0900: "Religions"

[troy]

Drive by post:

AFAIK, the only monotheistic religions are the Abrahamic onee. Note that the referenced article makes the claim that monotheism was popular throughout the Middle East during the Iron Age. I'd guess that someone had to have the idea first and we may as well call that person Abraham. Those competing religions seem to have died out, probably due to the arrival of the "have no gods before me" meme.

Zoroastrianism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism ) is a likely contemporary of ancient Judiasm, and has a very strong monotheistic bent. Ahura Mazda is the singular uncreated creator god and source of all good. It has some tappings of polytheism, such as a well-developed system of good and evil spirits (the good being worthy of homage), but Ahura Mazda remains supreme over all of them (much much more so than, for example, Zeus and the other Greek gods).

I'm disappointed at the lack of argument here after 2 pages. Let's see if I can help.

There are fundamental differences between the three.

I agree, but they're no more fundamental than the differences between (for example) many Christian sects.

This is quite the overstatement. If you look at the two biggest schims in Christian history
1) The Great Schism of 1054 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism
2) The Protestant Reformation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation

Points of contention were issues of church governance, faith vs works, or the inclusion of Filioque ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filioque ) in the Nicene Creed. To even begin having debates on matters such as this, there needs to be a large body of shared doctrine that both parties agree is true. Without that, a debate of whether the Communion can be done with leavened or unleavened bread is nonsensical.

To put it another way, imagine a Christian walking up to a Muslim and asking "Do you believe the Holy Spirit proceeds from solely the Father, or from the Father and the Son?" Such a question doesn't even register in a Muslim context, where "[Allah] is God, the One and Only; God, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; And there is none like unto Him."

-T

PS. Apologies on the links. Apparently I need so many posts to be able to use the url code

[Lazy Tommy]

The double-encoded title text has been fixed... it's now "1 Corinthians 8:6±2", not "1 Corinthians 8:6±2".

Doesn't seem to be fixed for me. I'm using Firefox 4; do I have to change the default encoding to Unicode or something?

View -> Character Encoding -> UTF-8 fixes it, but this is really Randall's fault. His web server reports Content-Type: text/html in the HTTP response header, while the actual page looks like XHTML and specifies its encoding in the XML header. Firefox believes the web server, as it should, and ignores the XML header, since the web server says it's HTML and not XHTML, and since it doesn't see an encoding declaration in any legitimate place, it assumes ISO-8859-1. The browser is doing it right, but it is given bogus content to work with.

[brentonbrenton]

Evangelical Seminary student here. This is my interpretation of the alt comment:

1 Corinthians 8:6 plus or minus two:

4 So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.”

5 For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”),

6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

7 But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.

8 But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.

If you go 1Cor 8:6 - 2 (thus,8: 4-6) the text is clear about food being sacrificed to idols, not gods. But if you go 1Cor 8:6 + 2 (thus 8:6-8) then you get the use of that word "god," which could indicate that idols = gods, thus admitting the existence of more than one god. It's quite a stretch to read verse 7 that narrowly, but it works.

[Pfhorrest]

The double-encoded title text has been fixed... it's now "1 Corinthians 8:6±2", not "1 Corinthians 8:6±2".

Doesn't seem to be fixed for me. I'm using Firefox 4; do I have to change the default encoding to Unicode or something?

View -> Character Encoding -> UTF-8 fixes it, but this is really Randall's fault. His web server reports Content-Type: text/html in the HTTP response header, while the actual page looks like XHTML and specifies its encoding in the XML header. Firefox believes the web server, as it should, and ignores the XML header, since the web server says it's HTML and not XHTML, and since it doesn't see an encoding declaration in any legitimate place, it assumes ISO-8859-1. The browser is doing it right, but it is given bogus content to work with.

W3C's 2009 document XHTML Media Types - Second Edition permits XHTML 1.1 (which Randall is using) to be transmitted as text/html; not enough browsers support application/xhtml+xml. Still, there should be a UTF-8 charset definition in the Content-Type http header anyway. I like to include a <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> in all my documents anyway, just to be safe and not leave it to the webserver to get it right.

[buddy431]

Personally, I don't get why people are so obsessed with the Rapture supposedly happening on one date or another. In multiple places in the Bible, Jesus clearly states that

No one knows the day or the time. The angels in heaven don't know, and the Son himself doesn't know. Only the Father knows. So watch out and be ready, you don't know when the time will come.

(Mark 13:32-33 is the quote, also mentioned in Mathew 24:36 that I can find in less than 2 minutes of searching)

So unless I'm missing something, anyone who claims that any specific event related to the Second Coming and all that is just blowing a lot of smoke.

