Ok I've got some time now for a brief response.

1. There are none. And where there are I try to push them. I don't really see your example as a boundary issue. If other people malign or ridicule my beliefs it doesn't really bother me except to feel sadness for those people.

2. Acts 17:11 says: Now these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of the mind, examining the Scriptures daily, whether these things were so.

It's out of context but basically its commending the Berean Jews for closely examining the teachings they were receiving from the apostles to verify that they were true. My faith demands rationality and my God is a rational God.

3. The Bible is not a science text book. The Bible is not a fairy tale either. I accept the bible as true understanding that it's purpose is not to teach me about scientific phenomenon. The travesty to me about evolution and the big bang is not that it is or isn't opposed to biblical teachings, it's that it is such a huge distraction from the true message of my faith.

4. No. This is the one I'm most likely to get into an argument about because history itself is subject to manipulation and interpretation. Has the bible been used to nefarious purpose? Yes. Is the bible's purpose nefarious? No.

I definitely have better understanding now.

This quote is attributed to F Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

My grandmother was deeply religious (Catholic) and yet was very much down to earth and practical when it came to every day life. It never seemed as if she had any apparent problem with this. Religious people are not computer programs and do not need to pass some kind of unit test for consistency before they are allowed into production.

And plenty of so called rational people hold contradictory beliefs as well, in fact I'd be surprised if anybody had a completely consistent set of beliefs and facts that they subscribed to.

Case in point: I have a close family member that is extremely rational except for that one point where we are descended from primates, that's one step too far.

1. I love talking to people with different beliefs. If we have a respectful debate based on our best evidence I assume we will both learn something.

2. Facts are facts. However, I think all people build world views around those facts which interpret those facts in ways that are consistent with their non-scientific beliefs. The scientific method is just a important to me as an agnostic in terms of whether a medical procedure is safe.

3. See answer 2. Many Christians have no trouble with evolution. It was discovered by an Anglican after all. It's true that Darwin lost his faith over the discovery, but after a few years, many Christians just incorporated it into their faith.

4. It is very hard to prove historical facts, but there is good evidence for many arguments (like the resurrection for example; or that the King James Bible was developed by a committee). I think for many Christians, good historical scholarship is fundamental to the sorts of things that they now believe. This works both ways; however. For example, after the Divinci Code came out I was able to quickly discard the sorts of claims it made because the evidence was so bad. Similarly, Richard Dawkins should not give up his day job to become a biblical scholar since he doesn't seem to have the knack for it.

Cheers

1. Offended no. I'll think you're rather rude, the same as if I wrote $manifestDestiny = false. If you know someone you can have banter with them.

2. IT has all sorts of articles of faith. vi versus emacs, I'm weird as I like nano. Religion is a way of living your life, my code is in no way affected by it. How I interact with my colleagues is, for instance I'd hope that having a nice easy rationale for being a good person makes me a decent co-worker. I'd rather not work with a hedonist who doesn't give a fig for anything other than their own happiness, and with the internet we're exposed to plenty of those.

3. I don't view evolution, the big bang etc as contradicting my religious views. Genesis has been viewed as a metaphor since the 4th century BC. Creationism and biblical literalism are relatively recent "innovations" in some Christian traditions. It isn't about the "God of the gaps", it is about science revealing more of the complex creation we inhabit whilst being incapable of answering what the prime first mover was. That said science only shows us what we can measure from the construct of our own perspective. It cannot, and does not claim to be able, to answer everything.

4. Being a member of the Church of England you have to be pretty aware of the historical context of religion! I'm not a biblical literalist and my church is not solely guided by what is in the bible. One of the reasons theology exists is to take all that knowledge and use that context to look at what we can actually divine from the bible.

Being religious doesn't make you automatically not a jerk. Neither does being "scientific" provide an alternative, science isn't a set of ethics. Up until the 1970s academic philosophy was viciously atheist (the only thing worse than a theist was an agnostic). However since then theism has enjoyed a resurgence and disciplines like epistemology have taken on the challenges raised by atheist philosophers.

