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> one side of the culture wars is fueled by a desire to impose Christian moral authority upon the USA. Impose? A broadly Christian ethos (I say broadly because

> one side of the culture wars is fueled by a desire to impose Christian moral authority upon the USA. Impose? A broadly Christian ethos (I say broadly because America is heretic central) was already in place and has been blandly fading out of existence in the West. Certainly, there are those who are actively defending their rights, but the hierarchy of the Church sold out long ago (50s/60s are generally treated as an important period in that respect). Currently, an amalgamated Marxist/secularist/scientistic/New Age-y pseudo-ethos is aggressively imposing its vision using the instruments of the state and private (corporate) coercion, propagating through the media and the education system. The revolutionaries of the 60s are in positions of power and have been working from within the system. > Such authority has been undermined by a pair of understandable happenstances: It happens that empiricism and the scientific method are simply better at making predictions about the world than priestly divination, Huh? First of all, contrary to the bizarre fetishism some have for "prediction", the ends of Christianity are not technological or predictive. Priests don't make predictions or engage in divination (certainly not in the Catholic Church). The very fact you'd said that casts serious doubt on your understanding of the basics of Christianity. > and it also happens that the abuses and frauds committed behind church doors keep coming to light. The latest wave of abuses and frauds are coming to light, absolutely, and this is a good thing because the current hierarchy is mired in weakness, cowardice, and corruption. But if you think in centuries instead of years and remove some of your prejudice, you'll notice that, first, the Church has gone through various crises involving elevated levels of corruption and mediocrity in the clergy and it has recovered from each (name another 2,000 year old institution, let alone one that could survive the wickedness and failures of its own clergy and leadership time and time again), and second, the frauds and abuses in question are hardly unique to the Church. Sex abuse of minors, for example, is a problem across all institutions where there are minors, and indeed, abuse rates are higher in other institutions such as public schools. > I wonder to what degree some participants in the culture war are trying to simply communicate the idea that we do not need a deity to deliver unto us tablets of moral rules, and running up against folks who cannot imagine existence without Jehovah. Again, you do not understand. While Protestants tend to have more issues defending their moral positions (divine command theory comes to mind), the Catholic tradition is firmly rooted in natural law theory. Natural law theory is generally understood as having its origins in Plato, which of course means its predates Christianity. What that means is that we can, to a large degree and in principle, reason morally using our own unaided faculties of reason (and indeed know the existence of God without recourse to revelation). Revelation does furnish additional knowledge with moral consequences, but not all moral knowledge is revealed. The "tablets" you refer to are presumable the Ten Commandments, but they are essentially expressions of the natural law. There is no reason why a pagan Greek could not have come up with that list.