However, he also says in Matthew 16:28

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

So we either pass off this off as a reference to the transfiguration, or invent the wandering jew who won't die until the rapture. Or maybe just accept that not all statements in the bible are consistent.

[Fixblor]

they can also look to nature to discover our original purpose (survival and reproduction).

Pet peeve: science says nothing about survival and reproduction being a "purpose". It says that things which are better at surviving and reproducing tend to be around more and longer than things which aren't (a trivial statement, really); and that that fact can be used to explain the cause of things having the features they do now, by showing how those features are or were useful for survival or reproduction (the real meat of the theory of natural selection).

Evolution explains the cause of things being how they are, the way that a neurologist could explain the cause of someone's nervous tick; but those causal explanations do not imply anything about purpose. A nervous tick could be a purposeless trivial behavior, or even counterproductive to certain purposes; so could many evolved features of organisms, possibly including even survival and reproduction.

But either way, the question of purpose is completely different from the question of cause.

Dude, you're totally getting raptured for that.

[udrf]

I've never understood how people can combine religions when each religion clearly states that they are the only one. That being said, it would be awesome if the whole world would decide on some Islamic Judeo-Christian faith so we can focus on more important things.

Hi; I may be able to shed some light on how people can combine religions. I do that. I,totally, do not stick to Judeo-Christian stuff.
I do not know how others do it.

e.g. Bahá'í, Ecumenism, Jews for Jesus, Catholic Bingo Thursdays, basically any non-secular inter-faith ho-down at your local community center.
... or there's secular humanism (*notice the lack of caps indicating plurality), most neo-pagan, new age, or alternative spiritualistic adherents like to cast a wide net too.

Everything is one, ergo:
1=∞
The Mathites undoubtedly agree.

I'm Bahá'í

From my experience most, or at least a lot of, young people innately feel that all the religions come from one source and that's pretty much the basic principle of the Bahá'í Faith. One God, One people.

[Schadenfreude]

I honestly think this could have been a one panel comic -- just the first panel.


Well... at least I thought that panel was funny enough to warrant being its own comic.

I concur. Actually, the other two panels felt kinda just like lame strings of random words kinda vaguely related to religion and math. Would've preferred just the first panel.

[thkng]

Loved it, specially the first panel.

[solobutterfly]

One of these days I'll take a comparative religion class, that is assuming that the rapture doesn't happen on May 21st and the world freaks out and goes to pot. But seeing as how the end of days has been predicted since at least year 1,000 ("Common Era") and hasn't come yet, I'm pretty secure in believing we'll all still be around for a while. Until such time that I can take the class, I'll just read the forums, and other sources on the internet, and occasionally chuckle to myself at how misinformed people can be about their own belief systems. If the rapture does happen, well, I'll just hide away in my room and watch my DVDs and read my books and listen to my music without having to worry about responsibilities for a while

[SecondTalon]

But seeing as how the end of days has been predicted since at least year 1,000 ("Common Era") and hasn't come yet,

...you're off by...I don't even know the factor. The End of Days has been prophesized since about five minutes before we came up with the idea of everything ceasing to exist.

Also, we discussed how the Rapture isn't Biblical yet? I wasn't paying attention.

[Azkyroth]

I would be interested in how you answer the question of "why" with a scientific approach, given that "why" is a question of meaning. Science could explain how my computer works, but it isn't science that explains why I use it. Only I can do that.

As a computer science, I am offended and flabbergasted by the stupidity of this statement. Please explain to me how on earth us in CS could make such lovely machines if we couldn't study what humans needed to do and why. Goodness.

"Why" in the sense of causation is distinct from "why" in the sense of value. Science, and reason more broadly, can describe both the different possible states of affairs and the outside events or choices that may effect them, but the decision to value one state of affairs over the other is fundamentally non-rational. It's basically adding (a minimum of) one extra axiom to the assumptions on which you're already basing your attempt to describe the world you exist in (like, that a world external to your conscious experience exists, that your senses tell you something useful about it, etc.). It's almost literally just defining another dimension into your analysis.

Which is why people who insist that "the is-ought problem" is a serious philosophical issue mystify me. I've never heard of philosophers getting tangled up in "the x-y problem."

But it's still trivially true that a descriptive statement does not become prescriptive without an injection of valuing one state of affairs more than another. Which can't be arrived at from (descriptive) postulates without introducing a new postulate.

[Plasma Mongoose]

One thing has always bothered me about the Holy Ghost, does it has a personality and a form like God and Jesus has or is it more of an abstract thing like the Force in Star Wars?

[xX17GHDUDE17Xx]

One thing has always bothered me about the Holy Ghost, does it has a personality and a form like God and Jesus has or is it more of an abstract thing like the Force in Star Wars?

I'm going to guess it's like the Star Wars universe's Force in that it too is fictional.

