(August 10, 2020 at 11:45 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: If a man believes water can cure his baldness, he is free to do so. My disagreement with him does not warrant exclusion of him. But any attempt to make his belief representative of everyone else's is dishonest.
What about majority's representation of beliefs? Most of Christians believe in personal God, that God lives in heaven, that you can record sounds of hell if you go deep underground, and also they believe in exorcism. Why do you think Vatican trains exorcists if they are so sophisticated there in Peter's palace? Perhaps to "heal" people from metaphorical devils?
And what you are doing is being very vague, and that is what some liberal Christians are doing by speaking of God as a "ground of being" rather than as an entity with humanlike feelings and properties that behaves in specified ways. Just so you can make the fewest claims and are thus the least susceptible to refutation--or even discussion.
But the truth is for anyone having the least familiarity with religion, it goes without saying that such watered-down versions of faith are not held by most people, who accept instead a personal god who intervenes in the world.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
