Mutant Christianity, a disagreement.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/08/27/almost.christian/index.html?hpt=T2

Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It's a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem.

Dean is a minister, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of "Almost Christian," a new book that argues that many parents and pastors are unwittingly passing on this self-serving strain of Christianity.

She says this "imposter'' faith is one reason teenagers abandon churches.

Apparently more and more Christian teens are treating Christianity like a self-help sort of deistic sort of God is out there to help you with your struggles kind of faith. This is making them abandon religion at an alarming rate. Because, everybody knows that the real faith is that Jesus demands that you act like his slave and do exactly what he says or you will burn forever in loving hellfire. This impure form of Christianity is the reason why teenagers abandon religion in droves. -- I disagree.

I think the fact that Christianity is able to morph into an amorphous blob of God is Love, is one of the few reasons why it's at all surviving. It really has become like a software license and "Christians" scroll to the end and click "I agree". While this results in the nominally faithful, who are happy to invoke paroxysmal reactions to atheism and pay lip service to the idea of Christianity, and lends a certain amount of credit to Christianity for having followers, in the same way that Microsoft tries to measure the using of Internet Explorer™ by the number of times it's installed (it's installed on my system, but I never use it), rather than the browser based traffic. It's a bit like when religions leave people on the rolls even though they quit a long time back. But, it gives a very general idea that paying lipservice to religious ideas of a virtue.

That this is done, is the reason why Christians are still "Christians". It isn't that this is the reason why they lose their faith, but rather a stop gap measure used to prevent them from losing their faith. If all the wishy washy nonsense was dropped from religion and they were only permitted to state their beliefs, everybody would walk away in droves.

The study, which included in-depth interviews with at least 3,300 American teenagers between 13 and 17, found that most American teens who called themselves Christian were indifferent and inarticulate about their faith.

You'd be amazed how many "Christians" cannot name any five books of the Bible. It seems a lot like all one needs is a bit of momentum and a change in the cultural zeitgeist that promotes Christian ethos as positive ethos. If not for all the wishy-washy self-help god-is-love crap, it would seem as wounded as it is.

Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good -- what the study's researchers called "moralistic therapeutic deism."

Yeah, God is like a cheerleader who wants you to be happy. Why focus on hellfire and the fact that you are to give away all your things and go out and preach the word to the unconverted. Although, really it seems this study would argue that you really need to preach the word to the converted, because apparently they are doing it wrong.

Others practice a "gospel of niceness," where faith is simply doing good and not ruffling feathers. The Christian call to take risks, witness and sacrifice for others is muted, she says.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and don't rock the boat. In reality, if you're trying to get by in life. Those are great bits of advice. And while I'm certainly in favor of the former as a pretty universal moralistic approximation of Tit-For-Tat, I'm not sure the latter is called for if you think the boat is heading towards some rocks, you should rock it. You really should go ahead and stand up for your beliefs and be firm and articulate. Sure it makes you seem arrogant or strident, but if you're right, then you're already a majority of one. And, this is the sense that Christians are right when they accuse atheists of being like evangelicals. Sure, we atheists don't evangelize but we do not subscribe to the doctrine of be niceness where nice is defined as 'shut the hell up'. Atheists, like Evangelicals, talk about religion. That's all they really mean about it.

More teens may be drifting away from conventional Christianity. But their desire to help others has not diminished, another author says.

Duh, because Christianity has nothing in the way of motivation towards charity. It's simply hijacked charity. People have charity, and to claim that Christians have some sort of monopoly will end up causing you to be surprised when atheists are moral or when people still are charitable.

A parent's radical act of faith could involve something as simple as spending a summer in Bolivia working on an agricultural renewal project or turning down a more lucrative job offer to stay at a struggling church, Dean says.