[Pfhorrest]

"Why" in the sense of causation is distinct from "why" in the sense of value. Science, and reason more broadly, can describe both the different possible states of affairs and the outside events or choices that may effect them, but the decision to value one state of affairs over the other is fundamentally non-rational. It's basically adding (a minimum of) one extra axiom to the assumptions on which you're already basing your attempt to describe the world you exist in (like, that a world external to your conscious experience exists, that your senses tell you something useful about it, etc.). It's almost literally just defining another dimension into your analysis.

Which is why people who insist that "the is-ought problem" is a serious philosophical issue mystify me. I've never heard of philosophers getting tangled up in "the x-y problem."

The segue between these two paragraphs confuses me. The "is-ought problem" is basically what you stated in the first paragraph: that without adding explicitly prescriptive statements to your premises, you cannot infer prescriptive statements for conclusions. I suppose maybe the mystification is why it's a "problem"? I think in this usage that word is synonymous to "question": the question "can you derive an ought-statement from only is-statements?" You seem to agree with those who say "no".

Few people ever say "You cannot make prescriptive statements" or "you cannot infer from prescriptive statements to evaluative statements"; at most, people usually say "you cannot objectively decide which prescriptive statements to take as premises". Certainly not everyone says that though; plenty of people believe there is an objective way to determine what prescriptive statements are true. Unfortunately, most of them seem to think that's because they can be inferred from descriptive statements... so frustrating teasing those two apart... Objective does not imply descriptive, any more than descriptive implies objective! We have a method of determining which descriptive propositions are objectively true, why cannot we have an analogous method of determining which prescriptive propositions are objectively true?

[Eternal Density]

I'm hard-pressed to find anything in this thread I agree with.

[Meloncov]

I've never understood how people can combine religions when each religion clearly states that they are the only one. That being said, it would be awesome if the whole world would decide on some Islamic Judeo-Christian faith so we can focus on more important things.

Basically, by assuming that the One True Religion claims were added by humans for political reasons, and don't reflect the will of God.

[mcv]

One thing has always bothered me about the Holy Ghost, does it has a personality and a form like God and Jesus has or is it more of an abstract thing like the Force in Star Wars?

Interesting question. I honestly have no idea. The Holy Ghost is obviously different from the Force in that it's part of the Trinity, part of God, basically. It's also never helped me construct a lightsaber or manipulate objects from a distance. But there are certainly aspects that they could have in common.

I've usually assumed that the Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit, which sounds a bit better to me) is God's mind reaching out to us. Maybe more like dead Obi-Wan telling Luke to use the Force, though on a much larger scale and somewhat less audible.

But nobody can ever really know the nature of God. We have a hard enough time coming to grips with the nature of Jesus, and he's the most human, most approachable, and presumably the most understandable part/aspect/whatever their relation really is, of God.

[foxfifi]

it's so funny.

[collegestudent22]

One thing has always bothered me about the Holy Ghost, does it has a personality and a form like God and Jesus has or is it more of an abstract thing like the Force in Star Wars?

I've always considered the Trinity as the 4D representation of an extradimensional God. ("But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!" 1 Kings 8:27) Kind of like how a cube in a 2D plane could be a point, a line, or a square (or some other shapes), depending on how it interacts with that plane. Could be totally wrong, though.

[niky]

Whoever said that three going into one was a mystery has never seen Siamese triplets... or read "The Dark Half"

---

Whenever I hear the phrase: "May the Force be with you" in a movie house, I have to stifle the urge to shout out: "And also with you... AMEN!"

---

And this comic gave me a chuckle. My studymate in College would go to a Catholic Church, a number of Protestant ones, a Buddhist Temple and a Mosque to pray before every exam. Of course, he was Indian.

[dg8672]

American Christianity is known for many things, and two of them that are the dumbest are the insistence in the Rapture and the forced notion of ID without any form of evolution. Many in Europe (and some in the US) hold to Theistic evolution, wherein evolution works, and even the Big Bang works, it's just that God was the causation of that Big Bang and had some interaction to help form life.

Mention any of that in the Bible Belt, and you get stoned.

*sigh* This is, sadly, true. I live in Tallahassee, FL which might as well be southern Georgia for purposes of culture and philosophy, and it baffles me sometimes how Christians speak and act. Hatred, ignorance and blind devotion. Not devotion to the tenets of Christianity, but devotion to some off the wall, bile-filled interpretation of the Word that somehow justifies their prejudices. Sadly, my mother is one of these people.

Even though I am a Christian as well, I find that I don't get along with many Christians (at least in this geographical area) because my beliefs fall more in line with the "of course evolution makes sense, but that doesn't preclude God's influence in it" way of thinking.

