zach
Member
I remember a conversation I had with a christian shortly after my deconversion, wherein every time I used a word like "ministry" in a secular context, he jumped on me for using religious terminology.
That's one of the issues that brought this up in my mind in the first place. My language has been heavily influenced by my old beliefs, so I started wondering to what degree I was able to hold onto my pre-conversion culture (I guess is the term) and to what degree I must reject them.
To be fair, there was science-esque investigation going on before Christianity, mostly by the Greeks that we know about, but also in China, almost certainly in early Rome, and likely other places. However, the fact that many of these science-esque avenues kinda petered out, or got their knowledge lost, or stratified and ossified, does mark a pretty big difference between the science that started revving up in Christendom (back when there was such a thing.)
Mark the Pilgrim
Member
With regards to the OP:
I guess the communion wafers are pretty tasty...
As Ty said, the monasteries did play a part in preserving some scientific and philosophical thought. And I suppose that the emphasis on charity was a good thing. Although I believe that even without Christianity we might have had something of that sort - whether it stemmed from other religious sources or possibly from secular sources- but I do think it was and still is an important incentive for many people. In the 17-19th Centuries, it was mainly the Churches who used to teach people how to read, so I suppose we owe them that one.
I realize that there is a disconnect between simple unbelief and cultural Atheism. My rudimentary knowledge of social behavior applies here—as I became an atheist, I began to adopt the culture of Western atheism which includes atheist mythology (narrative) and language (meaning and context to words). In my understanding, this has left a communication gap between me and my believing friends which extends beyond simple belief
I'm always curious whenever people claim there is an atheist culture. I don't want to threadjack, but is there, and can there even be one? If atheism is simply an answer to one question (i.e. Is there a God?), then how can there be an atheist culture?
There are subcultures where atheists are much less of a minority, or even a majority. These subcultures are often strongly informed by atheism as a "norm." It isn't exactly the same, but for some people it is probably close enough.
There certainly can be an atheist culture, but it wouldn't be a useful term, as culture would likely remain about 90-95% identical to now. (All statistics made up on the spot for your reading pleasure.)
Jeremiah
Member
Is it true (or partially true) that the scientific method originated in part due to Christian presuppositions about the consistency of nature? I know the Church as an institution had its part in suppressing new models of the universe. Don't belittle that point, if you will.
As JonJon mentioned the scientific method has been with us pretty much for our recorded history in one form or another. The real question is when did it become popularized and so entrenched as part of our society like it is today rather than just pockets of philosophers and mathematicians and so on. To me the event that was the real genesis of that was the invention of the printing press. The ability to more easily and cheaply share information was probably the single most important thing for setting up the Renaissance and Enlightenment times where the scientific method came to the fore. So, I think that event is far more important to the entrenchment of the scientific method than any religious or even cultural influence. The scientific method takes care of itself by virtue of producing correct results, and knowledge of that fact is thanks to the dissemination of information started by the printing press. My 2 cents anyways.
zach
Member
I'm always curious whenever people claim there is an atheist culture. I don't want to threadjack, but is there, and can there even be one? If atheism is simply an answer to one question (i.e. Is there a God?), then how can there be an atheist culture?
Not a threadjack, it's an important issue.
I don't know what other word to use other than "culture." If you have a better one feel free to suggest it. I'm describing the disconnect in terms of communication really. Some of it is simply vocabulary, as BOTL mentioned, but it also goes deeper into the idea of a church as a common meeting place, community, and the originating point of community-based ministry.
Seriously, what would church be like without a god, without worship? Like a point of contact between people, supported by donations, with the purpose of unifying people and helping the community.
I'm still in close contact with churches that are doing really good work transforming people's lives. My school has a big sub-organization that works with community development globally and locally. I just can't deny that these people have a lot of passion and are well organized. They are effective. I've read books some these people have written...one of my classes right now is mostly about poverty and if you take a pen and cross out "Jesus" it's really quite brilliant and well researched.
UrsaMinor
Member
Look at it from the flip side. Can theists be said to have a culture? They have nothing in common except their belief that there is a god (or gods). It would be difficult to lump Buddhists with Roman Catholics.
I think there can definitely be atheist cultures, but not an Atheist Culture, if you know what I mean.
WarbVIII
Member
JonJon what subcultures are you speaking of? I can't think of any.
Ursa I would suggest each faith(or even in some cases subdivisions of faith, i.e. Quakers vs Roman Catholics vs Muslims as examples) tends to have their own culture often enough to at least generalize about it. Then again most athiests still live within the culture of the faiths that brought them to atheism..so there is no atheist culture lower case or capitol letters. Either way both terms theist and atheist are to broad in this context.
kessy_athena
Member
[raises an eyebrow] Considering that you're gloating, I really think you have no business trying to tell others how to behave in a mature manner. I really would have preferred to just let this go, but since you seem to be insisting on bringing it to a point...
