Lasto beth Lammen - Is your religion nuts?

[RoseMorninStar]

ALATAR!! I see you've met my neighbors!! I'd laugh.. but it ain't funny.

I have discussed my neighbor on another messageboard, but I am not sure I have here.. so I'll give a little background.

I have EXTREME fundamentalist neighbors who has been VERY active in pushing their agenda in our community ever since I've known them, about 9-10 years. They have threatened lawsuits almost every year against our public schools (although they home schooled) for various reasons.. bringing in a national group that will back them for funding, etc.. Our community/schools cannot afford these lawsuits and this group often gets their way. These lawsuits were aimed at handing out anti-science/creation literature in the halls & parking lots at the public schools (blocking exits until you took their literature) .. anti-gay and anti-gay support programs.. anti-harassment programs (because one of the 12 protected 'safe zone' items was sexual orientation).. The science & history classes at the public schools ... they have often protested/challenged books and last year they were part of a group that took on our local public library. They were able to remove half of the library board by getting the community worked up by saying the library was a 'porn shop'. They wanted religion books placed in the science section.. and any books mentioning gays removed. It cost our town a small fortune.. and much division.

Last year 2 members of this extremist group landed positions on the local school board by misrepresenting their intentions and making it political even though school boards are not supposed to be political. They did not tell people they were going to attempt to undermine the curriculum and push for creationism to be taught. They would use words like 'cut the fat' and 'slash taxes'.. and 'get back to 'reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic' and core classes'. "We need mechanics and factory workers.. we shouldn't be paying to prepare all of these kids for college!" I know they are hoping to slash & burn the school system 'bleed the beast'. They were both home-schoolers and want to run the public school into the ground, unless they can institute creationism into the schools.

Here is a letter my neighbor posted in our local news opinion page this week. It is part of an on-going series of articles she posts on creationism and the horrors of our public schools. Her husband is newly appointed to our school board.

YOUR VIEWS
Responding to schools’ evolution teachings

Another school year is under way. I’d like to share some thoughts to help parents.

I host a booth at fairs throughout Wisconsin. We educate folks in interpretation of scientific data. Parents come to my booth for help. I hear comments like: “Help! My son is losing his faith because of evolution being taught in school.” and “I’m sick and tired of evolution and millions of years being shoved down my daughter’s throat.”

After my son took biology at East, I began this outreach. He told me kids are confused about creation/ evolution and don’t know where to get answers.

Space allows only a few points:

* Don’t confuse small observable changes in plants and animals to mean they change into other organisms. Perhaps we can say, “Microevolution does not mean macroevolution.”

* Evolutionists highlight one organism, i.e. daisies or finches. Small variations are shown, but never a new organism. There’s tremendous variation in plants and animals, color, beak size, length of petal, etc. The fairy tale begins when those small changes are extrapolated to mean more than that. A new organism arising from small changes has never been observed and is therefore not scientific.

* When “millions of years” language is heard/read, our kids should ask, “Were you (or anyone) there?” After all, science is supposed to be testable, observable, repeatable. One can claim that, “given enough time anything can happen.” But, really? A great deal of faith is needed to believe that. Children in our schools shouldn’t be subject to such unsubstantiated ideas.

Dinosaurs aren’t really a mystery. Evidence of man with dinosaurs includes:

Drawings, clay dinosaur figures, architectural designs, legends, Chinese calendar, and surprisingly to evolutionists, unfossilized T-rex bones uncovered, having soft tissue and red blood cells. Do students learn these facts?

Good resources are: icr.org or answersingenesis.org.

I need to write a rebuttal letter.. but I am thinking about it very carefully. I have nothing to loose, she has already told me many times over that I am going to hell since I don't believe the earth is only 5-6,000 years old.

Honestly, it is not evolution which is causing people so much to loose their faith as it is extremist stuff like this. And the hatred.. and the holier-than-thou-ness. It is just so ridiculous. 'The only people who are going to be 'saved' are the ones who believe as *I* do'... blah, blah, blah.

I was a devoted, practicing Catholic most of my life.. but after a few personal events.. and radical extremists, such as my neighbor on a personal level and al qaeda and others on a global level, among other things/events, I slowly- over a period of 10 years- have come to a very negative conclusion about religion.. they are their own undoing, IMHO.

