Can Christianity be progressive?

Not sure it’s ready for public school, but it has come a long way in the last few decades. This was going on while Dawkins and Harris were gaining notoriety. As Azim Shariff says, everybody hates me, because I tell the religious that their stories are myths and their gods don’t exist, and I tell the non-believers that there is value to coming together and sharing myths and rituals.

I went looking for something like this a while ago. Scott Atran had a couple books and I saw a few textbooks, but it’s only recently that I’ve found degree programs. Kinda late for me, but it’s out there now.

Is taught in religious schools in India and areas around. But not under the subheading of human philosophies and history. It is taught as religion. Has been for thousands of years. The problem today seems to be that the schools created their own branch. And there are over a thousand branches today. I think Buddha would fall under that type of teaching too.

Protestantism had many causes but Catholic warmongering probably was not one of them. I agree with the theory that behavioral changes – the rise of individualism – in Northern Europeans set the stage for an uprising against Catholic domination. Basically it’s part of the W.E.I.R.D. mentality.

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Ah, you stand so high on a hundred billion corpses and the view is just fine.

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I’m sure everyone here knows that WEIRD is " Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic " Some people might not know that this is not bad. “Western” is too broad of a term, but the others are what everyone wants. The hard part is having them with ethics and equality.

The bad part is that those who have these 5 things have a very skewed view of the world. Funny thing, that can be corrected by the “educated” part.

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300 million Orthodoxen

220 million Eastern Orthodoxen
60 million Oriental Orthodoxen
15 million Coptic Orthodoxen

and up to a billion Protestants in more fragments than you can shake a stick at.

So a third of the minor is Christian.

Making at least 2.1 billion Christians.

Are those 1.9 billion Muslims all Sunni? All Salafi Sunni? All Deobandi Salafi Sunni?

I think that makes it clear there is no consensus in religion at all. Each sect has a different interpretation of “scripture” ( different for each sect).

A clear indication that it has not worked out for theism at all.

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Yeah but. Only 10% atheist (where are they by the way? The EU is 20% atheist sensu lato, one hundred million, the best the WEIRD world has to offer after 300 years of ‘Enlightenment’) shows the magnitude of the problem. If religion, superstition is a failure for enthralling over seven billion people, what kind of success does that make atheism?

Aaaand, the goalposts have moved

Atheism is still a cause of death or serious trouble in many countries. It progress with some setbacks. Religion is such a tool of power when atheism cannot be.

How do you figure that when most of the time humans have religious wars and knowledge is suppressed by religious authorities? Many a scientist faced prosecution from the Church, clear back to Aristotle, if not before. The Church and even Islam has suppressed progress and knowledge for centuries. Most wars have been between various religious groups, not atheists. Religion also suppresses human rights too, but not atheism. When was the last time an atheist denied a woman health care? Oh and let’s not forget all the little kids who have died or suffered health issues because of the BS of their parents believing that Jesus loves their kids and vaccinations are not needed because God will protect their kids.

Of course there are Xians who don’t believe that BS and vaccinate their kids, as well as themselves or follow what the medical scientists say they need to do, but that doesn’t mean atheism is inferior or bad.

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In most cases, most of those who have died of COVID-19 thus far more than likely were ultra religious, believing that God will protect them and if not, he had a plan for them to have a far better life in heaven. They’d died delusional, because there is no afterlife that is better and with a god who loves them so much he allowed them to painfully suffocate to death.

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Atheism isn’t a movement, it’s a state of mind.

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A schizophrene large majority of my mind is in it.

Sorry if i was not clear, i meant that the fact of being an atheist can be the cause of your death by believers and authorities.

[Discrimination against atheists - Wikipedia]

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Which countries? ? ?

Really? In the post that followed yours, yes.

I look at atheism as a movement. As Martin said I got a good view from standing on a billion corpse. In reality, I am standing on a billion corpus. His numbers are off. The Pew poll says that 20% of Christians don’t believe in God. Atheism is a slow-moving success if you look at it from a historical viewpoint. What does it matter how many people are Christians? Christians can make good atheists. My favorite English atheist is William Blackstone. Atheists were looked down upon as people without morals. Blackstone help change that viewpoint a little. At the time the Laws of God were stronger than the Rules of Laws. Blackstone explained the English Common Laws. He covered the absolute rights of the individual. Sometimes called Natural’s Laws. Blackstone spoke and wrote in the times of Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, David Hume and Benjamin Franklin. Thus, help set the atmosphere for the Atheist constitution we have today. The philosophy of the Declaration of Independence asserting the “self-evident” “unalienable Rights” of people granted by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” could have come, and probably did, from Blackstone’s description of the rights of Englishmen under the British Constitution.

Yes, if you remove Jesus from any connection with a God. But to most Christians , Jesus is God so we’re back to where we started.

Your problem is that you must prove that everything in existence has a direct connection to a supernatural agency. If you cannot do that, but you can demonstrate that there are only natural evolutionary processes, then the very concept of a god becomes superfluous and all that remains are natural phenomena, even as we do not have all the answers to that.

But compared to knowledge of a God our sciences are a lot more informative than the vague assertion of an almighty consciousness that somehow existed before the existence of the universe, whether in pure spirit or in the human form of Christ, which makes all this infinitely more complex than the demonstrably simple evolutionary processes.

Do you realize how complex the notion of a supernatural agency is? By definition it is unattainable knowledge, it is supernatural and not of this universe at all. What are you going to do with that?

How are you going to explain that which is inexplicable? Faith? OK, good luck with that.

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OK either you are saying your mind has Schizophrenia or you just don’t make any sense.