John Hunt

I'm less optimistic. Fewer wars, sure. But it only takes one wrong finger on the button....apparently we were minutes away from war in the Cuban missile crisis, which would have given a quite different historical outlook on life expectancy in the 20th c etc... And climate change is the big one. I can't see that we're doing remotely enough to avoid it, and the big tech solutions will not arrive in time. Actually, I'm not sure that even that is the case, in terms of the middle class - I'm under the impression that median incomes have been declining or static for decades, and the rewards have gone to the top 1%. And that the decline of the middle class and the middle ground has led to the rise of populism. (Talking mostly about the USA here).

I don't know what the bar should look like. But I think a starting point would be that if you have a public site, you are responsible for what is said on it, if it breaks the law. And I realize that there's little limit on what you can legally say in the US compared to other Western democracies, but that could be a start.

That's the most moving post I've seen for a long time anywhere.

"Most science today has become a religion where we now have a priesthood of scientists , educators , who reside in there ivory towers of higher education. Never questioning their beliefs on materialism and putting down others who doNow materialism science is the same closed system as the Catholic church was in Europe killing anyone who went against their doctrine just as science today crucifies anyone who opposes their beliefs that there is nothing more than the material world " Honestly, this kind of stuff simply isn't true. Science is not a religion. It proceeds on the basis of the best evidence available, and as we learn more, it changes our understanding. Einstein's law of relativity has expanded on Newton's law of gravity, but the latter still makes sense, is still accepted. I'm not sure you understand anything about science - and OK, I'm in the same boat, but I know a bit about the principles behind it.

Not sure about the science here, but the psychology - sure - I need to practice it more.

Wouldn't disagree with any of that. And by "paganism" I meant broadly pretty much all belief before it getting started getting formalized into "religions." Out of interest, which country/area do you live in? (Apologies of course if that's an an inappropriate question).

Good question. I grew up in a very evangelical household, and spent a couple of years involved with an organization called Navigators, which was basically about going around converting people. I still think of myself as Christian, though most Christians would probably call me a panentheist. I feel more communality with some Sufis, Buddhists etc. Even paganism - after all, it’s by far the oldest religious tradition, alongside which Christianity is scarcely a blip; it’s based on a respect for Nature, which we’re all going to have to adopt if civilization is going to survive; it’s decentralized to the point where you can pretty much make up your own gods and goddesses, but then that’s what we’ve always been doing…). When I see the word "evangelical" now, I can't help thinking of some of those banners the mob were carrying that stormed the Capitol, saying "Jesus is my Savior and Trump is my President." And the words that come to mind are "delusional" and "dangerous."

Similarly, I've checked Christian forums over the last month or two, and gone thrown off a couple of them because I don't believe in the Trinity. The abiding image in my mind from the last month is protestors/insurrectionists waving banners/confederate flags as they stormed the Capitol that said "Jesus is my lord, Trump is my president".

Amen.

Can't argue with that. was just trying to get a conversation started.

Seems to me that Jesus gave two "great commandments", (Matthew 22:35-40, Mark 12:28-312, Luke 10:25-28, etc), which were to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. The rest, basically, is waffle. For me, the idea of God is pretty elastic. As it is for the Church, from fundamentalists on the one hand to Quakers and Unitarians on the other (where you don't really need to believe in any kind of God at all).

Quite true, but you can only interpret your experience through the prism of what you already know/believe. A good Christian in America would be a good Muslim if they'd been born in Saudi Arabia, and vice versa. Brain scans suggest that heightened religious experience is the same whatever god/spirit/ideology you believe in.

I'm new here, and haven't figured out how it works yet, and am hopeless with websites etc....more of a quill pen and paper kind of guy. I haven't really been on any forums till the last couple of months, and have been searching for spaces where "liberal/progressive" Christians congregate, but haven't really found anywhere, apart from this place.

Agree with that completely. But those are long term goals, and in the short term I can envisage leaving home for higher education reducing, rather than increasing. Too expensive. And online spaces are increasingly dominated by extremes. So what are the "hooks" which would get people interested in an intelligent conversation and find help from a liberal Christian perspective....