I also get the stink eye because of my (apparently bizarre belief) that yes, as Christians, we believe our faith is true, but followers of other religions believe their faith is true just as strongly. We need to learn to coexist, live and love each other because if there's one thing all religions teach, its to love your fellow man.

I don't think it's that big of a stretch, but even suggesting that other religions may have merit gets me shunned at family gatherings sometimes.

Maybe I should move to Europe.

[collegestudent22]

I also get the stink eye because of my (apparently bizarre belief) that yes, as Christians, we believe our faith is true, but followers of other religions believe their faith is true just as strongly. We need to learn to coexist, live and love each other because if there's one thing all religions teach, its to love your fellow man.

Agree with this. Although it isn't true of all religious interpretation - "fundamentalist" (this is an ironic term - in all three Abrahamic religions, the fundamentalist is somehow defined as the one who twists the religious texts around, and leaves poor interpretation to indicate hate and violence are OK, while rejecting all the Scripture that explicitly states that it is not) Islam is one that teaches to murder and destroy your fellow man for disagreeing with you.

I don't think it's that big of a stretch, but even suggesting that other religions may have merit gets me shunned at family gatherings sometimes.

This, however, needs to be clarified, and that confusion may be causing your issue regarding your family. When you say 'merit', are you claiming that the followers might be nice fellas, that just happen to be sincerely following an incorrect or incomplete religious picture? Or does 'merit' here imply that their beliefs have some form of 'validity' and Truth, whether because you reject a sizable chunk of your own religion (it's claims that it is the only correct way to God) or because "it's all relative" (or some variation on that idea)?

[Andrusi]

One thing has always bothered me about the Holy Ghost, does it has a personality and a form like God and Jesus has or is it more of an abstract thing like the Force in Star Wars?

I'm going to guess it's like the Star Wars universe's Force in that it too is fictional.

I don't know what it is about religion discussions that causes people to give Doylist answers to questions that would only ever be asked from a Watsonian standpoint.

[Lazy Tommy]

The double-encoded title text has been fixed... it's now "1 Corinthians 8:6±2", not "1 Corinthians 8:6±2".

Doesn't seem to be fixed for me. I'm using Firefox 4; do I have to change the default encoding to Unicode or something?

View -> Character Encoding -> UTF-8 fixes it, but this is really Randall's fault. His web server reports Content-Type: text/html in the HTTP response header, while the actual page looks like XHTML and specifies its encoding in the XML header. Firefox believes the web server, as it should, and ignores the XML header, since the web server says it's HTML and not XHTML, and since it doesn't see an encoding declaration in any legitimate place, it assumes ISO-8859-1. The browser is doing it right, but it is given bogus content to work with.

W3C's 2009 document XHTML Media Types - Second Edition permits XHTML 1.1 (which Randall is using) to be transmitted as text/html; not enough browsers support application/xhtml+xml. Still, there should be a UTF-8 charset definition in the Content-Type http header anyway. I like to include a <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> in all my documents anyway, just to be safe and not leave it to the webserver to get it right.

I may be reading it wrong (the wording is not completely precise) but the way I understand it, that W3C document requires web servers to specify application/xhtml+xml for XHTML documents if the client specifies that it will accept it in its Accept header -- and Firefox does.

[Klear]

I don't think it's that big of a stretch, but even suggesting that other religions may have merit gets me shunned at family gatherings sometimes.

This, however, needs to be clarified, and that confusion may be causing your issue regarding your family. When you say 'merit', are you claiming that the followers might be nice fellas, that just happen to be sincerely following an incorrect or incomplete religious picture? Or does 'merit' here imply that their beliefs have some form of 'validity' and Truth, whether because you reject a sizable chunk of your own religion (it's claims that it is the only correct way to God) or because "it's all relative" (or some variation on that idea)?

Does it matter? Neither of these should result in you being shunned at family gatherings!

[grumpy]

I'm convinced that the number of deities is π times i - it has to be an irrational, imaginary number.

[rcox1]

Drive by post:

AFAIK, the only monotheistic religions are the Abrahamic onee. Note that the referenced article makes the claim that monotheism was popular throughout the Middle East during the Iron Age. I'd guess that someone had to have the idea first and we may as well call that person Abraham. Those competing religions seem to have died out, probably due to the arrival of the "have no gods before me" meme.

Zoroastrianism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism ) is a likely contemporary of ancient Judiasm, and has a very strong monotheistic bent. Ahura Mazda is the singular uncreated creator god and source of all good. It has some tappings of polytheism, such as a well-developed system of good and evil spirits (the good being worthy of homage), but Ahura Mazda remains supreme over all of them (much much more so than, for example, Zeus and the other Greek gods).

I'm disappointed at the lack of argument here after 2 pages. Let's see if I can help.

