The reasoning ability of most of the indoctrinated christian world is atrocious. Most, not all, is rife with logical fallacy, nonsensical idioms, abstract metaphors, and worse: attributing false conceptions of personhood to what rightfully belong as objective arguments in the public domain.
Many people speak openly regarding things they understand little about as though they are experts, it shouldn’t happen. When someone openly expresses knowledge that is obviously ficticious, avoid them. People who cannot even keep their attention span long enough to comprehend complex argumentation and various lines of reasoning are in no position to even interpret the assertions. Yet they typically and without hesitancy skew the statements, hear one key aspect that resonates with them, and turn the entire thing into an obscurity to which benefits them by altering reality and perception of what was even asserted. These people, although human beings, must be excluded from a community that intends to utilize reason and understand one another on an intellectual basis.
Most of the Christian community has little desire to understand truth or reality. There must be action taken to do good…being stagnant or living in one’s own blissful mind like simpletons negates the ever-changing nature of worldly reality. It is a horrible tragedy when commonsense things result in deaths, injury, or mere lack of accomplishment, to which God takes the blame for human infidelity.
God is a purely metaphysical thing. The only time God was ever not metaphysical was when he came in the form of a man, aka Jesus. Nonetheless, God is not considered a metaphysical being, so the discussion of God (or things pertaining to God or Godliness) between secular and non-secular society is utterly bizarre.
“God” is a word that is essentially representative of human’s deifying every aspect of reality, physical and metaphysical. This act is a confusing one and has a strange effect on human social cohesion which actually can be made sense of to a large degree, a truth which gets diminished by psycho-spiritual thinking.
Simply put, it is impossible to have fully practical conversation about reality when metaphysical and obscure things are crowding up with reason and proven or accepted things. It is easy to sympathize with a person who becomes frustrated while making a rational argument using scientifically provable evidence or contribution to their logic debating a person who is lost in God-imagination mode. This is how toddlers “win” arguments with their parents.
To increase human civility and social cohesion (i.e. “make peace”), a certain level of reasoning and ability to interpret the logic of others is pretty much required if not at the least bit extremely helpful. Hence, I see lack of ability of the Christian domain to reason and communicate as a major hindrance of the bringing about of a more utopian world, reduction in inter-relational conflict, and the ability to overcome divisions for survival purposes…all at a time when the Earth is full of more people than ever, strained resources and heavy questioning of their allocation, and the most diverse populations in human history. It is of critical importance in a time such as this that people be developed intellectually, communicatively (this needs to be a legitimate word as used herein), with sound reasoning and comprehension of aspects of the human condition, as well as moral guidance not ruled by abstract rhetoric. That is not to say brief allegories or their compilations are not powerful teaching tools, but it means little in a world overrun by concepts well-understood and accurate by the scientific community who know with absolute certainty that modern mass-societies are characterized by a shift toward what they’ve termed individualization.
Understood properly, the most dangerous aspects of this could be overcome: complete lack of cohesiveness, complete sense of aimlessness, unfair distribution of blame among members of society for many, many ills from physical, medical, poverty, etc. to interpersonal like romantic or kinship loss. Many of these resulting from the fact that since the industrial revolution and quest for material wealth from a formerly impoverished world, the modern world is utterly ruled by financial systems and money like it is some sort of global savior providing everyone a ladder on Maslow’s pyramid…and their justifications of its propriety are endless.
Instinctually, most humans have a thing we might call a conscience. Yet, preaching morality to the masses in a state of social normlessness (“anomie” see Sociological definition) does nothing to improve their relations to one another and even less toward building a brighter future for them. Reproduction of the physical world into meaningful, usable structures and resources for human civilization tends to happen far more in a secular world. This is not supposed to be the case, but it is.
Indeed, it is only faux-Christians who pretend on Sundays to love God and really only worship God primarily for his protection of their bodies and material assets that actually do something beneficial to material conditions of the world, albeit ensuring themselves in a profitable transaction (as opposed to neutral).
A major problem is that this does little to unite humanity or provide pathways to engage in creating a more harmonious social order. It is contrary to the messages that Paul (or whoever) wrote that are part of the canonical New Testament. In fact, the text describes individualization and money-centricism as predictors of the apocalypse. “In the end of days, people will become lovers of selves and lovers of money.”
To whit, the entire world is precisely organized around financial systems. It’s as though Satan himself was using peoples desires for monetary gain and selfishness to organize a world ripe for his ultimate takeover. Environmental scientists concur about the state of human civilization as devastatingly destructive to the very ecosystems humanity needs to live, on a planet-wide basis. Its not hard to google endless literature that suggests impending environmental doom as humanity expands. Thus we have an earth-wide contradicting paradigm about how we ought to live and what progress means, and what the real value of a human baby is in this oblivious realm we have allowed fallacy to take over.
The logic applied to support scriptural assertions is varied, but overwhelmingly based in fallacy. The deluge is our prime example of this. Some geologists find evidence of massive flooding, occurring around periods of time that align with the story of Noah. NO GEOLOGISTS would assert that there was a planet wide flood. In all likelihood, the scriptures are exclusive to a population of people in a particular region that was overwhelmingly devastated by flood and isolated and unaware that their world was not, in fact, the entire earth, but their own perspective of it.
I know most theologians won’t like this, but their devotion to Biblical superiority does little to create peace and understanding when they defy reason and obvious truths about science. Nobody should be dumb enough to think rationale, logic, and pure reason are enough to save the world…we need meaning, unity, effort, and love. That does not mean people should be entitled to presume their interpretation of scripture is superior to the truth. Most of the discrepancies CAN be resolved amicably.
Refusing to engage in sharing the absolutely sacred history of humanity (the Bible being a central and astoundingly critical document to human progress, with a probable outcome of outlasting any current or future human doctrine) with modern thought and comprehension of what we know, displays a hostile insincerity of what its all about, shared existence and the fundamental advancement of truth. Science is nothing without human morality, intuition, motivation and drive toward something we might fairly progress as we understand it today, and scripture is nothing without reason and action based largely on human knowledge.
It is a new age, and the historicity of the deluge matters as much as the metaphysical firmament of human civilizations progression through time and space. The Titanic’s captains use of the phrase “godspeed” is equally as applicable to the happenings of our present world with private space conquest, faith and development of algorithmic dominance over our existence, post-modern forms of capitalism, and the new generations ability to deal with outdated systems, structures, and in a natural world that is under immense duress. Godspeed to all.