Mortification of the flesh. Exerting Willpower over the instinct, such as fear, hunger, anger, or lust.

If religion is the organized control of humans to alleviate guilt, then spiritual practices are designed to help humans self regulate their issues.

So if science wasn’t a religion, then there would be no barrier to co mingling of aspects.

It’s as if logick is something people are incapable of using. They use something they call logic, but it’s more like dogma.

1) It is impossible to separate logic and truth from God; everything that is true is ‘of God’ because God is Truth. Rather, the misunderstandings in Christianity originate in man’s misinterpretations of the Bible. Too many people mistake biblical allegory for literal truth. This has been especially true for the last 500 years under the influence of the Reformation, which erroneously encouraged people to start interpreting the Bible for themselves—every man his own theologian. Most of the time these interpretations have been wrong. (As evidence, I submit 26,000-odd variations of Protestantism.) The Bible is not a book of scientific truth but a book of moral truth.

2) If you take the transcendent out of the church, then all that’s left is a concert, a lecture and a snack. God is transcendent, and the Transcendent calls us to struggle, to aspire to understand greater mysteries, not to consume God in handy 8-oz. servings. A ‘user-friendly’ church that leaves men self-satisfied in their delusions is a dead church.

3) Science and logic can give us a lot of things, but they can never give us wisdom. For wisdom, man needs God.

4) If you accept the premise that a Prime Mover (God) exists, then a) He is by definition all-powerful and, being all-powerful, b) He is therefore able to do things like manifest Himself on earth if He wishes. That is, once you accept the idea that an all-powerful God exists, then the premises of Christianity don’t seem quite so irrational.

5) From a philosophical standpoint, the essence of Christianity is that we humans achieve our highest expression, and conquer suffering, when we subsume our selfish desires to the precepts of God and do not act as our own deity; i.e., we participate in God’s energies and exercise ‘lovingkindness’ toward our fellow man.

Read church history; the primitive Christian church was self-sacrificing and ascetic. In one sense, Christianity is like Buddhism on steroids, and Jesus is the Ultimate Bodhisattva. (Christianity might be more interesting to seekers if they recognized this.)

As an aside, a study of Eastern Orthodoxy and the church fathers would be worthwhile for those who have become disenchanted with the pandering and self-idolatry of the contemporary church. It’s not perfect by any means, but it is still a valuable institution.

I, on the other hand, grew up in a relatively liberal state with a lot of immigrants. I don’t remember having many regular church-goers as friends. Our church didn’t have much of a youth program by the time I went to high school. It is hard to be the ‘weirdo’ amidst everyone else in your school. I felt a little old-fashioned and odd.

Although I remained Christian throughout college, I admit there was a struggle there and a serious contemplation about my faith and why I went to church.

Then, I had my own children…and realized the burden was on ME to raise them in Christianity. Boy, did that bring me around.

Most people I hear from who no longer attend church usually point to the fault of other members or a pastor who wronged them in some way. Sinful behavior among sinners! Who would’ve thunk it? People seem to think that church goers should somehow be better than the average human being and be ‘kinder’ or ‘less sinful.’ Sorry, folks, if you’re going to church to find less evil people, it’s not going to happen.

Perfection is impossible. Just because Christians KNOW they should be like Christ, doesn’t mean they ever will be…and likely will NOT be much of the time. Don’t hold that against Christianity…that is why Christ came to earth…to deliver us from our sins because we could not do it ourselves…and still cannot.

If you don’t find sinners in a church, then something must be wrong.

Until I read and contemplated that, I was a member of the “moderately important” viewpoint. Lewis’s remark started me on a spiritual journey of immense personal value, away from being a nominal Protestant, and I am today blessed to be a Catholic.

physicsguy’s problem is that he seems to view God as a physics issue. His spirituality is physics, but God created the order that is physics. Were it not for God’s creation of heaven and earth, there would be no physics, no order to be discovered by physicists.

