quote: No. I think it's because they were actively trained to be bloodthirsty and cruel.
What do you mean by "actively"? Were they actively trained with the intent by their trainers that they become bloodthirsty and cruel? Or was it a more subtle teaching that happened because those things were prevailent in the culture and there was a dearth of good role models?
If people are innately good more than they are innately evil, why did people not overcome and balance these influences? Why is it so difficult to get humanity on track for goodness? Is this also the fault of religion--even though those religions usually started out trying to turn humanity from it's more nefarious tendancies?
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quote:Plus I’m not the one calling them fools. So why they’re mad at someone they don’t believe in is the true irony here. Their hearts are very hard, so reaching them is next to impossible and I guess my hope was in some way to get them thinking.
Sigh.
When you post something intended to be offensive to a class of people, slap smilies and laughing figures around it to point out how funny you think it is, add comments about high horses to let everyone know you don't care if it offends people, and then act surprised and puzzled that people in that class might somehow find it offensive, I really have to wonder about you.
There's a difference between joking with someone and insulting them. Really, there is.
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quote: Their hearts are very hard, so reaching them is next to impossible and I guess my hope was in some way to get them thinking.
So if someone is happy in what they believe in, and you don't agree with it, you offend them? Very respectable.
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posted
Well, Jay, that's a really good argument in a scientific discussion, isn't it just? I reply point-by-point to your link, and you accuse me of bias? Even if that were true, how does it invalidate the points I made?
Moreover, if you're going to say 'my bias is as good as yours', how then can you justify calling people fools on the basis of their bias? Either there is a correct point of view, or there isn't. If the latter, you have absolutely no call to go around calling people fools. If the former, just accusing people of bias is not going to convince anyone you are right. In fact, it is much more likely to convince people that you know absolutely nothing of the subject, and just fling out whatever silly articles happen to suit your - dare I say it? - bias.
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posted
And speaking of hard hearts, I would like to make exactly the same comment on the hardness of some people's heads.
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quote: Plus I’m not the one calling them fools. So why they’re mad at someone they don’t believe in is the true irony here.
Jay, you just don't get it. You are talking to a group of people who don't believe in God. So they believed that a man said that, nothing more, and that now you are choosing to call them fools for (in their mind) no good reason. How is any good to ever come of that?
If I were to quote scriptures that insult you, it wouldn't matter if they are true or that God said them of you. It doesn't change the fact that I am being rude and offensive. I (being Mormon) have a whole set of scriptures that you most likely believe do not come from God at all, but from man. I probably I could find an insult in there that refers accurately to you. Would me quoting it to you help convince you to believe that my scriptures are from God?
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quote:Plus I’m not the one calling them fools. So why they’re mad at someone they don’t believe in is the true irony here. Their hearts are very hard...
Ummm, yeah, you are calling them fools. This thread was not virgin birthed--you did it, Jay.
And you call them hard-hearted, presumeably just because they disagree with you.
Before you dismiss your critics with a flippant "I guess we all have our own biases!" (not the best debate comeback), many of your critics here criticized KoM in the irony thread.
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posted
I'm wary of posting arguments when I'm mildly drunk in a thread where any mistep will be pounced upon, so I'll leave that till monday. However, I would like to say, esepcially to bev, that you don't need to come up with this whole elaborate explanation for why I believe the way that I do which is different from my stated reasoning.
I'm certainly open to biases, but I also really do try to lead the examined life. If you feel the need to dismiss the idea that I may actually put a lot of time into looking at and thinking about the evidence and then still come up with a different conclusion than you based on some fantasical explanation that you may create, go right ahead. You're certainly not going to stand out here if you prefer attacks on my character or reasoning faculties instead of logical refutation. But besides being extremely disrespectful when you do this, you're also wrong.
---
Oh and bev, I never said that christians didn't do good stuff. I just asked for examples.