As a counter-point let me ask a non-religious person, what makes an act good? Be wary of associating it with something which makes you feel "warm and fuzzy" about having done it, because then would you expect someone who did not get that same feeling to do it.

How is this process of picking and choiceing from the Bible and 2000 years of Christian history not the same as making up your own morality (as most secularist do).

Seems to me, that the only thing 'being Christian' is (outside of the institution), is that you take some more of your morality from the Bible compared to all other books.

What is it that keeps you Christian? Why not just go all the way and look at all books and history to make up your own morality?

"Doctor, I understand the point of the rorshach test, in theory- but this inkblot clearly depicts my mother having sex with the postman. It's completely unambiguous."

The idea that Christianity is about the Bible is a relatively view of part of the Protestant community that many Christians who don't hold it view as a form of idolatry.

Christianity is, in other models of Christianity, about a personal decision to come to God through Christ; the Bible is a uniquely useful tool in this, in those views, as a collection of works about the relation of God to humanity, and particularly (in the NT) about Christ and his teachings, which, understood properly (which may not be literally for all parts; just as much of Christ's teachings are explicitly parables, much of the rest is often viewed as illuminating metaphor rather than factual history or commands) is understood, in those views, to free of moral error. In many such views (including the long-standing view of the Catholic Church) it is one of the two main sources of the faith, alongside sacred tradition.

The idea that the Bible is the sole source of Christian truth, or that it is entirely literal, are novel and minority opinions within Christianity. (The groups holding them are more relatively prominent in the US, and definitely more political prominent in the US, compared to other Christian groups than they are globally within Christianity, but even so there are quite large segments of American Christianity that don't follow these relatively newfangled approaches.)

> How is this process of picking and choiceing from the Bible and 2000 years of Christian history not the same as making up your own morality

Everyone is using their conscience to make their own decisions about morality, even literalists. That they choose to accept what someone tells them the canon is (about which there are disagreements among Christians -- and the canon favored by literalists is, like literalism itself, a recent change from the historical canon), and to accept that someone tells them the canon must be approached literally, and to accept the authority of a particular version or translation of the canon to be taken literally, and to then either choose their own or choose to take someone else's guidance on how to read the amibiguities are contradictions that arise when the text is viewed literally -- all of those are choices. Its kind of dangerous to think that the decision to delegate accept someone else's word for how to make these choices stops them from being choices.

Christianity, whether with or without literalism, doesn't evade the need to make decisions about morality.

> Seems to me, that the only thing 'being Christian' is (outside of the institution), is that you take some more of your morality from the Bible compared to all other books.

Except for those holding to a rather extreme version of the (also new) doctrine of sola scriptura, Christian's don't generally believe that books (whether one or many) are the sole source of morals.

> Why not just go all the way and look at all books and history to make up your own morality?

What stops someone from being Christian who considers all sources (not just books) in informing their conscience. Note that neither the Nicene nor Apostle's Creed -- generally held by mainstream Christians as the uniting features of Christianity -- makes more than a passing reference to Scripture (and that only in regard to the alignment between it and Christ's Passion.)

What keeps someone Christian -- or fails to, if it withers -- is their belief in God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Trinity, not their dedication to a book.

    > As a counter-point let me ask a non-religious person,
    > what makes an act good?

It's a secular look at morality and how we can reason about morality without a foundation of unscientific ideas (e.g. the existence of a deity).

In essence it makes the point that the religious idea of morality driven by a god with a big stick in the sky who'll discipline you if you step out of line isn't moral at all, and neither do most religious people actually adhere to it in practice.

E.g. we're not stoning homosexuals or burning witches as we once were, and it's not because the scripture changed, but because of secular progress despite of scripture. How do you decide which instructions to cherry-pick from the Bible or whatever piece of scripture it is you believe in?

