Another Big Big Thread of Religious Discussion

[Archbio]

Conscience falls under instincts, reason or desires, I think.

It's not really "out there" unless you interpret this as meaning that conscience somehow contains such a "list" of moral guidelines as matching a religion's, and/or that conscience actually naturally guides toward a religion. Basically, if you're saying that conscience reflects the divine edicts of the generic Judeo-Christian God, it's "out there" alright, since it does seem quite contrary to experience. To say the least.

Of you meant it in the exact opposite way, that the only necessary (in regards to divine judgment) moral principles, and the only necessary thing overall, are contained in the conscience as can be observed (without needing to assume that the vast majority of humans having lived are actively repressing specifically Judeo-Christian beeps of their conscience), then it's far from 'out there' (there is such a thing as social instincts.)

I mean, in the context of talking about supernatural things. It's all relative. Of course, it does seem to run contrary to most of Christian theology, but that's kind of necessary for it to make sense.

Making sense might be something that this post doesn't do, I'm not sure.

[Fifthfiend]

Among other things, if conscience is so inherently built in then how come my mom had to smack the shit out of me so many times before I worked out about tellin' lies and picking on my little sister?

I mean the conscience is what here, the metaphysical version of the TV you have to bang on the top of and maybe kick it in the side a couple times to get it to work?

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by I_Like_Swordchucks

Not to detract from your well placed points, but I do believe you're referring to Matthew there, not Mark.

Yeah, that was my bad. I blame myself for attempting to make coherent points at 5 AM. Also, I was trying to write all that without much assistance from my Bible, which was a mistake. (Memorizing Biblical passages really doesn't help as much as you think it would.)

[Professor Smarmiarty]

All I have to say is people have been studying the effects of conscience for years and no definite results have come out. It really does seem to be mixes of biology and environment. Children have been raised by animals and some have turned out exactly like the animals who raised them, some very human, others mixed.
What seems to be the best way to look at it is that your biology influences how you will develop in your specific environment. Some people who are so inclined might adopt strong Christian morals in one environment and strong Confucian ones in another. Another person might be a serial killer in both environments.
I, as a Latitudnarian (I can never spell it right) believe that we were giving working sense organs for a reason, so that we can study and adapt and learn about our environments. It seems silly to me to have all these things and not expect us to use them, as well as our reasoning power.
Also, however, I believe that some things cannot be reasoned out, some things are beyond our power, such as the nature or thinking of God and thus we should do the best we can with what we have and not try to go beyond ourselves.
I highly recommend the works of Godel who shows that when one is inside a system one cannot prove whether it is complete or logical at all. Logic is a crutch and not the be all and end all. And I do post-graduate work in quantum chemistry and that never makes sense at all.
I don't know whether my logic chain makes sense at all there but I'm off to work. Feel free to ignore my rambling.

[Frostatine]

If we plan on discussing perspective i cant continue to post on this thread. Discussing perspective is impossible, thats like the media doing a story on thier own bias.

Fifth the reason those kinds of things must be done is because as children we have very little concept of the implications of our actions. We think to acchieve our goals the path of least resistance is always the right one. As adults we come to realise that this is not true.

I think the influence of society will always ensure the existence of a conscience. Not everyone can agree on what is wrong or right, so the majority rules on that topic.

ALSO i did like your TV analogy, unfortunately your logic has more holes in it than ganondwarf's cape half way throught the fight.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Gorefiend

That said, how recently was that papyrus discovered? Any chance its a forgery? After all, papyrus generally does NOT survive that long, and many forgeries have been made. Unless you're talking about this one tiny bit of papyrus that HAS been found and, except for your claim that it is intact, quite readily fills the descriptions you've made. (The one I'm aware of is a tiny scrap, hardly a couple of verses.)