As a potential stop gap, the study author argues that parents can make some dramatic appeal, some grand gesture to bring their children back into the fold. And while turning down a job  and spending a summer abroad may seem a little weaksauce and fail to convey the message needed. After all charity isn't diminished, what has gone away is the theological underpinnings that God did not come to bring peace but a sword and that anybody who is not ready to hate their family, isn't ready to be Jesus' disciple. What's really needed is something that shows commitment to Christianity without being charitable in the mainstream sense, I highly recommend murdering abortion doctors accordingly. Now that's radical, and your kids won't see God as some vague cheerleader in the sky after that.

"If you don't say you're doing it because of your faith, kids are going to say my parents are really nice people," Dean says. "It doesn't register that faith is supposed to make you live differently unless parents help their kids connect the dots."

If you don't tell your children that you're being nice because of religion, then your kids will just think you're being nice. They don't realize that religion makes you live differently, unless you're living exactly the same as other people but giving credit to religion. WTF? Seriously? Unless you tell your children that religion made me do this, they might credit it to something more obvious and mundane and true. Unless you show children that charity must be hijacked, and that secular values of love towards your fellow humans are to be relabeled as Christian Love™, then they won't understand that the exact same actions taken by others for the sake of being reasonable people  are not different. That's not a deep and life altering faith, that's the relabeling of generic humanistic values as religious values.

Don't be nice as you're apt to do even without orthodox faith, be nice and say it's Christian niceness!

Thank goodness that no other religions thank goodness, or that might undermine Christianity. After all, non-Christians eat babies.

Faith doesn't answer questions.

Very true. Faith is the only option concerning things beyond our current grasp. :)

Very false. Science is the only option concerning things beyond our current grasp.

Make no mistake about this point. Things that have previously been beyond our grasp but are now within our grasp have, without fail or exception, been grasped by science. Every single thing we previously didn't understand and now do understand have come into the folds of our understanding through science.

Never once in the history of the world, in the entirety of things known and unknown, has faith every solved any problem or answered any question great or small sans evidence.

Fired for Faith?

Woman: I'm getting married. My girlfriend and I am getting married! I'm getting married! I'm engaged!
Man: The gay is evil.
Woman: LOL!!!

*FIRED*

Man: They fired me for being Christian!

Two Horses And Faith

Imagine two horses are due to run a race.

The first horse has won every race it has ever run. And it has run over a million of them. And each and every time it has won.

The second horse has never won. It has always raced against the first horse and every time it has failed to win, usually it has even failed to finish. It has done this over in the same million races.



Now, when you go to make your bet on the horses you notice that the odds are somehow even money. Now, is it really "faith" to bet on the first horse or the second horse? Is the "faith" to bet on the first horse actually equal to the "faith" it takes to bet on the second one?

Faith and Uncertainty

Faith is necessarily inconsistent. In fact, Godel proved that any system which could be used to determine the truth of any marginally complex statement must itself be inconsistent or incomplete. If it could prove itself true then it must necessarily be contradictory, able to prove any statement, and thus be completely worthless for establishing the truth of any claim. Since you can have faith that your faith is justified, one must properly understand that faith proves nothing. In fact, it is necessarily powerless to establish the truth of any proposition.

I know it seems a bit like hitting a flea with a bulldozer to show faith is pointless by way of Godel, but it's still a fun point to make.

Faith is better than shitting yourself.

One day I walked to the store and on the way back I was struck with diarrhea and shit my pants. Not too much you can do about that. However, while in the bathroom cleaning up for a long period of time, my sister came by and suggested that I should 'finish masturbating' and get out of the bathroom. I was briefly stunned but realized the stigma of being accused of masturbation was rather minimal compared to the truth so I decided to not contradict the error; that's a lot like the truth behind faith.

When people claim to have faith they are often lying. They have reasons to believe what they believe, they simply realize that those reasons are horrifically bad and it is far better to claim that it boils down to faith. At a certain point, claiming to have faith is far better than exposing the real reasons you believe something. So what lies below the faith threshold? What are those reasons embarrassing enough to warrant everything "boiling down to faith":

* Belief because you were raised to believe.
* Belief because your family or community believes and you want to avoid being shunned.
* Belief because you're afraid of your own mortality.
* Belief because you confuse universal emotions with divine providence.
* Belief because it is more socially acceptable.
* Belief because you're afraid of hell.