He essentially defines an act as "good" if it's a net increase in human happiness and well-being. Burning people to death of persecuting homosexuals, not so much. Looking out for your fellow man so he'll look out for you. Note that this isn't the same thing as reducing morality to hedonism.

Anyway, I'm doing a poor job of paraphrasing the gist of that book so I'll stop. But if you're genuinely interested in what constitutes a good act or moral behavior in the secular sense there's a lot of well-researched and interesting works you can read on the subject.

John Rawls, one of the foremost liberal philosophers of our time spends the bulk of his most famous book arguing agains that very idea. My take away is that from a secular perspective it is impossible to argue from first principles what is good and bad. It's also obviously not a very strong argument. If there was a tiny country that did dispicable things to it's citizens but it had nuclear weapons, by this argument, the 'good' thing would be to allow those citizens to continue to suffer rather then have the world intervene and potentially be obliterated in a nuclear war. However, the citizen's of that country would still be correct to say that the rest of the world was unjust.

That seems a very poor and weak definition.

1. It focuses on human as only a human can be happy.

2. net increase is relative, so this is relative to the author's life/view of the world.

3. Well-being doesn't mean anything. Does he defines it too?

    > That seems a very poor and weak definition.

I'm just replying to the religious OP (@cmdkeen) that if he's interested in what secular people have to say on the subject of morality there's a lot written on that subject. I found Sam Harris's book on it interesting, but it's certainly not the first or the last word on a secular definition of morality.

Having said that I'll elaborate a bit more on my poor recollection of the book.

    > 1. It focuses on human as only a human can be happy.

    > 2. net increase is relative, so this is relative to the author's life/view of the world.
    > 3. Well-being doesn't mean anything. Does he defines it too?

The basic idea he's putting forth is that there's actions you can perform which will make people happy (e.g. being nice to them) and sad (e.g. subjecting them to genocide).

Obviously this is not a single-axis spectrum. So he's setting forth the argument that happiness can be attained similarly to how we maximize the performance of a hill-climbing algorithm.

If we were in real-time able to monitor the net happiness of every human (and also animals, if you insist) and tweak our societies so that net happiness would go up we'd arrive at a moral society.

So thus we can say that some societies are more moral than others. E.g. every modern western state would be morally superior to the Mongol empire by this happiness ratio we can say the society is "better", and once we have a metric we can work to maximize happiness in our own societies.

I think the main hole someone who's religious would poke in this would be "but that's not morality, you're just optimizing for hedonism!". I think to some degree that's true, but from what I've read of secular literature on the subject the idea of "morality" is pretty much discredited.

It's based on the notion of absolutes, usually handed down by some deity. Once you get rid of that (because deities don't exist) what do you replace it with? Some combination of "don't do harm" and "let's make everyone happy" most likely.

Plus going back to burning witches and stoning homosexuals, really? Firstly there's some really interesting language translation behind "suffer not the witch to live" - in that isn't what it really says. Burning people has to be seen in the context of history and politics.

It isn't about "cherry picking". Different traditions have their basis, I'm not sola scriptorum, the CofE believes in "scripture, reason and tradition". But in all cases it is about looking at scripture as a complex document full of metaphor, stories and allegories. Then making an argument based on that which can be debated, discussed and a conclusion arrived at - and one that can later be decided as perhaps wrong. What you also need to bear in mind is that significant parts of what Jesus is recorded as saying is pointing out areas of religion where the Jews had become caught up in process or tradition rather than the underlying message.

Another commenter in this thread, @marcosscriven, also linked to The God Delusion. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember it being quite informative too.

    > no-one has come up with a good "right" way to
    > live or act and it is often even harder without
    > a theist grounding to decide on some pretty major
    > points.

There's no innate compelling reason for why Reasoning about morality from a theist background would be easier. I think all evidence points to the contrary.

Perhaps you disagree with that, but we could have a more interesting discussion if instead of blindly asserting our positions we'd back them up with some arguments, don't you think? :)

There are a lot of societies on the planet today that have little to nothing to do with the Judeo-Christian tradition or are otherwise without a scriptural moral tradition.

