What is your experience with Christianity?

To Church Refugees and Religious Orphans on Easter

 

It seems to me that there is one branch of Christianity that is more bigoted, narrow-minded, and more conservative than the others.

 

That's for sure! They wear red hats and give unthinking support to an evil, morally bankrupt crime boss for President. 75-81% of Evangelical "Christians" seem to be in that category. Confused, misguided lost souls. Fascists in choir robes. Hope they straighten up and come to their senses before it's too late. Idolatry never turns out well. https://www.npr.org/2020/11/08/932263516/2020-faith-vote-reflects-2016-patterns
A Year After the Election, Trump’s Effect on Evangelical Churches Lingers
How Trump Stole Christmas—And Why Evangelicals Rally to Their Savior

 

I go to a United Methodist church where we have two different religions called "Christianity" meeting under the same roof. Upstairs is the Sunday school I go to, where we believe Christianity is about peace, love, and social justice. Downstairs they believe Christianity is about correct belief, exclusiveness, and being saved by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior. The church teeters on the brink of breakup over the gay issue, but so far it stays together--partly because of concern over who would gets the stuff after the divorce. But the issues are major. Of course, we all believe in God, but what is that? downstairs, they think He's the Dude in the Sky--a basically anthropomorphic concept. Upstairs, we're more inclined to say (S)he's the Higher Power, Universal Spirit, Ground of Being, Ultimate Meaning, Great Mystery. Downstairs, they believe God sent His only Son Jesus to earth to die for our sins--Saint Paul's concept of penal substitution or vicarious atonement. Upstairs, we're more Lukan in our understanding of Christ's sacrifice as the world's savior who brings God's presence to humankind Luke's Interpretation of Jesus' Death Jesus' Death As Sacrifice? Downstairs, the Bible is the "Word of God", dictated if not written by Him, and true in every detail. Upstairs, we regard it as the words of men seeking God, inspired the way Rembrandt or Picasso was and expressing truth through metaphor. By and large, they both work at a basic level in keeping members on the straight and narrow and channeling organized altruism. And after Sunday school, we all get together for a common service, sing the same hymns and listen to the same sermon.

 

thanks for all the responses I have often wondered what it is that people have experienced with christianity and what makes them so strongly like or dislike the religion.

 

The gentleman featured supra is, of course, the late great astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, familiar to us from his televised science series. Scientists are trained to be skeptical and to hold out for empirical evidence that has been rigorously tested and has satisfied a panel of scientific peers that it is true beyond a reasonable doubt. I wouldn't want it any other way for our scientists. But as a non-scientist I make a distinction between doing science and doing life. The main reason I don't wait until there is "compelling evidence" is that I think it's unlikely there will ever be enough on this issue, at least in my lifetime, to satisfy the determined skeptic or even the neutral observer. And because life is short.

Nothing is certain, not even that. I have no "compelling evidence' that I'm not a brain in a jar, a character in a virtual reality computer simulation, or a figment of my own imagination. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by "compelling evidence"--beyond a reasonable doubt? preponderance of the evidence? probable cause? reasonable suspicion? clear and convincing evidence? When I think of "compelling", I think of something for which the evidence is strong enough that even skeptics find it persuasive. I usually go by substantial evidence, which in legal parlance means "enough to convince a reasonable person even though other reasonable people aren't convinced"..This is not so much "compelling" as it is something I'm willing to take a chance on. As Luther put it, a "joyful bet", something I'm willing to bet my life on. I other words, I'm an existentialist, but not the "leap of faith" type. I take hops of faith, based on reason, available evidence, personal experience and intuition.

