On 5-7-2009 3:38, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Yeah, this is the, "You don't understand the *deep* arguments, so you 
> argue about the shallow ones which no one believes.", assertion. Its 
> made *a lot* by two sorts of people: 1) Those that have no concept what 
> the deeper issues are, but haven't observed believers around them making 
> the stupid arguments that are being attacked, **often** due to being 
> European, and 2) believers that want to side track the issue, without 
> actually bothering to say what those deeper issues are. The sad thing 
> is, there are no deeper issues. A while back someone asked a number of 
> "prominent" religious scholars, including European ones, what they 
> believed the deeper issues of their religion where. They inexplicably 
> babbled 10 or so things they claimed where "huge" issues, ranging from 
> creation vs. evolution, to whether or not someone can *be* moral without 
> their own god and following his Bible, etc. In other words, their 
> "deeper issues" where precisely the nonsensical stuff that everyone from 
> Dawkins to you non-religious neighbor might complain about with 
> religion, and precisely the arguments, ideas, concepts, and/or bad 
> reasoning that believers always insist, "Miss the issue, because they 
> are dealing with the shallow matters, not the *deeper* and more 
> important things that people with **real knowledge** of religion think 
> about."
> 
> There is a subset of scholar that "do" imagine themselves thinking on 
> deeper matters, and will tell you that they don't think, can't imagine, 
> and simply refuse to believe, that 90% of the other people that call 
> themselves Christian all believe such *silly* things as god watching 
> them all the time, answering their prayers, like a customer service 
> desk, or spending all his time tinkering with things to make sure the 
> universe happens the way its supposed to. These people are delusional in 
> an entirely odd way. They deny the very ideas and concepts that 90% of 
> Christianity ***do*** believe in, yet, when asked what their "deeper 
> concepts" are... well, lets just say that they don't have answers, and 
> their questions just wander around until they run aground on the same 
> bad ideas and false premises that everyone else does, leaving them 
> looking like the very people they insist, "don't exist".
> 
> It would be rather funny, if it wasn't so sad, or dangerous. I mean, how 
> do you plan to fight the supposed "false(r?)" perceptions, when you, as 
> some high and mighty scholar, deny that the majority of people hold any 
> of them in the first place? When they deny that "they" hold them, 
> because it would contradict their claim that they actually do more than 
> circular logic, designed to mask the very things they insist they don't 
> subscribe to. If they admit that the unmasks, crazy, version is 
> dangerous and wrong, how do you fight it, when all your doing is 
> supporting a masked version of the same thing, "while" insisting that 
> most people don't follow the crazy unmasked version? Talk about 
> dissonance...
> 

I think there may be deeper issues, only those can be fundamentally 
different for different persons. For a gnostic it is totally different 
than for a true Roman Catholic or for a member of a pentecostal church 
or...
Like you I noticed that devout christians sometimes change a lot when 
they study theology. Often the 'God' becomes more abstract and/or their 
believe becomes more personal or gnostic. That is not strange, but it 
may result in a gap with the 'lay-man'. I don't have a problem with 
that, but it may appear hypocritical in certain circumstances.
As long as we take one another's religion serious and don't try to make 
fun of what differs from what we believe, there should not be a problem. 
This video fails pathetically in that respect.

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