[Goober5000]

That assumes that belief makes you good, and non-belief makes you evil, as belief is the only thing being selected for in the end. A simple glance around you is usually sufficient to dispute this.

And you'll notice that I did not state such an assumption.  It's a straw-interpretation of Christianity that is unfortunately embraced by many theologically immature Christians.  A tree is known by its fruit; the Christian will bear Christian fruit.

Your particular mythology condemns the majority of the people on the planet for lacking a trait they never had the choice or ability to accept. If God were just, everyone would have a fair shot at it.

When Judgement happens the only real deciding factor of your destination is whether you have honestly accepted Christ as your personal lord and savior.

Not as such, because that would exclude the Old Testament saints.  They are saved because of and by means of Christ's sacrifice, despite their ignorance of it and despite living prior to it.

God is both merciful and just, and he will judge everyone fairly.  This passage from The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis is an excellent illustration of this line of theology:

"So I went over much grass and many flowers and among all kinds of wholesome and delectable trees till lo! in a narrow place between two rocks there came to meet me a great Lion. The speed of him was like the ostrich, and his size as an elephant’s; his hair was like pure gold and the brightness of his eyes like gold that is liquid in the furnace. He was more terrible than the Flaming Mountain of Lagour, and in beauty he surpassed all that is in the world even as the rose in bloom surpasses the dust of the desert.

Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me.

Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, though knowest how much I understand.

But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless they desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what the truly seek.

If Christianity or any religion for that matter was the "one true religion" then really it should have spread across the globe spontaneously and independent of a central source rather then at the sword point of European conquest.  But it didn't, Christianity spread because it was borne by the explores and conquers sent from Europe across the globe.  Really, until the late 1400s when Europe really kicked off its exploration drive, Christianity is going to be confined pretty heavily to Europe and the Med.

A cursory examination of Christian history decisively disproves this.  First of all, Christianity spread due to persecution by the Romans during its first 300 years of existence.  It was despite, not because of, the sword point of a European power.  After spreading throughout the Mediterranean, it then spread to Africa and India independent of the Roman Empire's influence in northwest Europe.  Ironically, many Christian kingdoms in Africa were themselves displaced or conquered by Islamic military expansion.

[General Battuta]

That assumes that belief makes you good, and non-belief makes you evil, as belief is the only thing being selected for in the end. A simple glance around you is usually sufficient to dispute this.

And you'll notice that I did not state such an assumption.  It's a straw-interpretation of Christianity that is unfortunately embraced by many theologically immature Christians.  A tree is known by its fruit; the Christian will bear Christian fruit.

Ridiculous. That's a testable assertion and it does not hold up.

There is no evidence whatsoever that prosocial behavior tends to correlate with converting to Christianity in any society. Nor any evidence that being Christian correlates with being good.

It's a directional fallacy of colossal proportions.

Every time you try to justify your faith on empirical grounds, whether historical or behavioral, you cheapen it and render yourself vulnerable to a very frank criticism: if you were genuinely a believer you would just believe.

[Colonol Dekker]

[Nuclear1]

A cursory examination of Christian history decisively disproves this.  First of all, Christianity spread due to persecution by the Romans during its first 300 years of existence.  It was despite, not because of, the sword point of a European power.  After spreading throughout the Mediterranean, it then spread to Africa and India independent of the Roman Empire's influence in northwest Europe.  Ironically, many Christian kingdoms in Africa were themselves displaced or conquered by Islamic military expansion.

Nonsense.  For one, that's not what StarSlayer was talking about--no one's arguing that Christianity spread on its own during its early years.  He's referring to the days when people would set sail to the Middle East or the New World and conquer the locals in the name of Christendom.  If you're trying to deny that there wasn't some religious motivation or justification for the Crusades or colonial expansionism then you're frankly just dead wrong.

On the second topic, yes, Islam at a point was largely spread by the Arab conquests, but it had reached Mauritania, Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, India, China, and Indonesia well before that through trade.  And besides, it's not as if Christians in the conquered territories were necessarily oppressed by the Muslims--in fact, they were treated as monotheistic brethren to the Muslims, a practice which allowed the Muslim empire to expand so rapidly and peacefully.  Compare the individual conquests of Jerusalem--the Crusaders slaughtered indiscriminately.  Saladin, on the other hand, offered tolerance.  Huge difference.

