K
KyivAndrew
Guest
When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything It becomes either belief in New Age, Crystals, UFOs, the Maharishi, or any fantasy, or mostly a sick inner-focused pride that makes oneself one’s own God.
A new Gallup study, “What Americans Really Believe,” suggests that if anti-religious crusaders Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want a more rational, less superstitious world, they should encourage people to go to church. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that, according to the study…
“…traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians…
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.”
These findings are in line with the myth-shattering work of recent historians, who’ve discovered that more people believed in witches and the paranormal after the Protestant Reformation than in the era before. A major reason for that was the authority of the Catholic Church, which was a bulwark against popular superstition and irrationality during the Middle Ages
Or then there again is two cent comic’s Bill Maher’s movie Religulous. After it came out, people started almost word for word claiming to be religulous or falling hook-line-and-sinker for an imaginary Horus/Jesus connection and myth. The responses to these accusations always seem to garner the same answers.
It’s funny Bill Maher’s movie is actually providing thought and arguments for some atheists and agnostics to challenge Christ on CAF. Horus seems to be the starting point for many in keeping with the movie I assume.
Here’s Bill Maher last year before the movie premiered:
On Oct. 3, Mr. Maher debuts “Religulous,” his documentary that attacks religious belief. He talks to Hasidic scholars, Jews for Jesus, Muslims, polygamists, Satanists, creationists, and even Rael – prophet of the Raelians – before telling viewers: “The plain fact is religion must die for man to live.”
But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O’Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman – a quintuple bypass survivor – to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn’t accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: “I don’t believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory.” He has told CNN’s Larry King that he won’t take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn’t even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.
Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are.”
online.wsj.com/article/SB122178219865054585.html
Look, I am not here to say Catholics are more rational than atheists, but am pointing out that this Catholic = Superstition vs. Atheism = Rationalism in humans is a false dichotomy. Studies show this. I’m not arguing for Catholicism’s superiority here, just that atheism and agnosticism are not successful belief systems in reducing “irrational beliefs” like Atlantis, UFOs, etc. As I’ve said atheists try to tie Reason to their side of the argument but that’s simply not true. Why? Because when you rely on human reason alone, reason has limitations and reflects itself differently in each person.
French Revolutionary Jacobin Robespierre tried to kill Jesus Christ in France with thousands of brutal deaths and tortures of innocent women, children, and men, and drowning of priests and nuns tied together to drown in so-called “republican marriages”. Robespierre relied and idolized the new Goddess of Reason. Some Reason!
Almost 300,000 Catholics died in the Vendee alone. To believe that all answers to society (including the moral ones) can only come in the future from reason and science is an unreasonable proposition based on facts and history.
Stalin and Lenin too both felt religion mere superstition and were to build a society based upon reason without any Christianity. Their Society of Reason collapsed in failing to see anything rational other than the “scientific laws” of socialism. 100,000 million people died in this experiment of militant atheism.
I am just putting this out for thought, not necessarily to start a debate. If somebody does respond, I do not wish for any argument to ensue with ad hominem attacks and lack of charity, I ask.
A new Gallup study, “What Americans Really Believe,” suggests that if anti-religious crusaders Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want a more rational, less superstitious world, they should encourage people to go to church. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that, according to the study…
“…traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians…
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.”
These findings are in line with the myth-shattering work of recent historians, who’ve discovered that more people believed in witches and the paranormal after the Protestant Reformation than in the era before. A major reason for that was the authority of the Catholic Church, which was a bulwark against popular superstition and irrationality during the Middle Ages
Or then there again is two cent comic’s Bill Maher’s movie Religulous. After it came out, people started almost word for word claiming to be religulous or falling hook-line-and-sinker for an imaginary Horus/Jesus connection and myth. The responses to these accusations always seem to garner the same answers.
It’s funny Bill Maher’s movie is actually providing thought and arguments for some atheists and agnostics to challenge Christ on CAF. Horus seems to be the starting point for many in keeping with the movie I assume.
Here’s Bill Maher last year before the movie premiered:
On Oct. 3, Mr. Maher debuts “Religulous,” his documentary that attacks religious belief. He talks to Hasidic scholars, Jews for Jesus, Muslims, polygamists, Satanists, creationists, and even Rael – prophet of the Raelians – before telling viewers: “The plain fact is religion must die for man to live.”
But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O’Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman – a quintuple bypass survivor – to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn’t accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: “I don’t believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory.” He has told CNN’s Larry King that he won’t take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn’t even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.
Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are.”
online.wsj.com/article/SB122178219865054585.html
Look, I am not here to say Catholics are more rational than atheists, but am pointing out that this Catholic = Superstition vs. Atheism = Rationalism in humans is a false dichotomy. Studies show this. I’m not arguing for Catholicism’s superiority here, just that atheism and agnosticism are not successful belief systems in reducing “irrational beliefs” like Atlantis, UFOs, etc. As I’ve said atheists try to tie Reason to their side of the argument but that’s simply not true. Why? Because when you rely on human reason alone, reason has limitations and reflects itself differently in each person.
French Revolutionary Jacobin Robespierre tried to kill Jesus Christ in France with thousands of brutal deaths and tortures of innocent women, children, and men, and drowning of priests and nuns tied together to drown in so-called “republican marriages”. Robespierre relied and idolized the new Goddess of Reason. Some Reason!
Almost 300,000 Catholics died in the Vendee alone. To believe that all answers to society (including the moral ones) can only come in the future from reason and science is an unreasonable proposition based on facts and history.Stalin and Lenin too both felt religion mere superstition and were to build a society based upon reason without any Christianity. Their Society of Reason collapsed in failing to see anything rational other than the “scientific laws” of socialism. 100,000 million people died in this experiment of militant atheism.
I am just putting this out for thought, not necessarily to start a debate. If somebody does respond, I do not wish for any argument to ensue with ad hominem attacks and lack of charity, I ask.
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