Religion Thread

[WTF]

Edited for WTF.

 

. I think mainstream Christianity isn't dying in parts of Asia and Africa though and I'm fairly sure that it's becoming more accepted in China too. Amongst the growing populations. But I agree with you in that in regions where a religion is mainstream if they didn't act so dickish they'd have more followers.

 

Getting off the topic of religion, has anyone else watched the discovery channel/TLC documentary series 'Through the wormhole with Morgan Freeman'. There was this one where they talked about the various theories of life after death. It was interesting to say the least. Though I'm getting tired of the Quantumising of everything.

 

However the quantum connection between neurons and the universal stream of consciousness is an interesting idea.

[Yantelope V2]

But, like I've said before, belief is an involuntary act, not something that you can choose to do just because it's appealing.

 

Oh I completely disagree. At least on the subconscious level. It's my experience that the most influential person to you is yourself and your feelings and emotions and all kinds of inputs affect your rationality and thought process affecting what things you do or don't accept. I believe deep down that most people choose their religion based on what they want to do and then make their beliefs work around that.

[deanb]

But, like I've said before, belief is an involuntary act, not something that you can choose to do just because it's appealing.

 

Oh I completely disagree. At least on the subconscious level. It's my experience that the most influential person to you is yourself and your feelings and emotions and all kinds of inputs affect your rationality and thought process affecting what things you do or don't accept. I believe deep down that most people choose their religion based on what they want to do and then make their beliefs work around that.

Isn't that normally the stance reserved for us cynics?

[Battra92]

We got 17 pages without this?

 

http://youtu.be/-UKhVRIi_yY

 

Great movie.

[Yantelope V2]

 

Isn't that normally the stance reserved for us cynics?

 

Who say I can't be a cyinc too?

[TheMightyEthan]

I'll agree that someone is more likely to believe something if they find the idea appealing but I don't think you can just outright choose to believe something that doesn't make any sense to you, even if you find it very appealing.

[Yantelope V2]

but some people can go a long long way to make things make sense to themselves.

[Thorgi Duke of Frisbee]

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/07/148076026/christians-provide-free-labor-on-jewish-settlements?ft=1&f=1001&sc=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

It's going to be very humorous if the Israelis end up taking Palestine. Christians; "Great, now we can turn Palestine into a Christian nation!" Jews; "Fuck off, Christians."

[Hot Heart]

Not sure if this is old or not.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

Church signs Surely they must know what they're doing.

[deanb]

http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold-Creationist-View-Human-Origins.aspx

 

46% of Americans believe in creationsim, 32% believe in deity guided evolution, n just 15% follow regular evolution.

 

UK obviously has a slightly different ratio(We don't have Gallup though afaik)

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

http://www.gallup.co...an-Origins.aspx

 

46% of Americans believe in creationsim, 32% believe in deity guided evolution, n just 15% follow regular evolution.

 

UK obviously has a slightly different ratio(We don't have Gallup though afaik)

 

Honestly, who the fuck are they polling for this shit? It's like they exclusively ask people from the middle of the country.

[Mal]

Survey Methods

Results for this USA Today/Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted May 10-13, 2012, with a random sample of 1,012 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones, with interviews conducted in Spanish for respondents who are primarily Spanish-speaking. Each sample includes a minimum quota of 400 cell phone respondents and 600 landline respondents per 1,000 national adults, with additional minimum quotas among landline respondents by region. Landline telephone numbers are chosen at random among listed telephone numbers. Cell phone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.

Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, and phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both, cell phone mostly, and having an unlisted landline number). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2011 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older non-institutionalized population living in U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

View methodology, full question results, and trend data.

For more details on Gallup's polling methodology, visit www.gallup.com.

 

Then with the Gallup site I got...

 

How does Gallup polling work?

 

Gallup polls aim to represent the opinions of a sample of people representing the same opinions that would be obtained if it were possible to interview everyone in a given country.

