laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (01/03/84)
mARK, I don't thinkt hat this is quite fair. if I don't like my head hair I can get out my razor or go to the barber. Clearly there are "Churches" who seem to be formed out of a desire to make lots of money and make lots of followers, but this is not true of all of them. And some religions make a point of teaching their followers what the whole thing is all about. For instance, I have yet to meet an Orthadox Jew who doesn't have a very good and educated idea of what Judaism is all about. This goes for the Jewish tailors and dry cleaners and bakers, not just for the Jews in professional positions. Even Jews who are not as strict in their practice of Judaism seem to know a lot more about Judaism than most Christians know about Christianity. Now Judaism has been around for longer than Christianity and it doesn't seem to be dying out. Thus it is possible to have a religion which demands some level of competance out of it members which lasts for a long time. The question is, why are Christians so much worse off by comparison? is it that Christians are so interested in conversion that they will take whatever they can get? This does not explain why they do not go to the effort of educating their members in the faith. It also doesn't explain why the Christians aren't filling the U of T religion library in an attempt to fill in their own ignorance. I should thinkt hat for the followers, if religion is, as they claim, the most important thing in life, they would be making time to understand it better. But I see no indication of this. The number of people who seem perfectly happy singing "oh I'm and ignorant Christian and I don't know the first thing about my faith but I'm okay" interspersed with "you're not a Christian and your going to be damned and that is TREMENDOUSLY WONDERFUL NEWS" is so large as to encompass well over 80% of the Christians I know. What's wrong with them? And why aren't Church leaders screaming? Some of the Church leaders are remarkably well educated men who know a lot about their faith. Some of them are claiming that the level of ignorance in their church is a real problem, but more of them seem convinced that dabbling in politics (BAN THE CRUISE) and possibly in science (though from that last proposal, I am rather convinced that they don't really know anything about science *as it is done* either) is what they ought to be doing. I wonder if Christianity has always carried this percentage of dead wood. There were great thinkers in the past who were Christians at a time when everyone in Europe (more or less) was a Christian, so it looks like the problem is getting worse. Could it be that the people who have brains are leaving the Church on mass now that it has become possible to do so? If so, the Churches had better get organised before they select against intelligence so strongly that there is noone left who can reverse the trend, given that they want to survive. (Then again, amoebas aren't very bright and they are still around...) Perhaps the answer is to arrange to get lots and lots of real persecution. People have been persecuting Jews for as long as there have been Jews, which would be enough to ensure that the people who remained Jews were sincere about Judaism. I can't think of any group that would really want to persecute Christians, however, so it had bettter be an internal struggle. Do you think that another Protestant/Catholic war would have much of a result? I don't really. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura
robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (01/04/84)
Persecuting a people does not make it knowledgeable about religion. Education about religion is deeply bound into the fabric of Judaism, probably for many reasons. Catholics have been persecuted terribly over the ages, including by Nazi Germany. Our country was founded by Christians seeking to avoid long patterns of persecution in Europe. One of the fundamental differences bewteen Chistianity and Judaism is the determination by jesus that Christians should accept as commandments, from the first five books of the bible, only the "ten commandments". Jews recognize over 600 commandments in the same books, and there is an inevitable emphasis on the learning necessary to understand and follow a large number of commandments requiring meticulous definition. Christians have been offered a way that can be much simpler, but it seems to me that every branch of Christianity has an organized way of appealing to those of its followers who wish to understand their religion in great detail. - Toby Robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1 or: allegra!eosp1
tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) (01/04/84)
Tobias Robinson said the following recently: One of the fundamental differences bewteen Chistianity and Judaism is the determination by jesus that Christians should accept as commandments, from the first five books of the bible, only the "ten commandments". (Those spelling mistakes are his...) That may be correct when Christians are deciding what to eat and so on; however, you find it getting thrown out the window when the time comes to find Biblical reasons for putting some class of people down, like homosexuals or occultists. Then the quotes of restrictions from the Pentateuch fly fast and hard. -- Tim Maroney, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill duke!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@csnet-relay (ARPA)
mark@utzoo.UUCP (mark bloore) (01/04/84)
we seem to be approaching this problem (why are so many christians ignorant of christianity) in quite different ways. you are looking at individual behavior and the individual's reasons for it. you would go to a church- goer and say "why don't you know more about your faith?", or to a church leader and say "why don't you care that your people have never heard of thomas aquinas?". what i am doing is looking at the whole population and asking "what kind of churches can one expect to get under these conditions?". (actually, i don't feel up to predicting things from scratch, so what i am really asking is "are the churches i see consistent with the nature of the population and my ideas about how churches rise and fall?"). i don't care about individual actions or motivations, only about what proportion of the population acts in certain ways. i make certain assumptions about the people and culture we are dealing with: 1 some (perhaps most) people want, for whatever reason, to belong to a church. 