Religion Ask a Christian - Continued in Part 2

[Chief]

Continued in Part Two:

https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/ask-a-christian-part-2.1295001/unread

 

[Admiral Byng]

I suppose it comes down to if you were a parent over there.. what advice to your daughter etc. go the condom way and take your chances or abstinence till marriage. Saying your going to die if you have sex would carry the more umph than you will do to hell.

People will have sex regardless of anything you tell them. It is basic human instinct. Might as well tell them how to do it safely.

 

[Boston tiger]

People will have sex regardless of anything you tell them. It is basic human instinct. Might as well tell them how to do it safely.

It's pretty grim though. If the bloke gets it wrong it's a death sentence.Women over there get married a lot younger around the 17 to 20. Its not that long a time.

 

[SBYM]

An interesting read.
It makes no mention of the lack of education the masses. Literacy was a problem for those Islamic countries. Also the availability of literature for them to read.

Like in China, Imperialism did a lot of damage to those places in the last 2-3 centuries. China had a solid 2000 years of culture & philosophy to fall back on. Even Maoist Communism is bending to the Chinese way. However, the Islamic Fundamentalist tendancies & associated violence occurs in a small percentage of the Islamic world. Mistrust of 'the west' is much more prevalent. The bulk of the violence in Islam is perpetrated by a small minority, against other Muslims.
The key is not to isolate the whole religion & the people who follow it. Blaming the majority of peaceful Muslims for that minority plays into the hands of the Fundys.
However some idiots like Abbott & Hanson are too rabid to realise this, or care about the negative consequences of it.

I'm glad you thought so, and yeah, I found myself when I stumbled across that article a few weeks ago thinking it was a bit 'thin' in places, as you've pointed out re literacy. I guess it felt like it just relied on a few specific, rather discrete examples as opposed to the broader arguments you'd expect to find in a monograph.

As he says in the article though, he was writing the book at the time he wrote that article, so I'm looking forward to seeing the developed product.

 

[SBYM]

Dear Christians,

When do you believe the rapture will occur?

It's all here;

http://www.raptureready.com

My favourite part is the bit saying the EU is the Roman Empire returned, one of the signs of the imminent rapture.

Now I understand why all those Christians voted Remain...they want the EU to hold together to bring Christ to Earth. Makes total sense.

 

[Judd2Sewell]

Dear Christians, what are thy opinions on Ken Ham and his 'new age creationist' theories?

 

[Boston tiger]

Dear Christians, what are thy opinions on Ken Ham and his 'new age creationist' theories?

Has a crazy look about him.

 

[Boston tiger]

Dear Christians, what are thy opinions on Ken Ham and his 'new age creationist' theories?

Christian fundamentalism is a very new movement. Early 20 century etc

It's fun for scientists who can be bothered to pick it apart etc but it doesn't have its roots way back before we made any significant science discoveries.

It's not like all Christians believed in a literalistic view of the Bible until carbon dating and evolution came along and then everyone got on board the science train and started to view it differently. Christians always viewed the Bible as something that gave the truth on spiritual matters not scientific matters.

As for fundamentalist they are looking for authority and since the reformation Protestant religions can only find ultimate authority in the Bible. A book complied by the church 300 years after the beginning of Christianity.
Protestants what I can gather view the Bible more like how Muslims view the Koran.

 

[madmug]

Christian fundamentalism is a very new movement. Early 20 century etc

It's fun for scientists who can be bothered to pick it apart etc but it doesn't have its roots way back before we made any significant science discoveries.

It's not like all Christians believed in a literalistic view of the Bible until carbon dating and evolution came along and then everyone got on board the science train and started to view it differently. Christians always viewed the Bible as something that gave the truth on spiritual matters not scientific matters.

As for fundamentalist they are looking for authority and since the reformation Protestant religions can only find ultimate authority in the Bible. A book complied by the church 300 years after the beginning of Christianity.
Protestants what I can gather view the Bible more like how Muslims view the Koran.

Um, Im not sure what you're saying here. Christianity has been very fundamentalist since the Catholic Church discovered the beauty of political power & its money making potential. Their approach to 'science' was to call it Heresy. Look at Copernicus, Galileo & a host of others who were persecuted. Look up the Spanish inquisition. I've no idea where you're coming from.

 

[Boston tiger]

Um, Im not sure what you're saying here. Christianity has been very fundamentalist since the Catholic Church discovered the beauty of political power & its money making potential. Their approach to 'science' was to call it Heresy. Look at Copernicus, Galileo & a host of others who were persecuted. Look up the Spanish inquisition. I've no idea where you're coming from.

Get hold of some History without an anti Catholic bias which isn't all that hard but remember we are talking about the Whore of Babylon and the Pope is the prince of darkness himself. Plenty of myths out there especially Galileo.

