Impromptu Religious Debate on Real Time

I agree with Andrew Sullivan. Just because a person believes in angels doesn’t mean that he or she cannot make rational decisions regarding something like health care. The idea that religious people believe they are healed by spirits and don’t need health care is absurd.

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Sullivan doesn’t really counter the overriding point that faith-based reasoning is absurd on its face because it lacks any evidentiary justification. No atheist claims religious people are totally detached from reality in every way, only that in those aspects in which they choose to forgo evidence are they being ridiculous. And, naturally, many religious people forgo evidence in plenty of fields outside of religion, especially since most religious belief overlap with decidedly “real world” phenomena, as religious texts frequently step on matters of science, history, etc.

You can’t be religious and not apply that to everything without seriously ignoring the spirit of said religion. There is no room for compromise if you truly believe your immortal soul is in the balance.

Moderates are hypocrites, and, although evil, fundamentalists are practicing religion as it was meant to be practiced. This is obvious to everyone but the moderates and fundamentalists themselves…This is why we can live with religious secularists but we really have to pity them just as much as we worry about fundies…

@Samizdat

I’ve felt that way myself, but I’ve come to think that rationality and religion can coexist – it’s just that rational people don’t look too closely at their religious beliefs. I think, for the most part, this is because they don’t want to. Religion brings them comfort, it gives them a social circle, it makes them part of a bigger tradition that may be cultural as well as spiritual, and they don’t want to lose that.

The word fideist has often been used as an insult or accusation of hypocrisy in theology and philosophy, but I don’t think fideism is so bad – believing in something, despite knowing it’s irrational, because it feels good. And the difference between rational fideists and fundamentalists is that the first group is much more likely to have secular principles when it comes to politics and the second, as you say, REALLY believe their holy books and therefore can’t separate real life from religion

Sure, many moderates “know” somewhere that they’re believing in fairy tales. But they like the fairy tales and may find them useful or comforting, so they hang onto them. I don’t mind this, personally. I think that, so long as these people keep real-world facts in mind when making decisions that affect others, these people are harmless, and I don’t pity them.

SAMIZDAT: “fundamentalists are practicing religion as it was meant to be practiced.”

Um, who says how religion is “meant to be practiced”? God or the gods? But if they don’t exist, how can they inject their opinions? Consulting a religion’s holy books isn’t that helpful either when those books are neither overarching manifestos of religious belief nor internally consistent. Is there some Platonic ideal of religion to which real-world religions conform to greater or lesser degrees? There is no evidence of such a thing. Tell us, then, how do you know how a religion is meant to be practiced?

Well, some people would consider believing in God completely rational, merely for the fact that in our world something is never created from nothing. Spontaneous generation was disproved in the 19th century.

To some, it would seem that believing the universe came into exist by itself is the irrational belief.

Andrew’s last statement about dealing with religion separately than secular issues is where all people of religious belief should be. But Maher’s point still stands… most people of religion aren’t good at separating the two, especially when it comes to enacting governmental policies.

I don’t Maher attacks people that believe in some religion. He attacks their actions and how they try to apply them to everyone, religious or not.

SAMIZDAT: “If you aren’t a fundie, you’re necessarily picking and choosing”

And if you are a fundie, you are still picking and choosing, just picking and choosing different things.

Also, who appointed the holy books of a religion as being the last word on the behavior of those subscribing to the religion? If we are talking, for example, about the Christian Bible, that is, the Bible including the NT, then we are about a book that wasn’t even around in full form until after about 300 years of Christians’ existence. Furthermore, the Bible in practice isn’t always the go-to book on the behavior of Christians. For example, the NT gives just about no leeway with regard to divorce. There is an exception for adultery, and an exception in the case where a pagan spouse abandons the Christian spouse, but that’s it. The Orthodox Church, however, allows for divorce and allows for second and third remarriages. Should the Orthodox be considered inauthentic Christians because they don’t follow Martin Luther’s idea of sola scriptura, even when Luther is not recognized by them as an authority, to say the least?

SAMIZDAT: “I’d go so far as to call moderate Christians ‘fake Christians’.”

To have fake Christians, there has to be a standard by which one can judge who is a true Christian. Fidelity to the Bible, for example, isn’t a useful standard, and some of the reasons for that are mentioned above.

SAMIZDAT: “you have to take everything from a source as ‘gospel truth’ or admit that it’s not to be trusted.”

Says who? The all-or-nothing approach makes no sense. We regard all sorts of sources as being partially reliable. For example, newspapers are useful, but anyone who has seen a newspaper story on something that they know about can see that reporters get details wrong. Historians deal all the time with sources that, though useful, are biased. Why should believers not take a similar approach with their own holy books? More to the point, who are you, as a non-believer, to tell them not to?

I want to clarify one thing: I’m not arguing that ‘creation’ or the ‘source’ is FACT. My point is that it is merely more ‘rational’ for the average person to believe in a god, creator, or source for the existence of the universe than not, based on what they see around them.

Nor is this the same as saying that the Christian god is real, Allah is real, Buddha is real, no: I’m simply pointing out what is ‘rational’ for the average person to believe, based on their own observation of the world around them.

Why the hell are you arguing creation at all? That isn’t the topic being discussed, and it’s a pathetic attempt at derailing the thread into your christian nutjobbery whackaloon up-is-down nonsense.

Can the way a person views the world, magically, or scientifically, affect their other critical thinking and decision making skills?

“People can look around and view existence as it is and be led to believe that something must have ’sourced’ everything because everything else they see has a source.”

Yes, but “everything has a cause” is surely an irrational justification for positing an entity which does not have a cause.

Samizdat, I think there was a time I might have agreed with you–or maybe it was H. L. Mencken: “The only really respectable Protestants are the Fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots…”

But looking closely at the practices of various fundamentalists, they’re not really following their original faiths either. Near as I can tell, the difference between moderates and fundamentalists is which parts of scripture they choose to cherry-pick and how they read them. Moderates focus on the “love thy neighbour” part and ignore the fire and brimstone, while fundies latch on to the handful of vague passages condemning homosexuality and the…non-existant passages condemning abortion. Meanwhile, many of their filthy rich preachers ignore the 200+ passages condemning the filthy rich.

Christian fundies love to quote Leviticus, but how often do they quote from Obadiah or Haggai? Aren’t those part of the Complete Word of God(tm)? Why are they held in such less esteem by the fundies, or by Christians in general? Why are those books in the Bible if they’re not consulted regularly? This is where certain evangelicals get drawn into uncomfortable questions about early Christianity and the fact their faith splintered from the hated Catholicism, which they usually avoid with a spurious disregard for historical fact.

Fundamentalist Muslims? Are they really embracing the way the faith used to be? Back during the Golden Age of the umma when Islam strode across half the world, and Muslim scholars invented algebra in a cosmopolitan and relatively tolerant society?

And Jewish Orthodoxy is based on how many of the 613(?) Laws you uphold, but no one can uphold them all, given that about a quarter of them require use of the Temple, which was destroyed (for the second time) 2000 years ago and never rebuilt. (Someone once told me the fact that the whole Law could not be followed was the point–that man can never be as perfect as God. That sounds kind of evasive to me.)

I feel the notion that fundamentalists are “more correct” in their faith smacks of a No True Scotsman argument.