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most examples of good christians do not show up in the history books. most good christians choose to keep it that way. they don't need the praise from mankind. mother theresa was a good christian that did make it to the history books. my friends and neighbors are good christians that won't.
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quote:I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.
Very nice, yes. Exactly the sort of attitude that gives Christianity its wonderful reputation. Not to mention the belief that AIDS is punishment for sexual immorality.
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posted
Squick, feel free to correct me on my interpretation of what you think. I am not saying "this is definitely what Squicky thinks," it is more, "it sounds to me like this is what you think. Is that right?" I am trying to understand where you are coming from, not tell you what you think.
So I will await your explaination when you aren't drunk. Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Ok, ok. How about a compromise? I took away the smiley faces and post text to try and make it less offensive. How’s that? I know, to little to late. But figured it was worth a try. If nothing else it’s been an interesting thread.
KoM, Well, I was really saying both of us have our biases. Meaning that no matter what I say you wouldn’t change your mind that over millions of years and lots of evolution man came to Earth. And no matter what you say I won’t change my mind that God over 6 days about 6 thousand years ago made man and all of creation. That was why I said that. To be truly honest I’m not even close to being qualified to debate you point by point though.
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posted
It does, actually. Takes away a lot of the "It's funny because it's true! Ha ha ha!" feeling. Thanks.
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quote:So why do you feel you are qualified to hold an opinion at all, if you cannot defend it?
Well, now, that's kind of rude. Jay played nice in his last post; you try to do the same!
Everyone is entitled to have an opinion (you know what they say opinions are like, after all)--regardless of whether not they have the rhetorical skill and/or knowledge to defend their opinions.
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quote: What do you mean by "actively"? Were they actively trained with the intent by their trainers that they become bloodthirsty and cruel? Or was it a more subtle teaching that happened because those things were prevailent in the culture and there was a dearth of good role models?
It's a more subtle teaching than that, even. We actively train people to be ambitious, selfish, to "kill" in the name of God and country, to value coin and competition. These things produce people who are bloodthirsty and cruel -- as side effects, and not as the primary objective.
quote:If people are innately good more than they are innately evil, why did people not overcome and balance these influences?
I believe that, by and large, we are overcoming these influences. It's a work in progress.
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posted
Relative prosperity has to figure into it. Having less limitations on the general resources means fewer persons must act out of desperation to survive.
Mind you, that's only a part of the story, but I think it factors in. Note, too, that the most consistent risk factor for violence is poverty. That is far from claiming that "all poor people are violent" or "only poor people are violent" -- just that where poverty goes, problems tend to follow.
Of course, this is modulated by expectations -- poverty means different things in different contexts. The margin of sustenence is a pretty clear key, nonetheless.
posted
I'm still more than a bit torn about this claim. Can I add a caveat that violent actions are just one subset of immoral behaviors? This is but one possible piece of it all.
posted
I was just thinking, it is pretty common for Mormons to assume that prosperity will usually lead to wickedness, because this is a very strong reoccurring theme in the Book of Mormon.
The idea is that prosperity brings complacency and idleness. People stop being grateful for what they have and begin obsessing about things that aren't important. Their perspective gets more and more skewed because of it. Over time, chaos ensues.
BTW, this doesn't mean we should squealch out that evil prosperity! It means when we do prosper, we need to watch ourselves, especially to think of helping our fellow man, since we are in greater power to do so.
posted
I think even other immoral behaviors are, by and large, declining. In general, I think people are more self-aware and more capable of rational thought than they were even a century ago. We still have unquestioned assumptions, but I think we have fewer of them.
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posted
Tom, I think that might be true to some extent. I also chalk it up to an increase in education. Not just formal education, but our amazing technology allows us to "get the message out" so easily. People watch the news and see what is going on on the other side of the world. Our children are being raised to value wearing seat-belts because the idea has been pounded into them from a very early age.
Dora the Explorer: "SEAT BELTS! So we can be safe!!"
If we ever try to drive off without buckling them in ('cause we forgot) they cry! They make a complete hissy-fit! We are very grateful for that.