[axordil]

My family is, as a rule, very nice. They also believe a lot of things, for a variety of reasons. I will not go into detail. Suffice it to say I think their beliefs are incorrect, and while some are benign, others are less so.

In the past, I tried to avoid discussions with my family that might confirm their suspicions that I have rejected their beliefs. This was for the sake of my late parents, whom I did not wish to burden in their decline with the notion that they had somehow failed in my upbringing. Now it's more a question of baseline civility: they are careful not to ask questions they don't want answers to, and I do not proffer the information on my own.

I'm not sure how long the situation will last like this. I'm sure at some point my son will mention something incriminating to one of his cousins or some such, and things will degenerate from there.

Of course, they think I'm the nutty one.

[RoseMorninStar]

AX!! ahahahahaha.. that's pretty much how it is in my family.. We have a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy!!

[Cerin]

God has done real things in my life that I've known.

Would you agree that the more accurate way to state this would be, 'There are things that have happened in my life that I attribute to God', or 'that I believe God has done'? I imagine that's how a non-believer would interpret your comment. (Please note that I'm not suggesting you should have phrased your comment differently! I guess I'm trying to get at the notion of whether the kinds of things that happen to believers that they attribute to God also happen to non-believers but are interpreted in some other way).

[Túrin Turambar]

All religions are based on the very principle that there is some higher being, over human that created the world and some underlying principles to which humanity must obey.

Not so. See pantheism (link)

I would say that in order to be a religion then there must be the elements of some belief in the supernatural and some moral or imperative code that flows from those beliefs. So a simple belief in the supernatural (say, that ghosts are real) or a simple moral code (say, utilitarianism) don't make a religion on their own.

That, IIRC, is also the position that the High Court of Australia has taken with regards to freedom of religion and tax exemption.

[Lalaith]

God has done real things in my life that I've known.

Would you agree that the more accurate way to state this would be, 'There are things that have happened in my life that I attribute to God', or 'that I believe God has done'? I imagine that's how a non-believer would interpret your comment. (Please note that I'm not suggesting you should have phrased your comment differently! I guess I'm trying to get at the notion of whether the kinds of things that happen to believers that they attribute to God also happen to non-believers but are interpreted in some other way).

No, actually, I chose the phrasing of that carefully (unlike many of the other things I say). My point being that there have been things in my life that have happened that I am not sure non-believers have ever experienced. However, what you say is also true, and I could have added it as an additional thought.

So I'll say: God has done real things in my life that I've known that I believe are unique experiences to those who believe in Him. But God has also done things in my life that I have attributed to Him, things that non-believers may also have experienced but may have attributed to another cause.

[Dave_LF]

AX!! ahahahahaha.. that's pretty much how it is in my family.. We have a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy!!

Ditto. Until one of the kids who's too young to know better says something, or they start trying to evangelize my children... it's a fragile detente.

[Túrin Turambar]

AX!! ahahahahaha.. that's pretty much how it is in my family.. We have a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy!!

Ditto. Until one of the kids who's too young to know better says something, or they start trying to evangelize my children... it's a fragile detente.

OT, but do you have more than one? I can only recall your son, who was born around the time of the 2008 election.

[Dave_LF]

Correct (and good memory!). There should be another one in April.

Also, the first clause was meant to include his (nine) cousins.

[Primula Baggins]

<ears prick up>

There should be another one in April.

Congratulations, Dave!

[River]

for Dave and his missus!

My immediate family is agnostic, or, at least, areligious. We weren't always that way, but we are now. The rise of extremism in multiple camps was a major turn-off for us. My extended family, OTOH, ranges from nice, gentle, mainstream Christian to fundamentalist. Their political leanings are also all over the map, though the more fundamentalist types are also more conservative, if not downright reactionary. Now before anyone jumps down my throat, these are tendencies I've directly observed in my relatives and I'm not trying to map them onto the country as a whole.

It is a fragile peace. My father sometimes like to ruin it for sport.

[RoseMorninStar]

Congrats Dave!!

Ah River.. it's never easy, is it? My brother is an extreme fundamentalist Christian.. his wife & her friend did an 'intervention' on me years ago when I was still a devout Catholic. They told me that I had so much Christian 'potential' and they knew where I was going wrong and they wanted to 'set me on the right path.' Awww.. that was so kind of them. But .. that intervention.. among MANY other things, including the extreme antics of my neighbor, really got me to questioning my beliefs.. and led me to my current state of unbelief. It took 10 years.. but I deprogrammed myself ever so slowly. And my 'conversion' had nothing what-so-ever to do with evolution.

