From: sieferme@stein.u.washington.edu (Eric Sieferman)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: Nailing Christianity: Sufficient Support for Atheism?
Date: 5 Jan 93 16:56:23 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
NNTP-Posting-Host: stein.u.washington.edu

In article <C0CDAF.LKF.1@cs.cmu.edu> rhuss+@EDRC.CMU.EDU (Robert Huss) writes:
>
>	There is a great deal of debunking of Christianity going on
>on this group, but is this really sufficient grounds for Atheism?  
>Nailing the inconsistencies in Christianity certainly gives enough
>support to show that it isn't the One Truth as far as religions go,
>but that really doesn't give us enough to deny the existence of a god.

No, but it sure helps.  Our "debunking" of xtianity is due to the
fact that it is the religion with which most of us are most
familiar.  Many of the traits of xtianity which we criticize
(eg, reliance on faith and adherence to a static tradition)
are shared by many other religions, so xtianity is only meant
to be a case study.

Plus, bashing xtianity is so damn easy!

>	It is evident that all of the religions there are have certain
>inconsitencies within them.  The followers of any given religion may refute
>that the inconsitencies aren't important, but they undeniably exist.

Evident to you and me, but thousands (millions?) of people believe
that there are no inconsistencies in the bible; word of God,
don't y'know.

>I've 
>considered this proof enough that no single religion is exclusively right.
>But these discrepencies aren't really enough to disproove the existence of 
>god.  

It's sufficient to justify no belief in any gods, which
is all most of us claim.  "Disproof" is not our business.

>	However, I think maybe by looking at each religion, it's origins, 
>and it's errors, that we can see that the errors are due to the
>nature of the society in which the religion grew.  Most of the errors or
>discrepencies in the Bible show that chauvanistic men wrote it, and that 
>the differences between people were used to show superiority of one set
>of people over another.

In our enlightened age, we now know that women are just as
capable of making logical and factual errors as men.

>Now, defenders of the Bible will defend this
>by saying that the Word of God was given to these men, and they interpreted
>it, and wrote it down.  Therefore, they tainted the word of God with their
>own humanity.  
>	I'm not very schooled in other religions, but I do know that the 
>Islamic faith supports the culture in most Islamic country's and it is likely
>that the culture was similar when the Koran was written.  
>	Christianity is really the only religion to extricate itself from
>the society in which it began.

Buddhism was founded in India, but counts its greatest number
of followers in other parts of Asia.  The most populous
Islamic nation is Indonesia, which is anything but Arab.
Judaism has existed, even flourished, in numerous civilizations.
Your analysis is seriously flawed.  Please take a course
in cultural geography.

>This accents the affect that the originators
>of the Bible had on Christianity.  Hinduism, Buddism, Confusionism, Islam, etc..
>all pretty much remained in the area where they formed.  This makes it seem
>like the religion forms the culture.

Huh?  The religion is part of the culture, and they evolve together.

>However, Christianity has changed greatly
>in the past few hundred years, while the Bible has not changed.  This shows
>that the culture forms the religion, not the other way around.

If your observation is that religious beliefs change as other
aspects of culture change, this is correct (cultural materialism, anyone?).
If you are extending this observation into a causal principal
of culture -> religion, you have gone too far.

>	Is this enough to say that humans create religion, or just enough
>to say that we shape it to our society?  Is debunking religions enough to
>disprove God?  I'd like to hear what others have to say about this.

It is entertaining to see how certain seemingly weird religious
beliefs actually make sense in the broader context of a culture;
anthropologists do this very well.  Religions are creations of
humans; most atheists claim that the idea of god is also
a human creation.

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