Rules of Engagement — Please Review

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My recent post about intelligent design drew some comments that offered food for thought, but that sometimes descended into personal attacks. Please review the Rules of Engagement posted here this past January. The bullet points are as follows; each is explained in the linked post, with examples harvested from the blogosphere.

Take the hit
Don’t get personal, even indirectly
Take the trouble to signal your friendliness
Let the facts argue for themselves
Be careful about categorical statements
Watch your phrasing
No-no’s: Some things not to say

Comments

16 responses to “Rules of Engagement — Please Review”

2005-08-11

Derek

Gee I missed the flame war… Kudos to bls for some great comments, though!

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2005-08-13

Skeptikal Sammy

I’d like to ask a question of the faithful here: why is it that I can’t believe in your god? Quite honestly, I have tried on several occassions to “get religion”. But it never worked for me. I just couldn’t find anything of substance to hook onto. All I ever heard from believers was, “Well, you just gotta believe. Have faith first that he exists, then you will see that he does.”
Well, that’s just not good enough, folks.
So the question for today is: am I an unbeliever because god is shunning me? Did he decide before time began that I, Skeptical Sammy, would be exiled from the true path and salvation? Or did he screw up my wiring somehow so that I can’t tune into the god channel?
Or is it simply because my mind demands some shred of proof?
Discuss!

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2005-08-14

Skeptikal Sammy

I feel as abandoned by you peeps as by your god.
:o(

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2005-08-14

D. C.

Sammy, thanks for stopping by. You’ll find lots of modernist Christians who don’t “get religion” in the sense that some traditionalists would like us to. Can I suggest that you read “Why I Still Call Myself a Christian and an Episcopalian.” Feel free to ask more questions if you like; some of the regulars here are extremely nice people and far more learned about these things than I.

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2005-08-14

bls

SS, our Church is liturgical. This means that our services are composed of a set of readings, prayers, and rituals – and usually also processions, music, colorful vestments (robes), and sometimes incense and chanting. It also means that we take a sort of experiential approach to faith. Our Book of Common Prayer prescribes how our services are to be performed, and “we believe as we pray.” Our liturgy is based on very ancient tradition.
This is the long way of saying that I don’t think I could have come to “believe” in something without experiencing it myself. And I wouldn’t recommend that anybody else do this, either. I’m new to the Church – have only been going for about 4 years – and I found it hard to swallow a lot of things at first, too. But as I learned, I found that many things spoke to me; certainly the music at first, and I loved the services. The people were nice, too; I think religion is at least in part about community as well as “belief.” One extra benefit I found was that the study of religion is very interesting because once you start investigating it, you also learn about history and philosophy and anthropology and all sorts of other things, because religion has always been a (sometimes big) part of human life.
Again, this is the long way around of saying: most people don’t have a huge instantaneous “belief” experience. For most, it’s experiential and takes time.

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2005-08-15

Skeptikal Sammy

DC
Thanks for the link. Read it in its entirety. Still an agnostic.
BLS
Thanks for the reply too. I tried attending a church a few years ago during a very dark period in my life (breakup of a marriage). The pastor was a good speaker(Religious Science), lotsa singing, nice people, but in the end not satisfying at all. So I stopped attending.
I also tried going back to the Catholic Church during the disintegration of my marriage. Long story short: the wife was god only knows where. I read her journal and discovered that she thought she was pregnant by her lover. I end up talking to a catholic priest who had been married and became a priest after his wife died. I thought “wow!” a man who has experienced real life BEFORE the priesthood! He ended up comparing my story to that of Joseph’s and told me that I should accept the child and treat it as my own despite the fact that it wasn’t.
I thought about it.
I decided that every time I looked at it it would only remind me of my wife’s infidelity.
So I said “no thanks” to that idea.
Turns out that she wasn’t pregnant at all. But I divorced her anyways two years later. No regrets about it.
For religious types you guys are alright. You haven’t shut off your brains.
My point here is that I’d like to believe but I can’t.

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2005-08-15

bls

Actually, that’s one of the informal “mottos” of the Episcopal Church, at least among individual Episcopalians: “You don’t have to check your brain at the door.”
Here’s my thinking about religion: people go to Church for all sorts of reasons. I have a friend – she’s from China – who simply liked the atmosphere and the people at her Church. She came across good people who tried to help one another and who talked about the deep and important things in life. And she’s an immigrant, so the Church was also a way of feeing more at home in a new land. This is to say that there’s no reason you should feel you have to be a certain way, or believe a certain thing, before you go – if you want to go, that is. Just go. See what happens. You can always leave again if it’s unsatisfactory.
And here’s one more thought about “belief.” Long before I went to the Church, I was an A.A. member. As you probably know, A.A.’s Twelve Steps are based upon acceptance of one’s condition and surrender to a “Higher Power” – but that “Higher Power” is not defined in a precise way. We are asked to put our faith in a “power greater than ourselves” – and for me, this was nature, and the life force. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” in the words of Dylan Thomas. This is a power much greater than any human power, obviously.
This was the opening for me. And at this point, I simply surrender to the great mystery at the heart of existence. I’m again not very worried about defining this too precisely, and I don’t have to. At times it appears to me that God is defined as a sort of formless “Ultimate Good”; at other times I think of God as the ever-creative power in the universe. And I think, if we’d wanted to see what the face of God in human form actually is, wouldn’t we choose someone like Jesus in any case? If God came to earth to redeem fallen humanity – by all means think of this metaphorically, if you like – isn’t this particular story the best of all possible stories in this fallen world? That’s is why this particular story has been so powerful across thousands of years, I think. It’s hard to imagine improving on it.
I can’t say much for how the Church has abused its power in so many ways, over the centuries, but that’s another issue. My hope is that the Church will become more a place where we can find meaning, and less a place where human beings attempt to exercise worldly power over other human beings.
Good luck.

