unarmedman wrote:If you have any interest, I can look some of those up and post some references. Judging by the tone of your last response though it seems that you're more inclined to mock my faith rather than respect it.

i think all he's asking for is some rational thinking and consistency... things that are antithetical to faith. things that preclude my involvement in any religion.

steve wrote:

I think tmh said it quite succinctly:

i don't understand how any rational person could have any faith in humanity. it seems crystal clear that we're shitbags.

I disagree. I have met many fine humans. Even a few Christians. If only Christians could lose their disdain for their fellow men, they might be able to enjoy our company.

zing! hey, i don't think i speak for all, most, or even many Christians when i say that humanity-at-large comes across as a collection largely comprised of shitheads, though not *entirely* comprised of them. this last sentence you've written also seems to me to be equally applicable if you swap "their fellow men" and "Christians".

though it may not look like it, i think i'm agreeing with you far more than disagreeing, actually. i have much respect for your perspectives on this subject, because when you can contain your hostility, all that's left is a very thoughtful and intelligent analysis that shows what appears to be more than just casual consideration of the subject.

based on the way you refer to Christians, that you've met *a few* of them that are fine human beings, and the fact that-- at least according to the answers people voluntarily give on the US census-- the vast majority of americans are Christian (i wanna say it's around 85%, give or take), then one could logically conclude that you yourself don't like the vast majority of americans, if you've ever only met a few people you liked out of the group that represents the vast majority of your countrymen. no? i realize the math is skewed by the fact that you probably interact with a generally non-Christian subset of america. but you have to have met more than just "a few" Christians, right? and the vast majority of them are not fine human beings?

obviously there are Christians who can/could enjoy your company, and vice-versa. there have to be, with the diversity of different people that are out there.

also, i would assume that most Christians, whether or not they pull it off to a level that meets with your or anyone else's approval, should take to heart the idea that Jesus' #1 teaching was to love one another. i assume, right or wrong, that this teaching would be an example of what you respect about the Jesus character. i tend to think that the average joe, who is statistically Christian, in america anyways, is better off for much of what the church offers. ideas like charity, community service/outreach, compassion... these are great things.

the bad elements of the church, things like the hostile stance that people take towards gay marriage, ultimately it's something that could be debated all day long, to no end and, likely, to nobody's benefit. rational thought will tell many of us that there is nothing wrong with gay folks getting married. people who believe homosexuality to be an abomination (for reasons religious or otherwise) are not gonna change what they believe, either. deadlock. we all know it, right?

i would argue that this country's overall stance on homosexuality is based as much on innate human qualities that are amplified by the government as it is on anything that comes from "the church". people are innately afraid of outsiders, weirdos, or anything that puts them outside of their comfort zone. this comfort zone stems largely from society in general. does the 18 year old atheist who "fucking hates faggots" do so because a church that he despises told him to? or because he's freaked out by something foreign to him? i believe it was axl rose who said "immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me".

i believe this innate fear is amplified by society because it's perceived to be in society's best interest, in a really fucked up way, and ultimately not a religious one. gay people don't make babies. we need babies to pay their taxes and fight the wars. to be general consumers. the more straight people there are, the better, in those respects anyways. and i think those are two very important things as far as the people who plan the future of this country (and by extension, the world) are concerned. and they are not guided by the teachings of Jesus, cause if they were, we wouldn't even fight defensive wars, much less aggressive ones.

please take me an example of a Christian who is not in favor of ceaseless breeding of more taxpayers/war-fighters. personally, i'm in favor of ZPG or even NPG, ideally. i'd also love to see a united states with 0% unemployment and a 20 or 30 hour work-week. my personal form of idealism gets pretty weird.

also, consider me a Christian who is far more comfortable hanging around with non-Christians than with Christians. most of them are very foreign to me. we generally don't relate to each other so well. anybody who's met me will tell you i'm not some kinda sociopath, nor do i have some kinda universal "disdain for my fellow man". i genuinely enjoy the company of almost every person i've met (in real life) through this forum. and not one of them is Christian, that i'm aware of anyways.

99 times out of 100, when i'm flipping channels and come to Christian programming, it freaks me out. it seems pretty crazy to me.

