The wider issue, of course, is that the entire dogma is a fiction without any basis in reality. Arguing over direction to preserve attendance may be pointless if you've built an organization around a fairy tale.
Doesn't matter. What other commenters here try to point out as well, a lot - if not most - organizations are built around one fiction or another. Some examples:
- Fanclubs, fandoms, convent attendees - those are literally communities built around fairy tales.
- Programming language communities - built around ever-changing artifacts of human imagination, they too have to deal with possible change of direction impacting attendance.
- Political parties - organized around some people's understanding of some ideas, + shitton of meaningless slogans that everyone interprets how they like. Exist mostly to self-perpetuate, as evidenced whenever any established party has anything meaningful to say or do; suddenly the official program takes second place towards what helps electability.
- Companies - the ultimate bubbles of meaninglessness, they in principle - and often in practice - exist as an ever charging group of people bound together by will to make money on ever changing product for ever changing market, lead by ever changing board.
I'd add nationalities, as there's plenty of crazy fiction going on in there, but they're at least usually bound geographically, so there's that.
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The point being, many if not most organizations are built around some fairy tale or other, and what an organization is built around rarely matters to anything. What matters is how strong the community is, and that's pretty much purely social factor, without any actual dependence on objective reality.
When I look at people from $largeMainstreamReligion, I see people who will defend it as "the genesis of human life and the only source of truth" as a fact of the community you're supposed to accept. But then looking at their lives, they pay at best a lip service to the actual contents of that "source of truth", and instead only participate in the accepted traditions.
Basically, I feel that religions, fandoms, school associations ("I'm a Harvard Alumni"), etc. all work pretty much in the very same way.
Thinking about it, the fandom that I'm part of shows quite some resemblance to a religious organization.
What's more relevant is the differences. Funclubs' purpose is fun, I presume. Programming is serving humanity, I have no doubt. Political parties are in a way like football, a gentlemen game played by thieves. Companies are far from meaninglessness, they serve clear organizational and legal and taxes etc purposes.
Religions (edit: I'm familiar with) are built on deception to control people, they are not like fanclubs, programming, companies.
It looks like a viral infection, yes, that's how it spreads: an evil payload wrapped in good ideas. It's a tool to control people even if it's not used everywhere all the time, even if sometimes it's used for good. And finally, yes, the believers have no intention to deceive; they are the ones deceived and since most of them are essentially good people they naturally want to spread the "truth" by telling others about it.
You don't believe that's simplistic? Is that a way to jumpstart useful dialog about that institution?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/24/how-did-new-atheism-fai...
It's exactly the same with women's rights and minority civil rights: "Really, people would listen to them more if they just toned down and spoke politely". We already know that that doesn't work and just gets you ignored.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/07/08/t...
Lack of nuance? Maybe. Lack of reality? Not really. I don't think nuance is helpful here. The fundamental defining characteristic of the institution is faith as an epistemology. The details of how exactly this irresponsible epistemology is constructed don't really contribute anything to the understanding of why that makes it a bad institution.
> You don't believe that's simplistic? Is that a way to jumpstart useful dialog about that institution?
No, it's simple, but not simplistic. And whether it's a way to jumpstart a useful dialog? That's generally difficult to judge before you see the result, really.
So where does the 'useful dialogue' start? I think it starts well before we just give moral authority to a bunch of very old men arguing about rules that only they made up. They should give us a better chain of authority than "since time immemorial".
I also would not quite agree that religion has retreated to "questions that have no answer". They have more perhaps retreated to "god of the gaps", i.e. the creation, consciousness etc. These are very large gaps in scientific understanding, but of course this does not mean we need supernatural explanations for them, and it would be reasonable to expect science to fill these gaps eventually. But then again there might be limits to what can explain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
Plenty of people have believed it historically. Scroll down to the Catholic section and you'll see some of the mental gymnastics I talked about to claim it in modern times.
Protestants don't believe in literal transubstantiation; I'd say they probably trust their taste-buds more, but then again, compare Protestant/Anglo-German food against Catholic/Franco-Italo-Spanish food :)
> "questions that have no answer". They have more perhaps retreated to "god of the gaps"
I don't personally see a difference between these terms - they both mean claiming to have an answer for something that is unanswerable. If you have an answer for which the only proof is basically "just trust me", then it's not much of an answer. Russell's Teapot is a pretty clear example of this.
