Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured Faith

You suggesting that people should wake up to reality. You don't see the irony?

reality is not always as it appears. It can not always be quantified and measured. Of course, you will insist that evidence is needed to verify that its reality...so around and around we go

That's not really the author's fault. The pdf seems to be missing some of the appendices; where at least we'd find the names.

Noting your tendency to credit the absurd like Pizzagate while rejecting credible information is not attacking you. It might be belaboring the obvious, but it is not attacking you. We know. So you think that John Podesta, even though he had no reason to believe his private emails would one day become public, embedded what he wanted to say in code? Why on earth would he do that?You might want to read Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories.--Percy

How else do you know what's real?

intuition and subjective experience

Nope. No good. Your intuition and subjective experience produce a different god than the Muslims and the Aztecs. How can they all be real?

More detail than we have would be required to judge if Protestantism is really underrepresented in these textbooks. A world history textbook which didn't even mention the Reformation would probably be missing something, but we don't really know the scope, length or depth of the book. I could envisage a meaningful and useful introduction to world history which focused only on broad, socioeconomic patterns without saying much about religion.I'm sure you'd think that's precisely because of my secularist upbringing, but there's an important point to remember in all this. I grew up in the UK. A lot of schools in the UK are associated with churches. All schools, including those with no religious affiliation, are required to teach Religious Education (or they used to anyway, no idea what kids learn today). I went to a Christian school so our RE classes were almost exclusively about Christianity (in my whole school career I recall a couple of weeks digressing on Judaism in order to meet the requirement that we didn't only talk about Christianity).And yet this religious education which every Briton has to go through doesn't arrest the trend to secularisation of society - British society is, on the contrary, much more secular than American society. The reasons for the trend to secularisation in wealthy countries are debatable, but it's clearly happening independent of how much we talk about God in school.Incidentally, I tried to find out a little about what is taught in today's world history books in the US, since the study we were looking about was about textbooks from 35 years ago. My preliminary findings are that they look terrible; but then I guess writing a simple world history book is not easy. We didn't study any world history at school, so I suppose I can't criticise too much. Jesus and the Reformation could reasonably be argued to be the most important events in the history of the world if the beliefs of Protestant Christianity are true. That's why it's dependent on your religious belief.If you're arguing they're the most important events in human history even if, for example, there is no God, then that;s obviously going to require some justification; since it is no sense obvious.I'm not even sure the concept of 'objectively most important historical event' is coherent. 'Most important' seems inherently subjective without some clearly agreed criteria, and I can't think of any that are possible to objectively measure.

Sure, that's because these days "religion" is put into a separate compartment from everything else. But once upon a time Christianity in the west was generally understood to be true, not just true religion, but the truth about everything, about life and death. about history, about socioeconomic patterns, everything. Getting back to that view of things is probably not going to happen before the Lord returns, although I would never say flatly that it couldn't happen since God has the power to make it happen. But He isn't likely to make it happen unless Christians in great numbers spending lots of time in prayer, beg Him to make it happen. And I don't see THAT happening. Even that COULD happen but the signs aren't there at the moment.It's very interesting that Religious Education is required in the UK where you're all going so dreadfully secular, while we are told religion is not permitted in school at all. It's not true but that's the prevailing misunderstanding.So what did you learn in Religious Education? Anything at all?It may be that the revised edition of this book has updated information about textbooks too. I'll report on what I find when I read it. Unless it simply IS true apart from what I believe. Unless it had a huge impact on social structures, which it did. Which in itself should justify a chapter on it in any world history book. The Protestant Work Ethic alone needs a few paragraphs at least. The effect of Protestantism on the concept of liberty that was so big in the Enlightenment needs quite a few paragraphs. Women's rights another big result. But Christianity's role in all that is now rejected and it's attributed to other sources instead.However, it couldn't even have happened if there is no God. The story of Jesus life is the hugest event in history because God Himself came to earth as a man. And all history changed as a result.And the Protestant Reformation rescued the truth about all that from its centuries of burial in pagan superstitions in the Roman Church, and restored the truth to us.Ah well. I'll just leave it there.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

All I recall is that the emails sound weird, nothing like the way any normal person would talk about pizza.

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Sure, that's because these days "religion" is put into a separate compartment from everything else. But once upon a time Christianity in the west was generally understood to be true, not just true religion, but the truth about everything, about life and death. about history, about socioeconomic patterns, everything.

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A long time ago indeed. It certainly wasn’t the view of Jefferson, for instance.

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It's very interesting that Religious Education is required in the UK where you're all going so dreadfully secular, while we are told religion is not permitted in school at all. It's not true but that's the prevailing misunderstanding.

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The difference is at heart, simple. We have an established religion, you have laws forbidding that.

