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Pope Francis Basically Just Admitted There May Not Be a God

2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
I don't see it that way at all. One of the whole concepts of the Bible is that God set the wheels in motion, but then (for the most part) took a hands-off approach. I think the Pope means that the same concept that applies to letting free will and its consequences play out also applies to letting evolution and its consequences play out.

For what it's worth, I don't see these comments as strange at all coming from the Pope. I had 12 years of Catholic school that taught the interplay of evolution, science, and Catholicism pretty well, and that was 20-30 years ago. We had one class in high school that focused solely on the potential scientific explanation for Bible stories (locusts, floods, parting of the Red Sea, etc). As someone with a relatively religious childhood education, that was one reason why when I got to Wake and saw all of those hardcore IV Bible Study meetings I was like you guys are whacked.
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Totally agree. I was brought up Lutheran (with Mennonite influenced roots) and that's pretty much how I was raised. I had the same reaction to people believing things so literally. It was really odd to me and with a lot of negativity.

I still believe all the religions are really at the core a validation of humans as a belief creature. It's a shame biology can't get past the evolution issue to look for a scientific rational for why religions evolved. They happened for a reason. Someday it will happen...I hope.
 
pourdeac said:
I still believe all the religions are really at the core a validation of humans as a belief creature. It's a shame biology can't get past the evolution issue to look for a scientific rational for why religions evolved. They happened for a reason. Someday it will happen...I hope.
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How is this a biological question?
 
ChrisL68 said:
Well, it is but it is based on our intellectual capacity of self-awareness.
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Right, I just mean what would biologists study on the topic? And I'm laughing at the "can't get past the evolution issue." Just seems to me that this is more of a psychology/sociology/philosophy/anthropology question
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
I've always struggle with what passes for 2014 Christianity versus the general tenets of Christianity as they seem to exist in the Bible. For instance are you really a "Christian" if you think good deeds can get you into heaven without a belief that Jesus was the son of God? I've had a lot of conversations with people who claim to be Christians but don't believe Jesus is the lone way to heaven. I've said this before but I think the actual tenets and doctrine of Christianity are actually far more radical than we generally treat it in 2014. Seems as if the religion has been watered down a little to make it more palatable to a widespread audience. I would love to hear more thoughts on this from people who know more about the history of Christianity and the bible than I do.
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Jesus didn't talk much about the afterlife, nor did the early followers, instead, the Kingdom of God/Heaven was a present reality. I'd identify that as the biggest place that "modern" Christianity has jumped the shark. Death is probably the scariest and biggest unknown/existential crisis there is, so our preoccupation with who gets to live forever in Heaven isn't surprising, but it is misguided.

Yes- Jesus was a radical. There is a reason why he died (and it wasn't a sin offering). He was put to death to shut him up. And I'm pretty sure that we'd do the same to him today if we had the chance.

Though to be clear, Jesus and the early Church were more radical (in the sense of being devoted), the modern preoccupation with judgment has become much more radical than it ever should have become.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
Right, humanity/creation working towards that renewal because of God's hand's-off approach, and not him simply snapping his fingers and making everyone perfect.
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There's absolutely nothing hands off about Jesus, the Holy Spirit, God knowing the number of hairs on your head, the Jews being led out of slavery, etc, etc. The Bible is nothing if not a chronicle of God being the exact opposite of "hands off" and working throughout time and throughout the Church to bring about renewal. If God was hands off, Genesis and the "end" of Revelation would be the extent of the Bible.
 
The revivalism of the 17-1800s fueled that in the west. Many now have an understanding of heaven as "the perfect place you go when you die ." That's not scriptures understanding of heaven. Heaven is synonymous with the presence of God. The story of scripture is that of the sphere of God and the sphere of creation being together then separated - the story of god in scripture is the story of bringing those two spheres back together, primarily through the work of Jesus, culminating in the restoration of all things. The ultimate goal of the work of Jesus is a restored world, not escape from a broken world to a perfect heaven.
 
RacerDeac said:
There's absolutely nothing hands off about Jesus, the Holy Spirit, God knowing the number of hairs on your head, the Jews being led out of slavery, etc, etc. The Bible is nothing if not a chronicle of God being the exact opposite of "hands off" and working throughout time and throughout the Church to bring about renewal. If God was hands off, Genesis and the "end" of Revelation would be the extent of the Bible.
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Eh, not really. It is a few hundred stories that span the entirety of human existence to that point. It isn't like other shit wasn't going on elsewhere during those same times. You wouldn't say that American Idol and the people it has chronicled over the last ~15 years encompasses humanity as a whole during that same period.
 
