In talk.origins,

David Jensen <david@dajensen-family.com> wrote:

...

Whatever is No Longer Taught was an error. You can tell because it is no
longer taught.

:-)

But it *is* still taught, just not by the same groups...

My serious point is that it is possible for religions to make changes in
their teachings that have nothing to do with science. I realize that
self-correcting or correction of any kind is in the eye of the beholder
in this case.

This is a serious and critical point - how do you recognise error in
religion? There are three, and only three sources:

1. Revelation, preferably written. However, as any semiotician will tell
you a text can be multiply interpreted (if you are not constrained by
historical context, anyway).

2. Authority of an institution, tradition or community. The problem here
is that for any position, there is or can be at short notice an
institution, tradition and community to back it up.

3. Personal experience of the numinous. Of course, you only have *my*
word for it that my experience of the numinous is correct, and should
*your* experience contradict *my* experience, we are back to 2...

Now, there are facts in the world, contrary to some postmodernists, and
they can disprove a religious claim - for example, one particular
textual revelation and tradition asserted that the earth was the center
of the universe; this has been overturned in the sense it was
interpreted, and a new interpretation had to "correct" that older one.
But the thing doing the correction here was not religion - it was
science...

True. Though the problem with science doing the correction, as this
newsgroup (t.o.) is dedicated to, is that even science does not always
correct religious doctrine -- at least not immediately.

Religions can correct things that are perceived as errors (of teaching
or operation) by outsiders or unhappy insiders, often without even
acknowledging that they have. The Counter Reformation, glibly and
simplistically, was started with the claim that Luther et al. were
completely wrong, but maybe some reforms could be made (please don't
look at the reforms proposed by those evil heretics). The LDS managed
famously to discover that toleration of polygamy was not a valid
teaching and, decades later, that non-whites were completely equal to
whites in front of God. The SBC and other US southern religious groups
have moved away from the over racism that was a major part of their
past.

It seems to me that religions all have to reform themselves. While
pressure and evidence may come from the outside, it takes a commitment
from leaders inside to make the change, and these leaders, while often
willing to accept scientific evidence if that is part of their
tradition, seldom formally acknowledge any other sort of pressure from
the outside.