Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

People do not have to believe in G-d to be able to offer an opinion on religion.

 

It's sin.

The rule is also something I'd guess most people try to live by, oh, 90% of the time? Which might as well be zero in relation to a perfect god.

 

Agreed. But the poster found the topic "unworthy of discussion."

 

We call it sin. Non-religious folks can call it whatever they want.

 

A few thoughts:

If there is, in fact, one All-Powerful God, chances are the world is exactly the way that god wants it and anything that I might do is part of that plan. That god would have created puppies and cancer, gay folks and bigots and who or whatever I am. Any thought or action on my part would be predetermined.

Most religions have the same core values. That’s probably not a coincidence and could more probably the result of an evolving civilization as it could be the work of a supreme being.

One of the reasons that propelled Christianity was that Judaism of BC had become overwhelmingly legalistic with a priestly class that ruled the temple. Christianity disrupted the power structure and emphasized the concept of forgiveness. Another factor was that, when the Roman leadership decided to scrap their cumbersome multiple-god system for monotheism, it was not required that Christians be born into a specific tribe of chosen people. This allowed Christianity to spread through the various cultures that made up or were influenced by the Roman Empire. Islam shares traits with Christianity of seemingly being open to all tribes and the expansion through empire along with much of a common theological history.

 

Sure. But I'm a Christian, and I'm not because I'm not sure what it is, regardless of what other people call it.

There are many, many, many disputable matters in the faith. Sin's one of the few we're absolutely sure of.

 

I thought he said that G-d was not worthy of discussion, not religion. Religion has a significant impact on our lives whether we are believers or not.

 

K

 

Religion is fine, until you start using it as sword to limit/degenerate and belittle others who don't adhere to your beliefs or moral code.

Also, you - having never been to Heaven - telling me the path to Heaven and Everlasting Salvation, is akin to giving me directions to Bergoo, West Virginia. .. Unless you've been there, you don't know what the hell you are talking about.

 

Religion, spirituality, and belief are bound up in our rudimentary attempts to understand the world. It's part of what makes us human. Even if we couch our view of the world in ideas that have to pass scientific rigor, we are still answering a primal need to ask and answer questions of an etiological nature.

A few years back, I worked as a substitute teacher. When my students asked if I had a degree, (not a requirement in my county) I told them it was in anthropology and then explained what that was. The inevitable concerned parents would ask to talk to me. They were concerned I would turn their kids into baby skeptics. Maybe this was because of the evolution thing, maybe it was because I was usually called in to teach science classes.

I always told my students and their parents that science and religion answer two different sets of questions. The oversimplification is the former asks how and the latter asks who and why. That's not quite true. It's a similar set of questions for two different groups of people. Sometimes I can reconcile the two, sometimes I find it difficult. Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World" and Gerald Weismann's "The Woods Hole Cantata" have helped me untangle enough of this to choke out an, "I really don't know" Maybe that makes me agnostic. I'm not sure.

Religion, particularly when it came to ritual, gesture, narrative, and the performative aspects of practice, was central to my work as an undergraduate. I saw things I could not explain. Then again, there were incidents that made me marvel at how our beautiful brains parse reality.

tl: DR: Ahdunno.

 

1) I think it's possible for science and faith to co-exist.

2) There is no catalog of 'sin' in Buddhism. Only error or imbalance. An individual is perfectible in this life, right now, on earth, by right thinking and right acting, and one needn't/shouldn't wait to be absolved or restored to wholeness in 'heaven.'

 

Science and faith co-exist far more peaceably now than they did in the first half of the 20th century, when we nearly annihilated the planet several times in the pursuit of of perfecting weapons while thinking government, science and politics could perfect man.