Perhaps science and religion just seem oppositional, because so many Christians refuse to accept the place of science. For instance - the world is a sphere, not flat; it's billions of years old, rather than 6,000 or so; humanity is hundreds of thousands of years old, not 10,000; and life evolves. These are "facts," in terms of science - our understanding of them will develop, but they are not unproved hypotheses. But one in six Americans believe the world is a flat disc (14 references in the OT), and among millennials that's one in three. A quarter still believe the sun circles the earth. Half the population, according to consistent Gallup polls over the last 20 years, believe that God created man in the last 10,000 years. Two thirds think creationism more likely than evolution. Only 10% believe God had no direct involvement. What kind of things could be said to bridge the gap?

There was a thoughtful post recently, which got me thinking, that included the phrase "who controls the media controls the narrative." Which of course is broadly true - around the world new autocrats' first step is to seize control of the media. Might I respectfully suggest an alternative view though, that perhaps current political problems are because the media are out of control. I think it was back in 1987 that Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which required media to report both sides of an argument, if they weren't just reporting straight news. Then in 1991 web servers became publicly available. Local news reporting, providing verifiable information about your own community (but was expensive because you had to pay people to find and write about it, rather than just provide a platform for people to say whatever they wanted), gradually started to disappear. People started to retreat into their own news bubbles, being fed whatever confirmed their prejudices (on both sides, sure). Huge corporations now make vast profits from algorithmically privileging deliberate disinformation. They have no legal liability for the consequences of what they publish. The situation is particularly acute in the USA because of the extreme freedom of speech - much of the "hate speech" communicated through social media there would be illegal in most other Western democracies, as I understand it. In fact, much of what would fall under that category is constitutionally protected. Deregulation has led to a situation where democracy is ceasing to function. Coming up to half the electorate now believes that this election - in contrast to all the others - was stolen. Even in Republican states where the election officials completely deny that. A significant proportion of the electorate is now never going to believe in an election result again, if they don't like the outcome. Anything they don't want to hear - it's "fake news." Easier to believe in conspiracy theories like Covid is a hoax, or no worse than the flu, or that the government is actually run by Satan-worshiping pedophiles, than in a fair election. Given that this is a "christian" site, of whatever sort, it's a particularly relevant issue. Protestors/rioters/seditionists, whatever you want to call them, stormed the Capitol with some banners saying "Jesus is my savior and Trump is my president." Both, in my opinion, based on hearsay, rather than "truth." There is no "evidence," of the kind that would be allowed into a courtroom, that Jesus is the savior of the world, any more than there is of the election being stolen. But the genie is out of the bottle. Trump said many times over, before the election, that if he lost, it could only be because it was rigged. And he still says it was. Most Christians believe him. So it's unlikely they'll ever accept a Democratic president again. So it's hard to see where "unity" is going to come from. "Accountability," getting some regulation into these publishing platforms, is the only way forward that I can see.

Three days ago the US Joint Chiefs of Staff felt it necessary to write a letter, unprecedented in its nature, confirming the inauguration of Biden as President - https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol/2021/01/12/956170188/joint-chiefs-remind-u-s-forces-that-they-defend-the-constitution They refer to "sedition and insurrection". Some of the rioters had body armor, handcuffs, bombs, they built a gallows. 5 people died. A policeman was battered to death. It was planned - some rioters were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with "Civil War 6th January". The riot was incited by Trump. He has not condemned the rioters ("We love you. You're very special"). He still insists the election was stolen, despite not a scrap of evidence (rather than lies and hearsay) being produced. The world looks on in horror/despair (apart from autocrat and enemies who are lapping it up). Democracy in the USA has been pushed to the brink. 20,000 of the National Guard are being moved into Washington, to protect the inauguration. There is such a concern about Trump's followers in the police and the Guard that a former director of the FBI has said that counter-snipers are going to be in place, to watch the snipers protecting Biden. What charges are likely to be bought against the rioters and those who incited them? Evidence is still emerging about the extent of the planning that went into it, and who was responsible - this is a decent summary of possible charges- https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/08/how-to-investigate-charge-capitol-rioters-sedition-prosecutors-roundup-456127 I don't see how it's possible to just sweep this under the carpet, as if nothing serious went wrong here. That would be the childlike thing to do. It just encourages it to happen again. It would effectively be saying "democracy doesn't matter. The constitution doesn't matter. It's all up for a power grab, by those who have the nerve to do it." Of course the divisiveness isn't over. But to paper over this, to give in to constant lies and bullying - to suggest that words and actions like these don't have consequences - I think that's the route to authoritarianism and a failed state.