My understanding is that an atheist is someone who doesn't believe in any god--Judeo-Christian, Muslim, pagan or other god of supernatural theism. I tend not to think of God in anthropomorphic terms--the "Dude in the Sky", so to speak. But I do believe in a felt presence of a Higher Power "in whom we live and move and have our being." (Acts 17:28).I tend to think in terms of the Lakota "Wakan tanka" (Great Spirit, or as I prefer "Great Mystery") . I consider God to be fundamentally incomprehensible, but I use the term for something I infer from my limited knowledge, experience, and intuition--on the one hand, as "wholly other" (as theologian Karl Barth liked to say). But on the other hand, known to us by inference from reason and observation, and by the experience of a presence that is close to us--i.e. ,"immanent", as well as "transcendent. I've mentioned before my decision to take a chance on a life-changing experience triggered by the passage in Gen. 1, sec. 27, that humans are made in God's "image and likeness" (which I take to be insight, although others might have different opinions). The items of evidence that persuades me to take a chance on such an entity are: (1) the integrated, ordered complexity of the universe, or what's been called "fine tuning" or the "anthropic principle" ;(2) the "fortuitous coincidences" that led to life, consciousness, and human rationality, that seem to me to be too good to be just lucky accidents; ; and (3) human idealism that gives life ultimate meaning (Tillich's Ground of Being).. None of these is compelling evidence of a God. However, they are intuitively convincing enough for me to take a chance on the proposition.

As a Chrisitian, I'm drawn to Jesus' teachings about love of God and neighbor, and the John Gospel's message that "God is Love". The closest thing I have for "compelling evidence' of that is that if everyone acted on it, there would be heaven on earth, and if nobody did, it would be hell.

 

I wouldn't put it quite that way, but I do agree that when power, money , status and sensual indulgence get involved, as they inevitably do in any human enterprise, spiritual values tend to get compromised. A recent example would be the Southern Baptist Convention leaders' release of information about a cover-up of information about involvement of its clergy in a sex scandal. I'm sure this thing has been going on since the Upper Paleolithic, when shamans assumed responsibility for rituals to bring the game so the congregation could relax after a hard day's work of hunting mammoths. I'm willing to keep this in mind, use my best judgement, "take what I can use and leave the rest". I think it's useful to put religion in historical-metaphorical and evolutionary perspective, along with the as well.as the search for eternal truth.

I just dropped some jargon on you, so I think a brief explanation is in order.

• Historical. "Historical " means that I try to put the different passages of the Bible in their likely historical context to see what problems the author was trying to solve;
• Metaphorical.That means that a good deal of the Bible is allegorical, not literal.
• Evolutionary. The Bible, like other scriptures, is a product of human cultural evolution, functioning to protect and advance the meme system that it represents (not necessarily that of the individual believers.)

I think it's probably an exaggeration to say that religion is "nothing but" a con game. There are lots of good religious people, some in leadership positions in their churches. Religion gives the believers a sense of meaning and purpose, a set of moral guidellines, and an instrument of organized altruism, as well as community. It can be a mind crippling disease, but doesn't have to be.

 

Well if we are talking about evidence for the existence of God then I think that you may be approaching the entire thing from the wrong direction.

Hebrews 11:1

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

I actually find it funny that the word evidence is used here. But yes this verse is an adequate description for the word faith. If you looked up the word faith in the dictionary then this is what it should say.

Matthew 12:38-40

"Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying 'Teacher, we want to see a sign from You." But Jesus answered and said 'An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the belly of the earth."

So you may be familiar with the story about how Jesus rose again after three days and nights. Yes, He rose again from the dead. And...

Acts 1:2-3

"until the day in which He was taken up, after He through the Holy Spirit had given commandments to the apostles whom He had chosen, to whom He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God."

After Jesus rose from the dead He presented many infallible proofs of His resurrection for forty days.

 

the christian bible is the ultimate expression of human vanity,
to imagine an almost entirely mineral universe,
was created for the sole purpose of enabling the existence,
of their own species.

no belief nor lack of one, has any least thing to do, with the existence of non-existence, of one god or a billion of them.
which is utterly independent and separate from,
anything we might choose to pretend or imagine about them,
nor demand of one another to do so.

neither does the existence of the unknown,
prove nor disprove, nor require nor prevent,
the existence of anything.