Ironically, the Crusades actually made it much, much worse for Christians in the Muslim world, as the Muslims isolated themselves further and further from Europe and turned hostile against the Christians.

[Flipside]

The problem is, most religions see 'good' as 'doing what our Holy Book tells you'. Some of that is common sense, don't kill other people etc, people will usually obey those rules with or without any religion. It's the stuff like working on a Sabbath, eating during Ramadan, wearing the wrong costume etc, it's stupid stuff like that which really causes the problems.

I'll note that I stated in my first post that 'Religion', not 'Christianity' tends to put some kind of flag into the act of 'being good' as though only they knew the correct way to be good (as in, the silly stuff, not the important stuff), and I'll also highlight that I agreed that not ALL sects of Christianity are like that, but some people from the same religion interpret the book differently, some believe you should tolerate other beliefs, others say that the Christians who say this 'aren't real Christians'. That's how silly it's got, in almost every religion there are Sects, Protestant, Catholic, Sunni, Shiite, even supposedly united religions cannot agree on the details of what is in their holy book.  And, as I mentioned earlier, it's the intolerant ones who seem to get the most airplay.

If 'being good' is all about strange customs performed at specific times in specific fancy dress, it 'being good' is eating the right food and not working on the right day, then it seems to me the Religion has completely lost track of what 'good' actually is.

[Mobius]

Goober, are you a lawyer or something?

[Mikes]

Large scale organized religion is pretty much a scam that is only successful because of mass indoctrination at birth. It's hard to shake off what you've been told "all your life" with mere logic.
Conversion and/or indoctrination of adults is a much harder feat and usually requires more drastic measures, which brings us to the methods of smaller cults and certain new "upstart/wannabe religions".

Don't take me wrong. I do respect honest belief. And if you ask me, merely believing in something, anything, a wee bit more noble than the supremacy of ones own needs and desires would solve a huge majority of our current societies problems right there.

But funneling such self-sacrifice to serve a man-made institution of questionable integrity and with questionable motives ain't really anything else but the exploitation of the desire to believe.

[Flipside]

Heh, I've always said I'd never believe in a God small enough to squeeze into a book, or even two, of there's one thing that would dissapoint me, it would be to die and find out that God was nothing more than ANY religious book made it out to be, I think I'd pity any sort of Jealous, Possessive or Vengeful God, it'd be horrible to find out that God was just the worse aspects of Humanity but with super-powers.

[iamzack]

Takes a pretty self absorbed creep to think a real god would give a damn about his sex life.

[Goober5000]

Ridiculous. That's a testable assertion and it does not hold up.

There is no evidence whatsoever that prosocial behavior tends to correlate with converting to Christianity in any society. Nor any evidence that being Christian correlates with being good.

Okay, then what metric do you propose for the testing?  Let's take charitable giving for an example:

From Professor Arthur Brooks, Syracuse University, via Christianity Today:

Ninety-one percent of regular church attendees give to charity each year, compared with 66 percent of those who said they do not have a religion. The gap adds up—the faithful give four times more money per year than their secular counterparts. While most of that money is given to churches, religious people also give more to secular charities, such as the Red Cross or their alma mater.

Religious people also donate twice as much blood and are more likely to "behave in compassionate ways towards strangers," Brooks said. For example, they are much more likely to return extra change to a cashier when they are accidentally given too much.

Nonsense.  For one, that's not what StarSlayer was talking about--no one's arguing that Christianity spread on its own during its early years.  He's referring to the days when people would set sail to the Middle East or the New World and conquer the locals in the name of Christendom.  If you're trying to deny that there wasn't some religious motivation or justification for the Crusades or colonial expansionism then you're frankly just dead wrong.

European expansionism was motivated by mercantilism and the desire for empire.  The religious justification was justification after-the-fact.  This can be seen by the sequence of events in European exploration: first came the Conquistadors seeking gold, power, and fame.  Only after the conquerers found new lands did the Christian missionaries follow.  They weren't the spear-point of European exploration.