The Rylands papyrus is definitely not a forgery but what has survived entirely intact essentially barely comprises much of John 18. In terms of quantity it's not terribly much but in terms of quality, it does include a few of the more essential passages to defining the Christian faith. (The segments include conversation tidbits between Pilate and Jesus, Jesus establishing he was "a King" but "not of this world" and Pilate eventually affirming that, the Jews in the crowd desiring Jesus to be executed.)

Originally Posted by Gorefiend

Lastly, for the record, I'm actually Jewish.

I'd be interested in hearing a Jewish perspective as to exactly what Christianity is. Is the New Testament blasphemy? Do most Jews define Jesus as just a "good man" or a "prophet" in the same vain as the likes of Malachi? What makes the Old Testament from the Jewish perspective much more accurate than the New Testament, seeing as there would be the same inherent difficulities in maintaining the Old Testament's coherency and consistency over the years?

And most intriguingly from my perspective, Jewish people seem to be convinced that there's no plausible way that Jesus could be the Son of God or that he could heal people or raise Lazarus from the dead, but the Old Testament seems to make equally jarring claims about God...we have Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, Moses provoking miracles to free the Israelites. How are the Old Testament miracles believable and the New Testament ones debunked in the Jewish religion and does that mean that Jews believe that God simply "stopped" allowing miracles to happen around 300 or so BC?

Sorry for the many questions...I don't know as much as I'd like to about what Jews believe. I mean I guess I should say I know the Old Testament and what Jews believed then, but it doesn't seem to jive with what modern Jews tell me about their faith now.

Originally Posted by fifthfiend

Actually I would decry it as lazy and rather spiritually hollow. It just doesn't especially seem like what I would call a Beatitude unto the Lord to, having felt the touch of the divine in your own life, to blindly accept what the nearest person and / or religious institution subsequently hands to you with the claim that it represents His word and will.

I would decry it as rather silly for you to make these claims regarding the laziness of my faith without even knowing a damn thing about me. I mean I haven't even exactly told my story just yet, but based on the fact that I was an atheist and I became a born-again Christian you seem to instanteously conclude I was spiritually hollow and that I joined the first religious institution I could find after my crazy revelation regarding the existence of God?

I mean it's fine for you to believe that but I'd have to frankly say that's not anything like what actually happened and it's something close to offensive that you'd automatically and reflexively assert that's what did. (It certainly seems to suggest you have an awfully low opinion of me. Heh.)

I'm not going to go into too many details because I don't think most of you are the least bit interested in hearing my life's testimony, but I was raised by an atheist father and an agnostic mother who essentially taught me plenty of lessons about morality but always asserted that morality had nothing to do with religion, that organized religions were shams, that spirituality was just an awfully nice feeling and a scientifically explained phenomenon, and that evolution definitely happened and that life was created from molecules and particles randomly interacting over billions of years.

My father would occasionally in fact take me to a lutheran church in town just so that we could discuss afterwards just how ludicrous all the concepts were. It was fun, but it somewhat limited the nature of my friendships, seeing as a lot of kids I knew from that lutheran church in school really took an avid disliking to me. In middle school in particular I was that annoying kid who constantly used science and sarcasm in tandem to decry everyone's concept of faith.

That changed a couple of depressions later, but it wasn't an instant fix process. It wasn't like after my first profoundly spiritual experience with God I jumped up and said "all right, I'm a born-again Christian, hand me a Bible and let's start prayin!" Nah. For about four months after my first profound spiritual experience of that nature I resisted the allure of religion and became more antagonistic towards my friends of all faiths.

When I first became active in the Christian fellowship in college that eventually came to define much of my walks with the Lord I actually joined to discredit them. The first time I opened the Bible I purchased I did so because I realized I needed to be knowledgable on the subject matter in order to disprove its contents. I had made a few friends in the fellowship and one in particular was a guy I just liked a lot. We hung out often and we bonded a bit. But at first my impulsive reaction was that I wanted to save him from his flawed beliefs in the church. I thought I was doing him the favor.