The majority of Gallup surveys in the U.S. are based on interviews conducted by landline and cellular telephones. Generally, Gallup refers to the target audience as "national adults," representing all adults, aged 18 and older, living in United States.

The findings from Gallup's U.S. surveys are based on the organization's standard national telephone samples, consisting of directory-assisted random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone samples using a proportionate, stratified sampling design. A computer randomly generates the phone numbers Gallup calls from all working phone exchanges (the first three numbers of your local phone number) and not-listed phone numbers; thus, Gallup is as likely to call unlisted phone numbers as listed phone numbers.

Within each contacted household reached via landline, an interview is sought with an adult 18 years of age or older living in the household who has had the most recent birthday. (This is a method pollsters commonly use to make a random selection within households without having to ask the respondent to provide a complete roster of adults living in the household.) Gallup does not use the same respondent selection procedure when making calls to cell phones because they are typically associated with one individual rather than shared among several members of a household.

When respondents to be interviewed are selected at random, every adult has an equal probability of falling into the sample. The typical sample size for a Gallup poll, either a traditional stand-alone poll or one night's interviewing from Gallup's Daily tracking, is 1,000 national adults with a margin of error of ±4 percentage points. Gallup's Daily tracking process now allows Gallup analysts to aggregate larger groups of interviews for more detailed subgroup analysis. But the accuracy of the estimates derived only marginally improves with larger sample sizes.

After Gallup collects and processes survey data, each respondent is assigned a weight so that the demographic characteristics of the total weighted sample of respondents match the latest estimates of the demographic characteristics of the adult population available from the U.S. Census Bureau. Gallup weights data to census estimates for gender, race, age, educational attainment, and region.

Read more about conducting polls in Gallup's longer paper, "How Are Polls Conducted?"

I can maybe find more exact info but I am wondering if they do divide up the country by area, not by population. Also the actual data is interesting... I think its part of a poll that they run every few years since the 1980s. in which they survey about 100 people each time. That is my impression by just glancing but overall the data stays pretty much the same.

Edited June 2, 2012 by MaliciousH

[TheFlyingGerbil]

Interesting article written by the wife in a Mormon marriage after her husband loses his faith.

[Yantelope V2]

Interesting article written by the wife in a Mormon marriage after her husband loses his faith.

 

Sounds like they both abandoned their faith. If their faith was fraudulent then this is a good thing. What I hope is that discovering you were wrong about something leads you to seek out the truth. Just being happy about being wrong isn't enough.

Edited June 6, 2012 by Yantelope V2

[Johnny]

I am pretty sure the point is that they both left their faiths because atheism seemed more true to them than religion. They aren't "happy about being wrong."

[CorgiShinobi]

I almost feel obligated to respond, but I fear I'll more so open a can of worms rather than anything else.

 

But I have to try, because there were a few things that bothered me because of how opposite they have been in my life, and in others around me.

 

You know, I went through a lot of crap just even being related to a few Mormons (mother and sister). About half of my friends were Mormons because a lot of people would either never associated with me or berate me, a non-Mormon at the time, about the religion. Did this prompt me to convert? No, it just made life a pain because it seemed that I was cursed with a social stigma due to others' decisions.

 

Point is, I heard a lot of crap. Reasons, supposed facts, and etc on the false doctrine that half my family had committed their life to. If you look up anything against the faith in terms of doctrine and history, you will find a mixed bag of issued "truths."

 

White salamander, black magic, top hat, and the list goes on. If you were to find yourself at a large Mormon event, like say the Manti Pageant, there would be protestors of other Christian faiths holding signs and pamphlets about "the truth." One such individual I had the pleasure of talking to was wearing a giant yellow sign, standing on a table and trying to sell these DVDs. He went on about how Joseph Smith would abuse women, about what went on during the translation, and again I could go on.

 

Thing is, you ask him a question and he'd want you to buy the DVD. I stress my question a little more, like say, "How do you know Joseph Smith would hit Emma" and finally he said, "I don't know how or where, but it's on the DVD!"

