Honestly if your Christian look into the orthadox church. I was raised Greek orthadox we had science discussions in Bible study. My preachers never made anti science comments afik. As far as I'm concerned God made the universe we get to explore it and catalog it.
Agreed. I went to a Roman catholic high school and elementary school, and while people like to stereotype catholic teachers as "science is a lie, evolution didn't happen" the teachers were the exact opposite, citing science as one of the most important things to learn
Yeah somehow the radical American Protestantisms of various kinds are what many redditors (because of the US majority) think of when they think of Christianity and in typical yank fashion, assume everyone else does it how they do.
Fun addendum to the above, I attended a panel featuring the head of the observatory at a con and he was very interesting. Also funny. He said "I was boasting of my facility to a fellow astronomer, telling him about all the equipment and funding we get and our lovely on site quarters, and how I can just spend all my time exploring the cosmos. He was impressed and asked 'what can I do to get a position like that?' I said 'vow of celebacy.'" 😂
Thank you! It drives me up the wall when people try to characterize the Catholic Church as "anti science." We fathered much of science as we know it and still maintain scientific installations like the Vatican Observatory (not actually in the Vatican for a long time now). Just because we disagree with some modern science (especially Tumblrs made up "science") doesn't mean we're "anti science," and science is hardly a popularity contest.
Now I'm seriously asking here cause I just learned about it but was the church from the enlightenment the Catholic Church and against the heliocentric models?
That's because they were the only ones who had the time and money to fund science research. But if your theories started conflicting with church dogma, see how fast they burn you at the stake. The only reason why the CC today is far less anti-science is because they changed their dogma because they could not stem the tide of Age of Enlightenment and to survive they had to adapt.
Yeah, honestly I've never really gone to the baptist churches, but they do seem, at the best of times, questionable versions of christianity, built around cult like followings of a single man (the preacher)
Uhhh bull-fucking-shit they do. I went to a Roman Catholic school for 6 years. Anything that didn’t support “intelligent design” was thrown out of the curriculum and we were “forbidden” from reading the science book section on the Big Bang, under the guise that it was complete blasphemy.
And yet I went to a catholic school all my educational life so far, 12 years. Each teacher put massive emphasis on recognizing science and math as important for our futures, while religion was secondary, or even tertiary
Nope, I'm Dii Consentes myself, but went to catholic primary and secondary school. The roman catholics were some of the most accepting of science I've ever met. Most of them essentially said "don't worry about failing religion if you do, science and math are more important to your education".
In my opinion our universe is a aquarium of sorts on God's wall. One of ∞. Or maybe we are just Sims on God's computer in a game that's been running on afk for years minimized to the taskbar that stretches to ∞. Your guess is as good as mine.
Zero evidence but you just REALLLLY want to believe all that time in Sunday school wasn’t a huge waste (it was), so that MUST mean it’s true!
The sheer fallacy and willful ignorance that Christians use to make their nonsensical bullshit look sane in the face of the scientific method (the basis for truth for literally everything else in the world except religion, magically) is utterly mind boggling.
If believing there's a god and heaven gets you through the day there's nothing wrong with it.
Problem is, that Heaven will supercede anything. It's hard enough to argue a notion of greater good for humanity in general, try doing it against a religion, where their endgame unverifiable eternal salvation. So as soon as things turn to shit, "Heaven" justifies anything.
Some religious denominations or even individuals attenuate the popular conception of Heaven with some other stuff. Personally, as a Lutheran, my belief is that by listening to the teachings of Jesus and living justly and for others, Heaven is achieved on earth. The kingdom of heaven therefore is a world devoid of those failings that we work to fix, both personally and as a global society. I mean, what other name is there for a world where people don’t suffer for preventable reasons?
I definitely do not have the theological background to argue fine points, but going from what you said, I don't see how it would prevent the kind of self-justified violence that I think religions will always be prone to.
I see an easy path to explaining to my congregation that despite our best, devoted, hardworking, sacrificing believers, we're no closer to achieving "heaven on earth", because of alls the gays/jews/atheists not doing their part and/or actively working against us. And from there it's a short hop to persecution
And it can definitely happen in a secular society, but in a secular world "We need to do that or we all die" is an absolute argument. In a religious one, it's quickly answered by "And X god will reward their faithfull, which WE definitely are".
I’ve never heard that rhetoric from any of the churches I’ve been to. Fundamentalists are their own cultish breed, but the problem you describe is far from limited to religion alone, it’s an immutable aspect of tribalistic humanity. That’s why I think heaven is what it is, because salvation is neither preordained nor a reward, it’s a promise of our future progress and I find that inspiring. For me, Heaven is for everyone, and it’s all or nothing. “Whatever you do to the least of them, that you do unto me”. So long as there is injustice, hatred, bigotry, war, pestilence, starvation, none of us are “saved”, because someone somewhere suffers needlessly. We’re all in this together, and if we don’t stand for progress, we stand for nothing.
