[net.religion] theology = head hair

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