What are some counter-cultural rules you live by?

[Boydstun]

22 hours ago, stansfield123 said:

. . .

If the vast majority of Christians act in a selfish manner ... doesn't that mean they believe in the parts of the Bible that preach selfishness, rather than the parts that preach altruism?

What is it in the New Testament that applauds selfishness in material matters? When Christians behave selfishly in the sense of making themselves beneficiaries of dollars, they are not taking direction from the Bible. Then too, Christians reading the New Testament, having accordingly put Christ in the center of their "heart" and, further, accepting the account that death was introduced into human life by Eve and Adam breaking bad and, further, (again setting aside their critical rationality) accepting that Christ removes the death sentence hanging over any human putting faith in these teachings—are not getting from the Bible their behavior of grieving over the death of a "saved" loved one.

I should add that anyone thinking or calling themselves Christian, yet rejecting the Christian viewpoints I just mentioned, are simply wrong in thinking they are Christian. One might say, "well, I'll still be a Christian if I reject only the sayings in Revelations."  That might be fair enough, but to reject the Gospels or the entries by Paul and yet go under the label Christian is absurd.

Things humans or pre-humans have taken up and converged upon on account of outcomes: cooking meat before consumption, plowing fields, riding horses, replacing clay and flint utilities with iron ones, replacing sails with engines, and replacing mules with tractors. 

We know the histories of why human sacrifices and slavery ended, and it was not on account of "outcomes." We know how a free press emerged in this country and some others, and it was not on account of "outcomes."

The right stuff:

Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, by Robert Bellah.

The Axial Age and Its Consequences, edited by Bellah and Joas.

A Natural History of Human Thinking, by Michael Tomasello.

A Natural History of Human Morality, by Tomasello.

Sacrifice Regained – Morality and Self-Interest in British Moral Philosophy from Hobbes to Bentham, by Roger Crisp.

Emergence of a Free Press, by Leonard Levy.

Edited December 27, 2023 by Boydstun

[necrovore]

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

What is it in the New Testament that applauds selfishness in material matters?

This point of view doesn't come out of the New Testament; it comes out of the Enlightenment.

My understanding is that the first Puritan colonists almost died when they tried to take religion seriously, and only found success when they discovered productive work, an idea which developed into the "Protestant work ethic."

John Locke and some other Enlightenment philosophers thought that reasoning, based on reality, would ultimately lead to God -- to their conception of God. They argued that, if God made reality, to study reality was to study God. So they thought that if things could be derived from reason and reality, that was the same as if they came from God, and they thought of individual rights that way (as coming from God because they come from reality and the conditions necessary for human survival). They had a lot of confidence in the idea that they could have both reason and religion, but it turned out to be wrong, making a choice necessary.

There are still a great many Christians, especially in America, who discard logical consistency out of a desire to have it both ways. There are others who have decided that reason is error-prone, that reality is imperfect, and that both are corrupted by the Devil, so they side with religion (and the Bible) against reality. (Besides, if you can find out about God directly from reality, then "mistakes" in the Bible become evident, and the Bible itself becomes unnecessary, along with Christianity, and many Christians find that unacceptable. They'd rather say it's reality which is "mistaken.")

Sometimes I think there are two distinct interpretations of Christianity. One says that "Jesus sacrificed himself so you don't have to," that it was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the other says, "Jesus sacrificed himself as an example, so you should sacrifice yourself, too." I suspect John Locke (and the whole American system, which is largely based on his thought) would have aligned more with the former than the latter, but the debate seems to rage on to this day. (Or maybe it doesn't; it looks like the "example" side has been mostly winning.)

Edited December 27, 2023 by necrovore