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Yes, so nobody can say one thing about his/her own experience without being told that he's lying if his experience doesn't conform to the statistics.
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Please show me where I said that Jackal was lying. It is much more likely for a person to be simply wrong or mistaken about something like this rather than to be actively lying.
I withdraw the statement. I just don't think anybody's personal experience should be challenged as a lie OR as a mistake, since nobody else can make such judgments about your personal experience on such brief acquaintance.
Especially when you point to external facts in one's environment and assume an influence that has been denied and that you can't prove.
It's like somebody's saying they have no experience of pizza so pizza has played no part in their food likes and dislikes, but you answer Oh but there are many pizza places in every town and pizza ads all over the TV, so OBVIOUSLY your likes and dislikes have been influenced by pizza. That's simply a logical fallacy but you have been continuing to insist on it.
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That is why I have been asking about his particular experinences with other religions in the culture in which he was raised.
His EXPERIENCE might start to have some relevance -- MIGHT, it depends -- but he has DENIED any relevant experience. Your first claim was that the mere EXISTENCE of Christian churches and events and symbols in the culture PROVED such experience, proved his being influenced by them to his ultimate choice. It doesn't float.
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I mean, if know about Christmas and Easter and Noah's Ark, you attended weddings and events in Christian churches, ever saw any televangelists on television at any time, etc. then it means you were exposed to Christianity.
Only as a cultural backdrop as I said, which doesn't mean a thing to many people as far as what Christianity really is about, just stories, and meant little to me before I read my way to belief. You are assuming the influence of objective entities on the subjective experience of individuals. You cannot construct an influence on somebody else's mind out of your own observation of opportunities for there potentially to have been such an influence.
As could be inferred from one of my posts in this thread, I am the ONLY one of a number of friends and acquaintances from my past who went on to become a Christian in this Christian culture. That includes my own family, none of whom are Christians despite church attendance as children, although I finally got my brother interested enough to attend a church just in the last few years.
You can't explain why one friend of mine became a Buddhist by its prevalence in her culture -- if anything her childhood experience was more saturated with Christianity than mine was as she grew up in the deep South while I grew up in the West. Also, I'd have to say the influences on me were very anti-Christian from my teenage years on, same as for her, and I visited her Buddhist meditation session once, and many cultic and occultic practices, and read in many religions and yet ended up Christian without ever going to church.
Your assertion about the source of a given individual's ultimate religious belief is unsubstantiated.
All you have is statistics, and you don't even break them down to indicate which "Christians" really ARE Christians and which are just cultural Christians who really don't believe anything pertaining to the faith, or who drag themselves to church to please family perhaps but don't really get it -- and in fact believe anything BUT what is taught there -- none of which is being a Christian by the orthodox meaning of the term.
You need much more refined criteria for an accurate idea about these things, and certainly when it comes to individuals' statements of the influences on their own convictions, your notions mean nothing.
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I will repeat that I am completely open to the idea that he really wasn't exposed to any Christianity AT ALL growing up in the Bible Belt. I find it highly unlikely that this is the case.
That is why I have been asking about his particular experinences with other religions in the culture in which he was raised.
You have to define your terms better. You are contenting yourself with extremely broad terminology that you are subjectively defining. What do you mean by being "exposed" to Christianity? He answered honestly that he was not personally INFLUENCED toward Christian belief by any Christian exposure in his life. The same is true for me. Your pointing to all the cultural expressions of Christianity in the environment is meaningless in relation to an individual's belief.
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He's right, it is very easy not to notice anything Christian in this culture, although it may be so obvious to you.
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Does the business you work in close for Ramadan? Do you have a cleric calling you to prayers five times a day from the minaret in the center of town? Do you see the Buddhists providing food for the monks at the Temple near where you were raised?
No, but neither did my friend who became a Buddhist or those who lived in a Hindu ashram or those who followed various occultic practices or those who became atheists. And how do you account for my atheism for the majority of my life with all this Christian influence you are now saying influenced my current beliefs? It's been there all the time and I didn't get any more cultural exposure to it in the couple of years I was searching for God than before.
I'm going to skip some restatements of your same contention because I'll just be restating my own ad nauseum in response.
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I am afraid you didn't really answer the question.
I am unclear on if you were raised in a very religiously diverse community or if you chose to seek out such people later in life.
My childhood was spent in a very small town with three Christian churches. I went to one of them. As a teenager I lived in a large city where my friends were academically ambitious and anti-religion, and we influenced each other in those directions. Later my university friends and I shared this same basic mental set, plus our common culture and a university community experience together, but some of them moved on to various nonChristian religions and that plus other life experiences caused us to drift apart, as I stayed an atheist and only began exploring religions myself years later.