There are fundamental differences between the three.

I agree, but they're no more fundamental than the differences between (for example) many Christian sects.

This is quite the overstatement. If you look at the two biggest schims in Christian history
1) The Great Schism of 1054 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism
2) The Protestant Reformation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation

Points of contention were issues of church governance, faith vs works, or the inclusion of Filioque ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filioque ) in the Nicene Creed. To even begin having debates on matters such as this, there needs to be a large body of shared doctrine that both parties agree is true. Without that, a debate of whether the Communion can be done with leavened or unleavened bread is nonsensical.

To put it another way, imagine a Christian walking up to a Muslim and asking "Do you believe the Holy Spirit proceeds from solely the Father, or from the Father and the Son?" Such a question doesn't even register in a Muslim context, where "[Allah] is God, the One and Only; God, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; And there is none like unto Him."

-T

PS. Apologies on the links. Apparently I need so many posts to be able to use the url code

Monotheistic religions, for the most part, in a strict sense, do not widely exist. The Human brain that wants a religion really does not seem to accept a single entity as the full extent of the universe, mostly religions need to introduce a pantheon. About the only two religions that seem to be focused on 1 god are those that came from the divided family of Abraham, Judaism and Muslim. Otherwise most religions are polytheistic in nature, though some like christianity are monotheistic in name. Catholicism has saints. The protestants has the trinity. Severtus tried to get rid of the polytheism and break the protestant fully from the Catholic herresy, but was burned for his efforts to bring Christianity to the modern monotheism as opposed to what many would call the cult of many gods..

In terms of asking of where a certain aspect of god emanates from, such a question would be senseles to any monotheistic person. The devine is the devine, indivisible, and perfect. Our human mind may not be able to comprehend, and as a result break up the devine into manageable pieces, but that indicates human limitations, not reality.

[bzakharin]

There are fundamental differences between the three. Jews believe that they are waiting for a savior, and are currently "saved" through ritual sacrifice. Christians, however, believe that the savior has come in Christ, and therefore follow his teachings - namely that it is through belief in Christ and the sacrifice on the Cross, followed by the Resurrection, that saves them. And Islam says that the interpretation the Jews and Christians have is somehow flawed and "incomplete" (yet still from a perfect God?), and the real way to be saved is to perfectly follow the Qu'ran's teachings on good works, etc. (Which means I guess UBL isn't saved, even according to Islam, as he was all watching porn and ordering Coke up in his Pakistani mansion.)

Compare the extent to which individual practitioners believe(d) in the common mythology - angels, demons, spirits, magic.
Consider how lengthy, chaotic and shaped by worldly concerns the processes were that led to distinct doctrines.
The 'fundamental' differences barely register compared to other varieties in belief; they were more important as symbols of who recognised whose authority and was accorded a certain legal status.

The differences I speak of are quite fundamental. Differing on some point of doctrine, such as angels, is not the same as disagreeing with the fundamental concept of the faith. You cannot claim to be a Christian and disbelieve the Resurrection ("if Christ has not been raised [...] you are still in your sins"), nor can you be a (religious) Jew and believe Christ (or someone else) was the Messiah. Nor can you be a Muslim without following the doctrines of the Qu'ran on salvation through works, as explicitly stated multiple times in the book, or the idea of divine revelation given to Mohammed. These are the fundamental beliefs that form the foundation of the faiths, and cannot be explained away as "doctrinal differences".

I think salvation (in the sense that we are all sinners no matter what we do and we need to be saved by something) is a purely Christian concept (I am Jewish, so I can't really speak for Islam, but I'm pretty sure that's the case). There is certainly a process for repentance for sins (which once involved animal sacrifices in certain cases and will again when the temple is rebuilt), but it is a process for an individual and for individual sins. There is no wholesale salvation in communal sacrifices. It is only in additional to personal repentance and perhaps it helps inspire such feelings, but if they're absent, no dice.

Furthermore, Jews don't believe that Judaism is the one true religion (in fact, there are some commandments Jews must do that are expressly forbidden to non-Jews). In particular, a large portion believes that the other Abrahamic religions are perfectly legitimate (for non-Jews) and nobody's going to hell for following them. Islam has a similar belief (to a certain extent).

And anyway, there is no hell in Judaism. The Jewish hell is more similar to Christian purgatory (in that it is generally temporary).

[Isaac]

I've never understood how people can combine religions when each religion clearly states that they are the only one. That being said, it would be awesome if the whole world would decide on some Islamic Judeo-Christian faith so we can focus on more important things.

but we wouldn't be able to focus on more important thing since everyone would be a brainwashed Judeo-Christian incapable of critical thought.