 

The Christian Way is challenging when you want to be selfish and you are encouraged to check that and to do things for other people instead and it's rewarding when you succeed in doing that you will get more joy out of life than if you were only jonesing for your own fix and it's true if you only look out for number one your life turns to number two and it's comforting if you have a personal relationship with the Almighty than you will never be alone again for all the days of your life and it's frustrating when you focus on the Perfect then you see all the imperfections in the people around you and it's humbling when you look at yourself and realize that a big part of why the world is the way it is is because of the dude strolling around in your sandals and it's encouraging when the Almighty offers His forgiveness and the graces to keep on trying to do better each and every day.

 

I started having issues with Christianity when I was 8 years old and in a baptismal class and suddenly I was being taught that the all-loving god who is our father, will punish us for our sins and if we don't repent, in fact, if we aren't even baptised, we will be forever punished in hell, the farthest place from god---and I went to a fairly progressive church that did not preach fire and brimstone, though my friends did and they certainly told me what they were learning. I put the pieces together. It did not make sense to me that God's unconditional love had conditions. I looked at these issues and found more contradictions, and more things that rubbed me wrong, and by the time I was an early teenage, I felt that Christianity was not the way for me.

And when missionaries came to my door like used-car salesmen selling their religion, it made it even more difficult to buy into. I traveled around the world looking for answers, first living in Japan----and discovered they too had used car salesmen like missionaries going door to door selling religion. There it was Soka gakkai buddhists, who were the Mormon/Jehovah Witness equivalents.

But I had studied world religions from about 12 or 13 years old, so I knew that each of them had a common thread of spiritual truths and wisdom. And living abroad in non-christian countries confirmed to me what I suspected----that the main difference in religions is cultural. Beyond that, they all have the same message, but they also have similar contradictions and hypocrisies, so what I really needed was proof. In fact, I had really been looking for this proof of God or of the nonphysical, since I was about 5 or 6 years old. (At that early stage I thought if I stare into a fire, I will see God).

Long story short, after a period of agnosticism, I did eventually get my proof, and in a way that I could not deny. But it was not from a Christian source. It was, what I define as a spiritual source. But that's another story.

I think it is very silly to think that one religion is the 'Right Religion.' There are people around the world who believe that they have found the one and only right religion. And they can't all be right. And there are plenty of places where Christianity is a small obscure religion at best. Why would a loving god do that to so much of the world? In fact, why would a loving god condemn us to a life of sin unless we not only find him, but find him through the one and only way that he has chosen, and all the other ways are, what? Just to fool us? What kind of love is that? No thank you, I don't need that.

The problem is not just this vengeful jealous god, even worse are his followers who want to sell you this used car of a religion. There comes a point where you have to ask, with all this religious god-stuff, who are you trying to convince? Me? Or yourself? The message is to love one another and to show this love to everyone. But all too often, it seems that there are strings attached to this love. And then there is the judgement. It is part of the better than thou attitude.

I have many friends of many religious faiths. And I have found that those of the Abrahamic faiths are the worst in this regard, but the Christians by far, are over the top. I am very comfortable in my spirituality. I have found what for me resolves all the hypocrisies and contradictions and makes the most sense for me. Is this the one true religion? No. especially because I don't even consider it a religion, but a spirituality. But just because it makes sense to me, does not mean it would make sense to someone else, so it can't be the one and only true way.

But once you move away from the righteous path of Christianity---you will see how evil you are judged to be, and how they have to train you to go back to their ways.

My sister is an evangelical christian and I tell her, for example, how a christian foster family treated a good friend of mine who was a daughter of a medicine man (and therefore removed from her family as a young girl). My sister says (and she has told me this many times about other stories), "they are not real christians." Yet I often fail to see the christian love in her that she claims to embody. In fact, often times if I visit with her, when I leave, I have to play Iron Butterfly's, Ina Gada Davida at full volume in the car, over and over, until I have calmed myself down.

I really have a problem with what a Christian means when they say, a true Christian (and the implication is always that they themselves are just that)---as Kierkegaard said, "There was only one true Christian, and he died on the cross."