"In the words of J. L. Heilbron of the University of California, Berkeley, the "Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably, all other institutions." [3] This financial and social support extended also to other branches of scientific inquiry "

 

[madmug]

Get hold of some History without an anti Catholic bias which isn't all that hard but remember we are talking about the Whore of Babylon and the Pope is the prince of darkness himself. Plenty of myths out there especially Galileo.

"In the words of J. L. Heilbron of the University of California, Berkeley, the "Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and probably, all other institutions." [3] This financial and social support extended also to other branches of scientific inquiry "

Like the Tobacco industry who spent $millions studying the nature of addiction & links between smoking & cancer. They wouldn't have done it to enlighten anyone I can assure you.
Anyway, maybe you can point out to us some of the research & available publications the RCC produced in the 16th C to help their flock understand the nature of the universe?
I do note the Vatican did say Galileo was right. It took them until 1992 to do it. 359 years after they forced him to recant. RCC apologists will have to do a lot better to rewrite history.

 

[Boston tiger]

Like the Tobacco industry who spent $millions studying the nature of addiction & links between smoking & cancer. They wouldn't have done it to enlighten anyone I can assure you.
Anyway, maybe you can point out to us some of the research & available publications the RCC produced in the 16th C to help their flock understand the nature of the universe?
I do note the Vatican did say Galileo was right. It took them until 1992 to do it. 359 years after they forced him to recant. RCC apologists will have to do a lot better to rewrite history.

If you do one thing in life read this..join the enlightenment.

The award of the Templeton Prize to the retired president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, has reawakened the controversy over science and religion. I have had the pleasure of meeting Lord Rees a couple of times, including when my book God’s Philosophers (newly released in the US as The Genesis of Science) was shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize. I doubt he has welcomed the fuss over the Templeton Foundation, but neither will he be particularly perturbed by it.

Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.
Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.
That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.

But religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.
Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.
It was only during the “enlightenment” that the idea took root that Christianity had been a serious impediment to science. Voltaire and his fellow philosophes opposed the Catholic Church because of its close association with France’s absolute monarchy. Accusing clerics of holding back scientific development was a safe way to make a political point. The cudgels were later taken up by TH Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, in his struggle to free English science from any sort of clerical influence. Creationism did the rest of the job of persuading the public that Christianity and science are doomed to perpetual antagonism.
Nonetheless, today, science and religion are the two most powerful intellectual forces on the planet. Both are capable of doing enormous good, but their chances of doing so are much greater if they can work together. The award of the Templeton Prize to Lord Rees is a small step in the right direction.

 

[madmug]

What has Religion got to do with Science?

 

[chelseacarlton]

If you do one thing in life read this..join the enlightenment.

The award of the Templeton Prize to the retired president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, has reawakened the controversy over science and religion. I have had the pleasure of meeting Lord Rees a couple of times, including when my book God’s Philosophers (newly released in the US as The Genesis of Science) was shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize. I doubt he has welcomed the fuss over the Templeton Foundation, but neither will he be particularly perturbed by it.

Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.
Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.
That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.

But religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.
Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.
It was only during the “enlightenment” that the idea took root that Christianity had been a serious impediment to science. Voltaire and his fellow philosophes opposed the Catholic Church because of its close association with France’s absolute monarchy. Accusing clerics of holding back scientific development was a safe way to make a political point. The cudgels were later taken up by TH Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, in his struggle to free English science from any sort of clerical influence. Creationism did the rest of the job of persuading the public that Christianity and science are doomed to perpetual antagonism.
Nonetheless, today, science and religion are the two most powerful intellectual forces on the planet. Both are capable of doing enormous good, but their chances of doing so are much greater if they can work together. The award of the Templeton Prize to Lord Rees is a small step in the right direction.

The Scientific Endeavour does not attempt to beguile people with its interpretation of nature.
Regardless of whether you believe the church funded or encouraged the early beginnings of scientific enlightenment or not,it still remains that this endeavour was significantly restrained for centuries,by faith and dogma.
The very idea of a world without a creator deity was a very dangerous position to hold and many paid the ultimate price for this challenging stance,whether you burn them at the stake or not.

 

[M Malice]

What has Religion got to do with Science?

i would contend not much if anything although a few disagree.

 

[Gavin Excell]

What has Religion got to do with Science?

This is a very interesting question
I remember reading the famed australian scientist Paul Davies books on the universe and its creation. He ended it by saying that there remained a logical position that the perfect symmetry of the laws of mathematics denoted the hand of a higher being.

Complex and fascinating questions.

 

[chelseacarlton]

This is a very interesting question
I remember reading the famed australian scientist Paul Davies books on the universe and its creation. He ended it by saying that there remained a logical position that the perfect symmetry of the laws of mathematics denoted the hand of a higher being.

Complex and fascinating questions.

