Sure, they cherry-pick and discard the nastiest parts. That's great. But they are no more justified in doing so than the fundamentalist who embraces the killing and punishment stuff and drops the compassionate bits.

As long as the idea is embraced that the text itself contains wisdom from a god, it can be used in horrible ways.

Language, sex, many (if not most) forms of technology, chemistry.... Those things all "enable" harm the way the word is used in the argument to describe the relationship between liberal/moderates and fundamentalists. But so what? That's why we teach people to use all the things I listed non-harmfully, and that's what liberals and moderates do with sacred scriptures.

How does that make it "unique" in a meaningful way? Certainly descriptions of the potential harm are going to be different depending on the thing we're talking about, but to set religion apart the way you are attempting to, you need more than just "here's how it specifically threatens harm".

At any point, a believer in a revealed religion must accept that their god COULD speak to an individual, and introduce new theology or a new message. You cannot rule that out, because that's how your religion started. (From your perspective.)

As long as the book is given real-world credibility, you undermine any ability to truly say "that behavior isn't correct."

"Could" does not automatically equal "has", after all. Even for believers, by virtue of the fact that they, like other people, already have more or less accepted ideas that potential new information has to contend with.

That's why many Jews did not accept Jesus as messiah, and why both Jews and Christians decline to recognize Muhammad as God's final prophet.

but they don't disprove divine revelation. Not even close, because as I said, your religion depends on it.

And they don't have to.

Because that's the problem. That's what enables extremists.

Like I said above, believing that God can reveal does not entail accepting every claim that God has revealed. The burden is on the claimant, as I suspect you yourself have said at least once or twice before.

But you already have for one. And more importantly, you can't prove someone else's revelation is wrong based on other information because divine revelation CAN (and indeed always has historically) upset the existing order. As it did with the revelation that started your religion.

Regarding burden of proof, the moderate believer appears rejects the notion that they shoulder the burden of proof, as I have seen in this very group numerous times. Further enabling of the extremist.

Again, just because it can happen doesn't mean it has happened in every specific instance someone claims it to have happened.

You'll have to take up what other people say in this group with those people, since that is not what I am saying.

I said you couldn't even if you wanted to, and that by legitimizing or accepting the concept of divine revelation, it helps extremists. Look at it this way: Do you think that your god could personally reveal new information to you? Information that might contradict what you currently believe?

I'm glad you agree that the burden of proof is always on the religious believer though.

That applies whether the claim or claimant is "religious" or not.
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Even assuming for the sake of argument that you are correct, that doesn't help you. This whole thing started with you trying to explain why religion was uniquely vulnerable to the "enabling" charge in a way that sex or language or the other things that I listed aren't, even though they can also be dangerous when used in certain ways. Saying "you can't disprove the other guy's claim of revelation" amounts to saying "you can't guarantee that dangerous religion will never arise, or abolish it once it does. Dangerous religion will always be with you." But neither can I or anyone else guarantee the end of rape or verbal bullying.

You have not shown that religion is meaningfully different from other things that can be dangerous when used in certain ways. People can learn to use them non-harmfully.

Instead latching onto a strawman.

By giving credence to the notion of sacred texts, to the larger notion of the legitimacy of divine revelation, you make it impossible to dismiss the claims of extremists like ISIS. If we must grant that A) there is a god, and B) that god can communicate directly with individuals to reveal his will, then anything a believer in gods says MUST automatically be within the realm of possibility. You have yet to dispute that logic. The only response you've come up with is that you don't have to accept the revelation, which I fully addressed.

As a non-believer, I view revelation as a wholly invalid method of acquiring knowledge. No problem for me. Your religious philosophy, however, allows the door to remain open, if even just a crack, for the possibility of the head-chopping or clinic-exploding extremist to be right.

Why is that point even worth making, if it doesn't meaningfully differentiate religion from all the things I've listed? You say "divine revelation enables fundamentalism" like that should matter, but when we finally drill down to the substance of that claim, it turns out to be...pretty banal, akin to saying that language enables verbal bullying, or sex enables rape. Technically true, but nobody says those things because they aren't very meaningful.

Unless it's a way to imply a stronger connection without actually having to defend that implication, and then sit back as someone reacts emotionally by taking "enabling" to mean something more like "actively encouraging". In that scenario, I could see the attraction of using "enabling" language, to throw people off balance.

