That makes no sense at all. Let me quote from the book:
Imagine two women who are both forty-five years old, white, married, have an annual household income of $50,000, and attended about a year of college. The only difference between them is that one goes to church every week, but the other never does. The churchgoing woman will be 21 percentage points more likely to make a charitable gift of money during the year than the nonchurchgoer, and will also be 26 points more likely to volunteer. Furthermore, she will tend to give $1,383 more per year to charity, and to volunteer on 6.4 more occasions.
Pretty self-explanatory. If you are a Christian who regularly attends church, you are part of this statistical group.
As are the Muslims and the Jews and the Christians who believe in other rather different things such as the LDS and Seventh Day Adventists and a lot of other people. Your study is not specific enough to support the assertion that Christianity, particularly the brand we are discussing which believes in a near-future Second Coming, necessarily leads to good. The study sample has been hopelessly contaminated.
Or you simply can't explain this point correctly (I doubt you'd have held it in reserve so long), which makes your commentary about other religions being less charitable even more suspect than it already was since it destroys any residue of belief that this study of yours is not a feel-good exercise.
You are conflating two independent points here.
If so, this is only because you have already conflated them and quite possibly are now trying to deconflate them to disentangle yourself from evidence you don't want to see. Battuta and I have always, always been arguing that the Second Coming will either demonstrate that a God of boundless love and caring does not exist or that the Second Coming cannot occur. That has been our single, key, consistant point through the thread, and you have responded to it with this study. If this is a conflation, you have only yourself to blame.
As for "the Second Coming will occur only when the world has been divided into the believing good and the unbelieving evil", Revelation states that the circumstances immediately before the Second Coming are the Antichrist having forced the entire world to either worship him or be killed. That's a pretty binary situation.
It's also a remarkably stupid one as even a cursory knowledge of geopolitics will show. At this point in time the only possible solution to the creation of such a situation is divine intervention. This only further reinforces the premise that if God does in fact exist then we need to be rooting for Nuke.
As for "belief in Jesus or even the Abrahamic god in general is not a precondition to being a good person", I never said it was. I said that a Christian will bear fruit (i.e. actively be a good person) by virtue of his Christianity. I also said that being a good person is indicative of having the kind of heart that the Christian God accepts. But being good in general does not necessarily mean you are a Christian (or even religious), though they are strongly correlated.
Considering Christianity does not even represent a majority of the world population, this is an incredibly conceited statement. Considering Christanity's visible sins against others and itself, it is also unbelieveable.
Quite false. Compare the first 300 years of Christianity (when Christians were fleeing Roman persecution) with even the first 30 years of Islam. The Muslims conquered, in quick succession, Damascus in 635, al-Basrah and Antioch in 636, Jerusalem in 638, Alexandria in 642, Cilicia in 650. The reason there was a "golden age" is because they were plundering their neighbors.
This is why the Islamic golden age can be considered to last until about 1400, nearly eight hundred years after you claim it ended because they stopped conquering their neighbors. Right?
And I wish to amend my earlier statement that the Crusades were primarily about territorial expansion. They started off first of all as a defensive war. The Muslims had conquered nearly all of Spain by 715, held Sicily from 827 through 1091, and captured Manzikert in 1071. It was in response to this that the First Crusade was called in 1095 -- to recapture Christian lands that had been lost to Islamic expansion over nearly 500 years.
Which is why the First Crusade was directed at Jersulaem? Not, you know, Spain or Sicily? The Spanish accomplished the Reconquista pretty much on their own, and it took until the 1400s.
It is also a very poor fig leaf to hide behind that the Crusades were not religiously motivated, and you even reject this concept your self now.
You do realize that you're cherry-picking a lot of core theological issues, right? You may as well choose the metric of worshipping Zeus. (Also, you should note that most Christian opposition to stem cell research is specifically to embryonic stem cell research.)
No, he’s actually picking issues related to being kind to one’s fellow humans, providing them relief from suffering, protecting them from needless suffering and death due to disease via a method that is known to be effective. These are excellent metrics by which to judge the benevolence of an organization.
Or do you deny that allievating pain and suffering makes a good metric?
How does a scientific study, complete with an appendix full of statistical data, involve very little scientific thought? Be careful that you're not committing the error of the backfire phenomenon.
The study's bull**** anyway. Constant reminders to be generous could probably produce the same effect on secular individuals. Or, alternatively, churchgoing may be correlated with wealth and leisure (or may not - but it's a hypothesis) and therefore indirectly with more giving. The confounds are infinite.
The decision to post that study clearly involved very little critical or scientific thought. Which points out some of the dangers of faith, I suppose.
I have highlighted the relevant points of interest. I’m sure Battuta can produce more.
On the contrary, Christian fruit is an essential mark of a Christian life. It's far more consequential than eating porridge with or without sugar.
The consequence or lack thereof does not prevent the fallacy. “If all A are B” was posisted, then had to be amended to exclude A which are not B. You have invoked No True Scotsman and hence also begging the question.
This merely proves that rather than take an evidence-based view, you have worked backwards from your conclusion to create a view which supports it. That is the essential mark of a begging the question argument.
Then let's take strictly secular charity. Again from the book:
Although the charity gap between [religious people and secularists] was not as wide in secular giving as it was for all types of giving, religious people were still 10 points more likely than secularists to give money to nonreligious charities such as the United Way (71 to 61 percent) and 21 points more likely to volunteer for completely secular causes such as the local PTA (60 to 39 percent). In addition, the value of the average religious household's donation to nonreligious charities was 14 percent higher than the average secular household's.
This same correlation extends to donating blood, giving money to a homeless person, and returning extra change accidentally given them by a cashier.
The study's bull**** anyway. Constant reminders to be generous could probably produce the same effect on secular individuals. Or, alternatively, churchgoing may be correlated with wealth and leisure (or may not - but it's a hypothesis) and therefore indirectly with more giving. The confounds are infinite.
The decision to post that study clearly involved very little critical or scientific thought. Which points out some of the dangers of faith, I suppose.
Relevant parts again bolded. I do hope you read them this time.
