Do you think the folk that need some ‘tolerance and understanding’ are likely to go?

Very possibly. Not the EDL and NF mob obviously.

I guess there are plenty of people, particularity the older generations, who have never had much interaction with other cultures and religions, who are ignorant of Islam but basically decent people, who could gain a lot.

(THM I presume you don’t. And your use was merely a turn of phase)

I was extracting Michael from the absurdity of the thread

Still, got the mini’s booked in to watch Woppit do his party trick. I hope it doesnt hurt

(or is that virtue signalling)

No because you are actually doing something, not just tweeting your support.

I can unequivocally assure you that mainstream Christianity does not declare such stories to be literally true, never mind evolution and the age of the earth/universe.

Which branch of Christianity?

So everything in the bible isn’t literal or true then? Even if you don’t literally believe everything in the bible, the big one, a belief In a god only requires faith with no evidence required and faith is the suspension of critical thinking.

It’s funny how church’s change their teachings according to public opinion and fact.

So a religion that is getting bad press at the minute is opening its doors to try and build relations.

That was my take on it too.

I think there’s a mosque down in Portsmouth, but I wouldn’t drive into Portsmouth to visit a mountain bike shop, let alone a mosque.

Portsmouthist. 😉

Too right

It’s funny how church’s change their teachings according to public opinion and fact.

Only if you miss the point. Religion evolves, like everything else.

Which branch of Christianity?

So everything in the bible isn’t literal or true then? Even if you don’t literally believe everything in the bible, the big one, a belief In a god only requires faith with no evidence required and faith is the suspension of critical thinking.

It’s funny how church’s change their teachings according to public opinion and fact.

1. I said mainstream Christianity. That would be Orthodox, RC, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Reformed, Methodist, and even some evangelical communities such as certain Baptist, Mennonite, and other groups. Each of these Churches will also include their more fundamentalist types, but that brings me back to one of my original comments: that ALL gatherings of human beings have their fundamentalist types.

2. That is correct. Christians do not believe that everything in the Bible is literally true. As stated many times before: the Bible is made up of many books representing many different genres of writing. Each of these genres is read differently. Think of the Bible as more of a library than a single volume. You don’t go into your local library and assume every book in their should be read in exactly the same way, do you?

3. Faith is NOT a suspension of critical thinking. It is an entirely different, and philosophically legitimate, epistemological category. It is true to say that it believes a premise without ‘evidence’, but it does not follow to say that it is therefore the suspension of critical thinking.

4. Churches don’t change their teachings ‘according to public opinion and fact’. The central tenets of the Christian religion took at least four, and up to eight centuries to articulate, and these are accepted by all Christian Churches. Other, peripheral, questions have always been open to debate.

I’m a scientist too and I disagree. Just because something is intangible doesn’t mean it is not real……………

if there is no evidence to suggest the something is real then yes its not currently real. There is no evidence at all to suggest a god(s) are real at this current time. There isn’t even a cohesive hypothesis to suggest there could be god either like there was with the higgs boson.

oh and Time travel is possible

Think of the Bible as more of a library than a single volume. You don’t go into your local library and assume every book in their should be read in exactly the same way, do you?

when the book in question is considered factual and true then yes.

3. Faith is NOT a suspension of critical thinking. It is an entirely different, and philosophically legitimate, epistemological category. It is true to say that it believes a premise without ‘evidence’, but it does not follow to say that it is therefore the suspension of critical thinking.

you clearly don’t understand what critical thinking means.

4. Churches don’t change their teachings ‘according to public opinion and fact’. The central tenets of the Christian religion took at least four, and up to eight centuries to articulate, and these are accepted by all Christian Churches. Other, peripheral, questions have always been open to debate

erm slavery, homosexuality (some branches), woman priests (some branches). point one and two also fall under this category.

you clearly don’t understand what critical thinking means.

Um, I think you’ll find I do.

erm slavery, homosexuality (some branches), woman priests (some branches).

Other, peripheral, questions have always been open to debate

Faith is NOT a suspension of critical thinking. It is an entirely different, and philosophically legitimate, epistemological category.

Is it possible to think critically about a novel? Something that’s entirely made up?

