On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:13:58 -0600, "Denis Loubet" <dloubet@io.com>
wrote:

Perhaps it's a more difficult question than I made it sound. A belief
system is not the same as a system of morals.

I agree! But the Christians I've spoken to think otherwise.

Christianity runs a range, just like other religions. There is a sort
of continuum from ultra-conservative to ultra-liberal.

In fact it doesn't really have to do with the religion at all. Some
people just tend to want everything spelled out for them. They want
someone to tell them just what they ought to believe, and they'll
believe that. They might not be able to explain it or talk about it
or defend it, but they BELIEVE it and that's what's important to them.
Other people are more cerebral and want something more complicated to
think about and wonder about, even if that means there are some
mysteries that they have to admit they don't understand.

I see this as a liberal/conservative continuum. There are Christians
all along this continuum (just as there are Jews, Muslims, and
probably Zoroasterians.) It's a shame that the most vocal Christians
now, the ones you hear from the most today, are at the right-most end
of the spectrum. But I see this not so much a phenomenon of religion
as it is of contemporary politics.

Sometimes it
substitutes for morals.

That would be my opinion as well.

Simply believing something doesn't make you
moral, does it?

I certainly don't think so. But ask a Christian, you'll probably get a
different answer.

To fundamentalists it's all about -belief-. You can only be saved if
you believe. You can only lead a 'good' life, a justified life, and
be loved by God and be part of God's plan if you -believe-. This not
how I was brought up, I was brought up to see religion as a moral
code, a set of principles to try to implement in your life. But to
fundamentalists, 'good works' are secondary; even morality, for all
the fulmination they do about it, is secondary.

Morality is a little more work than that.

That's probably why Christians think just believeing something is sufficent.
It's too much trouble otherwise.

Well it doesn't sound nice to put it that way.

To give people the
benefit of the doubt, it's very comforting to think you have a direct
pipeline to The Truth, fundamental, original, unquestionable TRUTH.
Personally I would rather have a complex mystery than an overly-simple
truth. I think the real truth is probably way beyond my
understanding.

But those two ways of looking at things, isn't that just a matter of
personal preference? What's it to me if someone believes God
literally created the universe in six days out of nothing, 6000 years
ago? It's his right to think whatever seems reasonable to him, so
long as he also respects my right to think what seems reasonable to
me.

But a belief system can serve as a framework for morality.

If it's seen that way.

Right.

What if you believed that God -wanted- you to figure it out for
yourself?

Then you wouldn't be a Christian. Christians are fed their "morality"
through things like The Ten Commandments, and the words of the Jesus
character.

Those are fundamentalist Christians, but there are more intellectual,
cerebral strains of Christianity.

I was raised in a very 'liberal', individualistic tradition. It
bothers me to hear fundamentalists (of any stripe) telling me there's
only one truth and it's simple enough for everyone to understand with
no effort. I have never found these things simple to understand.

The difference between you and them is that "no effort" thing. Your problem
is that you're *not* intellectually lazy like they are.

Well I don't think it's fair to call it 'laziness'.

But in my experience, if you ask a fundamentalist minister some tough
chewy question he will point your nose to some passage in the New
Testament and tell you just what it means. This, he'll tell you, is
the answer to your question and we have no choice but to believe and
follow it.

Yup. They think you can get morals from a deity despite Plato's Euthyphro.

If you ask the same question of a reform Jewish rabbi, he'll rub his
chin and look into space. Well, he'll say, Maimonides said this about
that in the 10th century. This is what Hillel said about it. This is
what Thomas Aquinas said about it. Now go home and think it through
for yourself. Be honest with yourself. Don't just seek the simplest
or easiest answer. And you'll probably come up with a good answer.

That's better, but it still requires that the answer not contradict other
principles of the religion. The answer must stay within the confines of the
belief system.

Yes but they're open to interpretation, in fact the whole thing is
interpretation. The idea that there is only one interpretation of the
NT seems so strange to me. Obviously anyone who thinks that has done
no reading on church history. 8^)

The whole Jewish faith is built up on the Talmud which is a collection
of essays and commentaries written over thousands of years. The
highest status among Jewish people is to be a scholar, to discuss the
holy books with other learned men, to hear and consider alternate
views. It's not so much about belief as it is about -understanding-.

Well, they can perform lots of logic on the items in their belief system,
and reach logical answers. The problem is that you can do the same thing
with the items in the Star Wars universe. Logic can be applied to any fairly
internally consistent set of premises, and yeild logical answers, but the
only way you can tell your logic is valid in the REAL world is through the
use of Hard Objective Evidence.

That's what the intellectual religionists lack, any real evidence to back up
the logical house of cards they construct. Without evidence, they may as
well be arguing about how Darth Vader should have kicked Luke's *****.

Yes, excellent point! Nothing of Jesus's teachings were actually
original with him. He basically pointed out things people already
knew or had already read in the Old Testament, and those same
principles appear in lots of other places, dressed in different
clothes if you will. It's the principles that are important, not the
stories or situations in the scriptures.

They're not true just
because they happen to be mentioned in a particular verse of a
particular book, they're true because when we hear them we -know-
they're true. Many many novels/movies/plays/etc. illustrate the same
principles--Star Wars being a good example, or the Chronicles of
Narnia.

Also atheists in both categories.

Hmmm. Haven't met an atheist who didn't think for himself. I suppose it's
possible.

Communists and Nazis were atheists who didn't think for themselves.

No. The Nazis were very religious. "Gott mit uns" on the belt buckle and all
that. And communism may have been atheistic, but communists certainly
weren't.

I say the Nazis -pretended- to be religious because they warped
religion to fit an agenda that clearly had nothing to do with
religion.

This is what some Christian leaders have been doing since
the Reagan admin (though certainly not to the degree the Nazis did
it!) in their exploitation of such issues as abortion, gay rights,
religious freedom, etc., conflating and deliberately confusing
religious and political concepts.

It seems to me that this is exactly what got Jesus ticked
off--religious leaders cozying up to the centers of secular power for
their own self-aggrandizement. Jesus could handle sin, human weakness
and folly, even disbelief, he was very forgiving of those things and
even patronizing.

But when it came to hypocracy and corruption of
religious teaching and practice, that got him really *****!

8^) (It's true, the Nazis sometimes -pretended- to be Christians.
But the Communists believed religion was a disease!)

If they said they were Christian, I am in no position to contradict them.

LOL! Yeah, not being a Christian myself I don't feel quite qualified
to tell Christians what they ought to believe. 8^)