(Which means I guess UBL isn't saved, even according to Islam, as he was all watching porn and ordering Coke up in his Pakistani mansion.)

no proof of death, no evidence that he lived to see New Years Day 2002.

Is obsession with the rapture a purely US thing? It's not something I've noticed much t'other side of the pond.

as far as I can tell it's mostly hyped by the media, between the unfounded claims of Osama Bin Laden being murdered by US Navy SEALS in Pakistan and talk about the coming end times the mainstream media has completely ignored two court rulings that give the US indisputable police state credential (Indiana Supreme Court ruled that there is no right to resist unlawful police entry into your home.... and the US Supreme Court has ruled that if police suspect you of destroying evidence they can legally force their way into your home without a warrant.... by the specific wording it is likely that flushing a toilet is sufficient reason for police to suspect you of destroying evidence... )....... but then again, I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Mormons are a totally different breed of insane religious nut jobs and outside of Utah maybe there really are people running around preaching about the end times........

I also get the stink eye because of my (apparently bizarre belief) that yes, as Christians, we believe our faith is true, but followers of other religions believe their faith is true just as strongly. We need to learn to coexist, live and love each other because if there's one thing all religions teach, its to love your fellow man.

Agree with this. Although it isn't true of all religious interpretation - "fundamentalist" (this is an ironic term - in all three Abrahamic religions, the fundamentalist is somehow defined as the one who twists the religious texts around, and leaves poor interpretation to indicate hate and violence are OK, while rejecting all the Scripture that explicitly states that it is not) Islam is one that teaches to murder and destroy your fellow man for disagreeing with you.

Christianity was used by both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to keep the people complacent while they gave out orders for the murder of 10s of 1,000,000s...... also, George W. Bush used Christian rhetoric to shut up criticisms of the wars he started..........

[edited for reasons]
[edited yet again for yet other reasons]

[warspite]

Eschatlology. Amirite?
http://warspite.files.wordpress.com/201 ... apture.jpg

[KrytenKoro]

I've never understood how people can combine religions when each religion clearly states that they are the only one. That being said, it would be awesome if the whole world would decide on some Islamic Judeo-Christian faith so we can focus on more important things.

but we wouldn't be able to focus on more important thing since everyone would be a brainwashed Judeo-Christian incapable of critical thought.

Because there's never been a Christian scientist (or even more ridiculous, a Christian scientist priest!), right?

(Which means I guess UBL isn't saved, even according to Islam, as he was all watching porn and ordering Coke up in his Pakistani mansion.)

no proof of death, no evidence that he lived to see New Years Day 2002.

Wow. Just...you throw a tirade at Christians for being incapable of critical thought, and in the same breath jump on board with one of the more blatantly ridiculous conspiracy theories.

Is obsession with the rapture a purely US thing? It's not something I've noticed much t'other side of the pond.

as far as I can tell it's mostly hyped by the media, between the unfounded claims of Osama Bin Laden being murdered by US Navy SEALS in Pakistan and talk about the coming end times the mainstream media has completely ignored two court rulings that give the US indisputable police state credential (Indiana Supreme Court ruled that there is no right to resist unlawful police entry into your home.... and the US Supreme Court has ruled that if police suspect you of destroying evidence they can legally force their way into your home without a warrant.... by the specific wording it is likely that flushing a toilet is sufficient reason for police to suspect you of destroying evidence... )....... but then again, I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Mormons are a totally different breed of insane religious nut jobs and outside of Utah maybe there really are people running around preaching about the end times........

I seriously cannot figure out where to start with this. Insane troll, you are succesful.

I also get the stink eye because of my (apparently bizarre belief) that yes, as Christians, we believe our faith is true, but followers of other religions believe their faith is true just as strongly. We need to learn to coexist, live and love each other because if there's one thing all religions teach, its to love your fellow man.

Agree with this. Although it isn't true of all religious interpretation - "fundamentalist" (this is an ironic term - in all three Abrahamic religions, the fundamentalist is somehow defined as the one who twists the religious texts around, and leaves poor interpretation to indicate hate and violence are OK, while rejecting all the Scripture that explicitly states that it is not) Islam is one that teaches to murder and destroy your fellow man for disagreeing with you.

Christianity was used by both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to keep the people complacent while they gave out orders for the murder of 10s of 1,000,000s...... also, George W. Bush used Christian rhetoric to shut up criticisms of the wars he started..........

....the fuck? Stalinist Russia was famously atheist. And Stalin had more killed than any of your pick-a-devil names put together.

[Isaac]

(Which means I guess UBL isn't saved, even according to Islam, as he was all watching porn and ordering Coke up in his Pakistani mansion.)

no proof of death, no evidence that he lived to see New Years Day 2002.