LAD wrote:This is reductive, yes, of course, but basically, the social function of (conservative) Christianity and the Church in America is (and has always been) to produce millions of well-meaning unarmedmen to sanction the thousands of armed men who patrol the globe to ensure the profits and stability of American capitalism.

maybe that's the function you assign to it when you're making your observations, which are as biased as anyone else's. if you asked anyone who goes to church, they would likely disagree with you. i don't believe there's some centralized body that controls "the church" (thousands of them, of various denominations) and makes it serve this function, do you? if there is, is it the Vatican that's out to ensure profits for american capitalism? whuh? or is it someone else that's controlling the church? i tend to think it's generally just groups of people, from church to church.

and obviously with Christian churches with lesbian pastors, for example (which i have experienced), they're not in line. nor are churches that are serious about doing things the way Jesus seemed to indicate he'd like them done... charity, community service, etc. how is this stuff all about US capitalism? i would say without hesitation that there are *plenty* of churches that are doing just this.

go spend 8 sundays straight at Uptown Baptist Church here in chicago and you'll see that ideas like this are maybe a bit of a farce! those guys are not about capitalism, that i've seen. they *are* about preaching their faith all over the world, which is a whole 'nother story that i hesitate to bring up as it can be so annoying. but supporting capitalism? they are much more about helping the poor than turning a profit, from what i saw the times i was there.

having been raised in a dull-ass Catholic church, then taken maybe 10 years off to hate the church, and then in the past 5 or so years been to a whole slew of different churches of various denominations (all Christian, though), i can make a somewhat informed observation for everybody here to take for what it's worth:

most people appear to be involved in their church for social reasons. they want to be surrounded by people that are in a similar situation to them, namely, people who are struggling as flawed, messed-up human beings, to do the best they can to achieve an ideal, that being the teachings of Jesus. they want to be around people who understand what that's like. this is a very good thing.

i see it as the same kinda thing that happens when we as musicians gravitate towards other musicians. people can relate to each other and talk about things that they have in common.

for many people, that becomes the entire focus of their life, trying to follow the teachings of Jesus, which can be the greatest and can make for a truly wonderful person. for many others, however, they're happy just to get into the social circumstance that is church membership, and they are actually surrounding themselves with people who did just the same thing, got themself into a comfortable social situation... and it's a lot easier to just not struggle with the hard stuff...

like how no Christian (or Jew for that matter) should ever kill anyone else, because it's one of the 10 freakin commandments. but how do you protect your family, friends, country, from destruction at the hands of an aggressor? you kill him, that's how. cold hard reality. does that invalidate the commandment to not kill each other, or make the bible or the church bad? i'd say a resounding "fuck no". i think not killing other people is an ideal that everyone should strive for, always. but does this commandment always universally apply? unless we see a world where God jumps in and kills the bad guy for us, i'd say that rule will continually be broken out of some sort of "necessity".

there are tons of things in the bible that nobody can defend intelligently, rationally. i very much understand being irritated by people who claim it as a flawless, word-for-word-perfect dictation from the mouth of God. maybe the contradictory stuff is the fault of the authors, maybe it's something God did on purpose, maybe it's all garbage... everybody should make their own decision, right? is science without its contradictions? if light is determined to be both a wave *and* a particle, does that give pause? do we need to throw science out?

steve, i agree completely with this statement:

Because dealing with it verbatim is a problem. I understand. If you get to write-off parts of the Bible because you can't defend them, then I get to write-off those parts you shouldn't defend. And the whole thing then is not worth using as a now-and-tomorrow standard of propriety, since we get to pick and choose the parts that "matter" today.

i've made this exact same point in discussions with Christians. i couldn't agree more. it's a tough thing to reconcile. i spent a good long time trying to do it, and to no avail. at this point i'm happy with the good, and though i'm still well aware of stuff that seems to me to be messed up, i can talk about it and everything, but i generally like to keep to myself about that stuff now. i can see either side, and i make my choices about what i believe to be right or wrong. a beauty thing about the bible is that it somehow ended up where Jesus' words are so spot-on, and profound, to me.

i also don't try to apply the bible to anything but my own life. i don't try to tell anybody else that they need to live their life in a certain way because the bible says so, except maybe in one case: i will talk ad nauseum about how i upset i get when a guy like bush claims a profound Christianity in his life, and is the head of a military that murders countless people. he doesn't show the intense love for his fellow humans that i would expect from someone who claims such profound Christianity. granted, though i don't kill countless people, i certainly don't show a resounding love when i use expressions like "shithead". i also never use my faith as a weapon to control or oppress people. i *will* discuss it, on occasion, but that's as far as i think it should go.