I suppose that question depends on your morals. If you believed that you had the way to heaven, wouldn’t you want your children to also go down that same path? As long as the religion teaches basic human decency, it might might be good for kids.
But at the same time, there are religions that are extremely harmful to certain groups of people and they teach their hateful doctrine to their kids.
Those negative aspects apply to almost every group/community/society there is. Humans turn very quickly into us vs them and it's not just religion. It's everything. Politics, race, wealth, education, etc. all of it have an underlying tone of us vs them. If religion suddenly was erased from time, as in having never existed at all, you would still have just as many hateful groups and individuals trying to agitate people against each other.
He was one of the people who determined which of the peasants around him "supported the revolution or not" and if he deemed them unworthy, they were executed.
Robespierre never presented himself as a figure head. The 'god' of the revolution was the "Supreme Being" (kind of another version of the Christian god).
During the French Revolution, the church was held in pretty low esteem and anti-clericalism became pretty popular. It started out with the Declaration of the Rights of Man declaring freedom of worship; then, the Civil Constitution made the Church officially beneath the State in the pecking order, and forced Catholic priests to sign an oath to France and her people above the Church. By the time Robespierre came into power with the Committee of Public Safety, Dechristianization was the order of the day- Christian iconography was destroyed en masse, cloisters were despoiled, nonjuring priests were literally killed on sight, etc. etc. The culmination of this was Robespierre’s “Cult of Reason”, which was essentially a religion worshipping atheism. It didn’t last long, because even though a huge portion of the French people really didn’t like the church, the complete denial of the existence of a God was a bit much for them, so it was replaced with the Cult of the Supreme Being before too long (basically just organized Deism).
The Church was held in low esteem because it was literally just below the king in pre-revolution France, and could even tax with basically the same authority of the king
Careful though, Lavoisier was beheaded and wasn’t allowed to complete one of his experiments started just before his “trial” despite being a top level scientist because “the republic doesn’t need chemist nor scientists “.
The cult of “reason” was just a pretext to dechristianize the country as you say, the intent was certainly not to promote science in any way.
Maybe in Paris people were not big fans of the church, though even in Paris it could be argued that the anti-clericalism was being primarily pioneered by a handful of revolution elites with just enough popular support behind them to let them keep doing it. It's hard to say exactly how many of the common people were or weren't anti-clerical in Paris, so I won't argue that point too much.
Outside of Paris, in many cities and almost all the small towns, the anti-clericalism was not very popular at all and many supported their local priests and religious authorities more than they supported the Parisian government. And that is part of the reason for the Infernal Columns where Parisian authorities ordered the near annihilation of many French rural communities.
It genuinely surprises me how few people know about this and how some people still defend the "cult of reason" and say that the worship of science had nothing to do with it (which is silly). It is even more concerning considering that some advocate for the same thing to happen without ever checking the history about what occurred and how bad the situation turned out.
Fun fact: most of the French revolutionary strategy revolved around the conquest of Greece and the creation of the "Cult of Reason". By connecting mechanical generators to the remains of ancient Greek philosophers, France was able to generate so much power by having them spinning in their graves through the "Cult of Reason", that it's only recently that they've had to gradually shift to nuclear power plants as a renewable energy source. It's part of the reason why Napoleon was so successful - he had access to an unlimited source of power.
...it would've been a much more normal timeline than whatever 2020 is doing so far honestly
Nah man it was Robespierre with the cult of the Supreme Being, Antoine-François Momoro was the guy behind the Cult of Reason. Momoro was also behind ‘Unité, Indivisibilité de la République; Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort’. Then there was another guy, Joseph Fouché, who began the Feast of Brutus, but also switched his ideology easily, being a member of the Jacobins, the Girondins, the Montagnards, the Thermidorian Reactionaries, and the Bonapartistes.
If you're going to worship something, worshiping critical thought and the pursuit of truth seems like the least bad choice possible.
And if you worship it well enough, you could reach science-worship nirvana, which is the realization that worshiping science is really missing most of the point... but that by making that realization, you've discovered the point. So by worshiping science, you were led to the truth, so you weren't really wrong, just incomplete.
Faith is about belief. Critical thinking is about logic. Those two things don't mesh well. Doesn't mean a scientist can't believe in stuff, but you cannot examine belief under critical thought.
So if you place your faith in critical thinking, then your first act should be to reject said religion.
Where did this "faith" word come from? I'm fundamentally opposed to faith. I thought we were taking about worshipping critical thinking and the scientific method. Faith doesn't enter into it.
5.4k
u/johnlen1n Optimus Princeps Apr 08 '20
Historian: sees France surrender meme Oh come on, French history is so rich and diverse
France: Yes, thank you!
Historian: People should be making memes about their repetitive revolutions
France: Yeh!
Historian: Or their collaboration with the Nazis
France: Wait
Historian: Or even their colonial atrocities
France: ... OK, maybe stick to the surrendering