 

Again, where am I going with this? Basically, you can find reasons to justify your actions. When leaving a faith, you can find anything that would support your decision. You can do this for most anything because there is support in some form out there. That's the thing, support.

 

About a month ago a friend announced on Facebook he was leaving the faith. He said he had no ill feelings towards the faith, but that he didn't consider himself a Mormon anymore. Do you know how people responded?

 

They supported him. They didn't judge him, they didn't cram scripture down his throat, in fact they wanted to know if they were still friends and some if they were still on for this game they had planned later on. That's what rubbed me the wrong way about that article, that she felt only she would support her husband. I know in rural Utah you do get the more "hardcore" Mormons, but when my mother and sister temporarily left the faith, the people in church were still kind to her, they talked to her, they didn't push further without the consent of either one. About the only people who gave them hell for it was an old lady and other Christians who harassed her for "ever falling for it."

 

I can only say so much because we're reading from her perspective. I don't want to assume anything, though I've been witness to similar occurrences. Does this say anything thing about my faith? No, what your reading is about somebody else's faith because that's not what I've gone through. Heck, I could tell you about this local marriage here in Idaho between a Mormon woman and an Anti-Mormon man that were married and divorce three times. It basically came down to a lot of compromise, but they were doing it all in the pursuit of "happiness."

 

I don't really care so much what other people believe, that's "free agency" and all, but take the article with a grain of salt. Just this year alone I've read four "my Mormon" husband articles and how it somehow relates to Mitt Romney.

[TheMightyEthan]

I've never understood the beef other Christians have with Mormons. The stories aren't any more ridiculous than those of any other religion, they're just more recent.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

well, you're not going to get too many Christians analysing that too closely though.

[CorgiShinobi]

I've never understood the beef other Christians have with Mormons. The stories aren't any more ridiculous than those of any other religion, they're just more recent.

It's like what Jon Stewart said on The Daily Show a few weeks ago; all of Christianity could be the result of a teen pregnancy, and Judaism where a man came down from a mountain with scribbles on some rock. He said something about Buddhism, like "someone who really liked food," but point is religion in of itself takes a "leap of faith" to believe any of it.

[Johnny]

but point is religion in of itself takes a "leap of faith" to believe any of it.

 

I don't disagree, but I know quite a few religious people who would.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

See that's what I don't get about religion - I can see that someone can take the leap of faith to believe in a god(s) or just in general something potentially outside of reality, but I don't know how people can abide by religions when they know they are filtered through the minds of man and all the problems that are inherent with that.

[CorgiShinobi]

but point is religion in of itself takes a "leap of faith" to believe any of it.

 

I don't disagree, but I know quite a few religious people who would.

Well of course, because what faith comes down to at points is taking the irrational approach. With the virgin birth of Christ, you could give the rational reasoning that it was an unplanned birth. In faith though, you believe otherwise.

 

Overall, in religion, you have faith in the doctrine and lifestyle. What seems to be a common practice now is we have these religious people becoming comfortable living like a Christian, or whatever. Yet, when you speak of their faith's doctrine, you can find those who loosely believe most of it.

 

Sometimes, when I've talked to other Christians about the Old Testament, it's like they've forgotten that there was an Old Testament to the New Testament.

[Yantelope V2]

I am pretty sure the point is that they both left their faiths because atheism seemed more true to them than religion. They aren't "happy about being wrong."

 

What I read in the article indicates that the husband had done some digging on mormonism and decided that it was not a legitimate religion. He abandoned that religion. It does not seem to indicate (although it may be the case) that he truly embraced athiesm as truth but rather simply defaulted to it as a result of abandoning mormonism.

 

His wife seems to have done the same thing. The article also indicates that they are still unsure of what is or isn't true or what they do or don't believe and that they are actually embracing a marriage relationship as a way to overcome the pain and uncertainty of their faith. If this is indeed the case they're only going to be heading for more pain.

[Johnny]

Personally I think ever being completely certain about your beliefs is foolishness.

 

Additionally, in the article he had denounced his belief in god before he started doing such digging.