Well, I don’t want theocrats of any stripe, fundie or otherwise, making my decisions for me. But myths are not “antiquated” and they are not “dogma.” Myths are representations of basic human qualities, stories about ways of being human, and they have relevance beyond [meta-, anyone?] mikey’s simplistic, though rather sweet and naive, idea that “solid, rational science-based reasoning” is going to solve everything. All the science in the world — and I will support and defend science against any anti-scientific rightwing crapola — nonetheless gives the ordinary person very little comfort or hope when disaster or death strikes. Religion, organized or not, serves a real purpose that science can’t, as well as vice versa.

To objectiviely aggregate the good and the bad would be interesting, but monstrously difficult — it would be impossible to collect more than a fraction of the necessary data, and coding for “good” and “bad” (let alone quantifying it) would cause more arguments than it would settle. If you are truly interested, the only person I know even making a stab at the task is the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark. His knowledge of some historical periods and places is (of necessity) spotty, and his methodology is often, umm, questionable at best. Nonetheless, some of his conclusions are provocative — for example, his contention that the explosive growth of Christianity in the late Antique period had nothing to do with the intrinsic appeal of the message, but can be accounted for demographically by two well-documented factors: that Christians usually took intensive care of their sick, instead of abandoning them, and that Christians were encouraged to (and usually did) have more children than non-Christians.

I’d be interested in other researchers studying this if you could recommend any.

I think that you and I are on the same side, here, but let me just make a quick comment.

The political and religious spheres of Europe during the Middle Ages are frequently conflated. I once had a guy tell me that the Pope was essentially the Roman Emperor. Which is so wrong that it’s funny.

The political power of the Roman Emperor and the religious authority of the Pope were two very different spheres, and the offices were occupied by two different people.

But! The pope certainly could influence the Emperor, and I believe did so in some of these cases of heresy. Heresy was a secular offense, prosecuted by civil authorities. But that’s not to say that religious authorities leaned on, or sometimes co-opted civil authority.

I’m not the “defender” of Christianity. It can survive (or self-destruct) quite well without my help. As mikey grudgingly admitted, religious beliefs are held by PEOPLE — and people are motivated by their religious (and political, and nationalistic, and emotional, and even scientific) convictions to do terrific things and to do terrible things.

I just get so very very tired of the way people on so many progressive blogs, who claim the high ground of being “reality-based”, are so eager to chuck that out the window whenever religion comes up. Every stupid thing ever said or done by any Christian is immediately equated as the universal opinion of all Christians every where at all times. Anything someone doesn’t like (such as an anti-sex attitude), which *in the same sentence* is admitted to pre-date Christianity, be widespread in all cultures, and be antithetical to most Christian teachings, is nonethless “blamed” on Christianity. Meanwhile, anything positive (such as the scientific method, or the preservation of Greek literature, or the development of the university) which was developed within the Christian tradition *as an expression of Christian beliefs* must have of course been an accident, or stolen from another culture (because we all know there is no such thing as concurrent development) Anyone who expresses any approval of these positive aspects.of Christianity is immediately classed as “ignorant”, “stupid,” “theocratic fundamentalist”, beaten about the head with statements about “myths” and “fantasies” and “sky daddies”, and (my favourite) called a “Holocaust denier” because the Inquisition (which one, by the way? There were many Inquisitions, with many different jurisdictions, rules, and effects, and the so-called Spanish Inquisition was very much an aberration caused by, yes, political interests) was such a Bad Thing.

If folks are really interested in solving the very serious problems the U.S. faces, there has to be major political change in this country. Gratuitously insulting the deepest concerns and beliefs of the vast majority of its citizens, out of sheer ignorance and prejudice, doesn’t seem to me to be a very smart way of going about it. If, however, you all just want to congratulate yourselves on how Super-Kewl and Smart and Rational and Scientific and Stuff you are, by all means, continue this sort of bullshit.

But this is 2006. The world has changed. We can no longer afford the luxury of allowing the worldview of billions of people to be defined by mythology, doctrine, and assertions for which there is absolutely ZERO empirical evidence. Please! Right now. Go to the bookstore, buy Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith”, read it and give it to someone else.

Look around the world today. Notice the hardening of theocratic doctrine. Notice how religious doctrine is merging with political philosophies. Notice how the extreme wing of any given religion is begining to hold sway over the entire membership. Notice how exclusionary religions are becoming. Notice that unlike any other time, biological and nuclear weapons are begining to be available to non-state players.

