10 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Though it's important to distinguish what one is told in a religious book from what one is told in a science textbook or journal or conference proceedings. These are very different sorts of telling, epistemologically.

The religious book asks certain assertions be accepted on faith. A science text asks only your attention to what is empirically supported by the data, and asks nothing of you on the basis of faith. This would seem LESS dangerous in the beliefs engendered, given they would be derived from evidence and open to revision on the basis of new evidence and/or procedural flaws exposed by peer review.

I'm reminded of Bertrand Russell quote,

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. WB Yeats.

It was ever thus. Partly because the best can see nuance.

19 hours ago, dimreepr said:

m not sure why, yet history is replete with examples of the 'so called' sheeple being exploited

If your life is not that great then any port in a storm. There is a reason why ex drug addicts and alcoholics find Jesus, and not because they decided to study scripture.

Why did people buy into Trump? They believed his stories because they want a better life.

Without being too blunt about it, I think lack of political, economic, awareness plays a part.

5 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

Why did people buy into Trump? They believed his stories because they want a better life.

Exactly, they're not content with the life they already have.

5 hours ago, pinball1970 said:

Without being too blunt about it, I think lack of political, economic, awareness plays a part.

I think the biggest part, is believing the news that tomorrow has the potential, every day, to be disaterous; if only we had the ability to not watch or care what it says.

Imagine the war's we could avoid...

Nietsche called it the slave morality

But I think his argument fails, bc the master morality can only flourish by disrupting the slave mentality.

IOW fear of tomorrow.

18 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I think the biggest part, is believing the news that tomorrow has the potential, every day, to be disaterous

People also like scapegoats, someone to blame. Trump convinced the American voters that Mexicans were causing the downfall of American society first time round.

The right wing UK press want to demonise immigrants and Labour are suffering as a result, it is working.

Strange mentality coming from a country built on immigrants.

I have a ethnic Pakistani friend who tells me he no longer feels welcome here and he would leave if he could afford it.

it is pretty backward where I live, quite racist, except when they are getting cabs, getting takeaway or going to the hospital.

"I'm not racist but...."

23 minutes ago, pinball1970 said:

Strange mentality coming from a country built on immigrants.

The irony is palpable...

2 hours ago, dimreepr said:

Imagine the war's we could avoid...

Nietsche called it the slave morality

+1 for that. Avoiding war.

Although my knowledge of philosophy is poor.

22 hours ago, studiot said:

Why would I hate it ?

Sorry, I didn't mean you specifically, I meant the reader. The collective. Royal. It has been my experience that when I post that video the unbelievers don't respond well to it. I think maybe because they tend to be liberal and don't care for Peterson.

22 hours ago, studiot said:

I don't agree with it, but that is another discussion.

Okay. It's an interesting one. God doesn't have to exist to have influenced the building of cultures.

22 hours ago, studiot said:

Perhaps the speaker has never done any marine biology or read Stafford Beer.

That I do not know.

21 hours ago, exchemist said:

Yes, quite, the gospels are not agitprop.

All art is propaganda they say.

21 hours ago, exchemist said:

OK so you are referring to evangelical New Atheists on the one hand and fundie Christians (or Muslims or Jews, actually) on the other?

I think you've said that before? Someone said something like that. I don't really think in those terms. My interest is specifically in Bible study and I'm only introduced to things like New Atheism through discussions like this. I was talking about the discussions I've had with what I call "militant fundamentalist atheists" and "Nationalistic Apostate Christians." They're just people like you and me. I use words to describe their philosophies as I understand them to have been presented to me.

21 hours ago, exchemist said:

Yes, of course they are fighting one another. I also agree it could indeed be seen as a sociopolitical fight, in that both camps want to mould society according to their worldviews. While this is nakedly obvious on the part of the Religious Right in the USA, it is less so for the New Atheists. But I found this article on the topic of the political dimension to New (evangelical) Atheism:

I don't know if it's the same on your end but I only get an empty generic image placeholder with the file name faithless.pdf then a big blank space. I tried highlighting it (C, C & P) and that didn't work.

21 hours ago, exchemist said:

I thought it was quite interesting, though it was written in 2013 and my feeling is the New Atheism movement has grown weaker since that time. There is little doubt from reading this that the New Atheists have, or had, political goals. What I wonder now, though, is whether this crusade has gone anywhere. I see a lot less about it than a decade ago. I wonder if this may be linked to the failure of the Intelligent Design movement, which I know exercised people like Dawkins greatly.