I have always strongly stood by every religion to allow those people to practice and believe as they see fit. It is very hard for me watching evangelical christians rip apart this nation's democracy, and to force their narrow views of the Bible down the throats of the whole nation, and seek to push us under the thumbs of fascism, and it is a very difficult struggle for me to still stand by the side of Christians and push for them to believe and to practice their faith as they see fit. Especially when they deem me as an unworthy soul to have a nice afterlife or are sure that I am of the devil.

Having said all that, I do have Christian friends, that more than many others, do represent the biblical teachings of love. They are truly good people, and if someone were to ask me, what a good or true Christian is, I would certainly name them. I don't feel judged when I am with them. They are very well educated, and they do not have a holier than thou attitude. They respect my beliefs and do not try to change them, but are happy to find common ground. In fact one of these people, a theologian, actually encouraged when I was young and had all these questions and issues, to seek out the answers on my own path. One time he compared God to a mountain top, and said there are many paths up to that top.

 

When I was three, someone told me about God, and I refused to believe them, simply because it was obvious to me at just three years old, that people are full of crap.

By five, I had conducted my own informal survey, confirming that almost nobody knows how to use a stupid dictionary, and its taboo to even bring up the subject. I attempted to reinvent the Socratic Method, and dismissed it as obviously too complicated, requiring training.

In school, I could not care less what grades I got, but looked forward to high school as a chance to learn something new. So, I grilled all my teachers endlessly, studied physics journals, and discovered the accepted grammar of English is self-contradictory, and the principle of identity is tautological, all in the first year.

In other words, God is just another fucking word, people everywhere use and abuse, because none of the idiots even graduated from Kindergarten.

When I tell believers that God is synonymous with the truth, they have no comment.

The Truth Is Out There! And, inside your fucking brain idiots! If God is not synonymous with the truth, he's nobody I need to know.

 

I would like to comment on the idea that, if this is not the true religion, why follow it? Let me throw in original sin and all the fear that one justifies their faith with. The fact that we need all this in order to follow God's ways, just made the whole Christian thing disengenuous to me. If it is so wonderful and true, why do we need these reasons to believe it? Seriously, I always know when I'm being conned and I do not like it.

Take Eve, for example. The metaphorical story goes that God put them in the Garden of Eden to live forever, but he said, don't eat the fruit of those two trees or you'll be sorry. So what do you think is going to happen? Is God stupider than we are? 'It'll be ok they won't touch it, I told them they could do anything and everything just not that. They will never touch it.' Any one of us should have been able to tell God that sooner or later they will eat of it. And here's the thing, The human race will not come to exist until they do eat it. Because they don't learn about sex until they do this. So it is a big set up for Eve to be the Promethean Hero that brings about the human race. And what do we do? We condemn and vilify her. She should be glorified and celebrated. And why do we all have to be marked with a scarlet letter because she did exactly what she was supposed to do?

One of the messages of Christianity is to have faith and believe at all costs. This says to me, if you discover that it isn't the only way to god, and that you aren't really a sinner so you don't have to follow Jesus, and that everything will still work out, and that a loving god would not send you to hell for bowing down to an earthen idol, or doing some other unchristian thing, and you still follow Jesus and believe in christianity-----well, that is faith at all costs. That is exactly what the message is.

That would be the message of a religion that does not manipulate and control.

But here is the thing----if you remove all these fears and reasons for why you have to believe, and then you do not see any reason to believe, well, then obviously Christianity does not have what you need. It is not the path for you.

I follow indigenous spirituality. I know that if I stopped today, that it wouldn't condemn me, and I wouldn't end up suffering for all eternity in the fires of hell, or my life would become a living hell. When someone new comes to the sweat lodge I often go to, the Medicine Man will explain that now they are a part of the circle, and they will always be a part of the circle. This does not mean that if they didn't come back, missionaries would go out and find out why and urge them back. Or that the people would call them, or curse them, or condemn them for leaving the circle. No, it means that if and when they need the circle, they will always be a part of it. So why do I even bother continuing down this path? Why do I maintain the beliefs that I do?