There is no evidence at all to suggest a god(s) are real at this current time.

Again, this isn’t really the point. There’s no evidence to suggest that there isn’t a God, and I can’t see how that could be conclusively proved. You may be able to prove that God is not like the bible says it is, but that’s a different thing.

Given that it is impossible to prove the existence or otherwise of any kind of God, it is therefore absolutely a matter of faith. It cannot really be anything else, can it?

I can unequivocally assure you that mainstream Christianity does not declare such stories to be literally true, never mind evolution and the age of the earth/universe.

hmm… as a member of a christian family, ex-CoE school (very big into the churchy bit) pupil, ex-CoE sunday service attender (every damn week, even had to go to local churches on holiday) and fairly often dragged to faith weekends, I remember it differently.

They kinda steered away from the flood after the sunday school years but it was preached to the kids as true and never retracted later. The first time I heard “well that bits allegorical” was after deciding it was all cobblers and questioning it.

<Edit> actually thinking back I seem to remember a chat with an affable chap who was running the (faith based obviously) holiday our youth group was on, I was getting disillusioned and questioning a lot, he did a decent job of fielding a lot of them, reckon he probably did talk about the “not literal” aspect. But that’s half my point, it was only through questioning that I got a “ok, well maybe not strictly true” if I hadn’t questioned…

I remember it differently.

So here’s the thing. We can chinwag on here about why someone’s car might not be working, but when a professinoal mechanic turns up, we listen to their opinion, cos they do it for a living, right? When someone asks if expensive oil is worth it, people come along with stuff they’ve read or what dave down the pub said, but then a lubricant engineer comes on and sets us straight. We love it when an expert turns up to provide proper sound information to us interested amateurs. We think it’s a great thing about STW.

This is the same situation. You may or may not believe in God, but you can’t dispute that SaxonRider is professionally informed on theology and church teaching, and knows more than the average church goer. In the same way that a keen gym-goer and men’s health reader could give good advice about weight training, but they don’t have a PhD in exercise physology.

Or in other words, there are good priests and bad ones, and intelligent church goers and thick ones.

Point missed.

Eh?

They kinda steered away from the flood after the sunday school years but it was preached to the kids as true and never retracted later. The first time I heard “well that bits allegorical” was after deciding it was all cobblers and questioning it.

There is an expectation that kids eventually do what you did: that is, begin to question.

Wordsworth wrote these lines about London:

EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Why did he write them? Did he literally mean that there is nothing on Earth so beautiful? When he referred to the smokeless air, what was he talking about? It’s pretty smoky now!

My point is, of course, that, if you had this poem read to you as a kid, your parent (or whomever) will just have let it sit with you… inform you… move you…

When you were older, you began to explore the poem more deeply – for its meaning and for its literary conventions, etc.

Well, that is what Christians do, and would be expected to do with various bits of the Bible.

and intelligent church goers and thick ones.

😳 8)

Saxon Rider is wonderfully articulate.

Me, I just shot from the hip of my experience.

but you can’t dispute that SaxonRider is professionally informed, and knows more than the average church goer.

well saxonrider may know the official church line but that’s not necessarily in line with what happens in church every week is it? A spokesmen for the MET can say they they aren’t institutionally racist but the (black) man on the street may have different experiences. I never professed to be an expert just offering my anecdata.

Would be interesting to know how many people with similar history feel the same way. I mean there’s a whole load of shizzle in the bible that I reckon is complete BS so differentiating between allegorical BS and “No that def happened” BS and knowing the churches line on it is going to prove tricky huh?

well saxonrider may know the official church line but that’s not necessarily in line with what happens in church every week is it?

That’s what I was alluding to. But for the same reason people shouldn’t accuse the Church of something just because they heard a priest say it 20 years ago.

I mean there’s a whole load of shizzle in the bible that I reckon is complete BS so differentiating between allegorical BS and “No that def happened” BS and knowing the churches line on it is going to prove tricky huh?

You are free to shop around with priests I believe 🙂

Other, peripheral, questions have always been open to debate

slavery…the owning of humans by other humans as property…prepheral…right. 😯

changes my view of you, TBH

if there is no evidence to suggest the something is real then yes its not currently real

1/ Something can be ‘real’ while still being a hypothetical construct. Just because it doesn’t obey the constraints of physical existence does not disallow it. Is love real?