There is a big difference between something that cannot have an answer and a "gap". We currently do not understand consciousness, which leaves a gap for religions to postulate about souls. But it is very likely that in the future science will be able to answer to question of how consciousnesses arises in the brain. It is not an unanswerable question.
If you check out the Middle Ages section, it shows that the theological debate that it wasn't physical alteration started... at a date that is closer to us than the birth of jesus.
Check out Stercoranism [1] as well (which contributed to the above debate), whose whole basis is that the doctrine of physical change must lead towards normal digestive processes happening, and wondering if this turns the eucharist into, literally, holy shit.
At the end of that article is a bit of modern apologia stating that christ probably leaves as soon as the cracker hits your stomach ('but nobody knows precisely when'[2]). :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stercoranism
[2] god does, after all, move in mysterious ways...
You won't be satisfied unless the actual word 'literal' appears? It appears in the first paragraph of the Stercoranism link, and again in the second paragraph.
"the 9th century Carolingian theologian Paschasius Radbertus... wrote an influential tract around 832 upholding the literal interpretation of Christ in the Eucharist". He supported the literal change, but said that the holy bits dissolved before becoming poo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist_in_the_Catholic_Chur...
> Your taste buds would tell you otherwise.
You are trying to understand rationally that which is not rational.
So using this way of thinking the body and bread are one in substance, but differ in accidental properties. The bread still looks and tastes like bread but an indiscernible change has occurred in its substance. Thomas says:
> I answer that, It is evident to sense that all the accidents of the bread and wine remain after the consecration. And this is reasonably done by Divine providence. First of all, because it is not customary, but horrible, for men to eat human flesh, and to drink blood. And therefore Christ's flesh and blood are set before us to be partaken of under the species of those things which are the more commonly used by men, namely, bread and wine. Secondly, lest this sacrament might be derided by unbelievers, if we were to eat our Lord under His own species. Thirdly, that while we receive our Lord's body and blood invisibly, this may redound to the merit of faith.
* caveat: I'm neither a philosopher nor a believer in transubstantiation
There's this thing that Jesus rose from the dead, and also this thing that he delegated his authority to his apostles (including people who never actually saw him in person).
Both are very weak arguments.
Religions are all about community, and for communities, traditions and beliefs are usually social objects, i.e. arbitrary things around which a community forms. The question of whether it's really true or false is - to most Catholics - just about as relevant as the question whether Star Trek is true or false is relevant to Trekkies. The issues those communities are debating are not about how their beliefs match reality, but how their beliefs match the canon around which the community is built.
No, communities are all about community. There are religious communities. But there is also religion and even religious institutions that are not about community. And there are communities that are not religious. The thing that distinguishes religion, be it a community or otherwise, from non-religion is the promotion of faith as an epistemology.
> The question of whether it's really true or false is - to most Catholics - just about as relevant as the question whether Star Trek is true or false is relevant to Trekkies.
How relevant it is to them is not the question. The question is how epistemologyically sound their position is. The average Trekkie will, if asked, correctly accept the proposition that the universe they are a fan of is fictional. The average Catholic on the other hand will, if asked, incorrectly accept the proposition that the universe they are a fan of is real. Also, the latter is consistently a part of the indoctrination, so it's kindof dishonest to claim that they don't consider it relevant.
Catholicism probably puts less emphasis on faith than pretty much any other theistic religion. Its main doctrines are supported by volumes of dense (and rather tedious) rational argumentation.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/councils/v1.htm
>If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema."
I am not a Christian, and I'm certainly not going to start defending Catholic arguments for God's existence here (!), but the arguments definitely exist.
As always, money and power. At least ultra-capitalists are honest about their motivations.
You might be surprised, but brains and court records and all of that are actually physical and perfectly accessible to scientific investigation.
If I could persuade enough people that incorporation documents are invalid and that we all collectively agreed the corporations would cease to exist. This is of course an absurd notion and not practically achievable but there was a time before corporations existed and there could be a time after which they existed if we want. This is the same for any human conceived idea.
I think that is a very confusing way to look at things. It's not that we collectively agree that the document means that something exists, but rather this is the category of things for which existence is by definition caused by the existence of those documents. A corporation is not some ethereal thing that exists, and we agree that we are justified in believing it exists because there is a document, but rather the document is effectively the corporation. The thing we as a society agree about is merely linguistic in nature: We agree on the definition of the terms, i.e., we have a common language.
Legally speaking and as far as general people's understanding is concerned, this is incorrect. The document is the license to form the corporation, it does not make up the corporation.