IamThunderbolt said:
The revivalism of the 17-1800s fueled that in the west. Many now have an understanding of heaven as "the perfect place you go when you die ." That's not scriptures understanding of heaven. Heaven is synonymous with the presence of God. The story of scripture is that of the sphere of God and the sphere of creation being together then separated - the story of god in scripture is the story of bringing those two spheres back together, primarily through the work of Jesus, culminating in the restoration of all things. The ultimate goal of the work of Jesus is a restored world, not escape from a broken world to a perfect heaven.
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This.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
Eh, not really. It is a few hundred stories that span the entirety of human existence to that point. It isn't like other shit wasn't going on elsewhere during those same times. You wouldn't say that American Idol and the people it has chronicled over the last ~15 years encompasses humanity as a whole during that same period.
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Curious, what denomination or church background do you come from? You're perhaps the only person I've ever heard suggest that Christianity describes a God who is hands off.
 
RacerDeac said:
Curious, what denomination or church background do you come from? You're perhaps the only person I've ever heard suggest that Christianity describes a God who is hands off.
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As I mentioned earlier, 12 years of Catholic school.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Right, I just mean what would biologists study on the topic? And I'm laughing at the "can't get past the evolution issue." Just seems to me that this is more of a psychology/sociology/philosophy/anthropology question
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Biology underlies most everything psychology/sociology/philosophy/anthropology so if it pertains to those, then it has some sort of biological underpinnings. It has to physiologically. Religion has to mean something about how our brain is organized, how it functions, and how it evolved. If that's true, and IMO it must be, then....why wouldn't biologists (or other scientists like neuroscientists) explore it?

It's rare. The only researcher I've seen study it was a guy from Tennessee who studied the habits of church goers. Interesting talk (in a "Religion and Hallucinogens" symposium).
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
Eh, not really. It is a few hundred stories that span the entirety of human existence to that point. It isn't like other shit wasn't going on elsewhere during those same times. You wouldn't say that American Idol and the people it has chronicled over the last ~15 years encompasses humanity as a whole during that same period.
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You are suggesting that all of God's actions during that time are chronicled in the Bible.
 
RevDeac06 said:
Jesus didn't talk much about the afterlife, nor did the early followers, instead, the Kingdom of God/Heaven was a present reality. I'd identify that as the biggest place that "modern" Christianity has jumped the shark. Death is probably the scariest and biggest unknown/existential crisis there is, so our preoccupation with who gets to live forever in Heaven isn't surprising, but it is misguided.

Yes- Jesus was a radical. There is a reason why he died (and it wasn't a sin offering). He was put to death to shut him up. And I'm pretty sure that we'd do the same to him today if we had the chance.

Though to be clear, Jesus and the early Church were more radical (in the sense of being devoted), the modern preoccupation with judgment has become much more radical than it ever should have become.
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Are you saying the reason people put him to death was to shut him up, or that there was no higher calling (ie the satisfaction of God's wrath) in his death?
 
WFFaithful said:
Are you saying the reason people put him to death was to shut him up, or that there was no higher calling (ie the satisfaction of God's wrath) in his death?
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Within the narrative of Scripture, Jesus' death/resurrection is seen more as the triumph over evil (which does contain the idea of atonement, but does not reduce all that Jesus is and does to propitiation). It contains that, but is much larger. Jesus’s death was seen by Jesus himself, and then by those who told and ultimately wrote his story, as the ultimate means by which God’s kingdom was established.

Long, but I like the way it's stated here (from Wright's Simply Jesus):

There is of course much more that could be said on this subject. But trying to boil it down and keep it simple, I think we can and must say at least this. In Jesus’s own understanding of the battle he was fighting, Rome was not the real enemy. Rome provided the great gale, and the distorted ambitions of Israel the high-pressure system, but the real enemy, to be met head-on by the power and love of God, was the anti-creation power, the power of death and destruction, the force of accusation, the Accuser who lays a charge against the whole human race and the world itself that all are corrupt and decaying, that all humans have contributed to this by their own idolatry and sin. The terrible thing is that this charge is true. All humans have indeed worshipped what is not divine and so have failed to reflect God’s image into the world. They, and creation, are therefore subject to corruption and death. At this level the Accuser is absolutely right.