Do you really think those societies or their members are more inherently immoral? At best the idea is naïve, at worst xenophobic and offensive.

    > Plus going back to burning witches and
    > stoning homosexuals, really?
    > [...]
    > It isn't about "cherry picking".
    > Different traditions have their basis,
    > I'm not sola scriptorum, the CofE believes
    > in "scripture, reason and tradition".

You're quite correct that the moral tradition of Christianity doesn't stop at scripture. I'm not only agreeing with that, but suggesting that that post-scripture process is actually the only relevant process by which we arrive at moral truths.

Why is it that we've decided to put more emphasis on some stories in scripture than others? That really is largely a process that can best be described as cherry-picking. How do we decide what to cherry-pick?

I think the evidence is clearly on the side of the secular argument that humans are social animals, therefore we need to exist (mostly) peacefully in groups, which gives rise to "moral" principles like not screwing with your neighbor least he screws with you back.

Scripture is really just an adaptation of these principles in the form of stories and allegories. Those stories are important to reinforce those ideas in society, but to say that they're the primary source is putting the cart before the horse.

Let me respond to your counter question.

I'm considering myself as an atheist. I graduated law and (but) I'm currently working in IT.

What I found about myself and my own beliefs ( good vs. bad ) is basically a consequence of thousands of years of human civilization absorbed and morally embeded in human beings and in logically written laws.

So basically what I believe doing is good or what I believe doing is bad is defined purely based on logical concepts, incorporated mostly in our legal systems. Yes there are different legal systems, there are different cultural standards, but if you take a look at it, I bet :

1. Every legal system punishes killing, stealing, frauds, etc.

2. Every legal system has an exclusion of the first rule : self-defense, non-voluntary ( accidental ) steal, etc.

3. Every legal system also regulate the civil rights of people agains other people. ( Continental Law states that for a divorce there is a blame that might lie in one of the partners, based on this the other claims compensation - imagine cheating ).

So yes. You can find multiple examples for the most of the actions and you will see that they are mostly regulated.

e.g.

1) You found a passport on the street - By law you are obliged to return it to police ( good deed )

2) You drink a beer on the street - Based on the law you can decide if this is well received or not ( In Berlin it's pretty much everywhere )

etc.

For all other actions, that have no consequence in society and which are not regulated. I choose based on my own opinion and mood.

e.g.

1) Should I give a penny to that homeless person? Well If I feel in the mood, I would, If I don't I probably won't do it today.

2) Should I talk back to a rude person? If I feel really offended, I will most certainly do, usually I don't give a F.

The concept of "no good without religion" has a pretty decent intro with both sides at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_morality#Morality_requ...

Personally utilitarianism, often held as the secular morality, threatens to go down some really dark paths and has done so. You could easily see how things like eugenics (widely practised in the West until the Nazis put it beyond the pale) became popular, and it was the Catholic church who led the fight against it.

And indeed, as I said my way of thinking gives me huge library that suggest me what to do and what is good and what is bad.

Most importantly I think that human beings ( and animals in that matter ) have really big spectrum of emotions that we carry over thousands of years that are not here today, because we need to fight them.

Fear can save your life sometimes ;

Anger ( adrenalin ) can make you a better fighter in time of trouble ;

Jealousy sometimes give motivation of doing good deeds ;

etc.

If the results of those emotional decisions are not regulated by law and only by moral ( of your cultural ancestors, family, education, etc. ) then I really think it's up to me to decide, otherwise we will all be copies of the moral we inherited and there will be no change at all

1 : http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/shavell/pdf/4_Amer_Law_Ec...

2 : http://www.iep.utm.edu/legalpos/

This isn't really true. You're right that metaphorical interpretations are very old, but so are literal ones. The catholic church, who pioneered some great non-literalist interpretations, also used to excommunicate you if you didn't believe all of humanity shared a single male ancestor named Adam.

