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| Re: Religious knowledge test [message #437125 is a reply to message #437122] |
Tue, 28 September 2010 03:26   |
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Spoony
Messages: 3915
Registered: January 2006
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General (3 Stars)
Tactics & Strategies Moderator |
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9/10. i said saturday too...
Unleash the Renerageâ„¢
Renedrama [ren-i-drah-muh]
- noun
1. the inevitable criticism one receives after doing something awful
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| Re: Religious knowledge test [message #437188 is a reply to message #437174] |
Wed, 29 September 2010 07:29 |
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Starbuzzz
Messages: 1637
Registered: June 2008
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General (1 Star) |
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thanks renforums! I wasn't expecting this many quiz-takers!
@ R3: The survey finding that shocked me the most was about Catholics not knowing that the communion bread and wine literally becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus. How could someone not know that about their own doctrine! I just hope that now that they know it, they will see how absurd it is lol.
| Spoony wrote on Wed, 29 September 2010 12:35 |
| Starbuzzz wrote on Tue, 28 September 2010 00:17 |
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For example, it's not evangelicals or Catholics who did best - it's atheists and agnostics.
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that's not surprising at all. people who are indoctrinated into a religion usually aren't done so honestly, nor told much about other religions or the possibility of just living your life without religion. and, of course, it's easy to see why...
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they only get a lopsided side of the story.
Most Christians most probably haven't read the bible word-for-word and know only parts of it. Under very rare circumstances I somehow finished reading the bible cover-to-cover when I was 12; I read that whole year.
Once in a church meeting, the pastor was saying how in a recent visit to Israel, he saw the brass snake that Moses made and mounted on a pole. And he was showing pictures of it and all the other folks were like "woowowo"
lol I turned to my dad and whispered to him, "this pastor is completely wrong because king Hezekiah destroyed the brass snake that Moses made...this is maybe a fake one he saw." I even right then turned to the specific chapter in the book of kings and showed my dad the verse. So that is how well-versed I was in the bible.
Also growing up in a family with an incredibly concentrated level of religious education, I can honestly say that Christians don't know most of the bible stories. The rest of the books and stories are never told to them or preached about on sunday mornings and few read on their own.
When I was 12, I read on my own the story of Amnon viciously raping his own sister Tamar. Despite coming from a culture that heavily thrives on religious drivel, I was NEVER told about this story (and a whole lot of of others) by my parents, preachers, or sunday schools. So I can easily expect most Christians to not know of such stories as well and hence this may explain why they have appaling knowledge of their own scriptures.
Also EVERY bit of biblical information is presented in the context of "serving a god without resisting, doubting, and questioning." This is why kids always get told that what Abraham did was obey and that "obedience" is a good thing when god asks you to do something even if it is bind your child alive to a altar and gut him alive with a knife.
And since Christians are brought up to read the stories in the context of "unquestioning obedience to god" they too fail to see the injustice in the stories. For example, the story of Samson.
As a kid fascinated with Swat Kats and the Ace McCloud Centurion, Samson easily became one of my favorite biblical characters (even more than David) because he could bend metal gates like cheese and kick ass like a one-man army. Then when he is captured and the grateful Philistines (for having finally captured a man that had been a serious nuisance) prepare to worship their god, Samson prays and god immediately gives him the power and turns him into the first "suicide bomber." The verse even boasts how he killed more people during his death than when he lived (this includes all the women and presumably their children as well that were at the temple!).
As a kid, you don't really see the pathetic injustice in the story because indoctrination is biased and so the violent deaths of couple thousand innocent Philistines celebrating the capture of a reckless murderous enemy sounds good. So I grew up thinking that Samson did a good thing. Most Christians probably think the same.
This is also why I believe that the bible fosters hatred and negatively influences people regarding the issue of peace in the middle east. Rethinking some of the bible stories has probably given me more moral guidance in the subject of fairness and justice than when I was first introduced to them in a biased way by the religious establishments in my country.
Another thing when I was little that I had access to (thanks to a Desert Storm military bible that an American soldier gave to my dad) was the books in the Apocrypha. He never let me read it so I had to sneak it from his cupboard when he left for work. Judas Maccabee quickly became my new favorite hero. The books of Maccabees 1 and Maccabees 2 sounded like pure history and I actually liked them a lot. And looking back now, the current so-called "cannonical" books in the bible (atleast according to protestants) are a collection of jokes/fairy tales compared to the more realistic and plausible accounts in many books of the Apocrypha. The current bible stories of great heroes and supernaturally-influenced events reads just like the ancient epic poems and stories from so many different cultures.
One example is David. Sunday schools are eager to tell you of how awesome it was of god to help David kill goliath and kids can't reason against that. But now, the story as narrated in the bible is most certainly false. How hard is it really for a experienced slingshotter who had been habitually headshotting bears and lions to get a headshot on a big head target like Goliath? So is it god that helped David as the bible and sunday schools claim or was David just too good for a big lumbering Goliath? The latter seems more plausible. Not to mention how similar this story is compared to the story of Nestor lmao.
It's so easy to add supernatural meaning to real stories and then over time they become fact. A few months ago in church, I heard a invited guest speaker David Barton give a speech where he said that it was because of god directly intervening with the American revolutionaries guerilla attacks against British warships that got them success! If people like this are still around in 2010, you know what I am going to say next. 
I guess I went on a tangent but well....
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| Re: Religious knowledge test [message #437190 is a reply to message #437188] |
Wed, 29 September 2010 07:45 |
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Spoony
Messages: 3915
Registered: January 2006
Karma: 0
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General (3 Stars)
Tactics & Strategies Moderator |
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| Starbuzzz wrote on Wed, 29 September 2010 10:29 |
@ R3: The survey finding that shocked me the most was about Catholics not knowing that the communion bread and wine literally becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus. How could someone not know that about their own doctrine! I just hope that now that they know it, they will see how absurd it is lol.
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worse than absurd, it sounds revolting. like some kind of black magic ritual or something.
Unleash the Renerageâ„¢
Renedrama [ren-i-drah-muh]
- noun
1. the inevitable criticism one receives after doing something awful
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