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posted
Well, Megan, I see your point; but evolution versus creation is a question of fact. On morality or faith, I will agree that one might hold an opinion just because "well, that's the way I feel about it". But this is a scientific question, and Jay insists on going against all evidence, without being able to give a good reason for it.
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posted
Yes, but that's his right. I'm not arguing his correctness; I'm arguing his right to do so, as long as he doesn't harm anyone else in the process.
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posted
I believe that he does do harm, in that his teachings encourage a close-minded, anti-scientific attitude. This is not what we need in the world's most powerful nation.
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posted
Well, I won't object to what he thinks in his inmost heart, but I do feel he shouldn't try to propagandise for things he admits he cannot argue rationally for.
And Dags, you may not like anti-religious attitudes, but at least they have no history of encouraging warfare and poverty as 'good for the soul'.
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quote:And Dags, you may not like anti-religious attitudes, but at least they have no history of encouraging warfare and poverty as 'good for the soul'.
Communism had intensely anti-religious attitudes which caused much suffering and oppression throughout most of the 20th Century. It continues today in China, Cuba, and North Korea.
Oh, but those aren't your anti-religious attitudes? Well, Jay's religious attitudes (or anti-nonreligious attitudes, if you will) aren't the ones that led to those wars, either.
posted
Well, KoM, Yes I have opinions and so do you. I’m not sure where the actual line is drawn though for where facts and theories come into play. We could each argue till we’re blue in the face about which such theories can be considered facts. I’m sure you have theories you believe are facts as do I. I can’t begin to tell you the development stages of a baby in the womb other then the basics, but to me it’s murder at anytime to abort the baby. Yes yes, life of the mother, but you can do that in a way that isn’t actually killing the baby and more them dying on their own. But anyway…… What I’m trying to say when I sat I’m not qualified to debate you on this is that you’re getting into details that I really have limited education on. I’m sure if you emailed the author of the article they’d be thrilled to answer all your questions and be light years ahead of me in qualifications of knowledge on the subject. I really don’t think I have to have a doctorate in something in order to have an opinion or belief on it. Plus time constraints have to come into play sometime! Anyway….
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posted
People are making equivilences that just aren't true. It is not true that all other people were just as bad as whatever group you belong to. Cultures and peoples differ in the structure and nature of their beliefs and these differences have direct consequences in the actions and behaviors those cultures.
For much of its history, even in comparison to the Islamic world, which shared many of its cultural components, the Christian world fared poorly in regards to the "badness" of their behavior. (Which is not to say that weren't things about it that were "good" or "better" than other cultures. Cultures - and individuals - are complex systems that interact with their environments and with themselves and it would be a huge mistake to treat them as monoliths that could even be broken down into good or bad). And the statement that because there were cultures better and worse then them, they can be considered in the middle is frankly ridiculuous. Besides intercultural comparisons, there is the fact that, as with any culture, at various times, individuals or subcultures arose within the Christian world that offered changes in the existing structure. Whether they were adopted or which of the competing changes won out and the methods by which a viewpoint won tells us a great deal about the character of the culture.
The idea that all cultures are just as bad is wrong in another way, in that it implies that they are all bad in the same way. Obviously, all societies have major problems, but these problems, just like their virtues, differ. Again, these differences are in part determined by the different ways these cultures are constituted. Asian cultures have such a different outlook on the world that even the way they physically perceive it is different from the way we in European derived cultures do.
For the past 150 years or so, we've been struggling towards a systematic and sometiems even scientific way to study people and culture. This process has been riddled with problems, but it has also developed information and methods of analysis that appear to yeild greater confidence that has otherwise been available. As with any systematic study, one of the central pursuits has been to try and identify the underlying reasons for the similarities and differences among the objects of study, in this case persons and cultures. In some cases, we've been able to say with varying degrees of certainty that a person or a culture that has component X will likely also have component Y and will likely exhibit behavior Z.