Wow. Just...you throw a tirade at Christians for being incapable of critical thought, and in the same breath jump on board with one of the more blatantly ridiculous conspiracy theories.

uhm, are you accusing me of not being capable of critical thought while you unquestioning take the governments story at face value?

Is obsession with the rapture a purely US thing? It's not something I've noticed much t'other side of the pond.

as far as I can tell it's mostly hyped by the media, between the unfounded claims of Osama Bin Laden being murdered by US Navy SEALS in Pakistan and talk about the coming end times the mainstream media has completely ignored two court rulings that give the US indisputable police state credential (Indiana Supreme Court ruled that there is no right to resist unlawful police entry into your home.... and the US Supreme Court has ruled that if police suspect you of destroying evidence they can legally force their way into your home without a warrant.... by the specific wording it is likely that flushing a toilet is sufficient reason for police to suspect you of destroying evidence... )....... but then again, I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Mormons are a totally different breed of insane religious nut jobs and outside of Utah maybe there really are people running around preaching about the end times........

I seriously cannot figure out where to start with this. Insane troll, you are succesful.

US Supreme Court rules that if police knock on your door and then hear or smell something that indicates that you may be desposing of evidence (such as flushing a toilet) that they may enter your home by force without a warrant
Indiana Supreme Court rules that there is no right to resist unlawful police entry into your home (of course, only binding in you are in Indiana)

dumb ass.

I also get the stink eye because of my (apparently bizarre belief) that yes, as Christians, we believe our faith is true, but followers of other religions believe their faith is true just as strongly. We need to learn to coexist, live and love each other because if there's one thing all religions teach, its to love your fellow man.

Agree with this. Although it isn't true of all religious interpretation - "fundamentalist" (this is an ironic term - in all three Abrahamic religions, the fundamentalist is somehow defined as the one who twists the religious texts around, and leaves poor interpretation to indicate hate and violence are OK, while rejecting all the Scripture that explicitly states that it is not) Islam is one that teaches to murder and destroy your fellow man for disagreeing with you.

Christianity was used by both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to keep the people complacent while they gave out orders for the murder of 10s of 1,000,000s...... also, George W. Bush used Christian rhetoric to shut up criticisms of the wars he started..........

....the fuck? Stalinist Russia was famously atheist. And Stalin had more killed than any of your pick-a-devil names put together.

uhm.... cept that Stalin allowed the Russian Orthodox church to reopen during The Great Patriotic War and that he used it as a mouth piece both during and after the war...... historically illiterate twit. Reference above links for proof that you're an idiot who spouts off without having a clue and either just take me at my word on this one or invesitage it yourself.

[udrf]

I'm sensing anger on this page...

[Eternal Density]

Christianity was used by both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to keep the people complacent while they gave out orders for the murder of 10s of 1,000,000s...... also, George W. Bush used Christian rhetoric to shut up criticisms of the wars he started..........

[edited for reasons]
[edited yet again for yet other reasons]

Yeah, lots of people have and continue to use/abuse Christianity for their own selfish/evil ends. The most effective lies are those that combine some truth.
Also, woot for Godwin's Law.

[Vaskafdt]

Sounds a little hard to test...

Also, due to the fact that this comic mentions religion, I fully expect this topic to have reached 6 pages of debate by Friday (plus 1-3 pages of other comments). That's just how it works.

or does it?

let's hope all predictions concerning this weekend will have the same outcome.

[stardf29]

And then, the conclusion is that there is 0.999999999... (or 0.99(bar)) god, and then there will be heated debates on both the general religious truth of the statement and whether that's the same as there being one god.

[Pfhorrest]

And then, the conclusion is that there is 0.999999999... (or 0.99(bar)) god, and then there will be heated debates on both the general religious truth of the statement and whether that's the same as there being one god.

I believe* there are 0*infinity=1 gods; nothing is really a god, but absolutely everything has a spark of divinity, so the totality of the limitless universe altogether constitutes the one true god. An atheist animist pantheist, you might say.

*(No, not really. Not exactly, anyway. This is mostly for people to argue about the equation there.)

[collegestudent22]

I don't think it's that big of a stretch, but even suggesting that other religions may have merit gets me shunned at family gatherings sometimes.

This, however, needs to be clarified, and that confusion may be causing your issue regarding your family. When you say 'merit', are you claiming that the followers might be nice fellas, that just happen to be sincerely following an incorrect or incomplete religious picture? Or does 'merit' here imply that their beliefs have some form of 'validity' and Truth, whether because you reject a sizable chunk of your own religion (it's claims that it is the only correct way to God) or because "it's all relative" (or some variation on that idea)?

Does it matter? Neither of these should result in you being shunned at family gatherings!

