Are you a Sunday Stalwart? Solidly Secular? Or somewhere in between? (Pew Research Center quiz)

how do we know god doesnt have hands

a line I've heard from some p well-informed clergy is that belief as a sort of truth-claim is a fairly recent invention and is at least somewhat incommensurable with how 'believe' (& its equivs in other languages) was used back in the day (i.e. the "i believe in you" sense is older). i am inclined to believe something similar wrt sincerity but i cba looking into it

(xp) He has legs, according to Alan Partridge. Gas legs.

xxp well i do know christians have a problem w/ that idea too iirc

well Reb Yeshuah had hands, anyway

where I grew up the bar was not just "believe" the bar was "believe and have a personal relationship with." and supposedly if you just asked, the latter would happen. spoilers: I did ask, and it didn't happen

(this would have been in my teens)

I suppose "believe and have a personal relationship with" is closer to the original meaning, as in, trust in god, some degree of selflessness

[I imagine when we're dead we'll feel pretty much like we felt before we were born

hey this is MY line

xp in monotheistic religions that is imo absolutely colored with "have no other gods" - not sure about the role of "belief" in non-monotheistic faiths

Y’all explaining this quiz to each other and complaining about its obvious Christian bias? It’s a multiple choice test! Pick the best answer, not the right answer, is what I’m trying to say.

I’m solidly secular and kinda disappointed that it didn’t have follow-on questions like “is this all just atoms bouncing around” (yes) or “is free will a thing” (almost definitely not) because I bet less than 17% are with me there

“is free will a thing” (almost definitely not)

argh the ILX poll on this question drove me *nuts* (and I agree w you, btw)

xp yeah but there have been so many instances in which nominally monotheistic religions have been lax abt ppl worshipping, paying tribute to or otherwise focusing on particular subdivisions, incarnations etc. of god not to mention spirits of animals & ancestors, idols, saints and so on that i find the exclusivity claims hard to take too seriously

or “is free will a thing” (almost definitely not) because I bet less than 17% are with me there

― Paleo Weltschmerz (El Tomboto), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 5:36 PM (eleven minutes ago)

This is the worst. Free will is a thing

yeah, an imaginary thing

oh yeah this is the stuff

Free will’s fake but so what is how I break it down to an extent

I'm with Tombot, generally, but I hate the formulation of "just atoms." Atoms can be pretty amazing. I'm drinking some wine rn that I'm pretty sure is just a bunch of atoms, and it is really delicious.

Thing 1: I have no problem with imagining that nature (given eons of time and oceans of material) can come up with extraordinary things, up to and including me, Emmylou Harris, Curtis Mayfield, giant redwoods, and the 1982 St. Louis Cardinals.

Thing 2: But even if I HAD a problem imagining it, that wouldn't make any difference in terms of what is and is not true. The universe doesn't give a shit about whether people comprehend it or not.

If the ultimate nature of the universe is arrayed in a certain way - higher power or no - our ability to comprehend / imagine / believe it is pretty irrelevant in terms of its being that way. For all we know, the universe could all be run by sentient lint-balls that live in Wisconsin and crave Fanta. Unsurprisingly, I hold to a rather hardassed form of agnosticism.

People are weak but weak wills are still free wills

Will Smith vs. Will Forte vs. Wil Wheaton FITE

Pure materialism runs so far against the grain of our phenomenological experience that it just becomes goofy

yeah it's goofy! What good philosophical theory isn't goofy?

the one that posits a carrot has a soul

I used to me more of a hardcore materialist and hard determinist but lately I don't think those are that interesting; instead I spend all my time inveighing against all forms of consequentialist ethics.

Virtue ethics and deontological ethics are the ones I like, just don’t ask me to ground them. Existentialism is preferable to determinism because at least there is freedom in the void.

otm. maimonides points out something that should be obvious. do you know how we know the bible isn't literal? bc it talks about god's hands. god doesn't have hands bc he's not corporeal. so we know the bible talks in metaphor and therefore dot dot dot. ppl who are textual literalists are traditionally incoherent.

― Mordy, 4. september 2018 23:12 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Or it could be that different parts of the bible were written by different people, and it's not so much metaphorical as it is incoherent and contradictory.

Oh yeah this is the stuff

free will is not a thing

sike i chose to type that

xxxp textual literalists believe that the entire bible is coherent + true so i'm not that's as exculpatory as u imagine

Oh, I have no wish to excuse textual literalists :)

lol dmac

pi is 3

i appreciate this is marginally less useless than most surveys of religious belief but i think its worth thinking about to whom these are the distinctions that make a difference.

the idea that, say, all secular ppl will have more in common with each other than they will with certain theists is rubbish. esp given that ppls beliefs change and that its often quite subtle or minor shifts in overall worldview that wld move them up or down this scale, or at least, the differences are overstated.

and ofc, my favourite point for all discussions: a lot of ppl don't really know what they think. not just agnosticism; uncertainty and the inability to express these ideas are integral to all(?) religious traditions. ppl 'suddenly' changing their minds and so on, all manner of outside influences both at the individual and collective level.

the Pew Center isn't here for your shades of gray, they are here to generate a foundation of facts.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I got solidly secular "along with 17% of the public" bloody hell. Are there really that few nonreligious people in the US? I feel like if you did this poll in my environs I'd be in around a 40% or more group.

"Religious Resister", which is horseshit if you aren't equating religion with Christianity as these fuckers appear to be.

Because Christianity is the only religious worth resisting?

I got solidly secular, as expected, though I'd say it's only 90% accurate.

There needs to be an ‘aggressively atheist’ category, but it’s a pretty poorly constructed poll.

NB the categories are just clusters of ppl who answered similarly to the questions in the survey that were induced by data+clustering method+chosen # of clusters. The names are post hoc and might as well be A, B, C…

I knew I was solidly secular before I took the quiz and that is the result I got. Very clear answers, no waffling at all. Easy.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

yawn

i feel pretty good about my result -- my mom literally raised me to believe that one could be a good and moral person and not belong to any religion. she is in her 70s now and i think is fairly radical for her generation in her commitment to secular values (my dad too but that's another story) solidly secular is how i would have described myself at any point in my life.

i think this is a fine result -- did anyone expect religious zeal?