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Unless it had a huge impact on social structures, which it did. Which in itself should justify a chapter on it in any world history book. The Protestant Work Ethic alone needs a few paragraphs at least. The effect of Protestantism on the concept of liberty that was so big in the Enlightenment needs quite a few paragraphs. Women's rights another big result. But Christianity's role in all that is now rejected and it's attributed to other sources instead.

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The Reformation itself was only part of that. Though I note that you don’t mention the wars which were a big part of the impact that the Reformation did have. But is it more important than the rise of empirical science or the Industrial Revolution ? I think it would be very hard to demonstrate such a claim.

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The story of Jesus life is the hugest event in history because God Himself came to earth as a man. And all history changed as a result

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And that is purely a religious belief.

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And the Protestant Reformation rescued the truth about all that from its centuries of burial in pagan superstitions in the Roman Church, and restored the truth to us.

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And so is that,Why on earth would you bother to dispute my point if you were going to openly admit it a short while later ?

I went to Catholic school, so the focus was heavily on Jesus and Catholic belief. Lots of Bible stories. I don't remember a great deal - most of my childhood memories are not so clear, and most of those that are not about learning things in class. I think I never took RE very seriously either, so was probably often not paying attention.As we got a bit older, some RE classes started to cover controversial ethical debates. I feel like there was a lot of discussion of abortion and euthanasia; but I might be overestimating how much time we spent on that because these classes would lead to people arguin-g; so they stick in the memory more than Bible story classes that no one cared about.From the age of 16-18 RE became optional. I chose to carry on with it, but at this point the focus was more on philosophy than religion as such. We did moral philosophy; epistemology, and philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Maybe other things too, but this is what I remember,The content of Religious Education varied a lot depending on your school, though. The British system works where we have a set list of concepts everyone has to learn (decided by the government, so it changes all the time); but the content is usually quite broad and there's a lot of room for individual schools to vary. I grew up in an overwhelmingly white area that had seen massive Irish and Polish immigration after the war. As a result our schools were mostly Catholic or Anglican (with a few Methodist schools - before the war my home town was staunchly Methodist, and there's still a statue of one of the Wesleys). We all learnt about the Bible.People who grew up in racially diverse cities and went to non-denominational schools, however, have told me that their RE classes were different. It was more a case of looking at different religions one by one and covering their core beliefs; which would perhaps have been more valuable than the Bible-heavy education I had (I know you would disagree, but that's just my thoughts). The significance of the 'Protestant Work Ethic' is a complicated historical debate - it's not a fact. It's something to discuss at the end of school; or possibly university - it's not something that it makes sense to cover at the age of 13 (which I think is when the early modern period is covered in American schools, based on what I read while looking into this thread).As for Jesus, I understand that you believe that this was God coming to earth as a man. And yes, if that was true, it would be an event of enormous significance. Probably the most significant in all of history. But to those of us who do not think Jesus was God, it's of course of far less significance. Christianity is of course of undeniable significance to human history; but I don't think a useful discussion of Christianity needs much focus on Jesus' life - all that matters is what people thought about Jesus when Christianity later rose to prominence.Thinking about this, I think deciding what needs to be covered in a basic history education is probably one of the most difficult things to decide in a curriculum. It is also, for this reason, one of the most changeable in the national standards in the UK. No one agrees on the most important things in history, so it's used as a symbolic political football - one government will complain that history is too Anglocentric and ignores most of the world and introduce requirements to learn more world history, the next will object that now history ignores British tradition and introduce more British history and so on ad infinitum.This is different to, for example, physics. There seems much more agreement on what are the core things everyone should learn about physics; and there's nothing politically controversial about Newton's laws.

You're British? I always thought you were American. Every day's a school day.

I don't want to nit pick here but I will anyway. I'd suggest that there is only one god or one creative intelligence and not many gods of human invention or otherwise. The question to be answered in that regard is are we theistic or atheistic.
If we are theistic then the question is what is the nature of this deity, (regardless of whether we call this deity God, Allah, Zeus etc.) That then all boils down to religious beliefs.Even in the same religion we find numerous answers to the question of how we view the nature of a deity. For example Faith and I both call the deity God, but we have quite different understandings of the nature of this God. Look at the number of Muslims who disagree with the understanding of Allah as we saw in the 9/11 attack.My point is that it isn't about the religion that we adhere to, or the name we assign to a deity. The differences centre on what we believe to be the nature of our deity and how that is to impact the way we live.I would also agree that subjective reasoning and intuition are a big part of our conclusions. (This of course holds true for atheists as well.) Obviously though culture, holy books, tradition and reason enter into it as well.

That's overly simplistic. There are thousands of varieties of theism and every variety believes that all of the other varieties are made up. The only difference between a theist and an atheist is that the theist believes in one more god. Both lack belief in the other thousands.