The world faces a number of unprecidented crises, from weapons proliferation to global warming to resource shortfalls (did you know that UN studies indicate that in the next 25 years, at least 1 major regional war will be fought over WATER?), and in this environment we cannot allow theocratic fundamentalists to use antiquated mythological dogma to drive decision-making. I pretty much fall into the category of “Old Man” at this point. So I observe, but I won’t be here in twenty years. You guys need to think about the direction the world is going, and what the world of your children and grandchildren is going to look like. You need to decide if faith in fourteen hundred year old myth or solid, rational science-based reasoning is the best course to try and save, well, everything…

mikey

hapax – my brief account of the splitting of Christianity, though brief, is not inaccurate, and it’s anti-sex attitude (which, of course predates Christianity and goes back to the Old Testament) is real. It’s still here today. So I offended you with some inconvenient facts about the history of Christianity. Boo hoo! But I am not inaccurate. Hell, I even took a jab at neo-pagans, but you don’t see them getting all up in my grill. deee-feennnnsiiivee!!!

I’m a doctrinaire agnostic who thinks every religion (as opposed to, say, personal belief in God) is more or less equally stupid.

However, practicioners of Xtianity whose emphasis/interest is in the ethical rather than theological “truths” earn my extra respect. Not only are there good Xtians (like there are good people among all religions) but Christ As Teacher/Rebel/Ethicist is a powerful good role model.

OTOH, ppl who try to defend the indefensible need to slag off. The history of Christendom is nasty, guilty, chock full of the kind of evil that the urge-to-convert-or-else, and mystical certitude, always creates. And though such is not an indictment of their personal beliefs viz Christ himself, it is, I think, an indictment of Xtianity post-Paul.

I never meant that Xtianity had *always* been contra science, only that it had been, and on occasion egregiously.

And I view those who would minimise the causes and effects Inquisition and the Conquest to be on par with Holocaust deniers.

And Dorothy, to quote a phrase, SADLY, NO. The Christian Church was responsible for SAVING most of the scientific literature of antiquity, not destroying it. The university system of education developed out of Christian models of education, and no where else in the world.

Sadly, no. The Greek scientific texts and methods were preserved by Islamic scholars until they were rediscovered by Christianity in the middle ages, and the first universities were in India (Buddhist) and Cairo (Muslim). Similarly medicine stagnated under Catholicism with almost no advances, and some backwards steps, since Galen. It was Avicenna and other Islamic students of medicine who made the only real progress in Western medicine from Galen until the Enlightenment.

Mary is the best he can come up with? Please, she was a womb on legs. Her ONLY importance in the Bible was to give birth to Christ. She isn’t a god, and the protestants argue that even the meagre worship the Catholics give her is polytheism and thus paganism.

Not to mention that, unlike, say, Athena, she had no influence on theology; it all comes from the dudes.

Seriously, if the best argument you can make about women’s importance in your religion is “One of our gods was related to a woman!” then you don’t have a leg to stand on.

Especially since Catholic dogma says that Christ has always existed and therefore isn’t really even related to Mary.

So I guess it’s more like “Hey, our god once touched a woman’s vagina!”

Which doesn’t seem to be all that convincing.

Except if it came from, you know, THE FUCKING AMERICANS. The Mayans invented everything from indoor plumbing to the concept of zero to the comic strip, and the Spanish RELIGIOUS LEADERS destroyed it all. FOUR FUCKING BOOKS survived from the Mayans. A mid-sized city would have dozens and a large city hundreds. FOUR survived.

And hey, if you read De Sahagun’s book on doctors, it turns out that A good doctor is one who tests his remedies and observes the results, and a bad doctor is one who relies on religious dogma and superstition.

Sounds a lot like the fucking scientific method to me. Not to mention that the Aztecs had a fairly egalitarian and democratic society. All that went out the door when Christianity came in.

And all that shit (destroying the litarary tradition of an entire continent, replacing democracy and egalitarianism with monarchy and slavery, destroying art for the sake of destroying art) was something they did just in Mesoamerica, an area that doesn’t even encompass all of Central America. I haven’t even started on the shit they did when they got to the rest of the continent.

Just for their massive fucking up of the Americas, Christians deserve every anti-proggress and and anti-science epithet you can throw at them.

And, uh, Heresy is by definition a religious crime. It’s impossible to have a heretic unless a religious leader defines dogma. While I have no doubt the idea was used for political purposes, the very concept of heresy was invented by Christians. It’s impossible to divorce heresy from religion.

Dude, that’s totally a chick next to Jesus in da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Totally a chick.

Yes. And Leonardo had it totally accurate, ‘cos he painted it from life. That’s right, the actual Jeebus and the Apostles modeled for it–see? Jeebus was a white dude! Enneyhoo, once Leo finished the fresco, he pushed the entire refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie back in his handy Tardis and humped it all back to 1498, where he received a hearty handclasp from Duke Ludovico Sforza, man-about-towne. Leo went on to invent the Rubik’s Cube, the most sinister weapon of mass destruction ever created.

It wasn’t the Roman Catholic Church that invented the reliance on literal interpration of the Bible.

And if you want to read a truly funny series picking apart the LEFT BEHIND books (aka The Worst Books Ever Written), scene by scene, do check out Fred Clark’s series at http://www.slacktivist.typepad.com.