What is essential to Christianity

[Caskhades]

[Mr. Perfect]

[Caskhades]

[Tinker]

Why do Christians never realize that by arguing against evolution and comparing Christianity and evolution they do nothing but debase Christianity and don't threaten evolution at all?

Christianity has not explanatory power whatsoever. It's a system of ethical behavior. It doesn't tell us anything meaningful about the origins of life on Earth and any comments the bible does make should be ignored because they don't make any comprehensible sense beyond a vague sense of a philosophical idea. Whether or not light is split from dark isn't even meaningful. Literally, it doesn't mean anything. A man's rib being taken to make a woman? That doesn't mean anything either. It's the ramblings of a pre-literate society and shouldn't be taken seriously.

On the other hand, loving everyone as if they were our kin is a strong ethical stand. It has a lot of meaning. Unfortunately, it is overshadowed by the stupidity of people like Yukon, Marcus or Mr. Perfect who do a much better job of making their opponents case for them by comparing them.

It's like if you said, "What's your favorite kind of car?", and I said, "Poland Spring strawberry infused sparkling water."

Science and Christianity are not at odds because they don't even address the same issues. When they are compared (almost exclusively by Christians) they do a disservice to Christianity and don't affect science. When people defending science compare them, they only display an unhealthy ignorance of science on the part of the speaker.

If there were not physiological similarities between human beings and other creatures, then we wouldn't have so many mice in laboratories pumping out cures for diseases. That there is a similarity between man and other animals is simply not debatable, and one should be treated as a retarded monkey for thinking they are.

So Yukon, Mr. Perfect and Marcus, why don't you do Christ a favor and shut the fuck up, you're hurting Christianity with your inanities. If there is anything that is inessential to Christianity, it's hatred of biology.

[Mr. Perfect]

I think you're wound a little tight on that subject Tinker. With your little treatise on parasites and fetuses I'm not sure you are the great arbiter on biology.

[AzariLoveIran]

[Mr. Perfect]

[Tinker]

[Caskhades]

Mr. P

Look, my point was that Endo's contention that "all else is irrelevant" aside from "love your neighbor" when it comes to the essence of Christianity is an insane idea. You agree, adding "and by love, I meant tough love" and "If you don't work, you don't eat" to the core principles. Why are you trying to make this about Darwin, then?

[Mr. Perfect]

[~]

Chris ti an ity [krɪstʃiˈænɪti, kris-chee-an-i-tee] –noun, plural -ties

The unsupported belief that a walking dead Jewish deity who was his own father although he always existed, commits suicide by cop, although he didn't really die, in order to give himself permission not to send you to an eternal place of torture that he created for you, but instead to make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically promise him you accept him as your master, so he can cleanse you of an evil force that is present in mankind because a rib-woman and a mud-man were convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

[Mr. Perfect]

I feel like signing up all over again.

[Caskhades]

[Rhapsody]

Was thinking about the twin threads on the essential of christiantiy and secular humanism.

They seem to be on two sides of the same coin. The difference being that they simply operate on the other side. Or in opposite directions. Or concern themselves two different aspects of life.

Religious life conforms reality to myth/mystery. Secular life conforms myth/mystery to reality.
Religious life predefines context first, secular life writes the text and informs context accordingly.
Religious life evolves around emotion, secular life around reason.
Religious life is the landscape, secular life the path.
Religious life creates an environment, secular life concerns the organism that has to live in it.

Religious life is perfectly able to create a plethora of different environments that range from entirely imaginary (near delusional) to primarily painted with sensory impressions.
Secular life is perfectly able to stick to a very rigid no nonsense adherence to daily fact and action, but in doing so it leaves unattended the surrounding mystery of existence.

Not pushing the contextual envelope can be regarded as an act of respect for mystery and existence, but not everybody is able to leave that epistemological vacuum respectfully alone. The fear of God and of black holes will not be that different. Pushing the religious-contextual envelope too hard though, will paralyze the organism that has to find its way and the human tracks soon erased by weeds.

An environment needs a horizon beyond which no information is available, where things remain fundamentally mysterious, unknown. Efforts to remove that horizon are doomed, but we can push the horizon a bit, changing the map and the path we are on. But there will always be a horizon.

To close your eyes for that horizon makes a poor life. But removing the horizon and its tender mystery via fanatic and imposed religious dogma masquerading as "faith" will kill the traveler in the process.

More Vodka please.

[Yukon Cornelius]

[Marcus]

[Tinker]

[Marcus]

I thought it a cheap shot on your part, Tinker . . would have expected much better from you.

