It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
I believe in ghosts- The Holy Spirit of the trinity.
Many of them, (especially the older ones) are great examples of how design, layout, art and iconography can be used to demand respect, fear and deference. From the pads to help you when you kneel (no better sign of weakness than kneeling in front of anyone), to the impressive gold candle holders (yes, remember we are rich (and therefore powerful) to the collection bowl (we maybe rich but dont forget, we always need more), to the very silence of the atmosphere where speaking normally sounds as if you are shouting. The sizes of the buildings: almost always way too big for their actual purpose and very tall in an attempt to dominate the skyline.
They are cynical and not so sublte methods for creating awe and subservience where non is actually justified.
PS on a Sunday morning, everyone in our town can hear the church bells ringing. What other minority could get away with creating that many decibels at that time?
Good for you. :)
A fellow believer. Rare on this community.
And that is why they automatically loose the moral high ground.
...I get where you're coming from, but the same could be said of the the Washington Monument or Sears Tower.
Additionally:
As a preface, I was raised Roman Catholic. Around the age of 17 or 18 I unconsciously decided that a literal reading of the Bible and the interpretation of said text as I had been taught it through a decade of Sunday school was nonsense. I am now what the Catholic business would call "lapsed" (the equivalent of cancelling Netflix Instant -- monthly dues are halted, but your account is saved should you like to return).
Perhaps I'm misreading what is being said, but to approach religion from the perspective that sociology or psychiatry or any of the so-termed 'social sciences'—the science part I don't like; social research is more fitting—offers a more valid experience of life than practicing the religion seems slightly misguided. Sociology, to take it as the example, is precisely like religion and science in that it is nothing more than a tool for accounting human experience. But it is most definitely distinct from science. Sociology's premises are not falsifiable, nor can it discover anything new: it can only reiterate what was already known but perhaps forgotten or put out of mind. Further, no amount of quantification or observation alone can transform it into science. The social researcher—in documenting the behavior of people confronting the problems of life, and in offering an interpretation of these events bound by time and situation and to an extent by inescapable prejudice—has more in common with the author of literature (yet another tool for accounting for human experience) than a scientist.
I'm not saying anyone ought not to appreciate religion academically or that we all might as well throw every last bit of social research out the window. I'm merely advising that problems are bound to arise when we try and understand one mode of human storytelling with another. I think observing the goings-on of a church as one might observe an ant colony preys too mightily upon the notion that the world's troubles could be solved if only people were 'smarter' or 'more rational.'
Just a couple cents. I've refrained from this topic so far, but @patb and @0BradyM0Bondfanatic7 delivered some insights that were interesting enough to compel me to reply.
When it comes to religion, particularly but not exclusively the Church of England, they are as much as religious conservatives as Theresa May on a Sunday.
Though, again, Jimmy Savile was a Roman Catholic. Catholicism - now that's religious conservatism!
If you have a big building celebrating tea leaf reading or astrology, these are the comparisons that they deserve. A large tower in the centre of the town with a big bell that rings once a week to remind them of the invisible pink dragon sounds rediculous...because it is.
A political or financial building ringing a bell to the whole town would have Environmental Health around within an hour. But, again, religion gets a free pass
I said not exclusively. And the C of E and the Catholic Church are often in bed together these days.
To quote the famed theologian Father Jack Hackett: "That would be an ecumenical matter."
To be frank I don't really understanding what you are arguing here, @Strog, but I feel I've been misinterpreted. Nowhere did I go into a long-winded claim that I was using the practice of sociology or psychology and the rational mind as a placeholder for religion. All I said, and all that is really relevant, is that I viewed the worshippers in a way that prepared me to understand them, or to try to by using the constraints of society, the strain of their individual personal situations that could compel the belief in a savior and perhaps most vital of all, the tradition of their religious service and how they were brought into the church from a very young age and never let their belief go because it became a part of them, like second nature.
