His intention was to become more skilled at defending his faith, but as he tried to ¡°step back¡± to look at Christianity from a non-believer¡¯s perspective, he found that he became more swayed to that point of view.That's just so cool. That's how debate is supposed to work.
¡°If God is God, he¡¯s big enough; he can handle any questions I¡¯ve got. Well, he didn¡¯t. He didn¡¯t measure up! And that sounds, you know, so funny, because if I heard somebody else saying that a year ago, I¡¯d have thought, ¡®You are such a sacrilegious person. God¡¯s going to strike you dead by lightning or something!¡¯ I¡¯ve actually thought and tried to pin-point, but I can honestly say that intellectually, from within the first few weeks of my studies, I thought, ¡®Wow! Could this be true?¡¯"
The best understanding I've come to on this is expressed well by Kierkegaard, a devote CatholicKierkegaard was not a Catholic. His family belonged to the Danish national church and he was buried from it, though he refused to receive communion when in the hospital before he died. His brother was a bishop in the Danish national church.
Faith is not a requirement for membership in the Catholic Church, although it would be nice if you could muster up a little hope and charity. The ritual of baptism, for instance, depends on the certification of the required authority, and the performance of specified actions. The priest's state of mind is irrelevant as long as his authority has not been revoked by the Bishop, and the ritual is performed correctly.Baptism does not require authority from a bishop and need not be performed by a priest (one does not even have to be a Christian to baptize validly).
Those who know better, please chime in. I know that faith is not required of anyone who was baptized in a state of grace, such as a baby.Someone not baptized is not in the state of grace. Restoring man to the state of grace is the effect of the sacrament, even on infants.
Poking around the Catholic rule book: "Heretical or schismatical ministers can administer the sacraments validly if they have valid Orders, but their ministrations are sinful."It is true that " being heretical or schismatic involves active anti-church behavior." But non-belief is anti-Church behavior. Catholics hold that belief is an act of the will. To refuse to believe is sinful and all sin is held to injure the Body of Christ, which is the Church. You may or may not be culpable, but it's anti-Church behavior in a sense.
Note that being heretical or schismatic involves active anti-church behavior.
From what I'm seeing the emphasized quality for ordination is grace, not faith. Grace is administered by the Holy Spirit, the most mysterious and ineffable character among the three.Yeah, if you're saying faith isn't a requirement before someone can be ordained a Catholic priest, that's not true at all.
And thus the Dawkinsites and the creationists continue to have their quarrels, entirely unaware of how monumentally irrelevant such quarrels are). Yes, since you redefined all the words, there's no debate, the debate would then be pointless. But that hardly matters when you're only talking about a slim minority of educated 'religious' people vs the vast majority out there. It's also very condescending.
An amateur doing research on a topic for which he has a huge axe to grind? That's a textbook recipe for bad scholarship.Faraday, Mendel, Evans, Priestley, Jefferson, James O. Hall and a multitude more say 'hello!'
Confucianists don't, in general, believe in or worship any gods. Are they religious?Uh, no. Why would they be? There's nothing particularly religious about Confucianism. That would be like calling
You say that like it's a bad thing.Yes, believe it or not redefining the terms does not make the underlying argument go away. All it does is waste everyone's time.
What other career indeed?Right, it's not the same. Primarily because it wasn't a change. He was probably always a racist. But more to the point, yes coming "out of the closet" as a racist, or anti-Semite, or homophobe, pedophile, whatever will probably result in the loss of any prestigious career. What does that have to do with anything? Dawkins was obviously not talking about switching to beliefs that are socially unacceptable.
Oh come on, nanojath that's not the same thing at all! No, of course, of course it isn't.
But I think atrazine's response is really more to the point. You might be an atheist, but you're a very Evangelical Christian atheist.But the problem is that, you know, Evangelical Christians (as well as Muslims and lots of other religious groups who "believe" things) are the ones who atheists actually disagree with. So what if most of their arguments are aimed at them? If you have some other religion that does not make any actual statements about the world, or universe, or metaphysics or whatever, then obviously you can't "not believe it" because not believing in it is no different then believing in it.
This [that there are many valid gods] is still a belief, though, no less so than "it is understood by all that there is only one God, and that He speaks through the Church."Well duh. If my belief is that all beliefs (including both mine and yours) have a fundamental validity that should be respected, and your belief is that only your belief has any validity and that mine (including both my personal beliefs and my belief that all beliefs have some validity) must be suppressed, then we are going to come into conflict. Not because I don't respect your belief, but because your belief requires you to disrespect mine. To put it simply, your belief is rude.
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As others have pointed out, that's false. Syncretic religions may or may not be threatened or challenged by other syncretic religions, but if you challenge their central belief (that there are many gods), that's often viewed as a threat.
Rather, they seem to see what modern-day "new atheists" and contemporary fundamentalists miss, but that Karen Armstrong understands, along with centuries of monks and theologians and mystics and ordinary religious people: religion in its deepest form is not primarily a question of belief but a question of practice, a doing rather than a thinkingposted by delmoi at 4:59 PM on March 21, 2010
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And thus the Dawkinsites and the creationists continue to have their quarrels, entirely unaware of how monumentally irrelevant such quarrels are, while everyone else, including these good pastors, gets on with the actual living of spiritual life...
When you saw the headline "Dennett interviews clergymen who don't believe in God" did you have any doubt what slant the article would take? Did you expect to find hard hitting questions like "Don't you think what you're doing is fraudulent?" Are you at all surprised that the closing paragraph begins, "These are brave individuals who are still trying to figure out how to live with the decisions they made many years ago"? Might not a less biased interviewer suggest that genuine bravery would entail publicly stating their beliefs and living with the consequences?I didn't have any doubts or expectations one way or another, not being familiar with Dennett's work. Instead, I went in with an open mind, and found a terribly interesting article. I'm not sure what you mean by "less biased" here, aside from that Dennett wrote this article without starting from the same set of assumptions as you hold. I definitely don't think that telling people going through this sort of crisis of faith, being, and belonging that they're not "genuinely brave" is at all helpful, empathetic, or productive.
posted by straight at 3:32 PM on March 21 [+] [!]
1 THOU SHALT NOT BE INTOLERANT
2 THOU SHALT NOT TOLERATE BELIEFS WHICH OPPOSE 1
3 GOTO 1« Older Vernacular French signage | The Federal Reserve is so 1913 anyway Newer »
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posted by grumblebee at 12:39 PM on March 20, 2010