Can Christianity survive?

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I was still editing my post when you quoted the above that was changed before I saw your reply.Maybe I post too soon, but I sometimes am still editing until I see a reply, after which I only do things like change punctuation or spelling as needed.

I don't think I am exaggerating though. Dumbing down our children with the anti-science agenda of the fundies will definitely make America less competitive in the global economy, and making America into a Christian theocracy would go against some of the most important principles our country was founded upon. I'm sure most fundies sincerely think they are doing the right thing.

(I also notice my spelling errors and correct some of them in my posts)

I am not necessarily disagreeing with what you are saying. Every ideology has its apocalypse scenario. 'New atheists' have a quite totalitarian view at the core of their ideology, I have lost count of how many times I have heard that raising your children to be religious is equivalent to child abuse. I however would not be in any hurry to make a moral equivalence of potential threat against an actual reality that has killed many thousands of people over the past few years.

"In religion though, fundamentalism results in airplanes flying into skyscrapers. And it isn't any particular religion that is the problem; it is the fundamentalist mindset applied to any religion: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, even Buddhism. "

Have we not had for example fascist and socialist fanatics?

And history suggests that if you scrape off the top layer you will find there is a Napoleon or a Stalin using religion as a tool to motivate the kamikaze pilots, while the REAL motivation for the destruction is not the glory of God, but I want more empire.

Historians amongst us - is there real evidence that there was an increase in war and conquest with the rise of Christianity and Islam, or that there was a decrease with the rise of post-Christian materialism?

Raising one's children to be religious is one thing, trying to force and when that fails, trying to sneak one's religious views into public schools to raise everyone else's children according to one's religious views is something else.

And again, the dishonesty of those pushing this agenda offends me a lot, especially since they claim to have the moral high ground. They say evolution requires as much faith as what they believe, when we have evidence and they don't. In the past forty years there have been about a dozen major court cases involving the teaching of evolution in public schools, and not once have the creationists (or the "cdesign proponentists" ever been able to produce ANY scientific evidence that either falsifies the evolutionary position or supports their own. This is a social and religious controversy, not a scientific one. In his ruling, Judge Jones in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial referred to the "breathtaking inanity" of the anti-evolution people, and he is a conservative Judge!

[edit added]: I wrote something in another thread on WP yesterday that I think bears repeating (bold in the original):
It's bad enough that the religious right tries to legislate morality. History shows that doesn't work and usually has the opposite effect. But when they try to legislate REALITY that is so over the top that it blows my mind. It's as stupid as trying to outlaw gravity.

Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 05 Dec 2010, 12:07 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Actually, abortion was something that existed at the time, and I think the early Church fathers tended to oppose it. No opposition made it into scripture, but there is a reason why the Catholics so adamantly oppose abortion.

The real problem is that there is a tension between saying "The bible is a fallible result of its time", and "The Bible is the revelation of God". After all, God is not fallible, and not bound to the problems of a particular time.

Uniformitarian? Are you questioning the assumption of the uniformity of the laws of nature? We both know that this assumption is a very successful one in explaining the reality we see.

I am not sure where I advocated for that? The opposite occurs in many secular countries to a similar degree. In In French schools for instance I would be forbidden from wearing any article of faith that could not be hidden under clothing. The letter of the law in France for instance was only the beginning for some of the more activist teachers. The law bans clothing but the teachers in one particular school banned the Christmas tree (I am not sure how the students were going to wear that). My personal favorite example was when the teachers at a school in northern France returned 1300 boxes of St. Nicholas Day chocolates to the mayor of the town who had, in accordance with long tradition, sent them to the pupils. The reason? The chocolates’ foil wrappers had tiny crosses on them.

In my own country, Australia, preachers have been sued for testifying in the public square. If you look anywhere you will find similar examples of violations of religious freedom. Another good case, the four leaders of the 'New atheists'; Dawkins, Dennet, Harris and Hitchens all deny the right to freedom of religion.

My question is this: does this also count as something else?

For someone not bound by time His Biblical proclamations seem highly temporally limited.

Actually, I still am not sure that it will negatively impact America economically. I mean, the real important place would be engineering, and ID people can still be competent engineers. Actual scientists are rare, and fundamentalism will probably not be successful enough to reduce the supply of scientists anyway.

I'll agree on the theocracy part though.

I am not saying you are in favor of forcing your religious views on other people. However, many people are, and they try devious means that seem to go against their own stated principles (lying for Jesus?) The point I'm trying to make is that whether or not raising your children to be religious could be considered a form of child abuse, it is wrong to try to force those views onto other people's children.

Fundamentalism has already done great damage to funding for researching promising areas and limiting vital progress in these areas. Other countries not so impeded will surely move ahead into rewarding areas denied US scientists.

Actually a rather high percentage of engineers hold creationist views compared to other science-related professionals. The talk origins news group and others have observed and discussed this apparent correlation many times. It even has a name, The Salem Hypothesis

Of course. God is an Engineer.

ruveyn

I suppose we can reasonably argue that fundamentalism has been politically harmful. I am not going to touch all of a political discussion though on this matter. It is obvious that I am opposed to fundamentalism, I just did not wish for an overstated notion of it being harmful.

Intriguing - the Chomskyite revolution in which Fundamentalists took over and raped Linguistics involved a lot of engineering and math types who would never have been close to pre-TG Linguistics.

I need to think aboy that.

we are in the age of pisces which started in 0 AD the year jesus was born and it will end in the year 2150AD ushering in the Age of Aquarius and priests will be replaced by scientists. you can see evidence of this by seeing that religion is declining and will continue until 2150 AD when Aquarius dawns Aquarius literally means water bearer during The Last Supper the Twelve Disciples(12 Signs of the Zodiac) ask jesus where they should prepare for the next Passover(Spring Equinox) This would be their first Passover without jesus because jesus(Aries the Lamb) was soon to be arrested and then crucified (on the Celestial Equator and the Ecliptic) so, symbolically speaking, the Disciples are asking where they should prepare for the next Passover in the next Age....the Age after jesus(Aquarius) jesus, speaking in parables, tells them (Luke 22:10) that when they enter the city, they will meet a man bearing a pitcher of water; they were to follow him into the house that he enters. that "man" was Aquarius, The Water Bearer and we are all about to enter into that house and it is predicted that christianity, all religions, will die ushering in the age of science as well and this is shown with increasing humanism beliefs and declining religious beliefs and it will continue until 2150 AD a time close approaching