By the way, and a bit off the subject, I was also struck by the description of how the New Atheists see religion: "Tied to this is a view of religion as propositional, as a set of truth claims about the nature of reality that is to be treated as a scientific hypothesis and duly weighed against the available evidence. As such, new atheists maintain that since no evidence of this kind that can withstand scrutiny has ever been produced, the claims made by religion must therefore be rejected as false."

I wonder what claims those would be.

21 hours ago, exchemist said:

It seems to me this is a bit shallow, ignoring as it does the often profound value of religion in people's lives as a guide, a coping mechanism, a source of tradition, identity, the aesthetic (architectural, visual, musical, literary), shared ritual and community. But that's possibly a different subject.

I think the atheistic people I've talked to over the last 30 years tend to see religion in the limited Abrahamic sense. They seem oblivious to atheistic religions like Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, etc.

23 hours ago, Pathway Machine said:

The atheist believe that God doesn't exist

Some do, some don't.

42 minutes ago, Pathway Machine said:

Sorry, I didn't mean you specifically, I meant the reader. The collective. Royal. It has been my experience that when I post that video the unbelievers don't respond well to it. I think maybe because they tend to be liberal and don't care for Peterson.

Okay. It's an interesting one. God doesn't have to exist to have influenced the building of cultures.

That I do not know.

All art is propaganda they say.

I think you've said that before? Someone said something like that. I don't really think in those terms. My interest is specifically in Bible study and I'm only introduced to things like New Atheism through discussions like this. I was talking about the discussions I've had with what I call "militant fundamentalist atheists" and "Nationalistic Apostate Christians." They're just people like you and me. I use words to describe their philosophies as I understand them to have been presented to me.

I don't know if it's the same on your end but I only get an empty generic image placeholder with the file name faithless.pdf then a big blank space. I tried highlighting it (C, C & P) and that didn't work.

I wonder what claims those would be.

I think the atheistic people I've talked to over the last 30 years tend to see religion in the limited Abrahamic sense. They seem oblivious to atheistic religions like Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, etc.

OK here is the web link to the paper I referenced: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/kettell/cloud/faithless.pdf.

Hope you can open this. It's quite readable, unlike so many academic papers.

(As for all art being propaganda, I think that's baloney, but then I like Bach, whose instrumental music is abstract. But in any case I was talking about the gospels not being agitprop, so unless you are describing them as art I wouldn't think the aphorism applies.)

My biggest problem with religions is when the practitioners want impose their own beliefs (which almost none of them follow 100% of the time, anyway) on others.

6 hours ago, npts2020 said:

My biggest problem with religions is when the practitioners want impose their own beliefs (which almost none of them follow 100% of the time, anyway) on others.

Sound's more like a politician, not every priest/religious teacher wants to impose anything or fails to follow their chosen moral code; I'll bet the politicos get much closer to 100% bc political morality is very fluid/ambiguous/optional and is mostly for others...

7 hours ago, npts2020 said:

My biggest problem with religions is when the practitioners want impose their own beliefs (which almost none of them follow 100% of the time, anyway) on others.

I agree that practicve has defoinitely crossed the line.

9 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Sound's more like a politician, not every priest/religious teacher wants to impose anything or fails to follow their chosen moral code; I'll bet the politicos get much closer to 100% bc political morality is very fluid/ambiguous/optional and is mostly for others...

We are meant to be discussing extremism here, not benign exceptions.

1 minute ago, studiot said:

I agree that practicve has defoinitely crossed the line.

We are meant to be discussing extremism here, not benign exceptions.

But the title "is extremism the default for faith" I'm saying it's not and that extremism is born of the politicos and their faith is used against them to achieve a jihad et al.

It reminds me of that WW1 poster "your country needs you" and conscription in WW2.

20 hours ago, Pathway Machine said:

It has been my experience that when I post that video the unbelievers don't respond well to it.

I find the term 'unbeliever' to be perjorative.

55 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

Sound's more like a politician, not every priest/religious teacher wants to impose anything or fails to follow their chosen moral code; I'll bet the politicos get much closer to 100% bc political morality is very fluid/ambiguous/optional and is mostly for others...

I suppose. That is, if you want to call televangelists, anti-abortionists Christian nationalists and the like---politicians.