2 there is more than one church to choose from. 3 it is fairly easy to join or leave a church, or at least to move between them (ie no social or legal pressure against it). given these conditions, it follows that a church which is good at getting and keeping converts, for whatever reason, will tend to grow (at the expense of the others, probably, but that doesn't really matter). if one church is significantly larger than the others, then the average behavior of its members will dominate the average behavior of all church members, ie it sets the tenor of the times. this has nothing to do with "quality", only numbers of people. with another assumption: 4 churches appear and disappear fairly readily. one finds that the longevity of churches is important too. churches which don't last long (say, they are good at making converts but can't keep them) won't have much overall effect on the population's average behavior. my point is that the "average church goer and average church leader" will belong to a church or churches which are, for whatever reasons, popular and durable. to address the original question, one needs a datum about the population: what fraction (call it I for ignorant) of church-goers don't care to study their religion? if I is small then it won't have much effect on what sort of church may dominate, but if it is large then the successful churches will be ones which somehow take it into account (NOT necessarily consciously). it is my contention that I is large. this means that a new church which requires study of its converts will not grow very large and/or won't last long. either way, you won't see much of it. an established church which starts to push its people to study will shrink and perhaps die. again, it won't contribute much to the "average church goer". a church which teaches its leaders to be tolerant of a large I will prosper. it does not matter what the doctrinal justification for this tolerance is, nor how individuals live with it. it does not even matter if some rail against it, so long as they don't have too much effect. and, of course, there is no reason that a church can't combine brilliant theologians with ignorant congregations. is short, my answer to "why aren't church leaders trying to educate their people?" is that doubtless some are, but their churches don't grow large or don't last long, so these leaders don't make much noise in the world. whether this is a good or bad thing is an entirely separate issue. now, as for why most jews are well-versed in judaism, i can suggest two possibilities: one is that judaism and jewish culture are very strongly linked, and it is the culture that is responsible for keeping people within the faith, and getting them to study it. if it is socially difficult to stop being jewish, then making people study is affordable. also, it is not easy to become jewish, so in fact judaism doesn't really fit into the framework i outlined above. the other possibility is that judaism has come up with a way (again, not necessarily consciously) of getting people to study despite a large value of I, or even of reducing I. in this case, if it went looking for converts, judaism might get a following which was both larger and better-educated than christianity's (if it were at least as good at making converts, that is). mARK bLOORE univ of toronto {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!mark
gds@mit-eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner) (01/04/84)
I am curious, Laura, about one thing. What is your working definition of Christians? Do you feel that the U.S. is a "Christian" country because the law of the land is derived from Christian practices? Do you consider someone to be a Christian who celebrates Christmas, recognizes marriage as a holy institution, etc., or do you go according to the Biblical definition -- ... if you would confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead ... (Romans 10:9) Just curious (not trying to start an argument). Others reading this message may feel free to reply also. -- --greg ...decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!gds (uucp) Gds@XX (arpa)
laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (01/06/84)
I don't know what a Christian is, Greg. I just know that I'm *not* one. (okay now, everyone stop sniggering...). I thought that it was a pretty good question, however. the answers are coming in now. There are 3 main ones. the first goes: We're all Christians because this country was founded on Christian principles. I don't like this one. I think that you can separate the principles from the religion and if they are good principles then they are because they are good -- no matter what the religious belief (or lack of belief) of the person who presents them. The counter to this claim is that the only Good comes from the Christian God. So far, 7 people have decided that they ought to tell me that I am *by definition* a minister of Satan because I am not a Christian. Any good that I do is just an evil trap that is to catch Christians. I am not thrilled with *THIS* definition, either, but if that is the definition then I guess the shoe fits. It is funny that there is at least one Organised Church of Satan in Toronto, and if you think that I piss the Christians off you should see what I do to the Satanists. Oh well. The second goes: Anybody who calls himself a Christian is one. This, so far, is my operative definition. The problem with it is that it includes all the non-practising Christians and the Christians who don't know 2 things about their faith and who see Christianity as a sort of social club to which a large proportion of their family and friends belong. I have a lot more admiration for the Fundamentalist than this crowd. I think that the Fundamentalists are *wrong*, and possibly *immoral* but I am not going to overlook that they have guts, which counts for a lot in my book. They < the Fundamentalists > get annoyed when this crowd is considered Christians, and I can sympathise. Note, I am aware that there are knowledgable Christians who aren't Fundamentalists, and there are some Fundamentalists who aren't knowledgable, but as a first order approximation around here in Toronto, the Fundamentalists and some of the Catholics can meet the grade while everybody else can't. The third (which I mostly get from the Fundamentalists who aren't busy calling me a Satanist) goes: The Only real Christians are the one's that are living the Faith. When all the rest show up in heaven God is going to say "who are you?". The problem with this definition is that you then have to define "living the Faith". It seems to involve a willingness to try to convert anything that is human and not-yet Christian, and doing a lot of scholarship (or at least, reading te Bible a lot of times) and going to Church on Sunday. Beyond this, the danger is that individuals will define "living the Faith" to mean "living just like me, or better". Rabbi Seigel makes it legal (thanks to Andy Tannenbaum who taught me this marvellous phrase) strikes again. For the time being, I am going to define anybody who calls himself a Christian a Christian, but I am not pleased with this conclusion. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura