Elok & C0ckney's religion and society thread.

[kentonio]

Now don't get me wrong.
I've been to the islands on vacations.
americans are great. polite, eager to learn, humbled, feet firmly grounded.
I have never met an american i want to punch. (even those from washington)


english, they are the scum of the earth. repressed little jackasses.

french are great , german too.

too bad EVERYONE hates them

Yeah, you can certainly judge a nation of people after meeting a few of them. Dickhole.

[The Mad Monk]

The legacy of Queen Victoria lives on

[Bereta_Eder]

actually i havent met any of them

[Bereta_Eder]

listen, in all honesty that was all about telling you how much i really liked you.
that is none
not kentonio i like him,
the rest of americans though, yeah can get hit by an earthquake.
the quality of a paper bag.

[kentonio]

listen, in all honesty that was all about telling you how much i really liked you.
that is none
not kentonio i like him,
the rest of americans though, yeah can get hit by an earthquake.
the quality of a paper bag.

I'm not American, I'm English. You know, the scum of the earth repressed little jackasses you were talking about.

[Bereta_Eder]

oops, yes i know.

oh well, must have drunk quite a bit last night my head is all dizzy. coming back is the hardest thing...


sorry about the repressed thing. personally i havent seen any english. where i go there are always only german and french people, dont know why and they are very well behaved. probably the english would be too but you only learn about them from the news and in a bad light

[Bereta_Eder]

cant shake off that dizzy head btw

[kentonio]

oops, yes i know.

oh well, must have drunk quite a bit last night my head is all dizzy. coming back is the hardest thing...


sorry about the repressed thing. personally i havent seen any english. where i go there are always only german and french people, dont know why and they are very well behaved. probably the english would be too but you only learn about them from the news and in a bad light

The English are usually the loud drunk ones looking for a kebab and an open bar.

[Elok]

Elok: agreed that Christianity is in for a pounding in the states in the short/medium term but I'm not so sure it's in for a resurgence in the longer term. You're right then when ****s gets bad people are going to want something that helps them deal with feeling that their life is out of their control, but I'm not so sure that's going to be religion. Perhaps it'll be something a lot more amorphous and freelance than something that really looks like a religion. Look at all of the various ideas that are bubbling up and getting called "alternative" and how quickly they can spread without really being connected to an organized belief in God.

Example? Are you talking about New Age stuff--crystals, chakras, astral projection, reincarnation, etc.? Those have been with us a long time. They appeal to something quite different from the religious impulse in human beings IMO. Their disorganization would make them ineffectual as a social "rallying point." And if they organized, they would basically become a religion. Just a very different sort of religion. But I'm not sure what exactly you mean.

(thanks for being the one person who actually responded seriously, a scabrous pox on the rest of you)

[C0ckney]

firstly elok i'd like to thank you for starting this thread, there are a number of things i wish to address here and i'll try to get to as many as i can today.

Because I felt like rescuing this discussion from the gay bakery thread before it vanished into the arguing-with-BK abyss.

It's complicated. My opinion does shift back and forth depending on whether my mood is "morbid" or "very morbid" at the moment, but I think it's basically a matter of short term versus long term. Short term, Christianity is in for a pounding, yes. But I do think this is partly the consequences of the diabolical bargain of the Religious Right playing out. Also, at some point following the sexual revolution, Christians made the prim decision to largely cut themselves off from the broader culture, so that there's now a sort of Christian bubble completely isolating us and we have no real voice in society. All this will have to play out, and I don't know how long it will take. I do believe that, at the end of it, we will be quite leery of future entanglements with Leviathan.

i think the way you present this is interesting. although i can't comment too much on the american situation, i can say that in europe the churches do have a voice, it's just that few, and ever fewer, people really listen to it. it also depends on the subject being discussed, if it's poverty and social justice, people will listen, if it's homosexuality, most people's eyes glaze over (there are some exceptions to this and religious organisations can get people out on to the streets in some places).

on a slightly different note, americans in general seem quite suspicious of atheists and atheism. here's a poll showing that nearly half of americans wouldn't vote for an atheist as president no matter what his or her other qualifications were.