Using this sort of process, we can test things such as the central difference between the Augustinian and Pelagian worldviews. That is, is it possible for people to behave well (for a defined value of well) without God's grace. If we assume that God's grace is, as most Christian sects hold true, best or exclusively obtained through being a Christian and participating in Christian rituals, then we can ammend that statement to be "Is it possible to behave well while not being a Christian?" or, to recast it, "What is the effect on being good of being versus not being a Christian?" Put that way, the question is trivially easy to answer. Augustine was wrong, even by his own defnitions. That Christian world regarded many of the people in the Jewish scriptures, who were not Christian, as virtuous. From our lens of history, we can see that not only did other cultures contain virutous people, but that the Christians cultures were far from being the most virtuous. Thus, not only is the initial axiom that only Christians can be virtuous false, but also either being Christian was worse at promoting virtue than some alternatives or virtue was determined by something other than being/not being Christian. And yet, the Pelagian view of the world is still considered a heresy, while the Augustinian view was central to Christianity through much of its history and is still prevalant today, in a watered-down form.
Again using this process, people like Gordon Allport studied aspects of personality that we consider "bad", such as prejudice and authoritarianism. I've gone into it before, but one thing they found was that, in America, self-identifying religious people score significantly higher on tests of prejudice and authoritarianism than non-religious people (keep in mind that this was done in the 50s and 60s, so the social context is somewhat different).
For many reasons, not the least of which that Allport was himself a religious person, they probed further than this. What they found was that the degree of commitment to the religion was a strong determiner of people's scores. Those who were not all that committed tended to score higher than non-relgious, those who were moderately committed tended to score much higher, and those who were strongly committed tended to score about the same or sometimes lower than average non-religious. However, as the moderately commited were by far the largest group in the religious population, taking the mean of that population resulted in a higher scores being inappropriately inferred across the population.
A throw-away part of that description that is actually very important was defining the population as American. The same measures used in other countires turned up similar results, but with a very different aspect. In America, self-identified religiousity was correlated with relatively higher scores on measures of authoritarianism and prejudice. This was also true in other countries like say The Netherlands. However, correlation can be a tricky thing. In a case like this, it's entirely possible that one of correlated factors actually determines the other correlated factor, in this case the level of authoritarianism would account for the levels of prejudice or vice versa and the religiousity actually just keyed the one. To check this, we run equations that attempt to account for the variation in the things observed. In most European studies, authoritarianism, regardless of religiousity, was shown to account fully for prejudice. However, in America, this was not the case.
Suffice it to say, something more was going on here than the brainless religion implies prejudice. Allport, after years of study, came up with a way of categorizing religiousity based on it's components. His conception of intrinsic and extrinsic religion, did an even better job of distinguishing between those religious who had high scores on tests of prejudice and authoritarianism and has become a central idea in the study of religion. Further studies have shown it to be a good predictor of a whole host of other negative psychological traits that religions have traditionally been plauged by. Translations of Allport's ideas to fit the study of more general ideologies have also yielded quite a bit of fruit in terms of predicting certain types of bad things.
There are reasons why people take on these characteristics. We even have a relatively good ideas what some of them are, if only people would actually look at them. I'm going to jump into a brief (for me, anyway, the psychology of morality formation and maintence and its effects is one of my interests. I could (and have) gone on for pages and pages) my conception of morality in my next post.
I tihnk the best place to start is with some assumptions. My basic view of people's morality is that there are two interrelated (empathy and selfishness) but often competing systems at work, much like that yin-yang relationship expressed by the Daoist mandala. Selfishness is easy to establish. Not only is it enshrined in the thinking of nearly all religions and secular moral systems, but I wager that we all see it pretty clearly almost everyday.
Empathy, on the other hand, is a bit less of a given. Certainly it exists, but can someone really say that it is a near universal human trait. I think that you can, not through cataloging the good things people do, but rather by examining the bad ones. Consider, people will almost never intentionally do bad things to people that they see as equal to themselves. In order to do so, they must provide some justification to themselves as to why the other person deserves it or is in some way less of a person than they are. The central belief of nearly all negative prejudices is that the concerned group is "subhuman".