to me, the ultimate problem is not Christianity, or the church, or the book... the problem is that people pick and choose, and *the way they do it* illustrates the sad reality: they are shitheads. bush was not elected to a second term by a book or a church, he was re-elected by individual people. i was at a church that played the "vote your faith" card shortly before the election. it was lame. that idea should have resulted in more votes for Kerry than Bush, i think. and ultimately it should have resulted in votes for some undetermined guy who's clearly not a capitalist in the least, with capitalism being just about the antithesis of Christianity... but because it's in the hands of people, it's bush that gets the votes.

that's what i mean when i say people are shitheads. how could a Christian ever be a racist? how could a Christian ever kill someone out of hatred? how could a Christian ever be a capitalist, when Jesus was all about the sharing? because people are shitheads. i think it actually says that in the bible somewhere... "fallen nature of man" is maybe just a nice way to say "shitheads"

steve wrote:And cheers to you. I finally read an entire post of yours.

this one too? i know they're often too long. what can i do?

toomanyhelicopters wrote:.

LAD wrote:This is reductive, yes, of course, but basically, the social function of (conservative) Christianity and the Church in America is (and has always been) to produce millions of well-meaning unarmedmen to sanction the thousands of armed men who patrol the globe to ensure the profits and stability of American capitalism.

maybe that's the function you assign to it when you're making your observations, which are as biased as anyone else's. if you asked anyone who goes to church, they would likely disagree with you. i don't believe there's some centralized body that controls "the church" (thousands of them, of various denominations) and makes it serve this function, do you? if there is, is it the Vatican that's out to ensure profits for american capitalism? whuh? or is it someone else that's controlling the church? i tend to think it's generally just groups of people, from church to church.

With respect, you're missing the point. The disjunction between what attracts people to Christianity (or what keeps people within its worldview) and what Christianity (in social reality) is as an ideological state apparatus, is the crux of my point. It's a point you don’t seem to understand, and I’m not sure it's one that I have the patience to articulate in a clearer way than I put it in my last post.

Intention has nothing to do with it. Zip. I'm not saying American church leaders and members intend to be the housewives of global capitalism; in fact, this gap between what adherents of conservative Christianity think they're about and what their beliefs and politics really engender in concrete social terms is what I am talking about.

"Ideology" in the manner in which I'm using the term is not a series of beliefs consciously chosen through reasoned analysis; rather, it is a self-perpetuating organization of social reality which functions most efficiently by constructing and then putting a bridle on individual intent in the first place.

No one is behind it. It's not a romantic conspiracy. It's just the way class interests are maintained.

Natural is not in it
Your relations are of power
We all have good intentions
But all with strings attached

So I'm going to leap back into the fray and attempt to point out that the initial anti-Southern Culture comments I made were in no way explicitly about Christianity. Yes, they reference the conscious decision of some of the population to rely almost exclusively on their personal religious beliefs to define their political beliefs, but that's more a function of laziness and lack of education than any aspect of Christianity itself.

I think people adopt the religion-as-politics mindset because it's easy and it provides answers without much contemplation. The problem with the South is not that it's full of christians. It's that, statistically and anecdotally, it's full of some of the most poorly-educated people in the country. And when you take a mass of uneducated people and confront them with the kind of complex issues that define politics today, it's only natural that they will rely on a simple black-and-white morality to frame, define, and conclude every argument.

Forgive my effort to re-direct the thread. I really have enjoyed the back-and-forth here. I only felt compelled to clarify that I personally don't believe christianity is a culprit. It's a symptom, at least in the context that it's being discussed here.

LAD, it's pretty pathetic that you have to make stuff up that I said now to get an argument out of me. But kudos to you for trying.

I never said anything against gay marriage or for tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%. Anything. I debated abortion on another thread, but certainly not from the perspective of womens' rights. To me, abortion is not about womens' rights, but about a child's. A woman can make a decision before she gets pregnant. A child never gets to make the choice.

I respond to this just to clarify to anyone else reading this, that those supposed "beliefs" of mine were completely fabricated to make a point. As far as responding to the rest of it - well, you're just not worth it. sorry.

unarmedman wrote:There are a number of places in the new testament in which Jesus clearly states particular laws that have been abandoned, such as eating of certain meats, and circumcision.

This is exactly what I'm asking for, among other things. Where does it say don't burn a calf? Where does it say that it's no longer okay to rape your servants? Or keep slaves? Where does it say that when going to war with another tribe, you shouldn't subject them to the Ban (Herem), where every living thing within the city is killed? Yes, I'd like to see the Church's reasons for ignoring the specific parts of the Old Testament that are routinely glossed-over. Not some general "all things are made new in me" thing, but specific reasons.