Firstly, I wasn't wrong, and your criticisms betray a rather shaky grasp of history. Now a little browsing at Wikipedia turns up the following religious wars:
Conflicts immediately connected with the Reformation of the 1520s to 1540s:
The German Peasants' War (1524–1525)
The battle of Kappel in Switzerland (1531)
The Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) in the Holy Roman Empire
The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) in the Low Countries
The French Wars of Religion (1562–1598)
The Thirty Years War (1618–1648), affecting the Holy Roman Empire including Habsburg Austria and Bohemia, France, Denmark and Sweden
The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), affecting England, Scotland and Ireland
Scottish Reformation and Civil Wars
English Reformation and Civil War
Irish Confederate Wars and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland
This is hardly exhaustive, and deals mainly with the wars connected to the Reformation. And honestly, the Reformation wasn't a war? The Catholic Church was not too far from a unified government of Europe at the time, and had amassed an enormous amount of power and wealth of the preceding centuries. So they were just going to sit back and do nothing while half their domain declared independence? Yeah, right.
And you may have noticed the Eighty Years' war in the list? 1568 - 1648? The one where the Low Countries revolted against Spanish rule? I think they may have been aided by some country or another - wait what's that big island just off the coast there called? Oh, right, England. I think the Spanish might possibly have tried to do something about that, like maybe sending a few ships?
On top of which, the Spanish Armada was in 1588 - 40 years after Henry VIII died. So yeah, that was all about him divorcing Catherine of Aragon. Did I mention that Philip II of Spain - the king who launched the Armada - was all of 3 years old when Henry divorced Catherine?
You are right that I was being sloppy in using the Crusades as an example of wars over who're the real Christians. It was a series of wars over who were the real monotheists. I usually tend to think of Christianity and Islam as the same religion, just with different cultural backgrounds. So my bad there.
I may not be able to rattle of a list of European wars over the last two thousand years off the top of my head, but I do have a pretty fair grasp of the basics - such as that there was a lot of blood shed over the Reformation.
In any case, this entire discussion was not about whether or not there were religious wars, it was not about the reformation, it was not about history or facts at all. It was about you and Jabster trying to play gotchya with me. I hate to break it to you, but I'm wrong all the time, and have no problem admitting it - and changing my opinions - when I am. A big part of the reason I came here in the first place was because I wanted to have my positions challenged, I wanted to find out where my thinking was weak, and I wanted to hear other points of view and hopefully learn something. If you aren't interested in that sort of discussion, fine by me, just ignore my posts. If you have a problem with me, then take it up in email. Like I said, my mail is my tag here at UF at yahoo.com But don't comb through posts looking for some little detail you think you can get me with and drag this nonsense into an otherwise nice and interesting discussion. I would really rather not have to write another post along these lines.
----------
@ Blot and Zach:
I would like to suggest that the problems that Christianity sometimes causes have more to do with how people believe things rather then what they actually believe. I think that's what really needs to be addressed, and if you just swap out some of the ideas without looking at the ideological framework, you're just going to wind up with the same old problems in another form. If all you're going to do is redecorate your altar with new stuff, really what's the point?
IMO, one of the most fundamental problems with ideological thinking is that it confuses being factually right with being morally right. The one does not get you the other, and being factually right about something does not somehow make you a superior person. When you start thinking that "We're Right, everyone else is Wrong, so we're better then everyone else," it really makes very little difference what it is you think you're right about. It's always a frighteningly short step to adding, "And therefore we are morally justified in whatever we do to other people."
Instead of trying to build a new set of beliefs to identify with, what I did instead was basically to accept that the world is however it is, regardless of what I think about it. To me, that meant that getting attached to any set of beliefs was a mistake, because inevitably they would turn out to be wrong in some way. The universe is unimaginably vast, ancient and complex, and no human has ever come close to fully comprehending it. So there are always going to be surprises.
As for the question of vocabulary, remember that words are just symbols that represent meaning, empty vessels that we fill with ideas. And the primary purpose of words is communication, to let someone else understand what you're thinking. Therefore, I would advise you to use whatever vocabulary is going to best convey what you're thinking to the person you're talking to. As for the way you personally think of things, just use whatever feels right to you, what makes the most sense to you.
Like Blot said, you have a pile of bits to build with, you should just use whichever bits work best and not worry too much about where they came from. After all, an awful lot of the bits used to build Christianity are vastly older then Christianity itself. In the old Roman Empire, often quite literally. Christians often turned pagan temples into churches, or rebuilt churches on the sites of old temples, often with the same stone. And those temples had often themselves been rebuilt from even older temples...