You can set up a situation, like the Milgram experiment, where other forces influence people to do bad things to those they consider equals. This almost invariably results in a great deal of emotional distress. Some of various conditions in the Milgram experiment involved changing the perception of the other as a suffering person (in some cases, giving the subject and confederate who was to be fake tortured time to get acquianted, in others making the pain caused more or less visible) showed results that suggest that this distress is engendered by transgressing our empathetic nature. Much of our intial understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder came from studying soldiers who escaped from their careful training in how to dehumanize the enemy and suffered the attendent mental breakdown. One of the unintended consequences of the Milgram experiment was that it gave us a window into a bsaic form of morality formation. In some of the cases, some subjects explained that they conceptualized the confederate as transgressing some rule, or looking for reasons to dislike him and be annoyed with him, so that he actually deserved what he got.
A similar reaction can be seen in the Robber's Cave experiment. The two groups of boys (or girls in other permutations) quickly form a ad-hoc morality that makes the competing group out to be bad people. Oftentimes, they'll sieze upon some irrelevant and previously morally neutral aspect of the other group as an excuse to demonize them. This moral system is almost always attended by a dehumanization where they recognize the diversity of individuals in their own group but insist that the other group is largely homogenous. Later, wehn the groups are brought together by the impinging super-ordinate threat, this moral system and view of the others as being all the same go away.
Extrinsic morality often works like this. It provides a rationale for treating people as less than human. It separates the world into groups. The people like you who you can trust and you can help and the people who it's okay to screw over. This sort of morality, rather than being the device by which we are encouraged to behave, instead serves the purpose of helping us supress and overcome our natural empathetic urges. Those who humans would destroy, they first make not human anymore.
As I've shown, oftentimes this desire to do bad things comes before the formation of morality. It is what drives it.
Consider empathy again, and the highest commandment regarding treatment of others given by Jesus "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." It's the same thing. The central Christian commandment should be to always act with empathy. Why then have Christians historically been so darn bad at it?
In large part, it comes from the followup to Jesus's statement, i.e. "Master, who is my neighbor?" The biblical message was, I think, very clear, but the question got murky as soon as theologians needed reasons to justify doing bad things to people they wanted to do bad things to. It's not fair to lay this all at one person's door, as it was a vast cultural tendency, but a central choice point came with Augustine. One of the central issue of this time period was Christianity's growing power as it was becoming integrated into the Roman society. The pacifism Jesus preached didn't work for a religion or a culture that had become accustomed to expanding through the use of force. One of the concepts Augustine codified was the idea of a just war. While still affirming that an individual had a obligation to pacifism, Augustine posited that it was a ruler's job to strive for justice, first through peaceful means, and failing that, using violent ones. This idea was adopted very quickly and the idea of injustice soon took on the meaning of "not being Christian, or the right type of Christian". To my way of thinking, it's no suprise that Augustine was the one who also codified the idea of Original Sin and that of anyone who was not Christian was doomed to eternal torment.
But weren't there people who were commited to the ideals of pacifism? Of course there were. During the first 3 centuries, Christianity had an enormous number of interpretations. There are some indications that the sects that didn't feel such a strong commitment to pacifism killed some of the others who did and destroyed their writings. Makes sense. We know that this is what happened to some of sects that insisted on what became labeled as the Pelagian heresy.
If you take a look at institutional psychology, you'll find that there is a tendency for any organization to, over time, end up with a certain power-oriented type of person in their leading positions. This tends to not be a great thing for the organization. For one thing, the power-oriented person is usually good at obtaining and maintaining their power but not for much else. For another thing, these people tend to assume that other people have exactly the same motivations as they do. For one more, they tend to prefer things as simple as possible and favour mechanistic explanations and view other people as objects to be manipulated.