Pick a random medieval christian peasant, and ask him whether the Ark was a real boat, and let's place wagers on what his answer will be.

The genesis stories were literal before they were metaphorical, and opinions about the relative percentages of fact to metaphor have shifted wildly based on century, region, and denomination.

> This isn't really true. You're right that metaphorical interpretations are very old, but so are literal ones.

The existence of some literal interpretations is not literalism. Literalism is the doctrine which excludes any metaphorical interpretations, and it is, in fact, relatively new (and mostly isolated to a subset of Protestantism, not general to Christianity.)

For example: Is IT/open source/tech/programming a meritocracy? If so, how do you explain the massive gender skew? How do you explain how there are scientific studies showing people can be sexist in science (which should be as 'science-based' as IT)?

Many people in tech, confronted with this, will double down. They'll claim tech is a total meritocracy, that women must just be studier at tech etc. etc.

Atheist IT people can be just as closed minded as some bible thumper.

And a lot of the gender skew starts real, real early. Anyone who took Computer Science in college could see the gender skew in action. I regularly had between 0 and 1 women in my 30+ student classes. They just weren't signing up for Computer Science classes.

And there used to be quite a few female computer scientists, but that trend changed in the 70s. There was probably a cultural aspect to this (i.e. parents or peers influencing their decisions away from computers because computers are for asocial nerds, and you don't want to be a nerd!).

It does appear that the cultural influence is shifting at least slightly in favor of women being programmers again, with nerd/geek culture becoming more fashionable and so many people using computers/smartphones all day long, so hopefully we will see more women pursuing computer science, but the root of the problem is mostly right at high school/college age, not nearly as much in the workforce.

1.) The boundary of my beliefs - in terms of people offending me by what they say or write - I really don't care and don't get offended. I have zero expectation for people who don't adhere to my beliefs to say things in line with them. If another person who is a Christian says things I think are really out of line, it wouldn't offend me but I'd try to engage them and work it out - but people who don't believe in it, I don't expect to act like they do. If a person who is of another faith or an atheist is interested in discussing something like the validity of the Bible, I'm happy to have that discussion as long as it is a real discussion. If it's a debate with us just mindlessly exchanging arguments, I have better things to do.

2) I don't think IT and religion are at odds in any way. The tension happens more at the level of your next question. IT is too far removed from those fundamental questions. In fact, as someone who's life is focused on sharing a message with as many people as possibe, IT is awesome.

3) This is trickier. If something is for sure a scientific fact and it conflicts with what I believe my faith teaches about the nature of the world then my assumption is that I've somehow misunderstood what my faith teaches. The only authority I recognize for this is the Bible - so to simplify the discussion - if a fact contradicts what I believe the Bible says then I assume my understanding of the Bible is wrong and I adjust. For your two examples - coming to understand evolution and fit it into my faith has been an on-going process for me over a lot of year. The Big Bang is something that fits my world view better than one that proposes God does not exist.

4) Same as above but I think that a lot of what people believe to be "historically proofed facts" about the Bible are in fact wrong and reflect a lack of information with regards to current knowledge on history. A lot of theories about when parts of the Bible were written and who wrote them rest on the bias of the theories authors rather than any facts. For instance I believe the New Testament was written by people who knew Jesus Christ, saw what he did in person or knew people from that group. I do not think it was written much later by people creating a religion.

If I were to find out something I believe to be true is absolutely false - I would evaluate and adjust. I've done it in my lifetime. It's something I do about more than just my faith. My politics have changed during my adult life and lots of beliefs I have, have moved as I experience more and learn more. I've been living in Europe for 4 years, for example, and in that time I've changed my mind about lots of things. It has been a real education. I don't cling blindly to any opinon. I don't mindlessly follow any 'leaders' teaching or instructions.

Hope that's the kind of feedback you are interested in - if you want to continue the discussion feel free to email me if that's easier than here - bittercode@gmail.com