Thought I'd been following the US election closely, and that claims pf problems with mail-in ballots were just made by people who didn't really understand the process or didn't want to or were prepared to lie about it, so thought I'd double check; Here's a useful summary of who has actually been accused of fraud in the 2020 election, seems to be mostly Republicans -https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/voter-fraud-investigations-2020/2020/12/22/bdbe541c-42de-11eb-b0e4-0f182923a025_story.html And a summary of the overall claims/rebuttals- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2020-55016029 The members of Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee – Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) - released the following statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history....." The big, attempted fraud was by the President; quoting from a phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State (Republican) “I just want to find 11,780 votes". Who knows how many similar calls he made. I'm at the opposite kind of pole from Schwarzenegger's politics, but thought he did a good job here- https://twitter.com/Schwarzenegger?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author

Remember Trump's tweet "Liberate Michigan"? Encouraging protestors who opposed Covid restrictions? Two weeks later, armed demonstrators invaded the statehouse. Trying to keep the churches open? Interesting that "Spanish flu" hit rural conservative areas worse, because priests encouraged everyone to come to church, take mass and spread the virus around. The Trump rallies had the same effect, "superspreader" events. Which is why many sensible people used mail ballots. Which is why Trump said they shouldn't be counted. It led to the line of argument "the election must have been rigged, look at how many tens of thousands of people came out to support Trump, Biden could only get dozens". And we end up with 70% or so of Republicans believing the election was fraudulent, for which there isn't a scrap of evidence, just rumor and hearsay. Which is why it was thrown out of 60 courts. But we end up with a divided country, with a good proportion of the population believing conspiracy fantasies. I think it's hard to see how a leader could have done worse.

Sure Joseph. (Btw I hope I'm getting this reply thing right, systems-wise). I do look at the figures per head of population,and take the kind of factors you're talking about into account. Very broadly speaking, I figure that countries in the East, like South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, have outperformed countries in the west like the USA, UK, Italy etc by factors of 10. Take Vietnam for instance. Coming up to 100 million population. They have a 1000 mile border with China. They have big cities...Hanoi is 8 million+. They've had 3 dozen deaths (and experts don't seriously doubt the veracity of the figures). OK, it's an authoritarian state. I know a bit about this one though, because we have neighbors who went on a 3 week cycling holiday in Vietnam back in February. They were temperature checked every time they went into a restuarant or hotel, several times a day. Everyone wore face masks in public. Coming back to the UK, to Heathrow, they were staggered to be standing in queues with no social distancing or checks of any kind (and incredibly, that still seems to be the case). And this wasn't "forced", in Vietnam - everyone was involved, committed, to keeping the virus out of the country. So maybe the Vietnamese are just a bit like sheep? Doing what the government tells them? Personally, I think it has more to do with the communitarian nature of religion in the east. The family, neighbors, social units - they're important. Individual success - not so much so (or at least not if it's at the expense of the community). So when it comes to "I doubt anyone could have done better" I'm afraid I just can't see the rationale for that. And I think the UK record is disastrous - too little, too late. Which is why we have the highest death toll in Europe, and ambulances are queuing up outside the hospitals (and we have the advantage of being an island....we could have kept it out....). And it's a bit of a giveaway that the big countries that are doing the worst - the US, UK, Brazil - all the presidents/PM's have come down with Covid as well, because they never really took it seriously enough - "it's a hoax", "it's like the flu", "it's going to go away", etc. "its the legitamacy of the ballots" - not even going there....I've read/listened to a lot about the US election, and I don't know anyone who's genuinely serious, honest and knowledgable, Democrat or Republican, who is still peddling the "election was fraudulent" conspiracy theory. "Perhaps they are seeing something the media doesn't report? Perhaps free elections in the US are not as free as originally thought in schools or by past propaganda and many people are now realizing it?" Comments like this really do need some kind of evidence, rather than relying on hearsay and conspiracy theories. " i don't understand why Democrats are worried about a recount or challenges." I don't see how they are. The Georgia count, for instance, went through three recounts. Under a Republican official, Brad Rraffensberger, who'd voted for Trump and contributed financially to his campaign. And with stood the pressure of an hour long phone call from the president to ""I just want to find 11,780 votes," - his words. "The number of mail in ballots were soo great" Of course they were. 350,000 Americans have unnecessarily died because of Covid. If the country had taken the right precautions at the right time, like countries in the east - South Korea, Taiwan etc...it should have been more like 5000.