A partial cause of and result of this type of person in positions of power is the reward/punishment motivational structure. I imagine people are familiar with this. It's one of the central aspects to American business, religion, and education, along with so many other things. It's manifestation in psychology, behaviorism, is by far America's largest contribution to the field of psychology. It's one of the planks of our shared mythology. It also doesn't work.
We've known that for over forty years. People who set out to see how much we can improve task performance and persistence pretty consistently come back with the opposite result. Applying a reward/punishment structure leads to decreases in the quality of performance and the time people spend doing something.
Consider the classic example of a child who likes to play the piano. If you start rewarding him for playing the piano, you're likely to see a shift from the child enjoying it, throwing himself into, spending hours at it, to him playing just enough, both timewise and effortwise, to get his reward, without expressing much enjoyment of it, and, if you stop providing the reward, they stop playing.
The problem is, you've killed their motivation. Before, I talked about intrinsic versus extrinsic religion. Here we've got intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. My personl thinking is that intrinsic motivation is much more fragile in large part because it relies on constant outlays of effort and yields largely long term benefits. The extrinsic motivation can, in a person who doesn't have a very strong sense of self and attachment to the task, easily overcome this and recast the situation. Where before the person was doing it as something that grows out of himself and it's a form of play, now he's doing it because it's work assigned by someone else for which he will be rewarded or punished. The reward or punishment and getting it or avoiding it, respectively becomes the thing, and the person stops experimenting and learning and playing. There's an old joke about a man who got kids to stop taunting him by oferring to pay them per insult, then paying a little less, and then a little less. When he stopped paying them at all, the kids stopped insulting him, because he had successful cast the situation as them doing it for the reward.
In order to justify using this type of motivational system, people assume that people don't want to work and that children don't want to learn. They have to assume that the motivation to do these things aren't in them. But that's not true. Pre-school aged children delight in learning. It's pretty much what they do, all the time. Experietial Sampling Method (ESM) studies pioneered by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi show that despite people's understanding to the contrary, they enjoy work, especially when their work is meaningful, while the average emotion people have while watching tv is mild depression.
The main thing reward/punishment structures have going for them is that they seem almost designed for the way a power-oriented person sees the world. They confirm their power (or their authoritarian submission to the people who have power over them), they divide your subordinates and turn them against each other, so they're not gunning for you, they remove the focus from the actual thing being worked on and make understanding it irrelevant (all you need to do is wave the carrot and shake the stick), and it is a completely mechanistic process that let's you turn poeple into things.
Alternative motivational techniques that reverse each of these aspects have consistently shown, when properly applied, to be tremendously better. Children learn more and retain a love of learning. Employeee's productivity sky-rockets while sick days plummet (partially because they're actually healthier and partially because people look forward to going to work).
These same things transfer over into extrinsic morality. People come to believe that they have no empathy, that they must be forced to do good against their will. Meaning now comes to be seen as something that only exists outside (I shudder every time someone claims that without God life would have no meaning). They become innately suspicious of other people. They aren't engaged in the rules; they don't try to understand them, only to follow them. The energies that exist in them are blunted by an Ecclesiastical depressive outlook, but find release in the liberating action of attacking others. They become innately selfish and don't even come to realize that other people are like them.
You want to know why I think people, despite having a strong innate capacity for empathy and good, have been savage and bloodthirsty throughout history. That's it in a very brief, thumbnail sketch.
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posted
I don't know Tom. From my perspective, while we may not like each other that much and we have near completely opposite tastes in entertainment, if there were a simplistic Hatrack ideology poll, I think we'd fall into boxes pretty near each other.
And all this is really mostly a bump so that bev might see it.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Thanks for the bump. I only just now saw it.
I don't really think I disagree with what you have said here.
I suppose the question we must ask ourselves is this. What was it about the culture of the Europeans that caused the message of Christianity to be twisted so? I think we can all agree that you have to twist things in order to get hate messages from the New Testament. And it does seem pretty clear that many Christians have managed to do that.