Minorities creating a bad impression? The rank hostility to Christianity by a majority (?) on these fora creates a bad impression as well and befouls the conversation.

As for Materialists disguising their religion as science, too tired, too bored to go there again.

[Apollonius]

[Tinker]

[Marcus]

Ah, Tinker, me lad . . you continue to disappoint . . .

First, I am a Christian.

Second, if one's world-view/philosophy/etc. constitutes one's religion, then Materialism is a religion. Why be ashamed of it? Man up.

Third, I don't now and never have attacked science and quite enjoy the benefits thereof. Where'd that come from?

Fourth, you have no idea whatsoever how much time I spend doing what. Where'd that come from?

Fifth, I don't now and never have attacked Materialism. If that's what winds your clock, go for it. What i have done, consistently, is to show that Philosophical/Scientific Materialism is not science.

Finally, you attend to your morals, and I'll attend to mine. Fair enough?

[Tinker]

[Marcus]

Construction of worldviews
The construction of integrating worldviews begins from fragments of worldviews offered to us by the different scientific disciplines and the various systems of knowledge.[7] It is contributed to by different perspectives that exist in the world's different cultures. This is the main topic of research at the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies.
While Apostel and his followers clearly hold that individuals can construct worldviews, other writers regard worldviews as operating at a community level, and/or in an unconscious way. For instance, if one's worldview is fixed by one's language, as according to a strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, one would have to learn or invent a new language in order to construct a new worldview.
According to Apostel, a worldview is an ontology, or a descriptive model of the world. It should comprise these six elements:
An explanation of the world
A futurology, answering the question "where are we heading?"
Values, answers to ethical questions: "What should we do?"
A praxeology, or methodology, or theory of action.: "How should we attain our goals?"
An epistemology, or theory of knowledge. "What is true and false?"
An etiology. A constructed world-view should contain an account of its own "building blocks," its origins and construction.
[edit]Impact of worldviews

[edit]Structural aspects
The term denotes a comprehensive set of opinions, seen as an organic unity, about the world as the medium and exercise of human existence. Weltanschauung serves as a framework for generating various dimensions of human perception and experience like knowledge, politics, economics, religion, culture, science and ethics. For example, worldview of causality as uni-directional, cyclic, or spiral generates a framework of the world that reflects these systems of causality. A uni-directional view of causality is present in some monotheistic views of the world with a beginning and an end and a single great force with a single end (e.g., Christianity and Islam), while a cyclic worldview of causality is present in religious traditions which are cyclic and seasonal and wherein events and experiences recur in systematic patterns (e.g., Zoroastrianism, Mithraism and Hinduism). These worldviews of causality not only underlie religious traditions but also other aspects of thought like the purpose of history, political and economic theories, and systems like democracy, authoritarianism, anarchism, capitalism, socialism and communism.
The worldview of a linear and non-linear causality generates various related/conflicting disciplines and approaches in scientific thinking. The Weltanschauung of the temporal contiguity of act and event leads to underlying diversifications like determinism vs. free will. A worldview of free will leads to disciplines that are governed by simple laws that remain constant and are static and empirical in scientific method, while a worldview of determinism generates disciplines that are governed with generative systems and rationalistic in scientific method.[citation needed]
Some forms of philosophical naturalism and materialism reject the validity of entities inaccessible to natural science. They view the scientific method as the most reliable model for building an understanding of the world.

[Tinker]

Sure, I agree with all that. I just don't agree with the way you are using the terms. In fact I think you are debasing the language by trying to make terms mean more than they mean. Sure, beliefs occur at the group level. I don't find that controversial at all. But that doesn't make it a religion, because a religion is a coherent and structured form of practice. What are the forms and ceremonies, and in what kind of venue are they performed for so-called 'Materialism'? How many adherents put down materialism as religion for census purposes? What materialist organizations receive tax exemptions for their status as a religious institution?

The word you are looking for is still philosophy.

But enough about materialism, this thread is about Christianity.

[Rhapsody]

One feature of many religions is that they are extremely materialistic. It is the hotbed from which they grow their ideas and ideals about non-materialistic values and lives. Like kids who look in the morning at the presents they received from Santa the day before, and to their horror discover how poor those gifts are also compared to some of their friends who got much nicer gifts. These materialistic obsessions and rejections of their own material base, ignite various forms of self-hatred and self-mutilation that make the religious heart long for humiliation and submission. The religious spirit can therefore be seen as an obsessive compulsive disorder, comparable with anorexia and bolemia.