Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 04:00:19AM -0700, Joseph Fatula wrote:
> How is it "religion"?  Or, why is teaching about Christ "religion", yet
> teaching that the earth is round, or that Octavian became the first emperor
> of Rome is not?
Okay.  I'm going to take that question at face value, and try to answer it
reasonably.

First, don't put scare-quotes around "religion".  The distinction between
religion and non-religion is not one of fact vs. fiction.  Calling
Christianity a religion is not the same thing as saying that it's
not true.  The difference is in how you come to *know* it to be true.

For instance, if by "teaching about Christ" you mean teaching that
there seems to have been a guy named Yehoshua in Canaan a couple
thousand years ago who led some sort of failed revolution against the
Roman occupation (or against the Jews who were sympathetic thereto)
and wound up crucified for it, whose followers founded a religion
that has become dominant in the world today - then you're in the
realm of an acceptable education topic in a US government school.

If you mean teaching not only that this person DEFINITELY existed
despite the paucity of historical data, but that furthermore He
was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,
was the Annointed One, the Messiah, the Son of God, the Lamb who
taketh away the sins of the world, that He rose from the dead,
that He sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,
whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead, etc -
basically anything involving a capitalized pronoun - then that's
religion.

The dividing line is the scientific method.  In this case two
principles of the method come into play: independent confirmation and
disprovability.  We can't go back in time and see Octavian sitting
on the throne, but we have plenty of independent documentation of
his reign.  When it comes to Jesus, we don't even have independent
confirmation that he existed at all.  All the accounts we do have
come from the same source - not only in that they were all written
by his followers, but in that, for instance, Matthew is clearly a
copy of Mark; Luke used both of them as sources; etc.

And as for disprovability: can you tell me under exactly what
circumstances you would be dissuaded of your faith in Jesus Christ?
And can you actually imagine those circumstances coming about in
real life?

Basically, there is no compelling scientific evidence for the tenets
of Christianity.  I don't think any Christian would disagree with
this statement; I rather thought the lack of proof was the point,
in fact, since faith is a Christian virtue.  But faith is necessarily
subjective, and objectivity is a requirement for school subjects.
This is simply because reasonable people can disagree on subjective
things - which is why there is more than one religion in the world -
but not on objective ones.

That's all there is to it.  If pressed, I can locate the
evidence that we have for Octavian's existence, Natural Selection, the
Copernican model, etc; but no such evidence exists for Christianity.
And that's the critical dividing line between Church and State.

-Mark