Because there is power within it. There is love and acceptance (and I'm a white man). Because it connects me to the universe, to nature, to the infinite. This is the path for me, that when I pray with tobacco, my prayers are answered. And the answers are never excuses (like, God did answer your prayer, by showing you that you weren't meant to have that). In ceremony, I have experienced time and again what one could only describe as magic, supernatural, or a miracle. And these are things that have to be experienced to really know. I'm sure that Christianity does this for the true believers as well----because, everyone always tells me so. I have heard things about Buddhism as well, and Hinduism, and I have seen demonstrations of things by monks that seem superhuman or supernatural.

It is for reasons like this that you should believe. Not because of fear, or cons, or threats, or because it is the one and only true way. That is the faith that only the size of a mustard seed could move a mountain. And if that particular path does not work, then there are very many others to try.



P.S. Or maybe the problem is within you. My sister is always thanking god and talking about god, and praising god, and so on and so forth. It gives me the impression that subconsciously she has doubts about God. Now I am not in her head so I cannot say that. I know that Christianity preaches that one should do this. But nonetheless, I know that the way we approach the world and the people within it, is more often than not, based on subconscious perceptions, inderstandings and drives that we are not consciously aware of unless we work very hard at self-examination----to Know Thyself, as it says over the entrance to the Oracle. Much of what she does, I see, is subconsciously driven by projection and compensation. In other words, that her ego is working overtime to assure her that yes, she does believe in God and that God is real. So she finds miracles in the most mundane and basic things. A Japanese friend told me one time in Japan after an American had stayed with him and his wife for a few days, that its a good thing this American lady is alive, because if she stopped thanking god for having the sun come up every morning, maybe the sun would not come up the next day.

 

You ask for "proof", but unfortunately that's impossible for matters like God, religion, and most things that are important in my life: where to live, what job to take, whom to marry, who to vote for, etc. Nothing is certain, not even that. I go by educated bets and substantial evidence (enough to convince a reasonable person, even though other reasonable people may not be convinced). This is the standard of evidence public officials use to decide if our bridges and roads are safe, what level of toxic substances we should be exposed to, etc. I try to evaluate the evidence based on reason, expert opinion, experience, intuition, knowledge of historical context, street smarts, and what my Daddy told me about used car salesmen.

The problem is, many Christians are biblical literalists, have little or no sense of the historical context of their scripture, and have been taught doctrinal formulas about it. The scripture itself is a yoking together of the Old Testament--written by multiple authors over several centuries but attributed to God Himself, and the New Testament--a collection of selected writings, also by multiple authors over several decades after Jesus' death, but attributed to God. As you note, the Abrahamic God is depicted as loving but judgmental, and the Christian hell is the most horrific of afterlives of all the major religions. Plus there seem to be a bunch of unbelievable things every good Christian is supposed to believe "on faith": miracles like virgin births, walking dead people, turning water into wine, etc. Short answer: The Bible should be taken seriously, but not literally!

The Bible is often called the "Word of God", but it seems to be the words of men with different agendas seeking God at various periods of history. It's inspired, but sometimes the way a great artist is inspired, like Ferde Grofé being inspired by the Grand Canyon, or Picasso being inspired by a woman and painting one that looks like my worst nightmare of my worst blind date! I happen to be a Christian, but not that kind of Christian. Like you, I've studied world religions and incorporated elements of each of them into my faith. But I take an historical-metaphorical approach to all of them. "Metaphorical" means that much of the Bible is not factual but communicates truth by metaphor and allegory. Genesis , for example, tells the story of two people in Paradise who can't get their minds off what they don't have. I take this as prototypical of the human condition, communicating a truth similar to the Buddhist taṇhā (craving), a form of upādāna (grasping} contributing to dukkha (discontent; suffering). "Historical" means putting the various passages in the context of the period when it was written and the likely agenda of the human author. This is admittedly not easy, since the ancient historical record, especially for people who weren't royalty or celebrities, tends to be sketchy. But we do our best. I also use the rough and ready rules of thumb developed by the Jesus Seminar and other biblical historians: multiple independent attestation, a preference for earlier sources, congruence with known facts about the period, dissimilarity and embarrassment (stories that don't seem to fit the author's agenda). The criterion of embarrassment/ e.g., would lead me to believe in an historical Jesus, since a crucified savior is unlikely to be something His followers would make up if they had the option not to. (Deuteronomy 21:23 says such a man is "cursed".) And I use as my primrary hermeneutic the core message attributed to Jesus: love of God and neighbor. The latter would lead me to disbelieve accounts of God ordering the Israelites to massacre every man, woman and child in conquered Canaanite cities, or to endorse human slavery.