But the Accuser is wrong to imagine that this is the creator’s last word. What we see throughout Jesus’s public career is that he himself is being accused—accused of being a blasphemer by the self-appointed thought police, accused of being out of his mind by his own family, even accused by his followers of taking his vocation in the wrong direction. All the strands of evil throughout human history, throughout the ancient biblical story, come rushing together as the gospels tell the story of Jesus, from the demons shrieking at him in the synagogue to the sneering misunderstanding of the power brokers to the frailty and folly of his own friends and followers. Finally, of course, and this is the point in the story to which the evangelists are drawing our attention—he is accused in front of the chief priests and the council and in the end by the high priest himself. He is accused of plotting against the Temple; he is accused of forbidding the giving of tribute to Caesar (a standard ploy of revolutionaries); he is accused of claiming to be king of the Jews, a rebel leader; he is accused of blasphemy, of claiming to be God’s son. Accusations come rushing together from all sides, as the leaders accuse Jesus before Pilate; and Pilate finally does what all the accusations throughout the gospel have been demanding and has him crucified. Jesus, in other words, has taken the accusations that were outstanding against the world and against the whole human race and has borne them in himself. That is the point of the story the way the evangelists tell it.

This is “the extraordinary story of Israel’s Messiah taking upon himself the Accuser’s sharpest arrow and, dying under its force, robbing the Accuser of any further real power.”
 
I always find it interesting that some portions of Christianity feel that miracles or creation is a difficult concept to believe occurred. To me nothing seems more natural. The entire faith is based upon the idea that God incarnated himself into human form through the womb of a virgin mother, lived a perfect life, died a real physical death on a cross, raised HIMSELF from the dead, and ascended into heaven to return to his seat on the right hand of his Father, who by the way is also God, along with the other member of the pack - the Holy Spirit.

Seriously. If you are convinced that God can pull that off, then what is really so difficult about stopping the sun for a few hours, or turning water into wine. We have come to accept morality as Christianity, and we like the lessons of the Bible (some of them) but don't like the crazy. Well the Bible is full of crazy. Racer has made a great point that there are many different forms of writing in the Bible, but most of it is pretty darn clear as to what type of writing it is. The Bible leaves zero room on the issue of Jesus being God, of Jesus real death, of Jesus' real resurrection, and his ascension. In fact the entire Book is merely a prologue and epilogue to these series of events. So it always seems pretty silly to me when people get caught up with the whole miracles issue. If God is truly supernatural, then by definition he is above the natural, and lives by a different set of rules...mainly His own rules. That is a pretty key concept throughout the entire Bible.
 
pourdeac said:
Biology underlies most everything psychology/sociology/philosophy/anthropology so if it pertains to those, then it has some sort of biological underpinnings. It has to physiologically. Religion has to mean something about how our brain is organized, how it functions, and how it evolved. If that's true, and IMO it must be, then....why wouldn't biologists (or other scientists like neuroscientists) explore it?

It's rare. The only researcher I've seen study it was a guy from Tennessee who studied the habits of church goers. Interesting talk (in a "Religion and Hallucinogens" symposium).
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Seems to me that the "biological" explanation would be that there's something we have that makes us seek answers to fill a void of knowledge. I'm sure it does have some biological underpinning though. What if the answer is "humans have allowed religion to evolve because they are scared of the unknown?" We can't get half the population to believe in evolution why would we expect them to honor this logic? I agree it would be interesting but I don't know how practical it would be.
 
Wrangor said:
I always find it interesting that some portions of Christianity feel that miracles or creation is a difficult concept to believe occurred. To me nothing seems more natural. The entire faith is based upon the idea that God incarnated himself into human form through the womb of a virgin mother, lived a perfect life, died a real physical death on a cross, raised HIMSELF from the dead, and ascended into heaven to return to his seat on the right hand of his Father, who by the way is also God, along with the other member of the pack - the Holy Spirit.

Seriously. If you are convinced that God can pull that off, then what is really so difficult about stopping the sun for a few hours, or turning water into wine. We have come to accept morality as Christianity, and we like the lessons of the Bible (some of them) but don't like the crazy. Well the Bible is full of crazy. Racer has made a great point that there are many different forms of writing in the Bible, but most of it is pretty darn clear as to what type of writing it is. The Bible leaves zero room on the issue of Jesus being God, of Jesus real death, of Jesus' real resurrection, and his ascension. In fact the entire Book is merely a prologue and epilogue to these series of events. So it always seems pretty silly to me when people get caught up with the whole miracles issue. If God is truly supernatural, then by definition he is above the natural, and lives by a different set of rules...mainly His own rules. That is a pretty key concept throughout the entire Bible.
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Seems like a lot of trouble to go through for an omniscient and all-powerful figure.
 
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