Kednicma 6y ago
It sounds like you are, like me, a former Catholic; however, you're not yet free. I'll try to help. First, note that the Bible's clearly neither historically correct nor even maximally historical. Books are ghostwritten and backdated, as if stories from the Iron Age were real events in the Bronze Age. All of the Gospels are at least a lifetime after Jesus' actual years. There are basic calendrical errors in the NT. Actually, let me expand on one fun point, because it shows the degree to which science demolishes religious traditions simply by examination. By tradition, the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law on the stone tablets were written in Biblical Hebrew, tagin and all. (Indeed, tradition is that Jehovah designed the tagin!) However, we know that Biblical Hebrew developed after the Bronze Age Collapse, making it an anachronistic script for a story set in the late Bronze Age; the scripts that would become Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew, just hadn't been developed yet, and would need the Bronze Age Collapse in order to remove the influence of hieroglyphs for long enough to spread. Next, notice that Catholicism, and indeed all Christianity, predicts that Jehovah forgives sins (through Jesus) and that there is an afterlife for believers. This prediction is in total conflict with not just empiricism, which has no evidence to substantiate these predictive claims and plenty of circumstantial evidence against said claims, but also with "natural law theory", AKA scientific principles, such as conservation of energy/matter. Next, notice that homosexuality is natural and occurs in many species. So does necrophilia. So does bestiality, when defined as cross-species pollenation/conception. Therefore there's not much "natural" about any "natural law theory" which demonizes these behaviors in humans. I'm not claiming that these actions are moral or not moral, but I am claiming that you can't say that humans are being wicked when they're gay unless you can account for that one time that a gay duck raped a dead duck's body and explain how that's natural and not wicked at all. (Else you're in the bizarre-but-Puritan situation where animals can sin despite no knowledge of good and evil!) Next, notice that Zoroastrians have been practicing for about as long as Jews, and Buddhists for about as long as Christians (we'll ignore their few centuries of head start). This gives us good examples of comparative religions. Notice that Zoroastrians had the original concepts that became Christian heaven and hell, for example. We also get good examples of "2000 year old institutions" here; the Kung family traces their lineage to Confucius and are still alive today, making their lineage one of the best-attested to stretch into BCE and the Iron Age. Finally, as long as you believe in cultural Marxism, you're going to be blind to the fact that science just keeps marching on. The Catholics have finally accepted evolution, as of a few decades ago, and the acceptance takes the form of saying that evolution is part of God's beautiful plan. Okay, and? Does that somehow give some insight into how evolution works? No, it's just that they got tired of the fact that they had zero evidence with which to refute evolution. Science marched on and dragged religion with it kicking and screaming.

Kednicma 6y ago

It sounds like you are, like me, a former Catholic; however, you're not yet free. I'll try to help. First, note that the Bible's clearly neither historically correct nor even maximally historical. Books are ghostwritten and backdated, as if stories from the Iron Age were real events in the Bronze Age. All of the Gospels are at least a lifetime after Jesus' actual years. There are basic calendrical errors in the NT. Actually, let me expand on one fun point, because it shows the degree to which science demolishes religious traditions simply by examination. By tradition, the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Law on the stone tablets were written in Biblical Hebrew, tagin and all. (Indeed, tradition is that Jehovah designed the tagin!) However, we know that Biblical Hebrew developed after the Bronze Age Collapse, making it an anachronistic script for a story set in the late Bronze Age; the scripts that would become Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew, just hadn't been developed yet, and would need the Bronze Age Collapse in order to remove the influence of hieroglyphs for long enough to spread. Next, notice that Catholicism, and indeed all Christianity, predicts that Jehovah forgives sins (through Jesus) and that there is an afterlife for believers. This prediction is in total conflict with not just empiricism, which has no evidence to substantiate these predictive claims and plenty of circumstantial evidence against said claims, but also with "natural law theory", AKA scientific principles, such as conservation of energy/matter. Next, notice that homosexuality is natural and occurs in many species. So does necrophilia. So does bestiality, when defined as cross-species pollenation/conception. Therefore there's not much "natural" about any "natural law theory" which demonizes these behaviors in humans. I'm not claiming that these actions are moral or not moral, but I am claiming that you can't say that humans are being wicked when they're gay unless you can account for that one time that a gay duck raped a dead duck's body and explain how that's natural and not wicked at all. (Else you're in the bizarre-but-Puritan situation where animals can sin despite no knowledge of good and evil!) Next, notice that Zoroastrians have been practicing for about as long as Jews, and Buddhists for about as long as Christians (we'll ignore their few centuries of head start). This gives us good examples of comparative religions. Notice that Zoroastrians had the original concepts that became Christian heaven and hell, for example. We also get good examples of "2000 year old institutions" here; the Kung family traces their lineage to Confucius and are still alive today, making their lineage one of the best-attested to stretch into BCE and the Iron Age. Finally, as long as you believe in cultural Marxism, you're going to be blind to the fact that science just keeps marching on. The Catholics have finally accepted evolution, as of a few decades ago, and the acceptance takes the form of saying that evolution is part of God's beautiful plan. Okay, and? Does that somehow give some insight into how evolution works? No, it's just that they got tired of the fact that they had zero evidence with which to refute evolution. Science marched on and dragged religion with it kicking and screaming.