WarbVIII
Member
Ummm, Kessy they were right. The reformation was a movement,yes wars were spawned out of that movement, and were connected to it. That does not mean that the reformation was a war in the traditional sense of an armed conflict, it was a war of ideas and ideals which eventually caused armed conflicts, but I get your point and in this case conceptually you were correct but factually wrong in your original post about the reformation and Armada, as well as about all but one crusade if we are going to limit to conflicts about denominations of the same faith, though you are correct that all crusades were in one form or another conflicts based on religon.
blotonthelandscape
Member
@kessy, from an atheistic perspective, we have already rejected "what they believe", that is, christ died for my sins, god is a real entity, etc. Unfortunately, as christians, what we believed was intrinsically connected to everything we consciously did, and many things we did unconciously too. Our actions were justified by gods authority.
Thus when I rejected the what, I lost the foundation for my decision-making. In essence, I had to rebuild my thought processes from scratch. Even the things which were good about my beliefs had to go (at least initially), because I had no justification for it to be there. So I seek secular justification for any beliefs I have (and forming beliefs is an unavoidable element of the human condition). If those secular justifications work for things I had previously justified with faith, great! I'm not advocating getting attached to beliefs, just accepting them as a part of me, and doing my best to believe things that are true.
I do think origins of a belief are an important consideration; the "bits" that came from my christian ideology came under extra scrutiny, because I knew my natural tendency would be to confirm them.
zach
Member
Hmmm yeah, I really fucking hate this religion sometimes though. Just like, absolutely repulsed.
We had our chapel today...a thousand students being led by a couple of gospel musicians singing something like "Just be still, God will fight your battles" and so on in variation from verse to verse. Everyone singing it together. I got shivers down my spine, all of these people reciting words that don't even make sense to their own theologies.
We're such mammals. It shows in our social stupidity. Makes me wonder what *I'm* doing that is really really dumb without realizing it.
Oh yeah, cigarettes. Nevermind. Those "American Spirit" packages just get me every time.
kessy_athena
Member
@ Blot:
That must have been a really difficult process for you to go through, and I'm glad you came through it okay.
What you said does make me wonder though if it may be that it wasn't so much that you lost the basis for decision making as that you needed a new understanding of how decision making works? I tend to think that basic morality - I mean real morality, not cultural taboos - is pretty intrinsic to our nature as social animals. And a lot of the decision making process goes on in the unconscious mind, anyway.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with you that forming beliefs is unavoidable, although of course that depends a lot on the nuances of how you use the word "belief." Of course, it's necessary - or at least extremely helpful - to make certain assumptions about the world. Mainly that things will generally tend to continue to act the way they have in the past. Where I disagree is that I don't think it's always necessary to form precisely defined intellectual views on things. Accepting that a large part of the world around us is simply mysterious has worked quite well for me personally.
Besides, ultimately any set of ideas, no matter how logically rigorous or strictly defined or experimentally proven, are still just that - ideas. Ideas are mental constructs we create to represent the world around us. All knowledge and belief is fundamentally symbolic in nature, and since it is impossible for any symbol to perfectly convey all possible information about a thing without actually being that thing, that means that all knowledge and belief is fundamentally limited and imperfect. When I incorporated that realization into my thinking, my view changed and pretty much rejected the usual binary thinking of true and false, right and wrong (strictly in the factual sense, not the moral sense). It's not a question of whether an idea is right or wrong, it's a question of how well that idea corresponds to observed reality. That correspondence can take many forms and work on many different levels. And no matter how good an idea is, there will always be parts of reality it doesn't correspond to, requiring other ideas to address those things.
That's why I say that belief is a bad thing, and that you should never have anything stronger then opinions.
------
"I do think origins of a belief are an important consideration; the "bits" that came from my christian ideology came under extra scrutiny, because I knew my natural tendency would be to confirm them."
-------
That's an excellent point that hadn't occurred to me, probably because I've never had any emotional attachments to christian ideas. It's always important to keep our own biases in mind.
------
"Our actions were justified by gods authority."
------
I know what you're saying and this is slightly off the point, but I have to say that statement sent shivers down my spine. That's a frightening thing to say - that's how crimes against humanity get started.
ROFLMAO @ Ursa, that's a good one, and oh so true...
blotonthelandscape
Member
"That must have been a really difficult process for you to go through, and I'm glad you came through it okay."
It was properly scary for a little while; I felt drowned in responsibility for my actions.
