christianity, logicI never studied the Bible myself, but from what I gather in atheist resources, it has numerous irrational and unreasonable conclusions, contradictions, and claims shown to be false.
Does this completely preclude a person striving to be always rational from following the Bible and christianity?
In other words, would a person properly adhering to christianity be necessarily acting irrationally on occasions?
(for those who participated in my earlier question, I think this is what I actually wanted to ask there, but ended up asking something completely different…)
There is insignificant evidence to conclude that the claims (specifically those about God and miracles - other parts, such as the Roman occupancy, have historical merit) made in the Bible are true.
Therefore, if you believe in what the Bible says, you are thinking irrationally about this topic.
This does not necessarily mean that you are an irrational person in general, but you are being irrational about this particular belief.
Most Christians I know tend to pick and choose what parts of their bible they believe in. They admit that it was written a long time ago, and that it is not an infallible source of information.
This kind of partial belief seems more rational than, for example, the pure creationist (people riding dinosaurs!?!) way of thinking that some people adopt when trying to take the Christian bible at face value.
Moving beyond the Christian bible, I also know many Christians who pick and choose what other parts of their religion they want to believe in. For example, I have known several catholics who believe that there’s nothing wrong with birth control.
I don’t believe this phenomena is specific to Christianity. Very few people of faith seem to believe in every single word of dogma that their religion prescribes. Most religions today have been around for a long time, and the modern world tends to make extreme, dogmatic thinking very difficult to swallow.
So it seems to me that many people of faith are rational at heart, but tend to suspend that rationality in order to support the core beliefs of their faith.
I attempted this feat some time ago, because I wanted to understand Christians. It occurred to me that the only way to truly understand them is to start actually believing in God. At the same time, as an atheist, I did not want to believe in God! So I was looking for ways to do both at once, and this search lead me to Buddhism, which allows you to do these things while staying completely rational. That is for instance what all the koans are about - ways of training your mind to keep two contradictory ideas without conflict. There is actually mathematics backing this idea as well, namely Goedel’s incompleteness theorem, so you would not be a total fool for doing it - it is just very non-intuitive for people who got tertium non datur massaged into them in logic 101 classes and never got to look beyond that.
Also, following the Bible and Christianity is more than just believing that miracles happened exactly as written. I know of scientists who are Christians because the philosophy helps them being better people, it is practical, has positive effect on them, and thus doing it is quite rational in my book.
“In other words, would a person properly adhering to christianity be necessarily acting irrationally on occasions?”
I think that is the core of your question.
From a personal-viewpoint you could start this thinking line with “if a 35 year grown up still believes in santa claus and reads mickey mouse as if it were reality” … “would that indicate that he or she behaves irrationally on occasions”. You can make up your own thoughts on that.
From a scientific point of view, go to : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed and search for articles like “religion” like “Association of religion with delusions and hallucinations in the context of schizophrenia: Implications for engagement and adherence.”
You will find 40.000+ articles pretty much in line with the “common speak” line “Is a 35 year old still believing in santa claus sane?”
(since scientific articles are so boring)
From a scientific point of view there is no difference between insanity and believing in santa claus versus believing in Osiris versus believing in a series of books copied from earlier book of the dead and pyramid texts (go Google).
The difference with the earlier book of the death was that the book of the death was “dynamic” which means it changed along during the thousands of years as Egyptian civilization changed, so it was more or less an adaptive meta layer on society. The bible is more of a short management powerpoint of those earlier books which means concepts like “the soul” (see wikipedia: egyptian soul) have been ver-managed into very short simple concepts no longer understandable by anyone and therefore the complete book is static : managers like that.
If you ever worked at a big company you know how it goes: there is a smart idea, full of details, exceptions but… after 3 meetings it ends up being a 1 page A4 overview that is “the complete solution” (and totally different than what you actually ment) and when you return after years at that company you still see that A4 going around…. unchanged… that is pretty much the bible. See e.g. for the original 10 commandments: http://edward.de.leau.net/the-10-commandments-are-a-copy-from-chapter-125-in-the-egyptian-book-of-the-dead-20070513.html and compare the hundreds of detailed smart lines like “I have not given the order to kill.” etc… with the simple outcome.
The management meetings were really management meetings see the list of concilies in wikipedia and you will read in each meeting what was decided, led by the CEO “the emperor”. No difference between current day enterprises and back then: everything has to be powerpointed into a static 1 page simple overview.
Then again… if you never worked at a big enterprise you will not understand.
Your question includes “christianity’s conclusions”, which is open to interpretation. As already stated, if you conclude the earth is 6,000 years old, no, that’s irrational. However, for someone alive 3,000 years ago, with nothing else to go on and not much time for study, I would hesitate to call them irrational, just ignorant, not stupid, just uniformed.
You could also say that, if you want to run for President of the United States, and you notice that non-Christians haven’t been doing so well in American politics lately, believing might be a good idea. But I guess that is either self-delusion or lying. Although you could that any good scientist always leaves room for the unknown, accepts that there is something they don’t know, but that is a different question really.
The Bible does contain many arguments, men against God, prophets against prophets, Jesus against prophets, apostles with each other, etc. Many people have worked very hard to sort it all out and rationally conclude just what the Bible is saying. Some are satisfied that the golden rule is the ultimate conclusion, which is a pretty rational rule, but you don’t really need the Bible for that. Others think we should still be stoning people for adultery because Jesus didn’t specifically address that.
I think it is perfectly rational to view the Bible as a narrative and draw rational conclusions from it. You can drop a lot of detail out, like Moses parting the Red Sea or a virgin giving birth and still call yourself Christian. By my definition though, “Christian” is some form of accepting Christ as your saviour, or accepting that he somehow acts on the world today. This is really not even covered very well in the Bible. Christ doesn’t say much about it, the apostles argue about it, let alone all of the extra-Biblical evidence required to make that true, so NO, ultimately, it is not rational.
In other words, would a person properly adhering to Christianity be necessarily acting irrationally on occasions?
A person properly adhering to Christianity would argue that they can do nothing apart from God, rational or irrational.
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