Shortly after that conversation, I read God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis. It's a collection of essays; in one of them, entitled "Meditation on the Third Commandment," he considers the question of a "Christian Party," and manages to inadvertently but quite accurately predict what happened here: political Christians weren't a big enough bloc to wield influence by themselves, so they allied with another group, compromising their principles along the way. Corruption, disgust and disillusionment set in, and since the GOP identified itself so strongly with Christianity, it took Christianity down along with it. Lewis came to the same conclusion I had before I read the essay: we need to keep politicians at arm's length, and make them court our votes. I think religion took longer to wither over here in part because we have no established church. It needs to stay that way.

i would attribute the decline in europe to a number of things, 19th century philosophy, especially the german variety, which for some reason had less of an effect across the atlantic; scientific discovery and progress, which demystified the world and made miracles untenable; the early development of a hereditary proletariat in europe (engels talked about this quite a lot, i can go into more detail if necessary); curiously, the acceptance of the philosophical criticisms made in 19th century, by mainstream protestant churches (as strauss predicted) fatally weakened them, to the point that many of their own clergy didn't and don't really believe in god. there was also a lot of variation throughout europe. even today you have countries which are very religious and where religious institutions have a lot of influence, and countries where religion is practically absent.

As to why it did wither, I don't believe it has to do with people getting more "rational," or putting more faith in science, or what-have-you. Almost all current arguments against God have been around since Classical times. Yes, unbelief is correlated with level of education, but I believe this is because level of education is correlated with prosperity. People stop praying when they stop believing, but also when they don't feel they have much left to pray for; as the Good Book tells us, a soft, settled existence is quite inimical to religious faith.

i disgaree with the first part here (see above), although i think the second half is broadly true.

The Western world has had more than fifty years without a major war, and epidemics and famines have ceased. We would be fools to expect that to last. Climate science indicates it almost certainly won't, and if that doesn't do it, we're also looking at a world where the U.S. is no longer willing or able to play world nanny. Conflicts are springing up all over the place. I don't believe we can keep it all down. When the **** hits the fan, I expect either a resurgence of religiosity or a sudden enthusiasm for charismatic dictators. I'm not quite pessimistic enough to expect the latter.

i disagree here. 65 years of MAD has shown that wars (excepting proxy wars) between great powers don't happen, because one such war would literally destroy the world, and no one is that crazy. what we see in the west are the secondary effects of war, refugees, terrorism etc.

it's an interesting point you make about war being a prelude to a religious revival. i'm not so sure; in the 20th century mass movements tended to take either a nationalist or a socialist form, rather than a religious one.

To speak of the U.S. in particular: religious affiliation is way down among my generation. Partly this goes along with what I've already said about material comfort--we've prolonged adolescence to a ludicrous extent (Lord knows I did). Even so, most of the much-ballyhooed "Nones" are not atheists; they tend to be spiritual-but-not-religious. I don't think that's a long-term stable state for most people. Some may become hard atheists, some may go back to traditional religion, some may organize their spirituality to make whole new religions. Hard to say how many will go where.

could you explain a little further what you mean here? i don't see why a vague belief in a higher power of some kind is an unstable state; its very vagueness surely makes it adaptable and malleable, and thus durable.

[Dr Strangelove]

Meh, religion declines because religion behaves badly. The effect is more prominent in Europe because there was a long history of government and religion having a formal relationship. The bad behavior of governments which for so long played the "God card" undermined the respect for the churches associated with them. That's beginning to have an effect here in the US too.

[C0ckney]

i don't think that view really stands up to much scrutiny.

[Sava]

paiktis

[Felch]

Why can't spiritual Christianity be stable in the long-term? What makes you think it has to lead some back to dogmatic religion, and others to atheism?

WTF is "spiritual Christianity?" Is that the kind where you claim to be a Christian, but actually aren't?

[Imran Siddiqui]

WTF is "spiritual Christianity?" Is that the kind where you claim to be a Christian, but actually aren't?

Basically, I think. Kind of spiritual, but not religious or Deism with a Christian bent, with a but I really like that Jesus dude and think he was cool. Oh, and he may have died and been resurrected, but God loves us regardless.