2/ Billions of people will provide evidence to suggest that it is real. Just because it doesn’t fit your narrow minded scientific requirements doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.

3/ Can you say with absolute certainty that at some point in the future, you, I, all the other billions, will not ‘see’ God? Maybe when our ability to see God catches up with the way in which God can be seen? Until that point – I cannot say for certainty one way or another.

There is an expectation that kids eventually do what you did: that is, begin to question.

I think the trouble with that approach is there are also lots of people who never get to that stage, never question and don’t think other people should either.

For example, regarding the “allegorical” flood:
http://www.noahsarkzoofarm.co.uk/pages/about-us/earth-history/

No shit?

1/ Something can be ‘real’ while still being a hypothetical construct. Just because it doesn’t obey the constraints of physical existence does not disallow it. Is love real?

love, happiness, sadness are chemical changes in the brain. They are real. my happiness can be changed by taking or stopping my SSRI medication.

2/ Billions of people will provide evidence to suggest that it is real. Just because it doesn’t fit your narrow minded scientific requirements doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.

billions of people believing in something does not make it real. I am not narrow minded, if the evidence situation was to change I would re-evaluate my thoughts on the existence of a god. Its pretty sad that you call scientific methods narrow minded.

3/ Can you say with absolute certainty that at some point in the future, you, I, all the other billions, will not ‘see’ God? Maybe when our ability to see God catches up with the way in which God can be seen? Until that point – I cannot say for certainty one way or another.

no I can’t but I didn’t say it wouldn’t change. However, given the amount of current evidence to suggest there is a god, its more likely the theory of evolution will be overturned first.

You being a cyclist doesn’t limit you to one or all or any number … you pick and choose as you wish.

Which is kinda what I was getting at. Doing something “because it says so in the Bible” was all well and good 1,500 years ago but a lot of it is at odds with modern life, either culturally or because Science. You can pick and choose, sure, but how do you know what the important bits are and what can safely be ignored? Surely you have to infer that either it’s fact or fiction in its entirety, otherwise it’s Just A Book. How can you believe that the son of god really walked the Earth a couple of millennia ago when your source of reference describes the physical world in a manner we know now to be patently false? How do we know that Jesus isn’t an allegory himself?

Christians do not believe that everything in the Bible is literally true.

This may be true now, but it’s revisionist. When the Bible was still in short pants, it was absolutely supposed to be true. Word of God, and all that. People were murdered in droves for even suggesting otherwise. Galileo suggested the Earth orbited the Sun and spent the last ten years of his life under house arrest for Heresy because of it.

I kinda wish the Vatican / whoever had just gone “yeah, we got that bit wrong, sorry about that” rather than moving the goalposts and saying it’s a metaphor. As science marches ever onward it just feels a bit… desperate I suppose.

There’s no evidence to suggest that there isn’t a God, and I can’t see how that could be conclusively proved.

Come now Molly, you and I both know how this one ends. Burden of proof, impossible to prove a negative, Russell’s Teapot and invisible pink unicorns living in my skirting board. (-:

slavery…the owning of humans by other humans as property…prepheral…right.

Peripheral. Yes. Compared to the central religious questions about the nature of God as embodied in the Christian creeds, then of course peripheral.

The early Christians didn’t sit down and start discussing how they understand issues that would eventually prevail upon society as being important. They sat down and talked about what actually made them Christians – that is, what they believed about God.

And then they ran away before getting arrested and used to light up Nero’s garden parties.

I don’t know what you thought of me before, but you can’t seriously suggest that when I called moral issues (that weren’t even thought of at the time as moral issues) secondary to the religious questions of a nascent religion somehow diminished my character. 😕

love, happiness, sadness are chemical changes in the brain. They are real. my happiness can be changed by taking or stopping my SSRI medication.

Is Philosophy real?

Is there a difference between a wonderful poem and a prozac wrapped in a newspaper?

Come now Molly, you and I both know how this one ends.

No, we know how you think it ends.