I couldn't find any other relevant way to describe my actions than as a sociologist studying how society's current state and the world at large can drive people to believe in a God, or as a psychologist for plundering their minds for a cause and effect relationship that led them to where they were that day. It wasn't a matter of trying to understand "one mode of human storytelling with another," it was leaning on observation and a previous assumption of why religion is so widespread to see if what was true in other cases remained such in my local church. As sciences sociology and psychology aren't a matter of storytelling in the first place, so I don't really understand the comparison; when the goal of a field is in looking at what others believe and using supported models of observation to do so, the only relationship they have with storytelling is relating the stories of those they are studying and connecting them to others, in this case the stories the religious tell themselves. To refer to science as a storytelling device is misleading and makes an implication of fictionalized accounting, when we know that's not true. We record what we observe, of what is really there, the fact of the matter. When a scientist rallies against the belief of the bible as historical fact with pictures of the Grand Canyon and the superposition of the rock that prove it took millions of years of erosion for that landscape to form and not 6,000 measly years, that man of science is not using his own storytelling to judge the merits of another, he's using accounted fact that is support by the data and evidence the other side never has. No fictionalization, just truth.
All this besides I wasn't headed into the church that day with my clipboard or inviting the worshippers to sit on my padded couch after the service, I was just fascinated to know why they were there and how they could believe it and I made a very meek and not at all serious comparison to the social sciences that clearly was taken as literally as the bible was on that day. When it comes to these believers that I saw in church it's not entirely an issue of people not being smart or rational enough as you claim, but ignorance and irrationality does play an unmistakable part in why religion is still ongoing, as you can find no other descriptors for people who think the world is only 6,000 years old and who think that they are literally consuming the body and blood of Christ after the priest says a few words and gesticulates following a command. But of course in a similar situation it would be okay for the religious man to use the storytelling of his belief system to disprove the man of science, literally using fable to debate fact, by claiming that God's will and touch is too complex for the human mind to understan; it's beyond our understanding as his creations and that is why what we see in the modern world doesn't add up, and blah, blah, blah.
But, in a world such as ours with nothing in the realm of the fantastical, we have people believing in the fantasy of religion when all else fails to make sense, despite that delusion teaching their mind to ignore fact and critical thought in addition to loads of other unsavory things. I have to be honest and sitting there seeing fable rendered as fact was terrifying because again from a sociological or psychological perspective I was seeing what the mind can will itself to believe and follow like a flock to shepherd when there is enough pressure on them to believe it. Life can be difficult and we need easy solutions and happy thoughts to latch onto of an after-life paradise and a holy father, so let's avoid facing the truth of existence and lose ourselves in these circuses of ritual that in the modern age of enlightenment, advanced science and rationality simply don't hold up.
For me my experience in that church was the modern equivalent of walking into a car dealership and seeing the salesmen trying to get customers to purchase horses and buggies instead, or heading into a restaurant to find the chefs making fires on the open floor to cook our meal. The advancement of our society and how we think was directly at odds with the old ways of thinking that we should've evolved out of, and my own reaction was an incredulous ache of the mind and spirit. It was what it was, and I don't think I was wrong to have that gut feeling of depression and concern, or to use the tools I had to try and see why what I was seeing was there.
Cameron was watching A LOT of porn.
Then he will be missed.
There's mostly only atheists left here, so I don't think there's too much worry of that. ;)
P.S. That image and caption does say it all. Nicely done.
Only just got round to reading this. A new low even for religion.
I'm not talking about the blindfolds, although of course that is ridiculous but we should be used to the religious pretending to be morally higher than the rest of us when it comes to sex yet actually being obsessed by it.
I'm talking about the fact that a bloke gets on a plane inside A GIANT PLASTIC BAG so that the dead can't hit him with their cosmic rays!
You can say everyone is entitled to their beliefs and all the usual spiel but when is someone going to call these people out for what they are: deluded imbeciles if not actually mentally ill.