"Perhaps they are seeing something the media doesn't report? Perhaps free elections in the US are not as free as originally thought in schools or by past propaganda and many people are now realizing it?" Comments like this really do need some kind of evidence, rather than relying on hearsay and conspiracy theories. " i don't understand why Democrats are worried about a recount or challenges." I don't see how they are. The Georgia count, for instance, went through three recounts. Under a Republican official, Brad Rraffensberger, who'd voted for Trump and contributed financially to his campaign. And with stood the pressure of an hour long phone call from the president to ""I just want to find 11,780 votes," - his words. "The number of mail in ballots were soo great" Of course they were. 350,000 Americans have unnecessarily died because of Covid. If the country had taken the right precautions at the right time, like countries in the east - South Korea, Taiwan etc...it should have been more like 5000.

"I'm not sure the US is out of the woods yet, with the way Trump is behaving!" Looks certain today that he's going to go, after the Capitol riot/insurrection. But what he stands for, and he's given voice to, and constantly amplifies - the racism and fascism at the heart of what so many Americans actually think/believe, in their hearts - I think it will decades to undo that kind of damage. If it ever happens.

"But is there a need to transcend self? Can we not just accept that 'self' is part of the 'all' and that's that?" Well, that's the nub of it. But what's the "self"? We have these different parts of the brain, from the reptilian through to the mammalian. The concept of the individual "self", acting for its own interests, rather than on behalf of biological drives to support the family/species, is an odd one, in nature. The self is the one thing that is not part of the "all". But I may be talking off the top of my head here. I'm no biologist.

There's a vast amount of stuff on the internet about this. Check out Quora. Look at the 60 or so court appearances where Trumps lawyers have had their claims rejected out of hand (often by republican judges), basically, because all the affidavits are hearsay. Look at the hour long phone call of a day or so back when Trump tries to intimidate the Secretary of State of Georgia into finding him another 11,000 votes. Read the comments by election officials (often Republican) that these were the most secure elections in American history. Look at the comments like those from General flyn (pardoned by Trump) encouraging him to declare martial law to overturn the election results. It's scary how close the USA came to becoming an autocracy.

I agree. I think it's why it will always be with us, in some form. It’s part of self-awareness. Religious belief involves defining what the “self” is, and is not. The practice of religion is transcending it. There’s a score or so of other Homo cousins we’ve discovered in the last half-century, apart from the Neanderthals, most of whom trod the earth for longer than we have (and it’s hard to see us surviving as long as they did – indeed, it’s thought today that we nearly went extinct 70,000 years ago, after the Toba supervolcanic eruption, which bought the population of Homo sapiens down to around five to ten thousand individuals), God must have been in the frame for them too, surely? You don’t stop loving children because they turned out a bit differently than the way you wanted them to? But they would have described Him differently. For instance, the ultimate religious act in most traditions of Homo sapiens has been to sacrifice an individual for the common good, to drink his/her blood and eat their flesh (the ghostly descendant of this practice survives in Holy Communion; “Take, eat; this is my body,” Matthew 26:26). But if it had been Homo robustus (vegetarians who dug for roots rather than omnivorous scavengers like ourselves, who will eat pretty much anything nowadays, however bad for us, apart from the nutritious insects that probably formed a good proportion of our diet in times past) who had survived rather than Homo sapiens, there would have been a quite different idea of how to please God. We eat and sacrifice flesh and see God’s offering of His Son as a lamb. So lamb is high on the menu. Unfortunately they take up a lot of space, being grazers on lush grass, like cattle, which is why we’ve become more dependent on chicken, and to a lesser extent pork, compared to the Hebrews (nomadic wanderers over poor pasture, more suited to goats). But maybe Homo robustus would have seen Him as a plant. Which seems more logical. Predators eat other mammals, but, by definition, the vast majority live on plants, so we’re all dependent on them. Our religion is shaped by our biology, by our stomachs, even before culture has its say.