[Dave_LF]

Thanks, everyone.

I was different, I guess. It was the plain factual inaccuracies on things like natural history (among many other matters) and general baselessness of it all that really undermined things for me. Sure, I didn't like it that so many fundamentalists behaved like jerks, but I figure if you're right, you're right, jerk or otherwise.

[nerdanel]

It took 10 years.. but I deprogrammed myself ever so slowly.

It's amazing how long these things can take; it seems to have taken me at least twelve years. It's frustrating to me that these belief systems are inculcated in young children at an age when they are too young really to question critically what they are told. If religion was rated "PG-13" or R, and presented only to those who had attained sufficient schooling and life experience to parse and question critically without having been inculcated with a preexisting religious worldview, I suspect that we would have a far smaller religious population.

Of course most adults, whether religious or not, parse and question their belief system or lack thereof critically. But it's different to question fully when you start with a belief that a god exists and within a framework that encourages, reassures and incentivizes belief in the unprovable ("Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.") It's very difficult to extricate oneself from such a belief system, because the consequences are presented as so scary and the conditioning from childhood is so deep. Meanwhile, the rewards of belief are significant - a reassurance of a deeper purpose to life and suffering, a social community, a roadmap for living, and even the comfort of a promised afterlife. Still, I think it would be far more difficult to enter into such a belief system as an adult, and I suspect far fewer really do, particularly in the developed world.

[Lalaith]

Congratulations, Dave!


I feel sympathy for these people. Many of them are my friends. Heck, I was there with them not too long ago. (And I'm not implying that you all do not feel sympathetic toward them.)

Why evolution? Why has this become such a Big Deal to Fundamentalists? It's my personal opinion that it comes down to this: they believe that evolution is the primary cause of the decline of Christianity in the West. And they may be right in that assertion.

Therefore, I think it follows that if you feel as if something is causing the decline of your religion, if something is causing people to pull away from the faith, then you are going to be passionate about denouncing it or fighting against its "evils" or what have you. It's ironic, then, that this same passion can turn so many away from the very faith you are fighting to preserve.

I have a book from the library that I hope to start reading tonight, In the Land of the Believers by Gina Welch. Has anyone else read it? Apparently, it's written by a Jewish woman who "infiltrated" Thomas Road Baptist Church (Jerry Falwell's church). It's her outsider's perspective of Evangelicals.

[RoseMorninStar]

Lailath, I did not have any problem combining Natural history .. even evolution, and my faith. What I had problems with was how people of a faith felt THEY (and ONLY they) had THE right answer.. and everyone else was going to hell. If I didn't believe the earth was only 5-6,000 years old, they were going to hell. If they didn't attend ____ church, they were going to hell. If they didn't say this specific prayer or hate gays or.. whatever. So much hate. So much manipulation.

What al Qaeda did on 9-11 did nothing to dispel my misgivings about the power and hate and manipulation that goes with religion... and/or how people have used it politically. On top of all of this was the history of religion itself.. and the way one religion has morphed into another.. people deny it, but it is there. The borrowing.. the twisting of what was in one faith into something else in another to get people to convert. Of course the 'old' religion was outdated and silly and superstitious while the 'new' religion was the fulfillment of the promise.. and so on it goes..

If there is a 'god' (I prefer the word Creator)... but if there is a Creator.. I don't think it is anything like what we humans have made it out to be.. and I highly doubt what we humans have done in the name of 'religion' or in the name of 'god/gods' throughout history, would be what it had in mind. That is.. if it exists at all.

P.S. Lailath, that sounds like an interesting book.

[Lalaith]

I understand, Rose.

Some people have managed to blend evolution and faith; some people have not--and have either walked away from religion or turned to things like YEC. I think the fear of an idea destroying your faith can prompt people to become fanatics.

As a Christian, I look at those types of people you describe and think that they have certainly let the Enemy win the battle when their particular brand of religion is based on hatred instead of love. If it's always, "Here's what we oppose," instead of living a life that imitates Christ, then it ends up twisted and sick.

[River]

Why evolution? Why has this become such a Big Deal to Fundamentalists? It's my personal opinion that it comes down to this: they believe that evolution is the primary cause of the decline of Christianity in the West. And they may be right in that assertion.