If you went round wearing a plastic bag for any reason other than religion you'd be sectioned in 5 minutes flat. Utterly staggering how society's sanity goes out of the window once someone plays the religion card.
Given we all know Jews like to come up with ways to flout the laws they are supposed to believe in (see 'Eruvs' ) you wonder why they don't have cemeteries attached to tethered balloons at a higher altitude than commercial airliners fly so that they cant be infected by the dead when going to Benidorm for 2 weeks.
And before anyone tries to defend it one question: would you really be happy having that guy fly your plane in his plastic bag? Absolutely mental and needs locking up for his own safety as when he winds up suffocating inside his bag the state has failed him because they didn't commit him to a psychiatric hospital.
Godly people do tend to run away from this thread.
Same reason religious students look away when I give religion another blow in science class.
Here's the dilemma:
1) Oh no, what that atheist is saying actually makes sense!
2) But... but... but I can't just give up my religion. I mean, ... even though I know I'm wrong, I'll just stubbornly persist. You know what? I'll walk away, or look away, shut my ears - LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU! LALALALALA.
Must be tough, knowing you're wrong, while still maintaining a strong emotional dependence on the biggest lie man has ever told himself.
It's not unlike a chain smoker lighting up another stick while the doctors have given several warnings already that the Grim Reaper approaches with every next inhalation. Sometimes people are just stubborn.
Well, I'm trying to stick around.
Well, I wouldn't go that far now.
Whenever I write anything, I'm alway plagued by a doubt and fear that I've spewed out applesauce. Typically, I somehow manage (through sheer chance it often seems) to bolt the words together enough so that the idea in my brain is at least barely discernible in the mind of whoever's reading. "Ah, this is what you're trying to say, you poor muddle-headed man." "Right, yes, that's it."
Once in a while, however, not even the expert the TV news drags out to decipher Trump's press conferences could make heads nor tails of what I'm on about. I'm afraid I've unfortunately dragged you into such a case now, @0BradyM0Bondfanatic7. If you didn't understand what I was arguing, then the fault is clearly mine. Perhaps the core problem is that on a deeper level I myself am still unsure about what I am trying to say, and that came apparent in the translation — or lack of one.
(In addition to being incomprehensible online myself I also have the distinct talent of incomprehending others, so your own fears are well-founded. Perhaps it's all the coffee. ;) <-- this is no wink but rather a caffeine induced twitch)
Let's put the possibility that I'm an idiot and have no idea myself what I'm talking about aside for the moment, and I'll attempt to salvage the substance I had in my mind and see if I can't do it better justice. (I tried to keep it brief because I now self-consciously feel like I've thrown a wrench into the workings of this thread, but ultimately I've failed.)
Also, I know this was the funeral of someone you cared about, so in delving into your experience I didn't and don't mean to treat it disrespectfully or casually.
If you will, forgive me for replying to you a little out of order contextually but I believe it'll be more conducive to clarity ('God' willing, eh).
I was aiming to present a (hopefully) interesting idea, not an annoying one, and use what you had written as a sort of springboard for discussing whether a scientific critique of religion can exist. Fortunately, I did not take your comparison ...
...but rather as a fitting metaphor, as did you (or else you obviously wouldn't have chosen it), that summed up your attitude towards your experience as you described it. Unfortunately, I didn't make this clear. Quite the opposite, it seems.
No, of course. Fully acknowledged. Again, I only pulled that quote (where you compared yourself to a sociologist/psychiatrist) because that comparison struck me as fitting, as it did you, based on the language you used throughout the rest of the post. Focusing my response in on that particular portion may have inadvertently implied that the comparison was THE raison d'etre of your original post, and that you arrived at the mass dressed in full lab coat with a test tube already stashed under the pew, but that was not my intent, and I didn't mean to jump on that one portion of it, parade it around, and/or exaggerate it. I'd hate to feel as though someone jumped down my throat over a few mere words (non-literal ones at that), so apologies. My approach was ill-advised.