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2005-08-15

bls

(Sorry for the lecture about liturgy, BTW! I just sort of assumed you hadn’t had much contact with the Church, which is more and more true these days.)

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2005-08-15

D. C.

SS, let me suggest three things:
1. Something you definitely want to do is to read Seeking Enlightenment… Hat by Hat: A Skeptic’s Guide to Religion, by crime novelist Nevada Barr. It recounts her journey to the Episcopal Church in a series of short, enjoyable chapters. When she literally wandered into a church during a life crisis, she didn’t even believe in God (and she still doesn’t believe a lot of Christian dogma). My wife and I have recommended the book, and / or given copies, to several friends and family members.
2. Start going to church as a personal discipline. Maybe you don’t believe Doctrine X or Proposition Y; don’t worry about it. Don’t force yourself to say the prayers if you’re not comfortable doing that, nor to go to communion, nor to go to coffee hour (although all those things are very helpful). Especially, don’t try to force yourself to believe something you don’t. Just go, and let happen what will happen. It’s worth the time.
3. Keep in touch.

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2005-08-15

D. C.

I see I repeated a lot of bls’s good advice; great minds think alike.

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2005-08-15

Skeptikal Sammy

Here’s why I can’t believe. The story put forth in the bible is simply too preposterous.
Let me recap it as an outsider. We see it differently from the believers:
One day a bored or lonely bible god decides to create a universe where this great moral drama will then unfold over thousands of years. The inhabitants will find themselves in a game where they must divine the righteous path and stick to it or suffer a horrible fate for three back-to-back eternities with only a short ciggie break inbetween.
(Now why an omniscient being, who knew even before he created the universe who would go to heaven and who would go to hell, would actually bother to then create the universe is another baffling mystery. Perhaps he simply needed some inferior creatures to worship him as some parts of the bible suggest? This is like hearing that a kid needs the inhabitants of his ant farm to worship him. Perhaps you, the reader, would feel better about yourself if the bacteria residing under some rock in Siberia were worshipping you?)
So bible god creates this universe which contains a world inhabited by the most imperfect of creatures who screw up in every way possible. (Like he didn’t know this was going to happen!) Indeed they screw up so badly that the only way he can think of to save his little experiment is by creating a flesh and blood son and sending him down to live among these dreadful creatures who deserve an eternity in the hellfires.
To create this son bible god “knocks up” a young virgin who is already engaged to a young man she loves and who loves her.
So the son is born, grows up, and is ultimately killed by the ingrates inhabiting this screwed up experiment. Thousands of years then pass with the followers of the bible-based religion comprising only about a 6th of the world’s population. Not only is this “one true” religion a minority but it has to compete with many other religions for followers.
Even more perplexing is that the religion itself is splintered into hundreds, if not thousands, of sects which cannot agree on what the bible is trying to tell us.
“Every time I look at you
I don’t understand
Why you let the things you did
Get so out of hand
You’d have managed better
If you’d had it planned
Now why’d you choose such a backward time
And such a strange land?
If you’d come today
You could have reached the whole nation
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication”
At the risk of coming across as blasmephous, “Jesus had a bad weekend for our sins”. Sure he suffered for a day or two, if the story is true. So did all the other mere humans who were crucified back then. But if you open your eyes and look around you you will see people who suffered far more and for longer. Look at people dying slowly of cancer or some other illness. My own mother spent the last ten years of her life trying to take care of her husband of over 50 years as his mind deteriorated from Alzheimers. Most of you have no idea of the horror of this disease and how it destroys loved ones. Try dealing with this horror for ten years and hanging from a cross for a weekend won’t seem like sucha big deal.
So, there in a nutshell, are a few of the reasons I can’t believe.
(I could have gone on about how the bible stories in many cases are little more than plagiarisms of earlier myths, but need to get to work.)

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2005-08-15

bls

Well, that’s sort of a fundamentalist reading. We’re not really saying anything like that; personally, I take a more metaphorical view of most Christian precepts.
But maybe you’d be better off with Buddhism or something like that. Christianity is sort of odd in many ways, I agree; it’s a story that touches a lot of people deeply, but many can’t swallow its claims at all. And of course there are a lot of really nutty versions of it around these days, too.
I do think if a person feels the need for a spiritual life, they should probably pursue it. And it’s important, usually, to find people to be in community with. There are Zen centers around in most cities these days, and maybe going that route will be better for you.
Again, good luck.

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2005-08-15

Skeptikal Sammy

I’m not trying to be difficult here and automatically disagreeing with everything you say. However, I attended a private catholic school for the first 1o years of my education. We attended mass every Friday. That’s a lot of time spent in church. Despite that I felt it was all lies.
Then a few decades later, as recounted above, I tied a religious science church for a couple of years and lost interest in it as well.
If god is real why are there people like me who just can’t seem to sense him?
Well, the brutal answer is that there is nothing to sense.
Thanks to everyone who responded. You guys are thinkers which is something to be respected.

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2005-08-15

Skeptikal Sammy

BTW, last night I took a quiz to see which religion suits me best. It turns out to be Unitarian Universalist http://www.beliefnet.com/story/80/story_8041_1.html
or Secular Humanist (not really a religion).
The quiz is highly recommended.

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2005-08-16

Skeptikal Sammy

http://blog_of_interest.typepad.com/a_blog_of_interest/2005/08/church_guardian.html

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2005-08-18

Skeptikal Sammy

Breaking News!
Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New Theory of Intelligent Falling.
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
Continued at http://www.onion.com/news/index.php?issue=4133&n=2

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