 

Instead of looking at religions as a matter of true of false, it might be useful to consider them in terms of more or less advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint. Some religious memes (in the original sense of the term; a unit of culture) succeed in increasing their numbers. Others fall by the wayside. Zoroastrianism, for example, is no longer on the majors list--a major reason being In considering the role of natural selection in all this, some characteristics are more likely to attract followers than others. That doesn't make them good or true, but it makes them successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who invented the meme, saw them as analogous to genes. And he saw genes as "selfish" ( Dawkins, The Selfish Gene), in the sense that their only purpose is to survive and multiply--regardless of the satisfaction or well-being of their hosts. He even went so far as to analogize God to a virus, with an essentially parasitic relationship to its hosts. But You mention that it would be

 

That is an interesting way to look at it. An organic definition, but I'm wondering if it down plays the agency of the adherents. Not that this would invalidate the argument. Missionaries, for example. When one lives in Japan, it does not take long to realize how the Mormon church proselytizes there. They choose primarily good looking men that could just as easily be on the Nazi posters of the perfect Aryan, but they do fit the Japanese stereotype of the ideal American good boy. (The popular ideal American bad boy, from the 70's - 90's was the 1950's greaser like Jimmy Dean). You would see more of them around than you cared to. I don't know that I ever saw a Mormon church, but the missionaries were certainly as thick as Krishna missionaries used to be here.

On the other hand, I only saw one Zoroastrian missionary and he was very old and decrepit, in fact, I had to bring him into my house and nurse him back to health. And he smelled bad. He came to the door begging for water, and in broken missionary-Persian I converted him to Jesus. ...............OK, just kidding, there were no Zoroastrian missionaries.

Seriously though, by looking at it as an evolutionary dynamic, we might overlook that it is spread by missionaries and zealous followers using fear and manipulation to convince others that this way is better than that way.

Consider all the indigenous people around the world who have lost their language, their connection to their ancestors and their own traditions and culture and a spiritual tradition that has a lot of power for them, all through the work of missionaries. And its pretty obvious what happens to these people when they lose their way of life. In South America, for example, they leave the jungles and end up in the slums of a big city where they are victims of prejudice and exploitation.

These people do not see one religion as right and the other as wrong. They don't even understand what religion is. They might say, we pray this way, and they pray that way, ok, lets try that way too. So the missionaries teach them their way of praying, and once they have their attention, they start teaching these natives that their traditional ways are evil, and the con game begins. And the result is very ugly for the culture. There are a lot of traditionalists in an awful lot of tribes that see the high suicide rates, and the alcoholism and drug addiction and high rates of depression as a direct result of the missionaries taking people away from the traditional spiritual ways. It's not a simple answer. There are many factors that have contributed to this and colonialism and racism play a major part as well, but, it does get back to the problem-----when a missionary tells you how great his belief in Jesus is and how much better his life is for it, is he really putting you on a path that will truly meet your spiritual needs? No, he is just helping the numbers game. And he may very well bury what you truly need, under layers of fear, existential threats, and empty promises. Most likely he is not consciously aware of what he is doing. He thinks he is doing good. But he has been convinced of the same thing.

