An unsettling corollary might be that is the word(s) of one’s god(s) really is/are immutable - but that this demonstrates that believers have no idea what those immutable words actually are. This seems obvious to my existential/autistic models of being. Yes - there probably is true underlying reality. No - people cannot directly experience it.
Laypeople nearly always make the mistake of taking religion - a symbolic system - literally. But the whole point of using wholly symbolic systems is to bypass certain limitations innate to discursive cognitive models. Just like it is trivial to make models which appear to refute religious axioms, it is also equally trivial to make models which confirm them. All I need to do is posit a pantheistic model where “divinity” is the universe itself. So it’s “immutable word” is simply its prior seed conditions. So long as the universe seems to exist, those conditions are satisfied. No belief required!
The parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) implies otherwise in my mind.
Really several parables in that vicinity seem to deal with folks who think they have the monopoly on rightness, only to ultimately be upended.
These may have been aimed at the Pharisees of the time. But I really think any adherents who take this as a rally to anti-semitism, rather than a call to self reflection regarding one’s own failings, are missing the point.
While I appreciate and share Cory’s desire for organized religion to be less bigoted, I think his optimism is reaching here.
If you ignore the appeal to emotion and read the logical inference of the Pope’s statement† here:
I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.
He’s saying his God will have mercy on those who go to him. Then he says the issue is for non-believers to obey their conscience. The latter issue is whether the Pope is believes a person’s conscience can preclude the existence of his God. I’m less than optimistic. This response to Mr. Scalfari sounds like weasel words to me. And sure, that’s better than firebrand rhetoric. But as one of the non-believers, I’m keenly aware that Western history has more often than not considered lack of belief to be a capital crime, so I’m somewhat wary of inexact language. While Pope Francis isn’t likely to personally take on the task of punishing heretics who deny his God’s existence, there are some two billion Catholics on this planet, any of whom, if things turn ugly, very well might decide to play judge, jury and executioner just like the bad old days.
† With the caveat that the original was likely recieved and published in Italian, so something could have been lost in translation (but I’d guess not since Italian is fairly translatable into English).
I see where you are going, and all I have to say is: I doubt Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, etc. were part of the seed of the immutable word. Therefore what we have today may be a series of ideas, but they literally can’t be literally true.
Isn’t that moot, since there isn’t anything literal about it in the first place? People seem to be stuck in a rut with this, and I think that most people in both the for and against camps get it wrong, which makes these discussions rather frustrating. It’s like debating whether or not a painting is literally true or false - it’s a failure of trying to reconcile completely dissimilar conceptual models.
One sticky area of debate is that, as I mentioned, 99% of debate for religious models I encounter netside is by laypeople. This colors it similarly to if we were debating physics, carpentry, or movies with laypeople - in that most of them know what they like, and nothing else. I know that this sounds elitist, I think that anybody can apply themselves to learning the inner details of a discipline, but by far, most do not. So what I usually encounter is a bunch of pseudo-objectivists (subjective ideas are fake) who don’t know what religion is, arguing with a bunch of extremely naive objectivists (religion as history and/or cosmology) who also don’t know what religion is.
What people are doing is obviously confusing an axiom (there is an immutable word which passes unchanged through the universe) with their specific doctrine (and we are the special custodians of that word!). The former, the axiom, can easily be posited - while the latter, the specialness of their doctrine and organization, is laughably suspect.
The difficulty seems to be an unwillingness of many people to argue this sort of thing dispassionately. If the two main camps weren’t so emotionally invested in their positions, it could result in interesting conversations!
I will discuss with reined-in passion all day long.
Upthread we were told that not believing in a specific interpretation of creation, even though the pope said it was okay to be a non believer, was breaking a requirement by the all powerful creator of the universe. I say bullshit. As a manual the bible is prescriptive, boorish, vague, contradictory, and annoying. If that is the word of God, he was drunk, on ketamine, and had just binge watched breaking bad.
Everyone has a right to their faith, and I profess absolutely zero objective insight. So I put my faith into farcical aquatic ceremonies where moistened bints lob scimitars at me.
We none believers have to live with our wrong doings and try to make recompense and strive to be better. The Christian can do horrible things, beg for forgiveness, then repeat ad infinitum,.Tell me who is the more moral being.
According to Christian doctrine Hitler could possibly have ended up in heaven, which seems off to me.
At least the ancients knew and admitted the problem. 3rd century BC, they came up with the story of the Septuagint to mollify the Jewish faithful (72 intentionally isolated scribes supposedly made identical Hebrew to Greek Torah translations). Then you have the medieval polyglot bibles (Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, on each page so you can see how the meaning varies - sometimes with Arabic, Persian, and other languages too).
But what does belief even have to do with anything? Whenever topics happen which involve “religion” (whatever that may be), the discussion often degenerates into bickering about the pros versus cons of belief. But without any background information of how or why belief would even be relevant in the first place.
I disagree that belief == religion. One can perfectly easily conduct rituals to diety(ies) that one doesn’t believe in. As for refutation of religious doctrine, most of this “not real LOL” doesn’t even rate as 20th century hermeneutics. It is naive for people to take their own texts at face value, but I think it is worse for contemporary modernist/post-modernist critics to also take others texts at face value. When there are some deluded people who interpret their own text/doctrine naively, I think it can be tempting to accept this as easy affirmation that it is essentially without substance. But this is a critical failure because it uses their own poor reading as a basis for the refutation, rather than substituting one with better scholarship.
Fat lot of good that will do them! As clergy myself, I consider faith and belief to be delusional on general principle. When one approaches religion as a discipline, it has the effects of its own processes, and benefits from faith no more than does martial arts, fine arts, cooking, couture, or anything else people can undertake. So I see that whole line of argument of reason versus belief as being something of…
a red herring!
Once somebody arrives in the discussion who doesn’t equate religion with “belief in supernatural nonsense” (me!), people often cease to engage because it “misses the point” of the debate they prefer to have. When one does have a definition of religion which is realistic, the goalposts get moved from “It’s fake!” to “So, what’s so special about it?” I guess I just love most ritual, but hate most theology.
I agree with that. Did you know I am ordained, but don’t believe? (Yeah, its from one of those crappy, easy churches :D)
Yes, and I don’t. But again, upthread there was.
I agree to a point, and I think we both come to the same conclusion. The ritual of faith can be tremendously powerful, so belief at least can have a… Uh… Lean good?
I don’t think it misses the point at all. In my lowly experience the ritual and shared experience are the point.
Well… Not about to defend that per se, but historically you sort of needed to look prosperous and swanky in order for people to take you seriously.* The palaces and garbs were essentially a medieval equivalent of a quality PR campaign.
*It was one way to achieve that. Other approaches were also possible. But taking the basic survival requirements into account, the church (deciding to organize itself the way it did) needed power, ergo money and property.