When the reasons you *actually* hold that belief are far worse than the exalted "virtue" of faith it seems amazingly reasonable to opt for the excuse. Unlike the former reasons, which are shot down with amazing ease, nobody can really raise an objection to "faith". Well, other than pointing out that it's an epistemological crock of shit that is acceptable for no other context and should be grounds for being committed. Rather, that would be the case if faith weren't simply a sham which just so happens to have more credibility than reality.

Given the choice between submitting the true reasons you believe something ridiculous and having the underpinnings of that beliefs you want to hold knocked out from under you with trivial ease, exposing that a core part of your world view is built up as a house of cards, or claiming to possess the exalted socially accepted virtue of faith. It isn't surprising people opt for the latter. Faith is a silly concept and, in reality, is just mental masturbation but it is far better than the reality: you're shitting yourself.

Useful sytems or limitless systems.

Any given system can either be useful or limitless... it can't be both.

Godel's incompleteness theorem shows us that a system cannot prove its own validity unless that system is incoherent. In an incoherent system, you can prove everything, including the coherency of the system itself. However, an incomplete system cannot prove its coherency. Coherent systems can surmise things about reality. If I place 1 thing in a box, and then 2 additional things in the box... I now have 3 things in the box. In reality this works.

Now if I assign 1 to equal 2, I can now show that adding 1 thing in a box and 2 additional things I now have 2 things in the box. We know that 2 is 1, so I have 1 thing in the box. -- In the end... you can prove everything including that I am the pope (not just the pope of Discordianism).

The pope and I are two.
2 = 1.
The pope and I are one.
I am the pope.


In a system which allows for a contradiction, every statement is true (even false ones). This is why we disallow contradictions within mathematics and logical systems, not for some arcane reasons like being wrong or some elegant proof. Rather, without disallowing contradictions we end up with a worthless system in which everything can be proven true. And, in fact, by Godel's proof we can show that an "elegant proof" of this fact is impossible. In a very real sense, we need to take this on faith.

You need limits to be useful. If science could prove everything it would be worthless, it needs to be limited to only proving true things. Falsifiability is a method of differentiating science from pseudoscience. If you can't prove something wrong then it isn't science. It is an immortal idea, a limitless idea, then it is a useless idea.

So do we accept the coherency on faith? And if so, by what criteria do I condemn the faith of others?

-- Faith, in the religious sense, can prove everything. Religious faith is thusly worthless and fundamentally incoherent. There is a world of difference between accepting something as true in order to produce a useful system and accepting something as true and producing a limitless system. These are not Non-Overlapping MAgesteria. Everything science or any coherent systems can be established as true can be established by faith as well. In this regard the overlapping section (as far as science goes is 100%): every statement of science could be a statement of religion because religion produces a limitless system and science produces a useful one. If God tells me the universe is 14 billion years old... so be it.

How are coherent systems such as science limited? - They are limited by their ability to declare true that which is false. They are limited in proving things which can be proven with their correlation to reality.

What's left? Faith can prove everything science can prove. Science cannot prove everything faith can prove. What are these additional things which faith can prove but science cannot? -- False things.

Those things left over in the realm of faith, which science cannot establish ( and tend to discredit at every junction) are probably left over because they are false. It is far from proven, but it seems that Dan Barker was right when he wrote, "Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it cant be taken on its own merits." -- At the very least, one should ask why such notions can be established by those systems which can establish false things and cannot be established by those systems which cannot establish false things.

We limit science and coherent systems by assuming true things cannot be false. This places a massive limit those systems. However, the resulting system, which no longer being limitless cannot prove its own validity, is amazingly useful. This assumption produces a system capable of proving useful things about reality.

Next time you hear that, "With faith, all things are possible." Realize, that being true, this statement establishes that faith is worthless, useless, and does not correlate with reality.

With science, the possible is possible... and nothing else.

Two and Two equals Four? Since when?