Christians (especially those in the South who had to find excuses for slavery, segregation and murder), were and are fond of finding Old Testament footing for their arguments. This is done currently in the gay marriage debate, and I want to call their bluff. You (christians) say there is a biblical reason to take certain Old Testament scriptures to heart, and discard others. Okay, let's see the reasoning.

If you have any interest, I can look some of those up and post some references. Judging by the tone of your last response though it seems that you're more inclined to mock my faith rather than respect it.

Please look up, please post. I do not mock your faith. I have a low opinion of the Church, which I believe it has earned, and I like puncturing rhetorical disguises. If you can use casual language like "Jesus is my friend," then I can respond in kind.

i don't understand how any rational person could have any faith in humanity. it seems crystal clear that we're shitbags.

hmmm

more and more it seems to me that most people who glom onto a given religion do so primarily out of desperation. they are uncomfortable with their lives and the lives of others, which they are forced to consider on a daily basis, being part of the world and whatnot. and this unease, combined with the essential unknowability of the future, leaves them with a gap in their consciousness that they ache to bridge.

i sense the same gap in myself at times, but i submit that it's merely part of being alive. and if grasping at a faith simply allows you to indulge a distaste for the real world, to dismiss big chunks of life on earth that make you uncomfortable, then perhaps it is not a terribly constructive belief.

the side of religion that embraces all humanity, that holds up the divine as a (perhaps unreachable) ideal to which we should aspire, THAT shit i like. the thing is that you can always embrace humanity and aspire to greatness without buying into the rest of it.

unarmedman wrote:I never said anything against gay marriage

This:
http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewto ... 7347#37347

and this:
http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewto ... 7488#37488

lead me to believe otherwise.

Are you in favor of legalizing gay marriage?

or for tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%.

Did you vote for Bush? Were you in favor of the tax cuts his administration passed?

To me, abortion is not about womens' rights, but about a child's.

Okay.

I respond to this just to clarify to anyone else reading this, that those supposed "beliefs" of mine were completely fabricated to make a point. As far as responding to the rest of it - well, you're just not worth it. sorry.

Okay, Christian friend. Okay!

P.S.

In December of 2004 LAD wrote:. . . do you take issue with the Wikipedia entry on the "Christian right?"

Issues which the Christian Right is (or is thought to be) primarily concerned with include:

* Banning or heavily restricting abortion.
* Banning some applications of bio-technology: bio-ethics.
* Opposition to the gay rights movement and the upholding of traditional family values.
* Opposition to the practice of gay or straight "sodomy" (usually meaning anal sex or oral sex outside of marriage, though sometimes within too).
* Support for the presence of Christianity in the public sphere, such as with prayer in school.
* Ending government funding restrictions against religious charities and schools, and similar matters.
* Opposition to U.S. court decisions widening the separation of church and state beyond historical tradition.
* Banning of books, music, television programs, films, etc. that they view as indecent (especially pornography).

In the past they also supported other ideas, most notably prohibition, abolitionism and civil rights.

If you do, could you inform us of some prominent leaders in the conservative Christian community who hold positions which contrast with the points above.

Have members of this community ever spoken out against exploitation, unfair labor practices, human rights violations, and so on?

Beyond that, what would you say are conservative Christian organizations’ most important contributions to American society and the world at large?

Edit: Just thought I'd append a link to the Wikipedia entry on the Christian left.

Beliefs are nothing but an easily malleable idea that can be changed at any time. Look at the core of the conscious/subconscious. You could go from being a 24/7 bible preacher to a 24/7 wiccan. People love to feel as though they are a part of something grand, so they will take their deep rooted tendency of finding a group with similar interests in God or whatever and use that group as a source of power. That is the problem I find in the church. It is a business really. You think the pope is "wearing the fisherman's shoes?" You think he's poor as all hell? Eating can's of beans for dinner? doubt it.

So trash the church all you want, because you will find some corruption of course. Now what's your reason for researching the bible? to find flaws? to trash Christians? You can trash anyone for something if you look hard enough. It all depends on your intent of studying the Bible old and new....if you are reading it to become more moral you will, in other words you can either focus on the negatives or the positives. If you look for positves, the bible will ebenfit you more than harm you, bottom line. I have to go eat a baby fetus now, keep on tearing into each other.