When will religion die out or become irrelevant?

Religion will be part of the human experience so long as we are born and die.

 

Do you watch Fox News? They use the term "homicide bomber."

This is newspeak. You, and Fox News, use a non-descriptive term because it fits your political agenda.

What if a person straps a bomb to himself and walks into a crowd -- the bomb detonates, but it doesn't kill anyone but the bomber. Would you still call this a "murderer bomber." Fox has already demostrated that they WILL call such a person a "homicide bomber."

The fact that people are willing to blow themselves up in order to plant a bomb is significant. But some people don't want us to consider (or even be aware of that fact.) Sorry, Ian, but ignoring it and pretending that it doesn't exist is not going to make it go away.

 

Historically, on many occasions have self proclaimed holy men performed non-holy deeds, e.g., Spanish Inquisition, crusades, and in all major religons I suspect, like the Islamic terrorists

 

Excellent. I love to hear Christians explain how the Inquistion, the crusades, etc. were not what Christianity is about. It's so funny, particularly given that we are currently embarked on a crusade that was personally endorsed by Jesus (unless Bush is lying.)

 

That's funny, but how's this: in my parish yesterday at Mass we observed the solemnity of SS. Girolamo Savonarola and Jan Hus, martyrs (murdered by the inquisition).
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Carl: If you're gonna invoke Lutheranism, here is a quite well-meant suggestion. You tend to be Marcionite (OT=mean law, NT=nice gospel). Go read CFW Walther's Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel. It'll clear that up. No kidding. Have a nice day.


Janko Preotul

 

I thank you for the reference.... - Carl

 

I also agree with me again,

For the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will be the fulfillment of the scriptures and is the Blessed hope for all Christians!

When this glorious event happens, there won't be any need for "religion", for we will worship God Himself right in front of us.

Rich Hartel
A.A. in Theological Studies, Trinity College of the Bible (present)

 

• Posted by Rich Hartel
  For the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will be the fulfillment of the scriptures and is the Blessed hope for all Christians!
  
  When this glorious event happens, there won't be any need for "religion", for we will worship God Himself right in front of us.
  
  Rich Hartel
  A.A. in Theological Studies, Trinity College of the Bible (present)

Amen brother!!! Preach it!!! Oh, it will be a glorious day when Christ returns for His church and, best of all, eternal life is a free gift to anyone who will simply accept the Lord Jesus Christ as his Lord!!! But it takes an act of faith!!! As a Calvinist, I also believe that those who are destined to heed God's call will, indeed, do so.

• < "me again" grins wide >

 

Some form of religion will be around as long as humans are around. Unfortunately, when it comes to preserving life, the religious zealots haven't exactly been knocking the hide off the ball for the last few thousand years. I think there's a decent chance a religious war (or wars) will wipe out humanity. Maybe it has already happened.

Maybe we'd get it right in the next go round. It'd be interesting to see if religion developed in exactly the same way again. Alas, there is no way to experience more than one sample path, so we'll never really know.

Are we hard wired for religion, or are we hard wired for a fear of death, and one is a proxy for the other?

 

BLD - this is exactly my thinking. Organized religion may seem to grow or decline in human terms, but Jesus won't let Satan prevail. Not today, not tomorrow and not ever.

Regards - Andy

 

I do not have an agenda as far as I know unless it is hoping for a resolution to Western/SW Asian problems.

I made the comment because suicide is the taking of ones own life, not that of others.

 

Thanks Carl, that helps me understand you much better. I think I see where you are coming from.

Yep. Our society is polluted by Christendom's mistakes as if it were some kind of nuclear accident in the distant past. It runs deep.

Here's my basic quest in this problem. As you know, there are a ton of issues around this. Can we compare the bloodshed of modernity and Christendom? Is it possible to "save" Christendom? What should the political goals of the church be?

I hope you will be patient enough to read this post.

I think the most pressing here, especially in what I'm reading in your posts, is can a person legitimately claim to follow Christ, or enounter Christ, when it seems that there is no such "Christ" in human history? I think the way we resolve this problem will be dramatically different, based on how we want to end up. I want to end up still living in my faith, breathing my baptistic theology.

What went wrong, theologically and spiritually?