I think you agree that evolutionary forces, serve the group and not the individual. It is an evolutionary advantage for Christianity that it happened to be growing, and had a competitive advantage, at a time when television, radio, and mass media can spread its word. If someone is a Christian simply because they were convinced that it is the one and only true path, and then 10 years from now, a successful missionary convinced them that Islam was actually the one and only true path and they converted, and then 10 years after that, it was the Bahai faith, is their true spiritual needs ever really met, or are they just convinced that such is the case? It is the same for someone who never converts, but simply goes on as a Christian because he believes that it is the one and only true path.

 

As you may remember, I had a long career in the stock market. Money and stocks get you right to the core of people's psychology.

When someone thinks they found a great stock, they start telling all their friends about it, and try to get them to buy it too. The stock may be a real dog, and has been losing value since they bought it. But they will brag about how great it is and that it is the next big thing. They do this because they want affirmations that they made the right choice. Their ego tells them that if others are buying it too, then it has to be a good thing. This psychologically driven rationality does not take into consideration that the only reason so many people are buying it is because you are telling them to. As the saying goes, Misery loves company.

There is a horribly unethical man in politics right now, it is no secret that he is a career criminal who will break the law whenever it suits him, and women are his playthings, and freedom and liberty mean nothing to him beyond how it can be manipulated to benefit only himself. Yet a third of this country thinks he is God's choice to rule this nation, and to protect our freedom and democracy even though he openly tells everyone how he will destroy it. I think part of his power is this exact same psychology.

 

Unfortunately, I posted the passage you're quoting before I was finished with it. I dashed it off before went off to Sunday School. and apparently didn't dash enough.

I was going to say, a Zoroastrian missionary would be an endangered species, cuz they don't proselytize. That's why there are so few Zoroastrians (only around 122 thousand of them, mostly in India, Iran, and California.)

That's how evolution works with humans. It's not a cosmic force that happens automatically. Memes are ideas that catch on with people and they spread them--or not.

The dinosaurs had an even worse fate!

And that may be the difference! Bart Ehrman, religious historian, identifies one of the traits of Christianity that enabled it to out-compete paganism was its exclusiveness. The pagans had the same attitude as your indigenous South Americans. Commendable, but nice guys sometimes finish last!

Yes, I think that's the way it goes sometimes, unfortunately. I've noticed that Native Americans from the formerly nomadic hunter-gatherer plains tribes, prototypes of the "Noble Savage", seem to have more trouble adjusting to western modernity than those of us who came from sedentary agrarian backgrounds. As I said, Dawkins thinks of God and religion as essentially viruses whose hosts don't do well as a result of exposure. But it doesn't have to be. Susan Blackmore one of Dawkins leading disciples and proponents of memetics, now thinks that religion can be a positive force for individuals as well as the species. She cites data showing that "religious people are happier and possibly even healthier than secularists. BBC NEWS | Health | Religion 'linked to happy life' And data showing that "religious people can be more generous, cheat less and co-operate more in games such as the prisoner's dilemma, and that priming with religious concepts and belief in a "supernatural watcher" increase the effects. "Christianity" consists of a variety of meme systems, Mormons being only one--and many Christians would argue with including them. Some are into hell fire and damnation. Others (think Joel Osteen) are into preaching prosperity. And still others into spreading a gospel of peace, love and understanding. Caveat Emptor (Let the Buyer Beware) is at least as operative when it comes to religion as it is with other human activities. The more dogmatic ones may have an advantage for people seeking certainty, but the "progressive" ones which like to question and think Christianity is mainly about love of God and neighbor and social justice seem more congenial to believers like me . A friend of mine has been telling me about how great his experience with the Life Church has been. They serve popcorn with their movies. I'll take conventional mainstream Christianity. Yesterday, coincidentally, the topic for discussion in my Sunday School was how to handle the violence, contradictions and hateful passages in the Bible, which was pretty much a continuation of our discussions here. I use Jesus as my hermeneutic.