And although the intensity of subsequent spiritual experiences seemed to grow dramatically, there really wasn't a single definitive moment I can point to and say "A-ha! That's when I became a Christian." My worldview definitively changed, that's certainly true. But there was a month in there that I was actually intensively studying Islam in a course I was taking (after September 11, those courses were very popular) and I probably briefly went through a time where I found Islam even more appealing than Christianity (and I'm not talking like crazy fundamentalist Islam, I'm talking the more authoritative variation that's actually based on the compartively tolerant and peaceful claims throughout much of the Koran/Qur'an.)

I also went through a few weeks where I called myself a Christian to my Christian friends and acted born-again around them but continued to act like my atheist self in conversations with my family, and I was legitimately torn in both directions.

If anything I always wanted to be an atheist more. My father was an atheist and I've always felt a strong bond with him. More importantly at the time given I was a college student, the girl I had a crush on in 2004 and 2005...one of the most beautiful girls I've ever fallen for...was not a Christian. At all. My professors were not born-again Christians.

I mean from every standpoint of rationality choosing to become a Christian was a step back. I wasn't one of those cases where there were appealing reasons involving all my friendships and my family and society at large for me to "fake" becoming a Christian. It wasn't a predominantly social desicion for me, though I was ultimately accepted by the college fellowship I became a part of and I did have good times with my friends there. But, I lost my chance with that girl, who I'll never forget, when I became a Christian. My father and I are still at odds and our relationship briefly fell apart (it's since been partially restored, but hell, that took more than two years.) My mother's mother (grandma) essentially threatened to disown me because one of her sons (my uncle) became a born-again believer (in a fudamentalist sect that really doesn't represent anything like mainstream evangelical protestantism) and he subsequently disappeared entirely from her life. I've refused to disappear from grandma's life, but she's convinced I'm going to start claiming the world's going to end or I'm going to start aggressively attempting to convert everyone I know.

All I'm saying is, it wasn't easy. It wasn't a fun-filled desicion that I just merrily made one day as I was lazily skipping to class. It wasn't a desicion I made without having done a ton of reading and research into atheist and Christian literature (and to this day I still read atheist literature to test my faith from time to time, like "Letter to a Christian Nation," by Sam Harris, which I enjoyed but respectfully disagreed with.) It wasn't a desicion my parents agreed with nor even a desicion they respected. For that matter, it wasn't as if the fellowship I joined answered all my social problems or resolved all my spiritual issues. There are specific beliefs my fellowship holds that I personally disagree with and there are Christian tenets I'm not entirely convinced of, even though I agree with the Christian "essentials" so to speak. (Jesus was Son of God, the Bible was inerrantly inspired by God, God is benevolent, Jesus was sacrificed to redeem our sins and he was resurrected on the third day, etc.)

I mean is there any way I can successfully convince you that I'm not a lazy spiritually hollow person? Or am I just wasting both our times?

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I just want to endorse what Solid Snake says.
A lot of the time Christains and religious people in general are seen as backward, using religion as a crutch to avoid embracing the miracles of science.
Well my parents are staunch atheists and that's how I was raised. I am a scientist, working in microchemistry and rather specifically the evolution of life. Surely such a study has furthered my atheism. Precisely the opposite. As I have done more research into both biological evolution and quantum theories of universal creation the very massive holes and limits to our own knowledge has become very clear to me.
Some things can be explained by science and logic but some simply cannot.

[Mesden]

Science and logic tend to have this habit of finding out more things they couldn't previously explain as times goes on. While the same is opposite of infallible texts of any kind that can't explain things that science disproves.

[Odjn]

Things that were inexplicable one thousand years ago can be explained today.

Who knows what we can explain a thousand years from now?

[Sithdarth]

I don't know if there are really things that can never be explained. It seems every generation of scientist/theologians/philosophers say that about something and the next generation goes ahead and explains it.

Even now M-theory shows extreme promise in explaining a lot of things about the beginning of our Universe. Its also poised to answer questions about black holes and gravity by reconciling Relativity and Quantum Mechanics for the first time.