"lost the basis for decision making as that you needed a new understanding of how decision making works"
Both, either, same thing so far as I can tell. Not sure the distinction is useful (unless you mistook my statement to mean biological foundations, which I didn't mean).
"That's why I say that belief is a bad thing, and that you should never have anything stronger then opinions."
I think you've basically agreed and disagreed with me at the same time. Incommensurability ftw! As far as I'm concerned, beliefs are formed on the basis of facts,opinions, ideas and assumptions. Beliefs are not necessarily irrational or stupid; it depends on the mix of ingredients. I think you're using a lot of words which essentially agree with my premise that beliefs (as I meant to imply it) are unavoidable; whether it's because we make (often useful) assumptions, form ideas congruent with our surroundings, or interpret sense data consistent with our experience, we're forming beliefs.
"I have to say that statement sent shivers down my spine"
Yes indeed. I was lucky that the bad manifestations for me were creationism and homophobia. Could've been worse. Horrible to think there are millions of people out there who think like this.
kessy_athena
Member
@ Blot:
What I was trying to ask is if we're talking about confusion over what's right and wrong, or confusion over *why* things are right or wrong? I'm guessing the latter, since I'll assume that you didn't seriously contemplate going on a rampage of theft, assault, murder, etc... In my view, the basis of morality is understanding and caring about the consequences of our actions for others, which is something I think we all have, at least to some degree.
I think we pretty much agree about beliefs, it's just a question of semantics and emphasis. In contrasting beliefs and opinions, I was talking about how strongly an idea is held. I think we should shoot for, "This is how I *think* things are," rather then, "This *is* how things are." I feel that simply exchanging one dogma for another is not making progress, even if the new dogma is more solidly grounded in facts then the old one.
blotonthelandscape
Member
re. belief, I think we're on the same page, just using slightly different languages.
re. what vs. why, I think I was trying to encompass both; that is, the meta-ethics of divine command theory exchanged for secular meta-ethical systems, and the resulting difference in actual ethical positions from applying the new system to the same problems. But yes, emphasis on the why.
@zach, funny thing happened, which gave me a sad reminder of my previous life. My wife was really ill on Thurday night, but at 5 o'clock in the morning she crawls into bed and says "I'm feeling better now. I prayed for God to take away my nausea, and he did".
I said "Really, gee, you should have done that 12 hours ago."
"I did."
"I know, I was being sarcastic."
Needless to say she threw up a couple more times after that, and still felt green later (and passed the bug onto me and our 1 year old).
I like to stay in denial about my wife's fuzzier leanings. She doesn't make it easy.
Noelle
Member
blot, you have my sympathy. Stomach viruses are miserable. A lot of my patients hope the influenza shot will ward off those as well, and are quite disappointed to learn it's a completely different virus.
I was still a god-believing Christian when I married my already-atheist husband. We were 22 when we started dating, and 24 when we married. He tried to speak to me in his young man Nietzsche-loving terms, and I found none of that appealing or interesting enough to examine my own faith. As we loved eachother and had enough other things in common to go about a harmonious married life, the topic rarely came up. As I've mentioned previously, I found church too boring and life too busy to go out of my way to attend, so that was never a point of friction for us.
I do remember one occasion where the topic did arrise. It was in the pre-kid days, about 2 years into marriage. We had 2 cats that we liked a lot. One night, one of them fell out our 3rd floor apartment window (loose screen in the middle of the night). She had no way to get back in, and was long gone by the time we realized she was missing. We searched for well over a month, with trips to the animal shelter to look at the cats and see if anyone picked her up. We were both very sad about it. I prayed and prayed, which worked about as well as not praying. One day I saw him sitting quietly and sad, and I asked him if he could go back to his old ways and believe in prayer and join me. He shook his head and said no. And at that point I did feel the divide I denied would ever matter.
12 years into marriage now, with trials more difficult than lost pets, and I never again mentioned god as something to turn to, and he never mentioned it as something to not. He knows I don't believe anymore, but we've never discussed it. A practiced taboo maybe, even if we both agree.
blotonthelandscape
Member
Thanks for that story Noelle. It's encouraging, even though I am under no delusions about the chances of my wife joining me on the dark side.
@zach, that's exactly what she was doing, but in a dehydrated, insomniacal, delusory, 5a.m. kinda way. It was funny really. She got really distressed the next day when we were taking the little one to the doctor and I refused to call and tell our parents. I didn't want to worry them over a little ol' bug, but she wanted them to pray for us. It really bothered her that they wouldn't know that they needed to petition god for us.
Don't want to give the opinion that we're a broken/unhappy marriage; sometimes the ol' religious differences rub the wrong way at the wrong time.
You must log in to post.
