RE: Christianity compatible with atheism
October 1, 2011 at 3:53 pm
(This post was last modified: October 1, 2011 at 4:01 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(October 1, 2011 at 1:55 am)coffeeveritas Wrote: So you can appreciate Enlightenment-era, morals based Christianity? As in "Jesus was a great teacher of morals that we can live by, but there was nothing divine about him." That was, and to some extent is, a very popular belief among many Christians for a long time. It's not exactly popular now, but that would indeed be a fairly significant middle ground, Jesus as a teacher. (Of course you might not believe that Jesus was a great teacher yourself but still appreciate those who do.)
I can appreciate enlightenment era moral based Christians who, so soon after 15 century of mind numbingr, intellect crushing Christian moral totalitarian oppression, have already liberated their minds enough to demote jesus from god the sole and arbitrary fount of all morality to merely a guru with mortal but above average insight into morality, in the 18th century.
In the 21st century, to have not showed any progress beyond that, to have not taken full advantage of the accummulared worldliness and horizon expansion of another 3 centuries to see Jesus for the demented, overreaching, self-absorbed, mentally unhinged wacko that he was, can, far from being appreciated, only be deeply deplored.
(October 1, 2011 at 1:55 am)coffeeveritas Wrote: I also liked your statement about people of faith. Skepticism towards religion as one more admirable trait still leaves room for admirable people in all sorts of contexts.
So hypothetically, what if there were a form of Christianity that really believed that Jesus saved the world, but highly valued science, didn't feel the need to evangelize anyone, and spent all its time taking care of orphans, fighting economic injustice, and striving for world peace? Would you find that form of Christianity to be fairly admirable, if a bit deluded? Or would the belief in a deity still bother you too much?
(Of course the hypothetical is hugely favorable to my side, but this is just something I wonder about).
Valuing science and think Jesus saved the world is in itself a very severe sign of deep intellectual dissonance and/or complacent ignorance. The inescapable and unredeemable vice of any religion, and the ultimate source of all evil they prepetrate, is promotion of intellectual dissonance and complacent ignorance. The virtue of science is it provides a frame work for systematically attack on the effects of intellectual dissonance and complacent ignorance. Therefore a man who thinks he values science and loves Jesus does not understand the nature of science, and whether he is conscious of it or not, lauds superficial fruits of science while denying the bases that allows it to work and progress.
A man can no more both understand science and value science, and also honestly think jesus saved the world, any more than a man could not genuinely understand and value diligence while honestly preach salvation through indolence. So long as Christianity think Christ is anyone special, it has no real redeeming value. Since Christianity is unlikely to exist otherwise, I would say there is no way to make Christianity acceptable.