So why did this happen? Is it because early on the scriptures were not allowed to be viewed by the common man, so they were distanced from the actual message? Is it because people just weren't ready to let themselves be that vulnerable, that truly good? Is it that people who were power-hungry saw the potential to further their agendas and used it to guilt people or seduce them into less than honorable paths?
Remember, I believe Christianity is true. I believe that it was nothing but goodness from the source. That people have used it for evil, for me, does not reflect Christianity at all. It reflects the twisted, mutated version that has all too often been taught and accepted by the masses.
Remember, as a Mormon, I believe there was a great apostacy where the true church was entirely lost from the earth and those trying to follow after it either stumbled in darkness or found some light of inspiration by trying to get closer to what was actually written in the Bible. You really don't have to sell me on the idea that Christianity was abused.
But I don't see how that is the fault of Christianity.
quote: People come to believe that they have no empathy, that they must be forced to do good against their will.
This would not be the case for me. I was just more selfish than I was empathetic. I saw the lack in myself and hated myself for it. Especially when I was brought up in a large family full of kind people to whom I was unkind. I was taught to be kind--by example. They were always willing to forgive and accept me. But I didn't feel empathy like they did. I began perceiving myself as a black sheep all on my own.
As I felt like an outcast in the world outside my family, I began to feel particularly empathetic towards outcasts. This feeling remains with me till today. My sense of empathy radiated out from there, maybe because I realized that everyone has an aspect of the outcast in them.
But mostly, I recognize that empathy is good, or I believe it to be. I have saught after it with a lot of energy--to the point where today one of my strongest motivations is to truly understand others.
posted
bev, But, as you suggested before, you and I are using different definitions of Christianity, or rather we're talking in very different scopes. I'm talking about as a concrete social entity and you're talking about an idealized platonic form. edit: I don't believe in this platonic form, or rather, I don't think it's relevant even if it exists. Christianity to me is what it was, what it is, and what I see it becoming. I don't have this ideal conception of it that I can judge it's present state against./edit
That's a common thing for Christians to do. The only thing is that you need to keep straight that this platonic form is not the state of christianity now. That confusion seems to me around as common as the inital idealized thing. That is, "Of course Christianity used to be bad, but now it's all pretty much fixed."
It's not my job to judge the validity of other people's faith qua faiths, nor do I have to capacity to do so. However, the impinging of that faith into the testable world is someting I can responsibly look at and talk about. And from a concrete, testable standpoint, I don't think you can support a statement that Christianity is all fixed.
One of the biggest things I think Christians could do to help this process along (besides approaching morality from a data-driven as opposed to theory driven perspective) is to acknowledge that this is true.
One thing that may not come across is that I have no intrinsic problem with Christianity, nor is it my main focus. My central concern is the social and mental health of the human species. As I said, I don't say these things because I don't like Christianity. I have problems with Christianity because I see these things in it. I'd be very happy if it turned into this mostly good organization. I just don't think that it is right now nor do I think that it's exactly heading that way.
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Many people tell me that Mormons aren't really Christians, and it is true that we are quite different from the mainstream. I am curious to know if my particular branch is "sick" with the weaknesses that trouble you in the mainstream.
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bev, It's not really my place to say. Despite what it may seem, the psychology of religion and religious isn't really a big interest of mine. Any observations I would make of LDS would be that of a somewhat informed but non-professional perspective and even then, most of the LDS interaction I've seen has been on this board. To me, you all don't shine like a diamond in a dark world, but what the heck do I know?
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Just as an aside, from a perspective of the god you worship, I can totally see how mainstream Christians wouldn't consider you like them. You call god by the same names and regard some of the same stuff as from him, but your god is a fundamentally different type of being than theirs. In a lot of ways, their theological perspective is closer to Muslims and Jews than it is to you. To me it doesn't really matter, but no doubt you've seen some of the in-group/out-group effects that comes from them considering you on their team or not.
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