On the second topic, yes, Islam at a point was largely spread by the Arab conquests, but it had reached Mauritania, Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, India, China, and Indonesia well before that through trade.  And besides, it's not as if Christians in the conquered territories were necessarily oppressed by the Muslims--in fact, they were treated as monotheistic brethren to the Muslims, a practice which allowed the Muslim empire to expand so rapidly and peacefully.  Compare the individual conquests of Jerusalem--the Crusaders slaughtered indiscriminately.  Saladin, on the other hand, offered tolerance.  Huge difference.

And likewise, the Crusades were primarily motivated by territorial expansionism.  Many of the Crusades spread havoc, conquered cities, and carried back treasures while on their way, and at least one Crusade stopped at Constantinople and didn't bother even to attempt finishing the trip.

Goober, are you a lawyer or something?

I'm not a lawyer.  What do you mean by "or something"?

[Mobius]

Goober, are you a lawyer or something?

I'm not a lawyer.  What do you mean by "or something"?

Or advocate.

I was curious, that is all. I see many analogies between your claims and the claims of a few friends of mine, whose studies have made them a bit too passive in accepting God and Jesus. I used to take a look at one of your previous debates about religion, and judging from your replies I could swear you were a lawyer or, at least, a person who has the same approach of a lawyer on Christian history. When Rome got "conquered" by Christianity, Roman law (or better, law in general) entered a period of strong Christian influence and that led to certain consequences.

I heard one of the first things a lawyer-wannabe gets to know is that Jesus' existance is a fact and is treated in history of law because it implied one of the most important cases of crimen of the time. Sadly, the existance of Jesus cannot be proved so easily.

[NGTM-1R]

Okay, then what metric do you propose for the testing?  Let's take charitable giving for an example:

From Professor Arthur Brooks, Syracuse University, via Christianity Today:

Ninety-one percent of regular church attendees give to charity each year, compared with 66 percent of those who said they do not have a religion. The gap adds up—the faithful give four times more money per year than their secular counterparts. While most of that money is given to churches, religious people also give more to secular charities, such as the Red Cross or their alma mater.

Religious people also donate twice as much blood and are more likely to "behave in compassionate ways towards strangers," Brooks said. For example, they are much more likely to return extra change to a cashier when they are accidentally given too much.

Note that it conveniently uses the metric "religious people". This is so vague as to be meaningless. They could be talking about (in fact they probably are talking about considering both make charity mandatory) Islam and Mormonism. To say nothing of the possiblity the source is biased.

But on a larger level, you have now run into my favorite informal fallacy, which I call "the Elephants Fallacy".

Because all elephants are grey, you have asserted that everything which is grey is in fact an elephant. This not only does not follow logically, but is demonstrably false. Your argument is hogwash.

To say nothing of the things pointed out earlier in the thread that make a mockery of the benevolence of any omnipotent being subscribing to just about any human religious concept ever.

[Goober5000]

Note that it conveniently uses the metric "religious people". This is so vague as to be meaningless. They could be talking about (in fact they probably are talking about considering both make charity mandatory) Islam and Mormonism. To say nothing of the possiblity the source is biased.

Brooks defines this as those who attend religious services at least once a week, which works out to around 30% of the population.  Elsewhere it's said that Christian charities tend to be more wide-ranging in their scope, because Christian charities generally don't restrict their work toward only Christians, and Christian givers don't restrict their giving toward only Christian charities (giving to secular charities along with religious ones).  In constrast, Muslim, and to a lesser extent Jewish charities tend to be narrowly focused on Muslims and Jews respectively.

Because all elephants are grey, you have asserted that everything which is grey is in fact an elephant. This not only does not follow logically, but is demonstrably false. Your argument is hogwash.

What is grey, and what is an elephant, in my example?

[Locutus of Borg]

Why? Jesus would just turn the other cheek, man.

He's not about hurting people.

The character of the second coming will be significantly different from the first.

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[Flipside]

There is a wonderful book by Pratchett, called 'Small Gods', that does a really good job of summarising my opinions. There's an interesting idea put forward in that book that the food of the Gods is not Ambrosia, but belief, as long as people believe, a God has power. There's also another very interesting theory about one of the ways that a God can 'die', which is that, over time, a superstructure of ceremonies, routines and practices forms over the God themselves, as people take on the role of 'moral adjudicator' for the God in question, people start to believe more and more in the Church (because it's them doing the judging and the punishing) than the God itself. Eventually the God ends up entombed in ceremony and dies, and quite often, no-one notices.