Faith apparently unshaken in Peru as everything else was. An 8.0 Quake hit Peru, bringing the roof down on a large group of church goers. As tragic as that is, the response is rather odd.

The priest said the church was more than 300 years old. He still couldn't understand how the entire roof collapsed on hundreds of worshippers who were attending a funeral Mass when Wednesday's 8.0-magnitude quake struck.

He doesn't understand how an 8.0 quake can do that? Why, superman should have stopped it? There's nothing to understand.

Rash of Rationality. On Faith:

How can religions be wrong? I mean there's so many people who believe them.

Remember back when Saddam had vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? Everybody believed it? The news was on and on about how reliable it was? How this was an absolute truth? Skepticism was condemned as evil and wanting us to be killed? Then this brought us to war. We invaded Iraq to disarm them of their weapons of mass destruction only to find out that there weren't any. This is pretty much religion.

You have a large number of people talking about something, without evidence, in the most absolute of terms. This is religion. Not believing this will lead to eternal hellfire and damnation. This is religion. This unsubstantiated belief lead to war and death and killing on no real grounds. This is religion. The media, the government, the apologists all happened to be lock step though without discussing it. This is religion. The bad intelligence summed up to be group think. This is religion. Once proven wrong the apologists start making silly excuses such as 'God needs faith', or 'the WMDs were taken to Syria'. This is religion.

Really, if you want evidence that you can get vast number of people to believe a lie on no evidence and get that evidence to lead to war... look no further than the cradle of civilization. The source and destination for that kind of nonsense.

As a funny little side, somebody on some TV show made the comment that everybody believed that Iraq had WMD, while my sister was visiting from Washington. We both sort of raised our hands to signify our exemption to that statement. Though that was mostly because I had read Alternet at the time and came across some great arguments that it was all poppycock prior to the war, and she was the one who highly recommended Alternet to the rest of the family.

And as a side objection to this looking back and blaming people for believing what they were told. It's not as blame worthy to tell somebody something and have them believe it, than it is blameworthy to tell somebody something which is false.

The Complete Explanation of Faith

Go to that video and about 45:00 minutes (actually exactly that far). V.S. Ramachandran talks about an amazing finding he made with a split brain people (fibers between hemispheres are cut). Using specific methods to contact just the one half of the brain and ask a series of questions about beliefs. When asked, the right hemisphere believed in God, and the left hemisphere astoundingly did not.

This is it. The answer to most questions atheists have had about theists. The implications aren't instantly apparent, hence the reason for the low impact of the find.

Ask people what evidence they have to believe in God. An atheist will usually give you a good reasonable set of reasons they don't have a belief in god(s). A fundamentalist will answer the question very directly, usually saying that the Bible proves the claim or Jesus existed and told us. These aren't good answers but they are actual answers to the question. Ask a liberal Christian, suddenly, the evidence is that religion gives meaning to their lives, that they wouldn't know what to do without their belief in God, or it gives them a purpose in life. These aren't answers.

They are responding with their right brain, because the left brain accepts the argument. So we are just getting emotional right brain responses to a left brain question.

The left hemisphere in many liberal Christians is atheistic. They don't actually use their belief in God to make logical or reasonable decisions about their lives, they know that burning young women because you think they are witches, or hurting homosexuals for being homosexuals is wrong (even though it says clearly in the Bible to kill them). These are left brain activities.

Liberal Christians often act in a way which doesn't reflect belief. They tend to reject religious doctrines they don't like, even if the book they come from is the only one thing that tells them to believe in God. Even acting in very moral ways, in spite of their religion which tells them to do the exact opposite.

This actually explains a huge number of other things. Consider the idea of wrestling with faith, it's actually a neurological wrestling match with the hemispheres of the brain. Why can't people reason their way out of faith? Because reason is the left hemisphere, and belief is in the right; it's emotional, not reasonable. How can people believe in proper scientific evolution and a 6,000 year old creation (eg. Ken Miller)? Each hemisphere takes one belief, and the two don't meet.