Had to answer some questions by Christians about Christianity.

[Deep13]

Well the boss is away today and the secretaries were talking about their various church experiences. One of them, a Baptist, wanted to give a Catholic's friend's kid a Bible as a 1st communion gift. (Yeah, how original.) She was perplexed to find that Catholics use a different translation than Baptists. So she didn't get one because she could not give a Bible that she doesn't believe in. (It's not for you!) Anyway, none of them, including the one Catholic knew what the Catholic Bible was.

I told them the Catholic Bible was called the Vulgate, was written in Latin and its American English version is called the New American Bible.

This Baptist woman was also perplexed by communion differences between Baptists and Catholics. Said something to the effect that the Catholic method was not how Jesus said to do it in the King James Bible. I noted that Catholic authority was based on apostolic succession with the pope standing in for JC rather than literal, scriptural authority.

So why the hell don't Christians by and large not know anything about their own goddamn religion?

[onager]

1. You're replaying my childhood

I was raised as a Southern Baptist. Your co-worker's level of knowledge is about par for the course.

The one thing Baptists know about their religion...and I heard this a million times when I was a kid...is that it was founded by John The Baptist. Which is, of course, completely wrong.

Baptists used to have one good thing going for them: they were absolutely devout believers in the separation of church and state. Probably the result of their ancestors being drowned in Lake Geneva by John Calvin's boys.

Unfortunately, the Southern Baptist Convention threw out that quaint notion once the Falwellians took over, around 1980. Now they want all the commingling of church and state they can get.

One of my high-school friends is a Southern Baptist preacher in South Carolina. He told me once about his extreme frustration with the takeover of the SBC. But the way he explained it, it's like many other American organizations for the past 20-odd years: the Fundies took over the leadership and don't appoint anyone to office who's more liberal than Cotton Mather.

Communion? In our church, it was called "The Lord's Supper." I'd guess the word "communion" smacked too much of Popery. :-)

Church members could eat the Lord's Supper only after baptism, which for me was at age 9. The ceremony took place once a month. The ushers passed around a plate of unleavened bread, followed by trays of shot glasses filled with grape juice. That was to make sure nobody got drunk in church.

You know, like the Catholics did.

:rofl:

(The nearest Catholic church to us was about 20 miles away, suspiciously near a college. In my neck o' the woods, a Jew would have been about as common as a Martian.)

[Warpy]

2. The only way to maintain belief is not to look at it too closely

I often say my career as a skeptic began at the age of 2 when I pulled the beard off a department store Santa. I looked too closely and saw behind the mask and it was all over.

Refusing to examine any part of it means they won't ask uncomfortable questions neither they nor anyone else has answers to.

[YankeyMCC]

3. For most people it's just following tradition

it isn't about self-examination or examining what system of ethics they want to follow, just an assumption of tradition from the previous generation.

[Deep13]

4. Not for this one.

She listens to Baptist radio in order to "learn" things.

[YankeyMCC]

5. Well there you go

Learning is dangerous! Leads to Atheism. ;)

[and-justice-for-all]

6. If they were to sit down and actually observe other

religions, it would only confure them. Fuck, their heads might just explode.

It would be a good idea to have them all look at each other religious practices, I bet it would send a very large number to the Atheist table.

[Hoooweee]

7. i have the same type of moments every semester

when I teach World History since 1500. I live in the Bible Belt and my students wearing Jesus swag have absolutely no idea about the history of Christianity. It's even more fun in the history pre-1500 class when they learn that the gospels weren't written until decades after the supposed events too place happened, but were mostly passed down orally and that by the time of the ecumenical councils in the three hundreds C.E, there were literally dozens of versions of the gospels and that most of what was turned into what is now known as "the Bible" was a matter of deciding on what parts (which could have potentially been the factual stories)were to be thrown out.


Nestorian Christians wig them out even more.

[NMMNG]

8. Go over to Yahoo! Answers some day.

Most of the Christians don't know jack sh*t about the Bible or their religion, then ask stupid things like "why do atheists think they know anything about the Bible and Christianity?".

Um, maybe because so many people are atheists because they learned so much about the Bible and Christianity? (They vacillate between having no clue that many atheists are former Christians and being unable to fathom why any Christian would stray from the path if they were a "real" Christian. )

In other words, it's rather like our R&T.