W/ Earth Day soon, I'm multi-purposing my output.
In a Discussion of Biblical whatnot, also featuring FMM's own Nutella. (To whom I say it was all Charlton Heston.)Also: Not worshiping any old bastard (Let alone his self-appointed representatives on this planet.) who lets his stenographers get away w/ that whole incoherent contradictory Bible mess.Who does he think he is, Megan McArdle?
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20 comments:
Good on you, but that thread is still full of total bullshit (don't get me started on the linguistic part). Seriously, I love all atheists, but sometimes you guys should just pick up a book on religion, preferrably one not authored by Dawkins or Hitchens.
Arguing about religion is like arguing about the fucking nature of your favorite color.
Bullshit, NoT. You may not like the whole concept, which I totally get, but you can't deny that there's much more to it than "some people believe some weird fucking shit." At the very least, consider it not a study of the subject of God and what not, but of people and of history*. Take DougJ's fucking stupid question**, for example. Whatever you think of the concepts and ideas behind it, there is a whole history of those concepts and ideas and how people dealt with them.
* This is what smart atheists do. Smart atheists like for example my fellow members of the Society of Biblical Literature.
** Why fucking stupid? Because a) it assumes Catholics do not actually read the Old Testament, which is patently false, just like the rest of what he said about Catholicism and the Bible and Judaism and the Bible, b) a simple Google search would provide the answer, which is "it depends on the denomination and the school of exegesis they follow."
I've always looked at it as a study of *why* some people believe some weird fucking shit, and why people think their brand of weird fucking shit makes complete and obvious logical sense but other people's weird fucking shit is clearly just made-up weird fucking shit. That's really the only legitimate angle for study that I can come up with when we're talking about religion.
But YMMV, I suppose.
Ooops. Shouldn't have linked.
spencer,
if it works for you, be my guest, although that sound like you're taking a psychologist's / sociologist's point of view. Ain't nothing wrong with that.
Also: 'religion' (whether organized or not) is a system of beliefs, practices and institutions like any other and as such, it's as legitimate an object of scientific inquiry as any other system, whether natural or people-made.
M. Bouffant,
it's my fault, really. Shoulda stayed in the boat :)
When I was 18 & hitching rides, I got one with a large black guy who wanted to tell me about Jesus. In a convivial way, I admitted that a lot of Levitticus confused me.
He became intense. JESUS message was that Your Offereings have become a Stench in MY NOSTRILS.
It was a heluva lot more impressive than anything they came up with at BJ.
bulbul, I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about. I said arguing about religion was pointless. that's it. No one ever changes their fucking minds and we can't convey our feelings about god anymore than we can about why we like red over blue.
NoT,
that's just it, when you say "religion", I have no idea what you mean. I'm assuming "faith", since you make a reference to "our feelings about god", but I can't be sure.
As I pointed out, "religion" is a complex system of beliefs and other shit and in that context, arguing about religion is actually arguing about facts. Like, you know, denomination X believes Y, but does not believe Z, Bible contains says A about B and so on and so forth.
Wedding blogging!
And not just wedding blogging - marriage advice blogging! Please - please pretty please - Susan, tell me you're all over this!
As soon as I can.
Gottlieb's straying a little too close to Jane Austen territory . . . and even for her own time, Austen was overly brutal.
Heh. Austen was honest. I guess that's too much for some people. She knew human nature backwards and forwards, and spared nobody, not even her heroines. And she really, really disliked pretentiousness.
What does "Austen was overly brutal" even mean? A woman who turned down a lucrative proposal and ended up in shabby-genteel "poverty" knows less about what happened to women who turned down lucrative proposals than...say, a faux-libertarian blogger two hundred years in the future? Really?
ok. I meant faith, then, but I don't think that arguing about religion was what they were doing, even as you define it. they were arguing ways of accommodating different aspects of religion into their worldview and, therefor, faith. They were being philosophers, not historians.
Well, the question that prompted it, fucking stupid though it was, addressed an issue of exegesis (aka literary and legal interpretation) and its history. True, most people got off course to discussing whatever vague notions of religion they might have (aka bullshit), but still, some offered an answer, others still addressed related questions of history and even philology. So no, they weren't just discussing faith.
I would posit a theorem that any such question gets side-tracked in a similar way by any group of people with very few exceptions.
If there isn't any such law already, then I propose it be formally established under the name "the Nutella on Toast law" and be defined as follows: As any online discussion prompted by a question relating to a scientific aspect of the study of religion (such as history, exegesis or philology) grows longer, the percentage of posts discussing not the specific question, but faith or other vaguely defined notions of religion, approaches 100."
I made cornmeal pancakes for lunch today.
Small one put Nutella on hers. She found it good.
I think stupid bickering is the limit approached over time with any religious discussion, no matter media or particular point. And I think that this series converges rapidly.
Also, I had a great time sitting on some cornmeal pancakes this morning and a little girl got a kick out of it, too.
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