(10-06-2021, 12:45 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: [quote pid='79094' dateline='1633511106']
Because it's one of the only institutions that is a stable rock in society that's constantly changing and one of the only institutions not saying things like "God and heaven are metaphors" and all kinds of nonsense you see. I think today's society is too sex obsessed. They are willing to throw out concepts like God, meaning, eternal salvation, and heaven just because of issues with sex and sexuality.
Our society WAS too sex-obsessed. Now it is sex-repression-obsessed. Or both at once, depending on which part of culture you meet. I don't see people throwing "out concepts like God, meaning, eternal salvation, and heaven just because of issues with sex and sexuality." I don't see any connection between these issues.
[/quote]
That's how things often go: from excessive repression to excessive lassitude. In some circumstances tradition might dampen the tendency. But that takes a long time to assess. Sometimes we see paradoxical reality, as with same-sex marriage and adoption being accepted during a harsh (if justified) crackdown on domestic violence and sexual abuse of children. So LGBT people threw the "chickenhawk" gay men who preyed on vulnerable boys? That is one way to show that LGBT rights are possible with the qualification that they are for adults only.
Quote:Our approach considers God and heaven etc. as aspects of reality to experience and learn more about, rather than stories in a book to believe in, and a basis for knocking others who don't believe in them.
The prospect of Heaven used to be a reward for compliant suffering for non-elites who accept their subjection and poverty and adhere to the local orthodoxy, with Hell as a threat for anyone who rejected the demands of rapacious, ruthless, self-indulgent elites or challenges the local orthodoxy. I'm tempted to believe that if there is a Hell then the horror is the company that one keeps (stumbling around among fellow drunks and addicts is something to avoid, but the real horror is to go where the Nazis and Stalinists are.
Maybe if I were to write a modern Inferno, I would have the Bad Places ranging from a nasty slum to various shades of prison (including a plantation in which brutal slave-masters and human traffickers are the slaves and robots are the masters. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "as I would not be a slave I would not be a master"... to at the worst a Gulag or KZ-Lager. Unending battlefield? Somewhere in there. For obvious reasons, Dante could not write about the Atlantic slave trade, Nazis, Stalinists, Ba'athists, ISIS, or the like.
Quote:Catholic Church doctrine used to teach that God created the world in 6 days, and all creation is the same as it was 6025 years ago. But it is established knowledge that life has evolved and changed over millennia, and therefore life progresses and develops rather than being like a stable rock. You don't even have to consider evolution; just consider how a plant or animal develops in its lifetime. It grows from a seed and continues to grow and change. That is the way of life. Your Church simply refuses to be alive.
At the least the Catholic Church, if not for the most honorable reasons, has elected to ensure that scientific learning and achievement or a desire for social equity are not to be stumbling blocks to faith. Some religious bodies have dug themselves into an even deeper hole by rejecting science and acquiescence to extreme suffering on behalf of plutocracy. Maybe Aspie Millennial will be delighted to see many of these becoming Catholics.
Quote:Of course, today even the Church is more willing to accept science. And those like me who accept evolution don't have to reduce it to natural selection or some other mechanical cause, but also see it as divine spirit or God unfolding and expressing.
The best reason for believing in one God is that the universe makes sense. Does something supernatural underpin mathematics and physics?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.