Christian minister who gets reality

Post Reply New Topic

...Admits that today's church needs to stop teaching children fantasy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0OURWGg2Ok#t=827[/youtube]

Funny, he makes up his own subjective morality and tells people to stop believing in things with no evidence !

I would say your interpretation is subjective. Don't shoot the messenger. He is an ordained minister.

Sure, but ... his ideas are philosophical, and by nature are absent of evidence:

-"prejudice is wrong",
-"misogyny is wrong"
-"accept responsibility",
-"one should apologize",
-"delay gratification",
-"dedication to truth" ,
-"balance in life"
-"dont invade foreign lands"

Then he asserts that one should not "believe in anything you don't have evidence for". This is comical because his philosophical beliefs don't have evidence. For example, being prejudice may actually make you less likely a victim of a race hate crime, so in that sense, it pays to be prejudice.

I would stand up and point this out to him if I was there. I have done similar to college professors.

It's surely a step up from the fire and brimstone churches and has a nice message but while progressive churches are better than the more old fashioned as far as maturity is concerned, it's still a christian church, and they still believe the same weird things I would assume. How can someone tell people to not believe anything without evidence when it's their job to preach to people?

(I get the impression that he's probably an atheist or close enough to one)

Works for me.

I give him a thumbs up.

Im surprised that he didnt get around to mentioning evolution denial (ie "Young Earth Creationism"), the most important form of the willful ignorance that he is talking about.

It is curious that a Christian minister talks about the Buddhist "Eight Fold Path", in a sermon but does not mention Christ. I guess thats a no-no.

Cool, but the fact that his message - Intellectual Honesty 101, basically - is necessary, or even remotely controversial, is a testament to how massively screwed up things are.

You've stood up to "correct" your professors on contentious philosophical points? Probably not the best idea. Particularly if it wasn't in a philosophy course, which is about the only appropriate setting for that.

(Not trying to bully - just FYI. I've taught college; but I think anyone who's taken on a public speaking role would agree that that sort of thing is seldom useful or endearing. Shoot the professor an e-mail or speak after class, if you must.)

But more on point:

It's hardly an elementary blunder to separate or imply a separation between facts and values, or between the descriptive and normative, in the communication of ideas.

If someone makes a factual claim, e.g. in a news publication or scientific journal, then yes, that person had better have tolerably good evidence for that claim. But if someone endorses a normative principle, then matters are less straightforward. It'd be odd to ask for evidence that, e.g., we ought to have qualms with inflicting suffering. (And it wouldn't be odd for someone to doubt that assessing the "evidence" for such principles is an ordinary empirical task, even in principle. To loosely paraphrase G.E. Moore, it isn't clear that, e.g., the badness of suffering is a function of our psychological misgivings with suffering, or its interference with survival and species-propagation, or its being legally forbidden in many cases, and so on.)

One might even suspect that normative principles can have something like an axiomatic status, as in, e.g., the arithmetical proposition that every number has a successor. "Evidence" for these propositions seems both unnecessary and impossible, but it still might be worth our while just to assume them, for the sake of having something to agree on as a standard starting point for logical explorations - for teasing out our axioms' unobvious individual and joint implications, in a principled fashion.

(To make matters even trickier, we seem to employ normative principles in the very task of choosing between competing factual descriptions! For instance, there's the principle that, other things being equal, the "simpler" theory is preferable - what evidence could there possibly be for this?)

Now, I'm not saying any of this is definitely correct. I'm just suggesting that this is murky and difficult territory, with plenty of room for intelligent disagreement. It's also beside the point; clearly, for practical purposes, we can have ethical discussions without settling in advance our metaethics - or even attempting to do so. The minister in the video has nothing to be embarrassed about.