Edit: Not to mention it contains the classic exchange of:

'But that was in the century of the Floating Dog, when you appeared to the third prophet as a column of fire and gave him 300 new commandments!' said Brutha.

'Really?" said the Great God Om, 'all I can remember saying was "Look what I can do!"'

[Spicious]

The problem is, most religions see 'good' as 'doing what our Holy Book tells you'. Some of that is common sense, don't kill other people etc, people will usually obey those rules with or without any religion. It's the stuff like working on a Sabbath, eating during Ramadan, wearing the wrong costume etc, it's stupid stuff like that which really causes the problems.

It's all about hats.

[NGTM-1R]

Brooks defines this as those who attend religious services at least once a week, which works out to around 30% of the population.  Elsewhere it's said that Christian charities tend to be more wide-ranging in their scope, because Christian charities generally don't restrict their work toward only Christians, and Christian givers don't restrict their giving toward only Christian charities (giving to secular charities along with religious ones).  In constrast, Muslim, and to a lesser extent Jewish charities tend to be narrowly focused on Muslims and Jews respectively.

This merely proves my point that you are not offering evidence that supports your interpretation by citing this study since he bothered to include Muslim and Jewish groups in the total. The thesis that Christian belief makes better people cannot be supported with evidence so tainted.

What is grey, and what is an elephant, in my example?

Good works and religion, or perhaps goodness in general and religion.

Battuta's and my own point is that you are posisting that the Second Coming will occur only when the world has been divided into the believing good and the unbelieving evil. This is first-order crazy because such a thing cannot occur; belief in Jesus or even the Abrahamic god in general is not a precondition to being a good person. The conditions you state for the Second Coming are impossible, thus it will play out differently in such a way as to prove God is a prick by condemning based solely on belief or lack thereof with no regard to any other factors.

Or the Second Coming will not, can not, play out at all. By our diversity we have rendered God impotent. While I find that fitting, I doubt it's what you meant.

[General Battuta]

Goob's argument is basically the circular 'good people will become Christian, and Christian people are good'. No empirical proof can ever be acquired because of the hideous confounds.

And the argument that Islam spread by conquest and Christianity by trade is absurd - Islam was known as 'the merchant's religion' for a reason, and when Islam came to power there was a golden age of scientific and commercial development (taken versus Europe's Dark Ages.) Both religions spread both by conquest and trade, and the events that occurred under their reign (golden age vs. dark age) had more to do with the people and politics of the regions than the faiths concerned.

Religions are superficial expressions of historical currents as much as they are historical power players.

[Black Wolf]

Ridiculous. That's a testable assertion and it does not hold up.

There is no evidence whatsoever that prosocial behavior tends to correlate with converting to Christianity in any society. Nor any evidence that being Christian correlates with being good.

Okay, then what metric do you propose for the testing?  Let's take charitable giving for an example:

From Professor Arthur Brooks, Syracuse University, via Christianity Today:

Ninety-one percent of regular church attendees give to charity each year, compared with 66 percent of those who said they do not have a religion. The gap adds up—the faithful give four times more money per year than their secular counterparts. While most of that money is given to churches, religious people also give more to secular charities, such as the Red Cross or their alma mater.

Religious people also donate twice as much blood and are more likely to "behave in compassionate ways towards strangers," Brooks said. For example, they are much more likely to return extra change to a cashier when they are accidentally given too much.

Let's not take charitable giving as a metric. Let's take, I dunno, tolerance and inclusiveness of homosexuals. Or compassion for the dying through euthanasia. Or, I dunno, hmm, how about prevention of AIDS in the third world by promoting contraception through condoms. Let's see... what about... hmm, I know, what about the compassion for the millions of people suffering huntingtons and parkinsons that might be cured through stem cell research. Let's see how Christians stack up against the non religious in those areas of human compassion.

There're lots of areas where Christianity is very, very bad for society. And that's just the Christians - we don't even have to get into the horrible things done to women, gays and non-muslims in parts of Africa and the Muslim world. You can't take one study and assume it means religion -> Better Person.

[General Battuta]

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.