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Talking Religion...

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muffler dragon;2294880; said:
Such as?

th
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Yeah, that's great and all, cause who doesn't like titties, right? But what's that gonna look like at 40 after 5 or 6 kids?
 
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My deepest apologies as I can't find the original article online and/or in English... but, interesting take on Religion as Magic, or really more the actual intersection of what is belief... or in this case the belief of non-beleivers:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/berger/2014/01/15/religion-as-magic/

Religion As Magic
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In its issue of December 21, 2013 (as a sort of Christmas present), the German news magazine Der Spiegel carried a story by Manfred Dworschak, under the heading “Between Religion and Magic”. A better title, reflecting the bias of the story, might be “Religion as Magic”. It is the cover story of this issue (though it starts on page 112, which hardly signals an important topic). The picture on the cover indicates the approach: Religion and magic (or if you will, superstition) are treated as one comprehensive phenomenon. That is what I find interesting here.
The picture shows a young woman with folded hands and an aura around her head (perhaps the Madonna?), looking down on a black cat running by her. I was reminded of an episode I read about years ago: A group of American tourists were on a visit to the Soviet Union. They were shown around by a guide supplied by Intourist, the government agency which made sure that nobody strayed from the pre-arranged itinerary and which routinely reported to the secret police. As the group left the hotel, a black cat ran across its path. One of the tourists said, with a laugh: “A black cat. Perhaps we had better turn around?” The guide frowned thoughtfully, then said: “Oh, I see. You are religious.”
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Poor Finnish Atheists.... getttin' messed with:

The main focus of the Spiegel story is what it calls “the belief of unbelievers”—the persistence of all kinds of magical or superstitious practices among atheists or others with no avowed religious beliefs. It would appear then that there is a deeply rooted human propensity to believe in supernatural realities. The author (mercifully, in my opinion) does not ascribe this persistence to neurological peculiarities of our species or other vicissitudes of the evolutionary process. (One curiosity of the contemporary religious scene is that even some theologians find it plausible to look on religion as a variety of brain disease.) Various psychological experiments are quoted; I particularly like the one (conducted, of all places, in Helsinki), in which avowed atheists are asked to loudly petition the deity (in which they don’t believe) to burn down their house or to drown their parents: The unhappy subjects of the experiment evinced obvious reluctance and physiologically measurable stress (this can be done by analyzing the degree of sweating). The author of the story opines that this is nothing new, that it was always the case. In other words, he agrees here with what a Protestant theologian of my acquaintance has called “the eternal return of the Stone Age”. Sweating Finnish atheists today thus stand in a long line of supernaturally terrified humans, going back to the dawn of history, uninterrupted by allegedly more Christian periods (such as the Middle Ages) or the alleged emancipations of the Enlightenment.
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buckhead63 said:
God sent his only son to die for our sins. We are all sinners. That is all you need to know. God will come again-when? I will be prepared.
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if i didn't know better i would think this were the mission statement of some militia group...

during the "religion wars" in dark ages europe. weren't there a reasonably large number of "miracle offs"? i know greek and roman priests used "magic" (aka technology) to impress and recruit followers. i seem to remember reading about subsets of christian teachers doing similar things in an attempt to influence potential converts.
 
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tsteele316 said:
Yeah, except for all those new testament parts where Jesus says scripture can't be broken and is the absolute word of God and not to be broken.
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The pharisees spent the entirety of their time with him making those arguments too.

Hint: The pharisees tried that approach repeatedly, and it didn't end well for their hypocritical alt-Christian religion, given that they were addressing the Word directly.
 
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jwinslow said:
The pharisees spent the entirety of their time with him making those arguments. Their repetitive and lazy arguments did not work any better back then.
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So, selective interpretation of both the old and new testament then? The repeated references to Jesus calling God's word absolute, shouldn't be taken literally with respect to all the horrible things God endorsed. And of course that doesn't even get into the disaster that is the gospel of Mark where that appears.
 
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tsteele316 said:
So, selective interpretation of both the old and new testament then?
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Yes, they did that all of the time, and you're pretty fond of it too, I see.
The repeated references to Jesus calling God's word absolute, shouldn't be taken literally with respect to all the horrible things God endorsed. And of course that doesn't even get into the disaster that is the gospel of Mark where that appears.
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If you'd like to have an actual theological discussion on the topic, I'm game. So far you only seem interest in canned, drive-by mockery.
 
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jwinslow said:
Yes, they did that all of the time, and you're pretty fond of it too, I see.If you'd like to have an actual theological discussion on the topic, I'm game. So far you only seem interest in canned, drive-by mockery.
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What mockery. Those passages exist, which is why you tried the pharasee hail Mary (pun intended), fully knowing that the gospel of Mark where that is located is full of so many errors that it's hard to be taken seriously.
 
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