheists of the day. In order to understand the significance, you have to first understand that capitalism is the only real danger (aside from shit coming from space).
The great significance is this: religious beliefs create pacifism and impotence in the working class because (as N began to point out) they devalue the immediacy of their real problems by hoping for a life in heaven or wherever.
Now, it may be that ‘progressive christians’ hold socialistic ideals and want to work toward achieving them. However, that would be done much faster and much more efficiently by disposing of religion altogether. And you don’t have to put any of your hard earned money in a plate to pay for some evangelist’s new BMW.
Think of the christians as the retarded little helpers of the workers in their movement toward emancipation from capitalism.
The Pope stull sits on his hands on big issues of contraception and abortion, when population pressure in Catholic countries is bursting.
This frnge group finds that easy to say, but what are they actually doing?
Donations accepted
It’s worse than that.
The big three promise a future reward and the destruction of the current earth, whilst peaching dominion over the beasts of the field and the wild.
Indeed
Thank you for your post.
Religion wedded to capitalism has supported, in its lust for lucre, genocide of indigenous people, slavery, child labor and wholesale exploitation of Nature.
I support a religion that embraces democratic socialism.
In the possible fates of the planet that you mention, most of the world’s religions are not culpable. The religion that is culpable for atrocities to man and nature is the KJ literalist variety. That variety would be unrecognizable to the early church fathers.
Religion itself will not become extinct; it is “bred in the bone”. The best we can hope for is that it can evolve to include something like the 8 tenets of progressive Christianity.
What Dawkins failed to consider–blaming religious fundies for the world’s ills will not fix things.
He would not rail against capitalism; it sells books.
He’s not Jesus, so he can’t do everything.
What he is worried about is the rise in religious fundementalism which is antithetical to common sense, and deomcratic socialism. What do you expect after 9/11?
If you get Netflix, please watch the episode about Richard Scrushy in Trial by Media, where a captialist fraudster manipulated the jury using black religious fundementalism.
I don’t get Netflix, but thanks for recommending. I still think Dawkins is wasting his talents.
The internet is flooded with “fringe” Christian ideas. Since that is what I look for, I don’t see any rise in rabid fundamentalism. Maybe the fundies don’t use thee internet One could hope. .
The rise in religious fundementalism since the 1970s is much talked about.
Google it and you will be drowned in an avalanch of articles.
9/11 is one aspect of, Israel another, and each of these have their reactions elsewhere.
Generally the tendancy is incipient whilst any kind of religion exists, since the scriptures throughout the 3 messianic religions are so ambiguous as to allow a range of interpretations, and when they are read to the letter are dangerous in the extreme.
Googled it. It is as you say.
Evangelicals owe much to Augustine who first wrote about original sin and eternal punishment. The early church fathers expressed no such ideas. Modern fundamentalism, heir to Augustine, Milton, and the church councils, gives a distortion of Christianity . It is the distortion that has allowed centuries of “man’s inhumanity to man”.
On the other hand much religious art and writing are beautiful. So are its examples of charity.
The Crusades caused 9/11. War against Iraq was just a reminder.
It’s only a “distortion” because you don’t like it. But it’s all laid out there in the Bible, the Koran and The OT for anyone to obey and follow. And with each new generation the ugly fae of religion remerges.
This “distortion” is the literal message of the scripture.
Are these books to be a guide? If not where is your guide? ANd do not say divine inspiration, because they ALL say that.
You do not need religion for art. In any event these things fly AGAINST the words of God. The procription against graven images is a matter of cannon to Islam, even if it is widely ignored by Jews and Christians.
The est art has no reference to religion, being free of its clutches.
Many things were the cause of 9/11. The arrogant establishment of Israel whereby Balfour with the stroke of his Christian fountain pen condemned the region of Palestine to a thousand years of turmoil and hatred. Religion is at the heart of that particular version of apartheid. The fact that the christian/Jewish alliance have been conspiring over the entire Arab world to manipulate and control events, draw boundaries, and design conflict might also have something to do with it. The Crusades were just the start.
All of religion should not bear the brunt of your accurate attacks. The literalistic majority does not represent the whole state of religion; to claim it does and and thereby condemn it all is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. This is where Dawkins erred in The God Delusion–he takes the part to stand for the whole. Stating that the problems of the Earth are all caused by religion is to neglect the evolving of more humane religious approaches. The internet is full of the latter also.
Beautiful words to live by, sculptor. 
Those words can really whet one’s passionate sense of adventure.
I will clamber through the clouds and exist!
Keats
Seriously?
Look around you!
Thanks.
But its not a manifesto - more like a statement of reality.
Welcome back, Arcturus. Where have you been for so long? Can you relate to this thread?
Sculptor,
I do look around; and I don’t necessarily see what you see. We look in different places but ultimately see what we already believe. Neither of us is here to convert the other. And neither one of us is stupid for not believing as the other does. Consequently, since your mind is made up, I can wonder what you hope to accomplish by being here. It should be a waste of your time.
Speak for yourself.
I accept things that are provable and demonstrable.
You prefer to beleive whatever you like.
But as Carl Sagan says; "“Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.”
Don’t tar me with the same brush that you paint yourself.
If this is a problem for me, then how much more is it a problem for you.
And let’s face it there are more persons here than you and myslef.
Since you arrived in this thread, Sculptor, the majority of posts are yours, not those of others.
It’s possible that you frighten them away.
You disagree with every proposition I suggest.
These are based on first hand experience.
Sagan was not privy to these arguments.
Why are you wasting your time here?
Were you “'born to set it straight”? (Hamlet)–
According to the scientific method?
It is confined to its own set of unprovable beliefs about the deep, existential experiences of human beings.
What a weird thing to say. ALL of my posts are mine, as yours are yours.
Frighten posts??
Are you confused?
That’s very funny since I have been trying to get you to make one. You seem resistent to make any statement, perhaps, lest you find you do not have the wit to support it??
You are not the only person I post to.
Sagan was way ahead of you or me.
If you were to pay more attention to the world of philosophy and science you might learn something. You might learn that you can’t simply respond with “note to nature” and pretend it is a worthy or meaningful response.
I’m not - I enjoy it.
I always try to do my best to answer all posts to me honestly
Science works, you are idle.
Natural religion persists through time and change. Were it not relevant for humans, it would already be extinct.
From natural religion come the mental expressions, explanations of physical events, known as theology.
These abstractions suggest something tangible as their source.
Of course the abstractions cannot be proved by the methods of scientific or philosophical debate.
Yet their presence suggests real sources.
These sources are experiential.
The main source of natural religions is the experience of evolution.