Fall of the Catholic Church

There is not much outright wrong with his statement no, other than it being incomplete. The first half of the sentence is for the most part true. Good people will tend towards doing good things, bad people will tend towards doing bad things. This is incomplete though as it does not acknowledge the complexity of human beings. Which involves even the best of us doing bad things at times.

The intent of his sentence though comes from his own anti religion bias.... but it is not really wrong either. You can very much get otherwise good people to do absolutely awful and otherwise evil things using religion. Good people sometimes do bad things... such is the nature of mankind.... but getting them to do outright evil things is harder to achieve, especially with consistency.

I gave the example already, and there is an old (that word again, before you go citing the date of the article which is 2009 http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1877352,00.html ) Time Magazine article about them, of the parents who watch their children die.... sometimes painfully.... or suffer from relatively easy to treat illnesses. All because their religion considers certain medical interventions to be taboo.

His sentence does leave out the potential.... after all if we grant one we have to grant the opposite to be intellectually honest.... that there are bad or evil people in our world who refrain from doing bad things solely because they have religion. I am not sure if I have ever met such people. Though perhaps I have on this forum over the years... when you meet the occasional kind of theist who is surprised atheists are not going around murdering, raping and stealing.

There is that Jordan Peterson fella who seems to think atheists are not really atheists at all, but only pretend to be.... all because HE thinks that if they really were atheist they would literally be acting like a character from The Brothers Karamazov. The fact they do not, he thinks, is evidence that they are all actually believers on the inside and are faking atheism. (Ref: His debates with Susan Blackmore and Matt Dillahunty).

The only fallacy of making a bad association I see therefore, is the one I originally pulled BA up on before he ran off complaining my response was too long for him. The assumption he offered us is often unfounded, very much irrelevant, and also very much negated by it's opposite in terms of rhetorical applicability to the discussion.

I can not speak directly to YOUR incident as I was not there of course. But.... I have talked to a lot of Evangelists over the years. The kind that go door to door, or walk around the streets handing out books and leaflets. And actually putting a "psalm" leaflet under someone's chair and then saying "Excuse me, I think you dropped something" is actually a common ruse/trick of the trade.

Firstly it is a way to get the leaflet into someone's hands because quite often people brush past them with disdain on the street when they try to hand them out directly.

Secondly it is a way to make it seem like an "Act of god". If something on the psalm is relevant to the person who reads it they, a bit like you almost did above, start to question the serendipity that the words would find themselves into their hand in this magical way. It is.... to put it mildly.... all part of a con these people have refined over the years.

So it is not altogether unlikely that the woman who told you it was there.... was in fact the one who PUT it there specifically for that purpose.

I have heard similar over the years. How passages of the Bible seemed so wise and deep and prescient and relevant. And I can understand how you could be moved by that fact. In fact I am one of those "atheists" (I do not actually refer to myself with that label, but others do, which is fine) that likes to read the Bible and lament the fact it is not studied in our school curriculum in the right way (as in English and Philosophy classes, rather than religion classes).

But having said that, there is nothing particularly new and amazing in the Bible either. Pretty much everything useful in it was said or thought of before by others. And those things are just as moving and prescient and relevant too. Delve deep into some of it sometime. Random example from the 3rd century BC would be the Hellenistic philosophy and Stoicism. Or go back to early Chinese and Japanese philosophies too.

You see for all our advancement and philosophy and technology over the centuries.... the simple fact is that the general Human Condition has not really changed all that much. So the wisdoms of early thinkers often still apply today and we can find nuggets in there when we go through what you called "everything crashing down" around us.

The trick intellectually then is to distinguish between the baby and the bath water.... the product and the packaging..... and realise that wisdom contained inside some "X" (Like the bible) does not validate anything about "X" itself. The Cayenne Pepper diet for example is a lot of tosh nonsense it seems to me... but INSIDE that diet is the admonishment to drink more water and less processed foods. The utility and truth of that admonishment in no way means the Cayenne Pepper diet is any less tosh.

Similarly the fact moving and even revelatory wisdoms exist in the Bible does not at all, even a little bit, Validate the claim that there is a god.... that it impregnated an under age virgin in order to give birth to itself.... or that people entirely dead for days (in the case of the Nazarene) or even weeks, months or years (in the case of the other people who popped up resurrected, making resurrection rather common place at the time and not all that special) can come back to life.

Where that discussion gets messy.... to play devils avocado here as Stephen Fry would say.... is that the neuro-correlates of things like religious belief probably very much do exist in our DNA and have been selected for over the history of our species.

A useful analogy would be to the common cold. There is nothing in our DNA that is specifically designed to make us catch the common cold. Rather there are things in our DNA evolved to achieve OTHER ends.... which the common cold is able to extort and manipulate.

So I do not think we have DNA specifically related to us believing in a god. But there are many things evolved into us which concepts like god belief are able to commandeer, abuse, manipulate and exploit.

Yes Andrew, I do., 100% Its the bedrock of all Christian belief.

Would you be happy to pay an extra tax to the church, yes/no?

Responce:

(To be fair, I assumed it was a "no" and you just confirmed it)

Which verses in Paul's letters refer to homosexuality and is it or is it not castigated?

Repsonce:

..

Isn't it just as well that the RCC arent such sticklers for the 10% tithe, given the fact that some of the "faithful" will bemoan the fact that they have to make a "voluntary contribution" towards their child's confirmation and yet have no problem spending a good amount of money on bouncy castles and booze - none of which are of any religious benefit to their darlings?

In fairness, you pay a man for doing a job. They want a priest or a warlock to chant a few words over their offspring they can pay him for his work.

No issue paying a photographer a few grand. But object to the priest getting a hundred or so? Where do people think the priests get money? A few prayers wont pay for the light, heat and food in their homes

so christians have no need for the 10 commandments etc which is found in the old testament? seeing as they're following the NT..

Do you think that the priests don't know and recognise the senior Republicans who voted for the death penalty?

Do you believe that masturbation and contraception are intrinsically wrong?

Of course they will be paid, why would I ask anyone to do a job without payment??? Are you in the habit of doing that? Oh, could you give me the address / mob. Nr of your local or indeed any active warlock or witches??? I'd like to meet one here in Ireland. I did meet a few in the past, but that was in Africa, and quite incredible though it may seem, I saw them doing some inexplicable things too.

Matthew 5:17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

In your opinion they're fairy stories. Not in the opinion of many millions. But sure let you stand up there and convince them all they're wrong.