I think, first, it is important to say that modernity is just as theological as pre-modern, Middle Age times. It is just that, now, we affirm the importance of material things, the present over the past, and what the Greeks expressed philosophically as the "many" over and against the "one." Modernity threw off the heritage of the tyrannical "one" because it was platonizing and de-humanizing. When I look for modernity, I ask "where is materiality being worshipped here?" The disadvantage to this world we now have is that it lacks any moral or teleological discourse to call "good" as "good" and "beauty" as true "beauty." 9/11 was only "evil" to Bush because of the resources his world view availed to him.

I'm getting to my point.

In my opinion, modernity has allowed tyrrany to creep in behind the back door. Now we affirm particularity based on some abstract idea or principle of innate humanity, like "reason" or "freedom." This abstracts our humanity, and we are defined instead of under the tyrrany of the unversal human ideal. We are tyrranized not by "God" outside and above us but by the mechanisms we create to make peace without Christendom's God. "Reason," defined outside of Christendom's god forces us to separate our "private" beliefs from the public world of fact and truth. Islam does not like this about modernity at all. They see that they cannot separate themselves from what they believe as modernity demands. In this way, modernity can be seen as a competing religion. We aren't anything but individuals, certainly not persons. For the sake of not making waves, we are abstracted from our personal history, psychological disadvantages, our religion and our tastes. Just think, I'm not even present and I'm talking to you. I'm out in techno-space somewhere. And we call this "communication." Anyway...

The god of modernity has thrown off the transcendent, only to be replaced by the god of our unified and imminent humanity, a more insidious form of monism, in my opinion. Now that we have no reference point for peace outisde of ourselves, we need to create a totalitarian state: Stalin, Hitler, Communist China, etc. Or a more benign form of abstraction of the self in democracy, which, even though it makes great strides in affirming our humanity, does not unite people. It is a mechanism for limiting hostility by formal voting, which tyrranizes the minority. To some degree, it could be argued that the "War on Terror" is a war against cultures that resist the homogenization that modernity demands.

So I don't look at Christendom as much worse than the present. My read of this comes mostly from Colin Gunton's "The One, The Three and the Many: Essays on God, Creation and the culture of modernity."

I also think there are profound mistakes in Christendom's theology. Since we act out the view of God that we have, I think Christendom's failure was partly a failure of its model of God. In part, it was too Platonic to not be oppressive. You said this one yourself, Carl... That the "religion" of Christ has assisted in these atrocities. Augustine's request for the state's help in punishing heretics was a fateful decision--one made by a Christian Platonist. He also became the father of Christian theology, especially in the Middle Ages...

Since biblical revelation sees God fundamentally as a relationship between different persons, I look to the Christian God as a solution to our dilemma. The Trinity is the only long-standing view of God that includes more than one person getting along in the nature of one reality. I think Augustine's model of God was less affirming of the particularities of the three for the sake of the unity of God. But, by means of the Trinity, I can see the possibility of a Christian, multicultural society. If we want a peaceful, multicultural society, the Trinity is the best God model I can find on the market. All other forms of monotheism oppress. All other forms of polytheism divide and leave us in hostility, flux and chaos.

Chris

 

What?

Bill-

I agree entirely with your post-religion will always be with us in some form.

But where does your expedctation of Western ecnomic decline come from? What's the link or links in the future? (I believe you're leaving some important reasoning out.)

-Orson

 

That and the tradition of proselytization, ie, talking to people to change them. Islam lacks much history or doctrine supporting talking to evil Infidels. Besides Jesus historic example of pacificism, he called on the violent God of the New Testament and His Righteous anger. But talking and rationalizing and arguing won out.

Can any similar outsome result from
Islam? The World will be holding its breath for the next 50 years. Perhaps there are too few sources of dialectic and debate within that religious tradition?

-Orson

 

The Mutazilites gave it a pretty good shot.
Also lots of debate in Shi'a jurisprudence.
For starters, read Khadduri's "Islamic Conception of Justice" (JHUP)

 

The latter is - to these atheist's ears - an offense and confusion, collapsing reality into a stupid stereotype.