That out of the way, it's probably best I start with an attempt to succinctly explain what I failed to initially: I was advising that your sociological observations at mass not be equated to science in and of themselves, at the risk of viewing sociological 'truth' just as wrongly in comparison to scientific truth as religious 'truth' is. Reading your comments I was unsure (hence my 'I may be misreading') whether you meant them to amount to more than simple empiricism. I thought you did, hence my initial reply being a thing; now, based on your last comment, I'm suspecting you didn't).
I'm not sure if the rest will help clarify further or not. I may have just saddled us with too many scant ideas that drove us into the muck.
Nevertheless:
I understand the objection to my use of the word 'storytelling' in that it could easily connote the sense of fictional stories, bedtime stories, fairy tales, etc. Or as you said ...
However, this is of course not how I meant it. The intent was to use it in the sense of, for instance, a friend saying to you in front of someone else, "Tell her that story about what happened to us at the mall last weekend" — in other words, as a term for "recounting our experiences." In fact I intended it to be synonymous with the phrase I twice used, "accounting for human experience," which is what I would say storytelling is: imaginative literature, certainly, and religion, but science also accounts for much of human experience.
Still, I'll rescind my use of the term and happily replace it with the phrase. The idea remains, however.
I'll heap a further piece of criticism onto my word choice: housing each of literature, religion, science, and social science under the same umbrella like that might make it seem as though the 'accounting' of each is created via the same process. Though, these different accounts are created in different ways. Comparing literature to sociology, for instance, you'll tend to find in the former a focus on the individual, whereas in the latter the net is cast wider, and the individual seeps through only by inference. Additionally, in literature, things proceed by experiential details, whereas in sociology things proceed by logical argument. And so on.
I am saying they play similar roles. But I don't deny they're different. They differ in means, in what they hope to achieve, perhaps most significantly of all in what they understand to be 'truth,' which is rather what I'm trying to get at.
I agree with you, because geology is a vastly different animal from sociology and/or psychiatry. Geology is like chemistry, physics, biology — it makes inquiries into the natural world. It discovers. And experiments—like the ones Hutton performed, per your example of erosion—have the potential to reveal that its hypotheses are false. 'Social science' on the other hand looks not at the natural world but at the human condition. If human beings cow to their social context, it was not Milgram who 'discovered' it. No 'evidence' will prove Freud false. Etc.
In saying 'one mode of human storytelling with another' I meant that the idea of truth in sociology (empirical) and the idea of truth in religion (mythical) are distinct from both each other and from the idea of truth in science (falsifiable), and that mixing them up leads away from an understanding.
Like you, I don't claim it's an issue of people not being smart or rational. I worry that equating sociology to science would in part promote that view, though. I actually think that religious fundamentalism is less a symptom of individual ignorance and more one of society in general.
Yes, I mostly agree here. I do think there is benefit to ritual in general. I am fascinated by ancient and mythic traditions which I think go some distance in opening up a new kind of understanding of the world. (I'm thinking along the lines of the work of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade and Walter Ong for instance).
Certainly. Again, as I've tried to clarify, my intent was not to directly badger you for doing so.
On the whole, I haven't meant to make a nightmare of this, and I hope I've made myself somewhat clearer on this run through.
And they give the ultimate cop out in lieu of argument: "Well it's my faith!"
Feel like deluding yourself today? Here's how you do it:
- But I "know" it to be true, even if I don't.
- But I read it in a book, so it must be true.
- But my all-knowing parents, grandparents, priest... told me, so it must be true.
- But I can feeeeeel it in my heart.
- But I ... but I ... but I ... SHUT UP! Go away! You will burn in hell.
In reality, what people truly mean is: I WANT IT TO BE TRUE.
Well, wanting something isn't the same as getting it. Part of growing up is realising that truth. Sadly, when it comes to religion, the fairy tale part of the child's brain hasn't grown up...