Ancient Gray
, great post. I'll take a stab at a few things.
1. Sorry to hear about your experiences growing up. What denomination? For what it's worth, racism is entirely incompatible with the facial text of Christianity.
"Then Peter began to speak: 'I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right." (Acts 10:38). I don't know what your old man's beef was with sexuality but I think neuroscience and psychology show that there's tremendous value to chastity. And regarding denial of science - many of the greatest scientists in history come directly from the Catholic priesthood (Lemaitre, the proposer of the Big Bang Theory; Mendel, the father of genetics; Possibly Coepernicus, the proposer of heliocentrism). All of the leading thinkers of the scientific revolution cared and wrote about religion just as much, and in some cases more, than they ever did about science (Newton, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz). Our whole Western tradition of reason and rationality derives from the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
2. I think the world would be far worse off without religion. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest provider of education, medicine, disaster relief, and overall human services, not just in the world today but throughout all of human history.
3. The existence of God is a philosophical argument, not a religious one. Aristotle and the ancient Greeks proposed the idea of the First Mover. Renee Descartes also offered a proof that was independent from his fervent Catholic faith. To me, it just does not seem like consciousness, creativity, civilization, logic, are naturally-occuring phenomenons. We live in a universe full of dead rocks and our planet is the only one with any real biodiversity; we have an enormous planet with a vast evolutionary timeline, but we're the only animal with each of these gifts, let alone all of them at the same time. The materialist argument is implausible.
4. Regarding "works of faith" - we don't do it because we expect a reward or worry about our life's inventory. We do good works because it's our duty, it's the least we can do out of gratitude to God. (Luke 17:10). The reward is the same regardless if you devoted your entire lifetime to God or only just the end. (Matthew 20).
5. You're right that there have been many religions throughout human history - I would argue that's anthropological proof positive of how important it is for human functioning.
6. The geopolitical and socio-cultural underpinnings of atrocity would persist even in the absence of religion. The explicitly atheist governments of the twentieth century slaughtered and starved more people than all wars of religion combined. France's anti-religious Reign of Terror killed more people than all of the Inquisitions across Europe combined. You cannot deny that the Crusades were a pre-emptive response to a violent, hegemonic Islam, who had destroyed the Persian Empire, and now besieged all of Europe in the East (the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire), the West (The Moorish conquest of Spain) and the South, all along North Africa. Most of the accounts of atrocities are implausible stories by people who were born decades after the events - the sieges were largely in line with medieval warfare and have been revised downward as the evidence gets better. You should read the works of Thomas Madden for more.
phisheep
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AngularSaxophone
I think Christ could have a comment and throw down some fury regarding what some of us believe. I remember he spit fire at the money-changers in the temple. But, his was a righteous anger, in my opinion. He could not be wrong. We are, all of us, fallible. Maybe we could understand that in ourselves as well as others to get along as best we can? If you have all of the answers, what are you doing hanging around here? Go and start a church! After all, aren't we meant to preach the gospel? When the comet comes, tell Do and Rey I said, "Hi!"
has been exclusively that. The Catholic Church. They are not God’s church as much as they’d like you to believe it. If you truly seek answers, read the Bible on your own with adult eyes. I’d start with the gospel (Matthew Mark Luke John) as you’ll get to know who Christ is. All else follows from there. If you go that far you’ll have an understanding of prayer and should be able to make your way through the rest of the book with a greater understanding and more answered questions. Go that far and all questions are answered along with understanding.
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