The latter one definitely should. You would basically be telling your family that their religion is all wrong, without any real reason to do so. They don't like it, and therefore reject association with you, as is their right under the First Amendment (and its equivalent in other Western countries). Pissing people off and seeing them withdraw from you and "shun" you is a normal response.

I think salvation (in the sense that we are all sinners no matter what we do and we need to be saved by something) is a purely Christian concept (I am Jewish, so I can't really speak for Islam, but I'm pretty sure that's the case). There is certainly a process for repentance for sins (which once involved animal sacrifices in certain cases and will again when the temple is rebuilt), but it is a process for an individual and for individual sins. There is no wholesale salvation in communal sacrifices. It is only in additional to personal repentance and perhaps it helps inspire such feelings, but if they're absent, no dice.

"When he goes in to make atonement in the holy place, no one shall be in the tent of meeting until he comes out, that he may make atonement for himself and for his household and for all the assembly of Israel." Leviticus 16:17 (emphasis added)

21 "Then Aaron shall lay both of his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the sons of Israel, and all their transgressions in regard to all their sins; and he shall lay them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who stands in readiness. 22 "And the goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a solitary land; and he shall release the goat in the wilderness."

Individual sacrifice was done, but so was collective sacrifice over the sins of the whole nation of Israel.

Furthermore, Jews don't believe that Judaism is the one true religion (in fact, there are some commandments Jews must do that are expressly forbidden to non-Jews). In particular, a large portion believes that the other Abrahamic religions are perfectly legitimate (for non-Jews) and nobody's going to hell for following them.

As far as I can understand, we are both right. I am correct, in that Judaism is considered by Jews to be the most correct way to follow God, but you are definitely right in that Jews also believe that all that a Gentile must do is follow the Seven Laws of Noah and believe in the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. (I am not sure if Islam qualifies, as it was originally followed by the descendants of Esau, not Jacob, but that is up for debate even among Jewish theologians.) As an aside, Mormons also believe that all of humanity gets into Heaven, although they deem the "higher levels" of Heaven as more restricted.

Islam has a similar belief (to a certain extent).

"Verily! Those who believe and those who are Jews and Christians, and Sabians, whoever believes in God and the Last Day and do righteous good deeds shall have their reward with their Lord, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve." Qu'ran 2:62

If that is held by a Muslim, I see that belief. Islam, however, has an issue where the Middle East and Indonesia (where the majority of the Muslims live) do not follow this on an official, state line (despite claiming to be theocracies), instead opting for the "Great Satan and Little Satan" theology, where Jews and Christians are unbelievers and should be massacred for that. I don't know what the average Muslim believes, though.

I will state that Islamic doctrine on Hell is based on a "balance" of good vs. evil deeds, and once it is determined it cannot be changed. However, Allah can rescue people from the punishment of Hell if He so chooses (the Qu'ran mentions him removing believers from Hell), so it is unclear whether residence in Hell is a permanent state according to the Qu'ran.

And anyway, there is no hell in Judaism. The Jewish hell is more similar to Christian purgatory (in that it is generally temporary).

I don't know of anything in Christianity that mandates a permanent Hell (other than for Satan, the angels that fell with him, the Anti-christ and False Prophet, and the armies of the damned that see the Second Coming and still don't believe). In other words, it is only for the people who know God exists, having met with Him after death or when He returns in glory to Earth, and still rebel against the will of God. That, however, is my personal belief, and I'm not sure that I am correct on that.

[mcv]

I don't think it's that big of a stretch, but even suggesting that other religions may have merit gets me shunned at family gatherings sometimes.

This, however, needs to be clarified, and that confusion may be causing your issue regarding your family. When you say 'merit', are you claiming that the followers might be nice fellas, that just happen to be sincerely following an incorrect or incomplete religious picture? Or does 'merit' here imply that their beliefs have some form of 'validity' and Truth, whether because you reject a sizable chunk of your own religion (it's claims that it is the only correct way to God) or because "it's all relative" (or some variation on that idea)?

Does it matter? Neither of these should result in you being shunned at family gatherings!

The latter one definitely should. You would basically be telling your family that their religion is all wrong, without any real reason to do so. They don't like it, and therefore reject association with you, as is their right under the First Amendment (and its equivalent in other Western countries). Pissing people off and seeing them withdraw from you and "shun" you is a normal response.

Expressing an opinion should get you shunned by your family? That's a pretty scary family. In my opinion, a healthy family loves even its black sheep. Even losing your faith completely shouldn't get you shunned, and that goes quite a bit further than simply being tolerant of other religions. Of course if you go out of your way to convert family members to your point of view, that might be considered obnoxious, and if you persist, then yes, you might expect to get shunned.

But a family has to have incredibly fragile family ties in order to shun its members over merely suggesting there might be some merit in other faiths.