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HEY GAL posted:JcDent, one of the reasons this is different for y'all might be because Pellisworth is from a region that is goddamn huge and has almost no people in it. Church might be one of the few occasions there's enough of them in one place for people to hang out. Probably. My aunt lives out on the country, and at least back when she was in her 40'ies church was the one social event in the local village, so she attended even though she is (and was) an atheist. I doubt rural Denmark is as sparsely populated as the Midwest, though.
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Sep 23, 2016 10:22
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Pellisworth posted:Yeah this is my theological problem with astrology: it assigns influence to the positioning of stars and planets. God alone can affect our lives. In a universe where the planets did affect behavior directly, in what way would that be different from the influence of gravity and other natural phenomena? Would whatever influence the planets had not ultimately stem from the God who made them? In what ways does astrology (claim to) predict behavior in a way theologically distinct from other types of prediction? Is it intrinsic to astrology In general or specific schools of astrology in particular?
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Nov 25, 2016 22:32
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@Pellisworth: So if I understood you correctly, you have 3 main objections. 1) astrology is pseudoscience, no 2) astrology implies predestination 3) astrology assigns (semi?) divine power to the plamets. Now I agree with nr. 1, so I'll skip that one. As for nr. 2, I can see how astrology *can* imply fate/predestination, which I myself consider nonsense. So let's skip that, too. I think I understand (and agree with) these objections. It's mostly nr. 3 I have trouble understanding. Have astrologers claimed that the planets and stars have intentionality behind their influence? If not, wouldn't any hypothetical influence be solely natural, like the influence of terrain or weather and such? I mean, the planets may be though to have influence, but how would such an influence be more or less godly (if that's the word) than, say, the presence or absence of rain? I mean, if someone conflates Mars-the-planet with Mars-the-person, that seems obviously unsound theology. But if not, what then?
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Nov 26, 2016 12:57
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Merry Christmas everyone, whenever and however you celebrate it  .Get well soon, Cythereal. Normally when someone talks about how Christmas has been taken over by materialism I roll my eyes. But the point about the poor children is pretty good. I admire how consistent Pope Francis is about caring for the downtrodden and the needy. It's very life-affirming .
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Dec 25, 2016 14:04
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Bel_Canto posted:I dunno, it seems straightforward to me. Most of the atheists who pull that nonsense haven't ever engaged with serious scriptural and theological study, and so they read religious scriptures with a pretty childish hermeneutic. Many of them come from backgrounds where that kind of hermeneutic was the norm, and they project it onto any religious person. People who weren't raised as literalists tend to be much more chill. I agree with the first part of this sentiment, but would argue that atheists from non-religious backgrounds, myself included, can also fall into the trap of overly literal interpretation. IME this is because the most newsworthy people are the outrageous ones. For religious people that's stuff like YE creationists and other biblical literalists. In the absence of contact with religious intellectual traditions, it becomes easy to assume that literal interpretations are the typical ones. Those are then the ones argued against, which leads to reasoning such as 'God as presented literally in the Bible is evil by modern standards. Abrahamic religion includes worship of said God, therefore Abrahamic religion is evil'. Which is a sad mirror of the ignorance shown by YE'ers and such. Before I came across this thread, my only exposure to religious thought was from a)the media, b)examination of religion from an anthropological perspective, and c) two Mormon missionaries I spent some time talking with back in my first year at uni. Kind people, but also quite young even compared to myself at the time. When I first started reading this thread, I had thought that religious intellectual traditions, if they existed at all, did so only in the form of people who were relatively intellectual 'for their time'. Or Alternatively intellectuals who were also religious were intellectual in spite of their religiosity, not because of it. I've learned differently since then. Mostly thanks to y'all, and the interest in attaining a greater understanding of religious traditions you've sparked in me.
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Feb 24, 2017 18:28
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... Does that make more sense in context? 
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Feb 25, 2017 07:34
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CountFosco posted:I lumped them in together in the sense that from their subjective point of view, they would lump themselves in together, i.e. Dawkins doesn't see himself necessarily as a "new atheist" but as continuing a long tradition of anti-superstitious rationalism. And that perspective is important to recognize. Please don't conflate us Atheists with the people who've convinced themselves that being agressively evangelizing and smugly self-righteous is only a vice when religious people do it. I really don't see why you think acknowledging the roots of extremists means pretending they're the same as the more moderate groups they've broken away from.
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Mar 2, 2017 07:27
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Well I, for one, like reading the stream-of-consciousness posts quite a bit, even if I rarely reply to them. So as far as I'm concerned,  .
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Mar 10, 2017 20:34
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