Just because Bush is Born Again and beleieves in a personal relationship with Christ does not mean that Christ talks to him about his leadserwshp decisions. Surely Bush understands the inscrutability of the Divine's intentions? One needs only to know a small subset of Christian history - eg the fate of the Pilgrims in Massechusettes - to be disabused of such simplisticism.

Are you so ill-motivatated to believe that Bush deson't even know his American history?

As Bernard Lewis acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal, when Bush used the term "Crusade" after 9/11, he was, however, not using the term cognizant of its historic original usage, but rather of its secular American usage (we are, after all, the world's oldest democracy): a "crusade" is a long-term poltical campaign (to use another term borrowed from military history but now secularized), or struggle, like prohibition or women's sufferage or the Cold War.

The Crusades were, naturally, a Catholic led counter-insurgency to Muslim conquest of already Christian Europe - but half a millenia before the Pilgrims. The apparent confusion, Lewis wrote, was unfortunate - but hardly intended. (The Crusades were'nt essentailly Christian - even this historically trained atheist knows that! But where did you get the notion that theh were?)

Who today dosen't hear of "a front coming down from Canada?" Who also confuses the statement with its origins in military history? implying a Canadian invasion of the US? Or of a "marketing campaign" and foresees all the sacrafices of industrialized warfare?

These confusions are silly to us because we are so used to peace - which is why Bush did not make the diplomatic conclusion that the term was wrong for the world to hear.

Like most American's, Bush's historical consciousness is decades, and barely a century, long . By contrast, most of the world 's is centuries and millenia.

The compulsive negative stereotyping that Democrats make of Pubbies for over half a century convinces me that their journey in the political wilderness will long continue: you can't win by reflexively underestimating your opponent!

Where do you come by such weasly perile stereotypes if not through christopobia?
The book "Christianity on Trial" can disqabuse you of these and similar errors of cultutal intolerance.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1893554155/qid=1103075523/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6630257-5213766?v=glance&s=books

-Orson

 

Oh ya. When she is a 'believer' than she can harken to 1 Timothy 2:11-15

'Let a woman learn in silence with all submission.

And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.

For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into temptation...'

According to the Bible, no woman is to be trusted to teach or have any 'authority' over a man, because how can anyone in their right mind trust a woman? It was her who lead the woman into sin!

Who doesn't want religion to come to an end, and liberate us from such nonsense!

 

In my rage I miswrote a line in my last post

'It was she who lead the world into sin'

What a disgusting thing to say! What misery this has brought upon woman for so many centuries, and continues to.

And statements such as these are regarded as the inspired word of god! Really, what sort of god do we have here? I would suggest a god of man's creation!

 

re:

Christianity is already irrelevant to most people, but I do not think religion or faith will ever disappear. It will take on new forms, and I actually think it will increase as the need for community increases.

Peace,
Daniel (btw, I'm Unitarian Universalist - one of those faiths that has taken on a new form)

 

religion and academic fraud

Not only do we face problems with religious interpretations (which is often just trying to justify each other's nonsense), but also real problems when churches have ownership of RA universitities.

I would have liked to highlight this in a separate thread but Degreeinfo seems be be inflicted with some real posting problems at present

A serious academic fraud appears to be not only perpetrated by a religious organization, but also condoned by its RA university. I refer to the Joseph Smith saga relating to the ‘Book of Abraham’ and Bingham Young University.

The story of the fraud goes like this: back in the mid 1800’s Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, ‘translated’ an Egyptian document, which we now find in the ‘Book of Abraham’ – a part of the scriptures of the Mormon church. Smith ‘translated’ the Egyptian document at a time when no one knew how to unlock the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

To cut a long story short, the Egyptian manuscript that Smith translated from went missing and was thought lost to the world until it turned up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1967. Leading scholars in the ancient Egyptian language have now examined the manuscripts and have to one accord pronounced Smith’s ‘translation’ a nonsense! The Egyptian manuscript is but a common burial account and has nothing to do with Abraham or anything contained in the ‘Book of Abraham’.

It is time that Bingham Young University, in the interests of scholarship and academic integrity, also made an academic assessment of the manuscript and the ‘Book of Abraham’. This is not an issue of religious interpretation but goes to the heart of academic integrity. If they cannot bring themselves to make such a judgement then one should place a big question mark over this institution.