Also, which bullet wrapper did you finally decide on?

I think you’ve gotten the correct gist of what I meant by “oppressive culture”. To clarify: I was referring to the church as an institution, rather than individual churches, or churches in general. I gather that individual churches have enough independence that they don’t have to preach the ‘party line’, so to speak, and you’re right that directly telling people “Stop doing X or you’ll go to hell” would be counter-productive.

Even without explicit threats however, you can still tell people how to think. If they don’t think that way, then they must be ‘sinning’. Sure, they could ask forgiveness, but they’re still going to be left with the guilt that they’ve somehow wronged Christ (never mind whoever else they may have affected). And so they try not to think that way anymore. I would argue that the stick of immediate guilt is much stronger than the stick of distant, and abstract, hell, which can be avoided by asking for forgiveness anyway.

There will also be an effect of peer pressure within an individual church which makes it difficult to speak out against authority. This is by no means unique to religion of course. Authority by its nature creates this kind of environment – more often than not, if you disagree with the authority, then you’ll be wrong, right? They wouldn’t be in charge if they were wrong, surely. The difference here between the church and say, the workplace, is that the church teaches morals, which you will use as the basis of your behaviour, while the workplace teaches how to properly fill out your TPS form, which has a much more shallow effect.

How open to disagreement is a church? If your priest makes a point with a passage from the bible, do you feel able to question him about a contradicting passage? If he teaches a certain morality that you don’t necessarily agree with, do you feel free to debate him? I’m not talking about you asking him a question, and him giving you an answer, but rather a proper rational debate.

Oppression does not have to be in overt form, and this is why I used the phrase “oppressive culture”. The teachings of a church can be purely positive, but still foster an oppressive culture, if the negative aspects are not openly discussed.

I’m not really trying to refute your assertions here, I’ll leave that sort of thing to your future evidence and rationality-based posts, where arguments on both sides can be more direct. I just thought I would attempt to give you a better idea of what I meant by “oppressive culture”. Obviously it would have been difficult to fit all of this into 140 characters .

– Simon

PS. I have actually been ‘churched’ somewhat while I was in school in England. We were taught that Christmas should always be spelled with a capital C, and never ever X-mas, because Christmas is about Christ. Of course no mention was made to its roots in paganism. Anyone who didn’t agree with singing the weekly christian hymns, or reenacting the nativity play, was politely asked to leave for the rest of the assembly/class. Everything was kept positive of course, but free-thinking was hardly encouraged. This is just my brief experience of course, and I don’t put too much weight into it. You can still count me as one of the unchurched.

1) Tooth Fairy” vs “Divine Being”, and growing up. Once people gain the ability to reason properly, they realise the Tooth Fairy isn’t possible. They may continue to believe in God though, as reality and belief in God are consistent. Your challenge: come up with one inconsistency. Just one.

2) Existence of Free Will – which Dawkins completely dodged, saying its unimportant and complicated, but never refuting its existence. Free will is impossible without consciousness – impossible in this “physics simulator” view you mention…which brings us to…

3) Existence of Matter – This “Physics Simulator” has to come from somewhere. Yes, “Science is working on it”, and hopes to find an answer – but the leading hypothesis (that, by the way, cannot currently be refuted, it also cannot be proven) is that something or someone created it. What Quinn called “The Uncaused Cause”

4) The whole point about Dawkins going for pages about atrocities commited in the name of God, but playing down the atrocities commited by atheists against relious people. The fact that Dawkins disagrees with this is kinda weird, has he not read his own book? It’s a double standard if ever I saw one.

5) Evolutionary Scientists thinking they’re qualified to be talking theology – indeed, in Dawkins’ case, thinking he’s more qualified. Eg. “Everyone who doesn’t have the same view of the “Old Testament God” as me must not have read the Old Testament.” Bollocks, he’s come to his opinion of God before he’s read it, read it, and it agreed. Grats, he accused people of getting their morals using the same methodology. What was the point?

Finally, regarding the whole free will/physics simulator thing. You make a claim: “The universe is just a giant physics simulator”. Prove it. That’s a remarkable claim and, if you can prove that, then I’m sure you will win a prize of some sort, and people will be abandoning their religion in droves. Your faith in that statement is as bold as my faith in “The universe was created by a divine, personal being who loves us, despite our desire to go against him – to the point of sending His Son down to die on our behalf, so we might have a relationship with Him.” My statement has indicators too (much like G = g*M_1*M_2/(d^2) is an indicator of the universe being a physics simulator, for example).

If you want to find out about any of these indicators, any of this evidence (which I honestly doubt you will, but I hope you will), I’d be happy to go through them with you, or you could read some of the plethora of books available on the subject. One of the better ones is “Case for Creator” by Lee Strobel. By no means perfect, yes it contains some funky science which causes one to raise ones eyebrows, but most of it is good stuff, and shows you how much of faith is rooted in solid evidence.

Dawkins is quite correct that free will is not an important discussion in this case. The universe is just a giant physics simulator; your sense of self is an illusion and there is no absolute morality. Plainly there is no room for free will in the absolute sense, but clearly humans perceive that they have free will in the same way that we perceive that we are conscious beings. These truths don’t lend themselves to the argument because Quinn would reject them out of hand.