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Nobody is denying that Christianity is dominant in our culture,
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Thank you.
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....more or less still though dying fast, but you are missing the point that it is very possible to grow up in this once-Christian culture
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Huh, "once Christian"?
It is the most Christian nation on the planet.
Most of it is just the empty cultural shell any more. Christianity is dying daily in this country. So many of the anti-Christian opinions expressed on this website are a symptom of its decline.
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...and it have zero impact. It's simply a meaningless cultural backdrop with no more religious influence than all the McDonalds and KFCs in every town.
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Oh, then you believe it has a HUGE impact on our culture, just as fast food chains have had a large impact on our culture.
These chains have affected almost every aspect of our lives, in fundamental ways that many people are not really aware of, and the influence starts at a very young age.
That may be so as a generalization but have NOTHING to do with a person's personally choosing to eat at McDonald's or not, which was my point.
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Really becoming a Christian is a very big thing that has nothing to do with culture.
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If that was true, wouldn't we see less of a trend for Christian communities to stay Christian, and Hindu communities to stay Hindu, and so forth, if it had nothing to do with culture?
Maybe the clearest way to say this is that you have the influence reversed. Christians made Christian culture but the culture doesn't make Christians. Christian culture is the expression of those who have genuinely become Christians, but the culture itself does NOT make people into Christians. It just doesn't work that way.
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It is not something you choose. it is something that happens to you.
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Then why doesn't it "happen to" any of those Buddhists or Hindus who weren't raised in a Christian culture?
Who says it doesn't? Christianity is growing extremely fast in China for instance:
growth of Christianity in ChinaAn author and journalist who spent a number of years in China says at the rate Christianity is growing there, it will eventually bring about a change in the government -- although in the short term, the Communist country could lurch into extreme nationalism.
Another article on religion in China:
History of Christianity in China 中國基督教歷史(中国基督教历史)Undoubtedly, Buddhism has been the most popular religion in China. The evolution of religions in China, however, being influenced by Ancestor Worship, Taoism and Confucianism was quite complicated. Since Buddhism in China is well addressed and documented on the internet, it is our intention to focus on another religion in China, namely, Christianity. Christianity was introduced into China as early as the 5th century. The first three early missionaries failed to bear fruits. The Fourth attempt which began in 1806 and ended around 1956, had moderate success, but it helped to spark the Anti-Christian Movement in the 1920's. Since the Communist took power in 1949, Christianity have been growing steadily against the oppressions of the government. Nowadays, there are about 30,000,000 Christians in China (according to an unofficial survey). God Bless China!
Persecution:
Church Leader Gets Reprieve |
Christianity TodayIn December officials charged Gong Shengliang with using an "evil cult" to "undermine the enforcement of the law." The court had also convicted Gong of "crimes of rape and hooliganism."
The case is now on hold. The pastor, 46, founded the South China Church in 1990. It has 50,000 members in eight regions.
Gong was at one time a leader in Peter Xu's Born Again Movement, one of China's largest house church groups. Gong's group has an evangelical statement of faith called "God's Forever and Ever."
India:
http://in.crossmap.com/News/june04/12/north-india.htm
NEW DELHI, INDIA -- with over 60,000 estimated house Churches, most of them being concentrated in Northern region, Northern India becomes a home to one of the fastest-growing revival movements on Earth, Joel News reported. Last year alone, 200 new house Churches were added in Hariyana State, which was a part of one of India's least evangelized states.
According to an April 2004 report, the number of house churches in Northern India has grown to around 30,000 in the past seven years, with an additional 28,000 regular home prayer meetings. Experience shows that these prayer meetings turn out to be house churches within few months.
One South Indian Church growth observer (name withheld) reported that there are over 10,000 house churches in Southern India.
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Why do we see the pattern of religious distribution that we do, Faith.
Explain how culture has nothing to do with that.
Again you have the direction of influence reversed. Culture is the creation of Christians, it doesn't create Christians. You are using statistics to answer an individual claim about personal experience and that doesn't fly.
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I keep asking many questions which you don't answer.
Well I hope I have finally done so.
This post really should be stripped down quite a bit to make it easier to wade through, but that's more work than I'm up to after writing so much already. Sorry.
This message has been edited by Faith, 05-10-2005 11:28 PM
This message has been edited by Faith, 05-11-2005 02:30 AM
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