Burden of proof relates to someone who is trying to assert the existence or otherwise of God. My point is not *how* to prove God exists, rather that proving is impossible. So I don’t need to provide proof because I don’t think such a thing exists.

I had another reply I think, but it got lost somewhere in my head. In the meantime,

I do think the old saying “there are no atheists in foxholes” is very true.

I think it’s wishful thinking on the part of the theists, desperately trying to convince people that atheists are really secret believers. Any priests sniffing round my death bed hoping for a last-minute conversion will be disappointed and sent on their way.

I think the trouble with that approach is there are also lots of people who never get to that stage, never question and don’t think other people should either.

I agree, which is why it is important for religious leaders to teach well. Unfortunately, not all appear to do so.

This may be true now, but it’s revisionist. When the Bible was still in short pants, it was absolutely supposed to be true. People were murdered in droves for even suggesting otherwise.

Cougar, I have tried in past threads to illustrate how this is not accurate. I can’t deliver an entire course on the history of exegesis on STW, but I think maybe I should. Alas, you’ll just have to do an online tutorial with me. 😉

That’s basically the Cliff Notes, isn’t it?

Secondary to the religious questions of a nascent religion somehow diminished my character.

well yeah, it sort of undermines your earlier point where you tried to argue that religions don’t move with the times, and now you’re saying that early Christians in their deliberations about the nature of God didn’t think to include Slaves…A group of folk at the very heart of the beginning of the Christian movement, and a dangerous one at that, as the WHOLE POINT of Christianity is the fact the everyone’s equal, that slaves and not masters (without some serious work) could get to Heaven easier. One of the very reasons it was so appealing and gathered momentum so quickly

So to say Slavery was peripheral…hmmm

Cougs, excuse me if I have missed your reply, Hv, earlier you suggested what you would like the RE syllabus to look like. I asked if you knew the details of the current syllabus in the hope of understanding where you felt it fell short.

Dont bother answering if you dont want to and excuse me if you have done so already.

If philosophy real

Yes, it’s the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.

Oh yeah, likening god as a concept to things like love.

I’ll happily concede that “god” may well be a mental / chemical construct inside us, in so far as when you’re “praying to god” in reality you’re giving yourself a good talking to, telling you to pull your socks up or that everything’s going to be ok, or that you’ve done your bit for little Timmy who’s in hospital. After you’re done, you feel better about things, your god has helped. Similar to how meditation works I suppose, or mindfulness, or climbing up a hill to get away from it all.

Like love you can’t measure it, but you can’t deny that you feel different either. But going from that to a big beardy white bloke hiding behind a cloud is too big a leap for me I’m afraid.

I asked if you knew the details of the current syllabus in the hope of understanding where you felt it fell short.

Sorry, you did, and I forgot (I read a few pages sitting in a dentist’s waiting room earlier, hence the splurge now).

Short answer is no, I don’t. I don’t have kids so the last time I looked at a syllabus is probably about 30 years ago. I was really just thinking out loud with reference to my own schooling, I didn’t intend to criticise what’s currently being taught as I’ve no idea.

Galileo suggested the Earth orbited the Sun and spent the last ten years of his life under house arrest for Heresy because of it.

Bible doesn’t seem to assert geocentricism…?

where you tried to argue that religions don’t move with the times

No, he said that it doesn’t change to reflect popular sentiment. And then he went on to say that the central theological tenets are stable. Which isn’t quite what you are talking about.

Is it really just me that understands what SaxonRider says?

“Dont bother answering if you dont want to and excuse me if you have done so already”.

A lot of posts from a small number of posters and most of very limited relevance or usefulness;
Saxonrider, theotherjonv & ernie_lynch excepted from that with cougs and molgrips also being (generally) excepted.
For those who make the effort to visit a mosque on sunday – self included – would be good to share what impression it makes.
Right, just off to leeds cathedral for some quiet contemplation – and smell the incense……

it sort of undermines your earlier point where you tried to argue that religions don’t move with the times

No. You had originally suggested that central Christian teaching (e.g. Biblical exegesis) changed to suit the time and place, and I responded by distinguishing between what I called central religious teaching (that doesn’t change), and secondary teaching, that most certainly develops and addresses issues as they arise.