Saudi cleric: Earth does not revolve around Sun, moon landing was faked, because religion

[dacree]

Who said anything about debates or input? I was talking about how no one would listen to the crazy cleric if it weren’t for religion. I also asked for an example of a politician who said to follow them blindly and with out thinking when another poster said politicians use faith as well.
You go on and shout in to the wind all you want but it makes no sense to me why you think the oil war had anything to do with this discussion.

[Willondon]

@teapot

the payouts they’ve had to make to victims are jeopardising the size of the church’s big pile of everyone else’s money

Well, they still haven’t exhausted selling property willed by parishioners and reserves donated by them in the past, or simply applying a levy on the victims parishioiners for the future.

Unfortunately, Vatican City is surrounded by foreign land, so there’s no way to move loot out of there to make reparations.

[popobawa4u]

@anon50609448

Alright, that I’ll definitely agree with. But to rephrase what I said above, I think football hooligans might be seriously disappointed with the reality of what their football team is (though at least some of them are presumably just there to get drunk and fight and don’t actually give a shit about their football team).

I agree with you here. But I apply the same logic that despite people - perhaps even most people - misunderstanding the real -world significance of their football team, or indeed the object of any other cult of personality / popular mass symbolism, that it would still be dishonest to say that they do not “exist” in some sense. People who dismiss such things out of hand might benefit from a more considered approach. Better to evaluate them upon accurate criteria.

@anon50609448

This doesn’t make much sense to me if we take religion to be expressions of subjective experience. Religions are what their adherents make them, of course Christians understand Christianity because Christianity is their understanding of it (among other things).

This relates to the distinction I made earlier with regards to initiated versus non-initiated religious experience. Adherents are not necessarily practitioners. By the internal logic of most religions, laypeople do not actually know what the religion actually is, or can be said to be about. This makes organized religion something of a paradox. Functionally, religious experience can be said to be ritually-based, rather than simply membership in a club. The subjective experiences of those who participate directly in the rituals (public and private) are naturally of a different order than those of people who merely observe.

To extend the football analogy, it could be seen as the difference between kicking a nerf ball in the living room with your buddies when the game is on television, and organizing and playing in a professional team. This is even a fairly drastic difference with a completely exoteric activity. Or consider the differences between what I might experience working at the US Department of State, as compared to what I might learn of them in the news.

[shaddack]

@popobawa4u

Or consider the differences between what I might experience working at the US Department of State, as compared to what I might learn of them in the news.

However, keep in mind that direct experience can blind you. You think you know more than the spectators, but if you are a compartmentalized clerk, you may actually know quite less about your own work than those who read the Manning’s leaks.