[Serious] How many reasonable solutions are there to any particular social issue?

[Belacqua]

Indeed, it's almost as arrogant as coming to a group predominantly composed of former xtians and trying to tell them that you know how xtians think better than they do...

Thanks, this is a good opportunity to address this sort of insult. I've explained my position on this kind of thing many times, but this will give me a chance to put it in one place.

First, Christians are an enormous and diverse group, and there is almost nothing you can say about them that will be true for all of them. So I want to be very clear that when we say something about Christians in general, it isn't something that's only true for the worst ones. 

Second, as I have said many times, I am not interested in percentages among Christians, as to how many believe what. Nor do I care about what the people said in the church you went to until last Sunday. In just about any subject, looking at the majority is not the best way to find the best thinking -- unless you want to argue that Dan Brown is a better novelist than Dostoevsky. 

I have always been careful not to say "Christians believe" without further attribution. I will say that Christians in a certain tradition believe a thing, or that a given theologian says something. Christian thought (in some cases non-thought) is too diverse to say that any given thing is believed by all of them. 

Naturally I get scolded for mentioning the names of important Christian thinkers. But I get insulted for not mentioning them, too. The insults are irrelevant. 

If you want to spend time arguing against the stupidest Christians I think that's great. That's not how I want to spend my time, however. 

It seems that many atheists on the Internet realized that the stories they were hearing in church were silly, and quit believing when they were about twelve. That's perfectly reasonable. The twelve-year-old's image of God is almost invariably silly. Sometimes, though, those same atheists assume that the twelve-year-old's image is all that there is in theology, and they don't have to address anything else. That's overly simple. 

One of the greatest of Christian poets, William Blake, addressed the difference between the child's view and the adult's view in his Songs of Innocence and Experience. He knew of the tendency a long time ago. 

As for the topic at hand, which you pushed all over the place from cave men up to 16th century explorers, if we were able to focus on my specific claim I think it would be clear that what I'm saying is very limited and defensible. What people think of as religion changes. Secularity is possible in some times and not others. Concepts that we think of as religious are sometimes detachable from medicine, government, and general education, and sometimes not.