May 13th, 2015 at 7:42 am

… However, Christianity bothers me in several ways: 1) it hinges on the resurrection which, for myself, I would need some actual physical proof. And no, the Shroud of Turin doesn’t cut it for me. 2) Why us? From the results of the last several years, it’s obvious that every star has planets, so the number of possible planets with environments suitable for life is skyrocketing, and that’s just our galaxy! There are hundred of billions of galaxies. The universe is vast beyond imagining, so why would the God of this universe decided that this one species on this one tiny planet out of, most likely, uncountable intelligent species, send His Savior to us?”

Why would God send a savior to any intelligent species? What role does the multiplicity of intelligent species play in any such decision? What role – conceptually- do distances play within a creation, relative to a God which maintains the being of the creation, in the first place.

I cannot tell you what a well informed Christian would say, but just to ramble on for a moment, it appears to me that some of what is often claimed for or held of the Bible in the way of propositional content by some people, is underdetermined at best; and the result of not very well derived inferences. And these specious premisses or faulty assumptions, or incautious extrapolations, force us to deal with a number of pseudo-problems.

For example, although the Scriptures say certain things about creation and man in Genesis 1, the inference [not yours] that creation was for man in particular, and alone, seems to me to be unwarranted and based on overwrought homiletic horatory than clear and distinct propositional content.

Genesis says that man formed from the dust of the earth had Divine life breathed into him; was made some way in the image and likeness of his creator. It does not say all Creation was made for man, nor that he was the centerpiece of it.

That should then, never have been an issue – to later be “debunked” or viewed with skepticism – in the first place. The debunking is a denial of what is not textually asserted.

Then, there are initially trivial seeming things, such as the placement of man in a “garden”. It is a thing which does make a kind of rude narrative sense. As opposed say, to the kind of fantasy vision which seems to be the concept entertained by many. of the entire universe as a primordial Candy Land until “the Fall”.

Clearly, and even if you are a literalist, and even on the telling in Genesis 2, the world outside of the special or protected environment for the man who was made of dust and ensouled via direct action, is by weak implication likely much the world we now know.

“The whole world fell with the sin of Adam” line is something we might have heard said, or read as being said; but where in Genesis 1 or 2 is that found?

Similarly, the Catholic notion of original sin, (and you need only reference a 1940s Baltimore Catechism to see it) has more to do, in fact all to do, with “our loss” of superior powers due the/our origins as part of the lineage of “Adam”, than it has to do with some inherent guilt over an ancestral act. The line is posited as estranged from it’s once superior state, and now merely in it’s natural, clouded, striving, death ridden state …

Of course, the size of the universe in relation to man means noting to a classical theist. God is not conceived of a king on a throne “someplace” far away and just outside of the place we conceive of as the expanding bubble of the universe.

I’m not personally sure that we even have a very clear public idea of what constitutes matter, anymore.

Finally, insofar as the question of the physical proof of the resurrection goes, what would you consider as actually constituting adequate proof or as establishing a supernatural event? Would it be material remains on the order of the shroud, but better attested?

Would it be something else along the the empiricist lines of our ability to conjure up Jesus at one’s command; as if he were a Genii in a bottle which needed only to be heated to so many degrees in order to drive him out? I think it’s a hard problem there: made harder by the very concept of God, a concept which excludes the notion that “It” has the attributes of a plaything or material to be toyed with experimentally.

In fact, I am not sure how any event occurring or entering the natural would, no matter how public, could establish its supernatural provenance. Suppose a beam of light predicted by a saintly visionary to appear on a certain day, and to last forevermore, did appear, initially accompanied by the sound of choirs of “angels” and seen and heard by all including skeptics. And further suppose that this luminous shaft of mild light remained, untouchable, unblockable, visible both day and night, for years.

What would that prove to the committed naturalist?

But if the resurrection were proved, would that necessarily mean that you would then care?

If those were the choices, I would also go with science and rationality. The fact that the Christian church embraced Greek philosophy from the beginning and that science arose from the bosom of the church makes that Hobson’s choice invalid. Unfortunately, many people have so lost contact with philosophy that they don’t realize that science began as one branch of philosophy – natural philosophy – and has never been the repository of all truth.