Surely the knowledge of god exceeds that of humans?

Anything that is sanctioned or ordered by a god supersedes the laws of humans, does it not?

I'd hardly call the substance of divine claims "pretty banal."

Care to try again?

Please explain how I have misunderstood the terminology of religion.

Have a nice rest of your day, Trotsky.

Your claim is "divine revelation enables fundamentalism".

The statement "divine revelation enables fundamentalism" is banal.

"Divine revelation enables fundamentalism" has the same structure and the same worth as the statements "sex enables rape" or "Language enables verbal bullying".

Nobody says "sex enables rape" or "language enables verbal bullying" because while it is technically true that there would be no rape without sex, or no verbal bullying without language, nothing follows from those truths.

So even if "divine revelation enables fundamentalism" is true, nothing follows from that truth, and there isn't really a point in making the statement.

You may find my statement banal, but its implications are far from it. To summarize:

1) You are a believer in a revealed religion.
2) You therefore accept divine revelation as a legitimate way to determine knowledge.
3) In particular, you think divine revelation can provide knowledge that concerns ultimate truths, such as the desires and plans of your god. (I.e., your religion.)

I'll pause here - do you disagree with any of the above?

So finally...
4) You admit that while you reserve the right to reject someone else's claims to have received divine revelation, you cannot dismiss the possibility they are correct.

What this leads to is the ability of the religious extremist to claim his or her actions are sanctioned or even ordered by god. If we accept divine revelation as a legitimate means to acquiring knowledge, we cannot dismiss the extremist's claim. If we deny the legitimacy of divine revelation, we can. But if we deny that legitimacy, we also declare religions based on divine revelation to be null and void. That's the part that even liberal and moderate believers cannot accept. So you don't allow that, and the extremists are enabled.

Last edited Fri Feb 27, 2015, 07:33 PM - Edit history (1)

it produces outright misleading results. To see why, consider the following:

If we cannot dismiss an idea, we are enabling those who use that idea to do harm.

Richard Dawkins cannot dismiss the idea that God exists (he labeled himself a 6/7 on his scale of belief in The God Delusion, and then later a 6.9)

Richard Dawkins enables theism, and therefore those who use theism to do harm.
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Used consistently, the standard you are proposing turns Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, into a theist extremist enabler. That's misleading.

Look at it from this perspective:

If we grant that divine revelation is a means of acquiring valid knowledge, how do we distinguish between true and false claims based on it?

If it is something I agree with, it is divine revelation.

If it is something I don't agree with, it is heresy.

that atheists are accused of neglecting, will someday make an appearance. For now though, it's remarkable how accurate your answer is.

The scenic route to a predetermined conclusion.

For two reasons:

First, any criteria I give would be in the context of already believing that God exists, and believing certain things about the nature of God. Since as far as I can tell, you reject the foundation of "God exists, and God's nature is such-and-such" as irrational, it would hardly make sense for you declare subsequent issues built on that foundation, like a standard for the validity of revelations, to be rational. So even if I named a standard, you would not be in a position to objectively determine whether I had succeeded (or even what success would look like).

Second, we've already assumed for the sake of this argument that I cannot ultimately dismiss claims of revelation used by others to do harm. My arguments don't rely on me having some standard that you would accept by which to do so. So continuing to go over this ground doesn't move the discussion forward.

Do you have anything else to rebut my contentions on the triviality of the "enabling" connection you draw, and the misleading (and therefore defective) standard you derive from that connection? They remain unchallenged by what you have said so far.

And you don't have an answer other than that you would judge it in the context of what you already believe about your god. But knowing that divine revelation can overturn established ideas about a god (as it did when your religion was founded), pretty much nukes that option.

Your inability to refute others' claims of divine revelation is what helps enable or empower extremists. That's the challenge to everything you have attempted to bring up. Supporting the framework that insists there is a god who reveals itself to others helps make these religious extremists and fundamentalists possible. Nothing you have said has been able to dismiss that connection, and you have essentially admitted defeat on that point.

It appears this discussion is at an end.

Since you've defaulted, your "connection" is definitely trivial, and your resulting standard, misleading.