Only if you apply a cause and affect principle.
We know that changing the strong nuclear force,would greatly impact on the nature of the universe.
But what we don't know,is whether it would have not have been able to give rise to a set of laws that would have enabled a different environment for which other life could have arisen.
"The life as we know it" principle,is only the causal basis from which we can determine "our" origin.
Multiverse or Foaming Megaverse theory outlines these questions in a very specific manner.
Change the 4 forces and either life thrives or can exist as we know it,or it doesn't in ways we cannot imagine.
What appears to be fascinating in its fine tuning,is only a contention of an intelligence behind the governing of these forces.
It's an infinite regress.
Hydrogen!
Helium?

We got lucky!

 

[Gavin Excell]

Only if you apply a cause and affect principle.
We know that changing the strong nuclear force,would greatly impact on the nature of the universe.
But what we don't know,is whether it would have not have been able to give rise to a set of laws that would have enabled a different environment for which other life could have arisen.
"The life as we know it" principle,is only the causal basis from which we can determine "our" origin.
Multiverse or Foaming Megaverse theory outlines these questions in a very specific manner.
Change the 4 forces and either life thrives or can exist as we know it,or it doesn't in ways we cannot imagine.
What appears to be fascinating in its fine tuning,is only a contention of an intelligence behind the governing of these forces.
It's an infinite regress.
Hydrogen!
Helium?

We got lucky!

My mind is too feeble to understand

 

[Boston tiger]

The Scientific Endeavour does not attempt to beguile people with its interpretation of nature.
Regardless of whether you believe the church funded or encouraged the early beginnings of scientific enlightenment or not,it still remains that this endeavour was significantly restrained for centuries,by faith and dogma.
The very idea of a world without a creator deity was a very dangerous position to hold and many paid the ultimate price for this challenging stance,whether you burn them at the stake or not.

A view of the world without a creator diety would be a dangerous position but not a science position. That would be a position of faith. Science just discovers things and doesn't have an agenda. Not sure how the scientists were restrained. Philosophers may have been restrained but not scientists.
The belief that there is a creator/ diety has no effect on science today unless you are doing it wrong.

 

[chelseacarlton]

My mind is too feeble to understand

I disagree.
I think you are more than capable,as we all are,when given a rudimentary understanding of the basic principles.
I'm only a casual self educated observer,yet this still makes me always take the position of "I don't know".
My unwavering belief in the makers of "our" world as we continue to understand it,defiles my belief in an overlord of personal emphathy.
It confounds me how this observance still reigns on our planet.
Trade Money Faith
Replace one word "reason" and we have a fighting chance.

 

[chelseacarlton]

A view of the world without a creator diety would be a dangerous position but not a science position. That would be a position of faith. Science just discovers things and doesn't have an agenda. Not sure how the scientists were restrained. Philosophers may have been restrained but not scientists.
The belief that there is a creator/ diety has no effect on science today unless you are doing it wrong.

I don't accept your first premise,given that it is my belief that there is no cause.
I know that you and I share a common impasse,but you're one of the only people I admire in our polar view.
Ok,ass kissing aside,let's breakdown your first observance.
"I don't believe in the Big Bang,
Nor do I adhere to a causal affect".
I'm a Doppler man.
But,the tree still makes a sound when falling in the forest regardless of "you".
"You" are not important.
Expansion and contraction.
No Beginning ,No End.
Infinite.

 

[SBYM]

Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.

Great post overall, but this deserves highlighting.

 

[Total Power]

Great post overall, but this deserves highlighting.

You can say "great post" if it was his, everything he types is pure copy paste job, this one aint different. Directly copied from reddit and other blogs. He just likes to parrot other posters and searches google through his confirmation bias. I dont think i have read a word typed by him lol ever.

 

[SBYM]

You can "great post" if it was his, everything he types is pure copy paste job, this one aint different. Directly copied from reddit and other blogs. He just likes to parrot other posters and searches google through his confirmation bias. I dont think i have read a word typed by him lol ever.

 

[SBYM]

You can "great post" if it was his, everything he types is pure copy paste job, this one aint different. Directly copied from reddit and other blogs. He just likes to parrot other posters and searches google through his confirmation bias. I dont think i have read a word typed by him lol ever.

Point still stands but (even if the credit is due to Dr James Hannam...)...the Church was very much involved in the progression of human knowledge, up to and including the supposedly 'secular' Renaissance. The Reformation/Trent in the mid-16th was a huge shock to the RCC system, and things shifted radically thereafter towards a more cohesive, conservative understanding of the faith. Science inevitably became a sore spot.

And the point about papal egotism is particularly important. Too often the Church is painted in broad strokes, with little attention given to the major differences from one pope to the next...strong leaders, political novices, learned men, and everything in between.

 

[Boston tiger]

What has Religion got to do with Science?

Nothing but if you think more along the lines of " what has Universities got to do with Science ?"

Religion organises .. good or bad .. but it organises.