Well it's nice to hear that Saint Reagan wasn't so preoccupied with murdering Catholics in Latin America to attempt a death bed conversion of his atheist father in-law by testifying to how prayer cured a peptic ulcer. Really puts a human face on an impersonal god.
🇺🇸 How Christianity’s Decline Impacts White Christians’ Emotional and Attitudinal Response
“Racial resentment predicts Christian nationalism, Christian persecution beliefs, and White persecution beliefs. In other words, negative stereotypes about Black Americans are related to Christian nationalism and persecution beliefs. But while Whiteness and Christianity are undeniably intertwined among Whites, our experiment provides evidence that they cannot be conflated.”
@bibliolater@politicalscience I will just say this much. For a couple decades or so I attended fundamentalist/evangelical churches, but if I had had even the slightest inkling that they were racist I would have been out of there so fast it would have made their heads spin. I got disillusioned with the church after I realized that they had not been telling the truth about several things (in particular about hell, they never bothered to mention that three or four very different words with completely different meanings in the original languages had all been translated to the English word "hell" and that dishonest preachers conflated all those words in order to control people) but even then I had not seen any overt racism. It was such a shock to see the type of people I had fellowshipped with for years suddenly turn into Trump supporters and racists and generally awful people. I mean, I knew that black people generally went to their own churches but I never heard anyone say that they couldn't come into the ones I attended, but then in retrospect they probably would not have made a big scene about it.
Now the way I feel about it, I would never go back to one of those churches again. They have lost me forever. In a way I feel sorry for them because they are being played big time by politicians that are just pandering to them as long as they are "useful idiots", but who will drop them like a hot potato once they are no longer useful. But having seen how easily they abandoned their core beliefs (in particular the teachings of Jesus) I have to conclude that there is nothing to their religion. They are like all of us in that they believe what they want to believe, but when what you believe includes hate and authoritarism, then I want no part of your beliefs.
I see. There's a good deal more going on here (& w/ religion in general). A key insight from RS is that “religion” has no singular non-reductive definition, only a family resemblance of features. So can only define religion for the purposes of a given discussion. You take value derived from myth as religion's core here.
What's the most helpful way to think about myths and values?
Myths are stories that fill the world with meaning and value. Humanism has its myths (answers to questions of meaning) too---and some are quite cosmological in scope.
“Values are ideas about what people ought to want.”
The Ghosts of Max Weber in the Economic History of Preindustrial Europe
“References to Weber in the literature on preindustrial Europe published by economists during the last fifty years show that the more economists have rehabilitated culture as an autonomous force of economic change, the more they have heralded Weber as a precursor of their endeavors. The casting of Weber in such terms, moreover, has gone hand in hand with a decline, rather than an increase, in conversations between economists, sociologists, historians, and other humanists and social scientists interested in the role of culture in the formation of modern economic life.”
Trivellato, Francesca. “The Ghosts of Max Weber in the Economic History of Preindustrial Europe.” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 4, no. 2 (2023): 332-376. https://doi.org/10.1353/cap.2023.a917621.
Identifying Bible Interpolations The False Pen of the Scribes!
“…we work on learning how to spot and identify texts of the Bible, whether Hebrew Bible/O.T. or New Testament, that have been overlaid with what appear to be disjunctive interpolations inserted for polemical reasons.”
‘This photo captures novice monks at around 6am as they wake up to collect alms. Each morning, these young #monks follow a tradition that is centuries old.
Photograph: Will Langston
The Corruption of Reality: A Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis, and Psychopathology by John F. Schumaker, 1995
This groundbreaking volume examines our sometimes strained grasp of reality and sheds new light on three subject areas that continue to fascinate researchers: religion, hypnosis and psychopathology.
God’s Ghostwriters by Candida Moss review – did enslaved scribes write the New Testament?
“And if the Roman family that purchased them as a scribe had subsequently converted to Christianity, either openly or secretly as many did in the first and second centuries CE, they may well then have been drafted in to write down the words of the great Christian missionary preachers who criss-crossed the empire and came to its capital, including of course Paul.”
Origen of Alexandria and the History of Racism as a Theological Problem
“Earlier scholarly accounts that portray Origen as a champion of human equality and as engaged in anti-racist efforts therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny. Origen disparages certain ethnic groups and develops arguments that connect ethnic identity and geographical location with various degrees of sinfulness. His work offers clear evidence that theories of ethnic inferiority have a long history within the Christian matrix that stretches considerably beyond the modern and medieval periods.”
Matthijs den Dulk, Origen of Alexandria and the History of Racism as a Theological Problem, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 1, April 2020, Pages 164–195, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flaa025
#Image attribution: Luyken, Jan (1649-1712), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OrigenStudentsLuyken.jpg
“The extent to which the worship of Baal and Asherah affected Israel’s understanding of Yahweh is seen in the inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud. Jezebel was not fully responsible for the ongoing worship of Canaanite deities in Israel and Judah but her reign gave legitimacy to the long held tendency.”
Dolan, M. (2024) “Jezebel: A Hebrew Disaster”, Buried History: The Journal of the Australian Institute of Archaeology, 40, pp. 39–48. https://doi.org/10.62614/7d25h288
“…thanks to Alexander the Great, Hellenistic and Buddhist cultures came into contact in the 4th century BCE, creating a cultural synthesis known as Greco-Buddhism.”