You are right about one thing, though. This discussion is definitely over.

Your red herrings do not interest me. Thanks for the discussion.

it shares many of the attributes.

Nationalism can and frequently leads to exceptionalism, a form of state religion.

Nationalism often has its own holy books. Sometimes these books are called a constitution, or laws, or comforting fiction masquerading as objective history.

Nationalism has its own clergy. We call them politicians.

Nationalism leads to us vs. them thinking. That leads or can often lead to the demonization of the other.

Nationalism, like religion, is used to justify war. "We" have to fight "them" because of unspecified transgressions.

So why does nationalism work?

[div class="excerpt" style="border: 4px double black; border-radius: 1em; background-color: #CEF6F5;"]Our remaining challenge is to instill the value of universal human rights universally. Though some believe that this could be done by abolishing religion, I disagree. For one, other toxic ideals exist. Race, nationalism, ethnicity, radical feminism, even the free market can trigger a disastrous moral cascade that results in identity politics, the exclusion of outsiders from moral consideration.

the notion that religious moderates and liberals enable extremists or that religion is uniquely susceptible to enabling harm on the ground of divine revelation ("God wills it!&quot Substitute "the Founders' intention in the Constitution" (Madison wills it!) for "divine revelation" and you have rigidly conservative "strict constructionist" justices as a counterpart to religious extremists. Each group appeals to an ultimate and putatively sacred authority.

But--how do the liberal justices "enable" the conservatives? Is there any meaningful content in an argument that "Ruth Bader Ginsburg.enables Antonin Scalia?"

Now let's try this:"Bishop Eugene Robinson enabled Fred Phelps."

If that one doesn't make your brain hurt, your synapses aren't snappin'.

So I'm not even going to venture defending their position.

Suffice it to say, I don't think your analogy works. Ginsberg and Scalia are justices... that's a job description, not an ethos. By that category alone, there is no way to ascertain a person's beliefs in a propositionally meaningful way. A more appropriate question, I think, would be how "mainstream" conservatives like Scalia enable fanatical fringe conservative elements, like sovereign citizens, etc. Or how people who hold the founders sacrosanct enable illiterate tea party idiots who do the same, albeit with markedly diminished historical and legal knowledge.

which is half the point I'm making.

To answer your objection, "prophet" is also a job description. My people call them Holy Women and Holy Men. Frank Fools Crow was one of the greatest in a century that also saw MLK, the Berrigan brothers, Dorothy Day, the Dalai Lama, Cesar Chavez and many others.

The problem they present is the sacrosanctity of ideas. If both moderates and fanatics hold the same ideas sacrosanct, moderates may inhibit criticism of those ideas and thereby enable the fanatics.

While I personally do not see this as a wild leap of logic, I wouldn't take it as more than food for thought. We're talking about the HuffPo here... not exactly the most academic or rigorously vetted publication, if I may say so.

they are not going to find all the same ideas sacrosanct, or to the same degree, which is why some of them are fanatics, and others are moderates. For a very rough example, many of those that liberal and moderate Christians would consider fanatics believe in salvation by faith alone. Moderates and liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to be found in denominations that teach salvation by faith and works, or even works alone.

"Religion" tends to be a pretty amorphous category in discussions like these. Even "Hinduism" or "Christianity" are too broad to be meaningful. Once you get specific, Methodists, for example, or Gardnerian Wiccans, discussion becomes much more productive.

You really can't define a religion--at least the major ones, at any rate--in specific propositional terms. There's simply too much ideological variance within them to get anything more than a general idea of what they're about.

So, while I think the author hits a decent, discussion-worthy point, I am not sure how useful this point is, practically speaking. Liberals and fanatics often have wildly different interpretations of their religion, and for this point to hold true, you'd have to nail down specific instances of where liberals and fanatics overlap... and I don't think that happens very often.

But, I can think of one specific example here:

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Pope Francis--not a liberal believer, in my opinion, but certainly not a fanatic--told the world "you can't criticize a person's religion". That's a pretty broad statement, I think, and one that gives cover to people who do really terrible things behind the veil of their religion.

Answer my question, okasha. But I bet you can't.

If we grant that divine revelation is a means of acquiring valid knowledge, how do we distinguish between true and false claims based on it?