Interesting.

I've been wondering why evolution is such a juicy target for the Fundamentalists. It certainly does fly in the face of doctrine, but so do other theories, such as quantum mechanics. In fact, one would think that the Christian Fundamentalists would find quantum more dangerous than evolution because the heart of quantum mech is the idea that there is nothing deterministic about this world. There is no plan. There's just rolls of the cosmic dice and the consequences that follow. But, then again, no sane person really gets quantum and so that may make it less of a threat.

On the other hand, judging from the counter-arguments offered for evolution, the Fundamentalists don't really get evolution either.

And then again, for some reason, people seem more keyed into evolution than quantum. Which isn't to say we never see quantum mechanics in action - any time you turn on a flourescent light or play with glow-in-the-dark stickers, you're looking at quantum mechanics in action - but it's just out of the public consciousness. Which is fine.

Be that as it may, religious leaders have been treating scientific findings as a threat to their influence since the days of Galileo. And the weird thing about the trouble Galileo got into was, AFAIK, the geocentric dogma of the Church at that time wasn't even from the Bible. It was borrowed from the Ancient Greeks.

[Primula Baggins]

I think people can't see QM as a personal thing, so it's hard for the philosophical implications to mean much. But evolution can certainly be taken personally. Not only does it conflict with the Bible, but it also strongly implies that a human (me! personally!) is just another kind of animal, not something lovingly and deliberately constructed to take the central role in all of creation. That can be quite a blow.

I am not being snarky; I mean this quite sincerely. For many Christians, being told that evolution is real is the same as being told that God, whom they love and trust absolutely, has lied to them in the book that they have been taught to believe is God's absolute truth for their lives. Because it is impossible that a loving God would lie to his own specially created children, the scientific evidence cannot possibly be valid. If denying that evidence means denying that all science has any validity at all, then that's what must be done.

It's got nothing to do with stupidity or ignorance. It's got everything to do with valuing faith above objective reality.

I think people who do so are misusing their gift of intelligence and failing to see that one can have both. But that doesn't make them "crazy" within the universe as they understand it.

[Maria]

If religion was rated "PG-13" or R, and presented only to those who had attained sufficient schooling and life experience to parse and question critically without having been inculcated with a preexisting religious worldview, I suspect that we would have a far smaller religious population.

I don't think it works that way. I was raised without religion- as much as is possible in the US, anyway. My parents didn't attend a church, and refused to talk about or answer questions on the subject. I couldn't help absorbing a few facts about religion going to public school, but I dismissed all such things as willful self delusion on the part of the believers. If it couldn't be measured by science, then it wasn't real to me.

I maintained that attitude until my early thirties, when some paranormal experiences convinced me that my world outlook was faulty. After some poking around, I ended up believing most religions have a core of truth- despite the almost universal ridiculousness of their outward appearances.

As much as I *don't* get the meaning behind poetry's actual words, I *do* see the underlying simliarities behind various brands of religion. I feel it. I know it. I couldn't explain that *knowing* very well because I'm not that good with words and have zero charisma..... but it's there. Some tenents of some religions are good, some are icky and some are just plain silly- but at the heart someone caught a glimpse of how the universe actually works and tried to explain it in terms that their audience would understand and that struck a chord with those people. And a religion was born, because the followers could feel the truth of the words.

So, I was raised without religion and am now a Believer in Something. I could try to put it into words, but however I tried to describe it would sound silly. It is absolutely impossible for us very limited creatures to understand and describe the supernatural aspects of our universe in any way relating to how things really are. It's like trying to imagine an object existing in 17 dimensions. My brain just doesn't work that way. Sure, I know scientists have proved the existance of 17 dimensions (or is it more nowadays?) but I can not imagine it. I have a 4D brain.

That's what happens with religions. However things really are, we can't accurately imagine it or describe it other than in metaphor or with anthropomorphization. Whatever is behind our reality is something brighter and bigger than we can imagine and completely non-human.

But we can feel it. And to deny that feeling is to shut yourself off from half the mystery of human existance. I've been there. Allowing myself to believe in the supernatural was like going from black and white to color. And it's both comforting and a heck of a lot more fun.

So, no. Keeping kids from religion doesn't keep them from believing it later on. That said, my brother's in law's indoctrination of their very young kids kinda creeps me out.