Theology is bullshit.

[laconicsax]

That is all.

[Tobin S.]

1. "Religion is all bunk." Thomas Edison

[laconicsax]

2. And theology is the practice of sorting out the inner workings of non-existent phenomena.

I wish someone would pay me a steady salary to bullshit like that.

Maybe the sensation of Cap'n Crunch cereal cutting the roof of your mouth is God's way of telling you that He wants you to eat Lucky Charms instead. This is well supported by scripture, namely the books of Joshua, Ester, Numbers, and the Gospel according to Mark. For a mere six-figure advance, I'll publish this groundbreaking theology.

[onager]

3. Some of my favorite quotes about theology.

All from H.L. Mencken.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

-----------------------------

The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the Popes preached in the Thirteenth Century, but this yielding is always done grudgingly, and thus lingers a good while behind the event. So far as I am aware, even the most liberal theologian of today still gags at scientific concepts that were already commonplaces in my schooldays.

Thus such a thing as a truly enlightened Christian is hard to imagine. Either he is enlightened or he is Christian, and the louder he protests that he is the former the more apparent it becomes that he is really the latter.

(Mencken obviously shot thru a rip in time and was reading R/T when he wrote that one...)

A Catholic priest who devotes himself to seismology or some other such safe science may become a competent technician and hence a useful man, but it is ridiculous to call him a scientist so long as he still believes in the virgin birth, the atonement or transubstantiation.
-----------------------------

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence.

The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities. The theologians, taking one with another, are adept logicians, but every now and then they have to resort to sophistries so obvious that their whole case takes on an air of the ridiculous.

Even the most logical religion starts out with patently false assumptions. It is often argued in support of this or that one that men are so devoted to it that they are willing to die for it. That, of course, is as silly as the Santa Claus proof. Other men are just as devoted to manifestly false religions, and just as willing to die for them.

Every theologian spends a large part of his time and energy trying to prove that religions for which multitudes of honest men have fought and died are false, wicked, and against God.
-----------------------------

The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic.

It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms, religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. While we're on Mencken - some of his thoughts on discourse with the religious

written after the Scopes trial, that I saw quoted on a blog a few days ago Bear in mind R/T:

Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World's contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy.

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.

I do not know how many Americans entertain the ideas defended so ineptly by poor Bryan, but probably the number is very large. They are preached once a week in at least a hundred thousand rural churches, and they are heard too in the meaner quarters of the great cities. Nevertheless, though they are thus held to be sound by millions, these ideas remain mere rubbish. Not only are they not supported by the known facts; they are in direct contravention of the known facts. No man whose information is sound and whose mind functions normally can conceivably credit them. They are the products of ignorance and stupidity, either or both.

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/menck05.htm#SCOPESC

[onager]

5. Thanks! Sounds like Hitchens, doesn't it?

Maybe Mencken was a New Atheist...

He also wrote this, which I've always liked for its refreshing bluntness:

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected...

(This) convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency.

That they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly.

Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.

[Odin2005]

6. Theology = making shit up.

[laconicsax]

7. It's more nuanced than that.

The crazy guy by the transit station downtown makes shit up. Theologians make up shit with reference material.

[darkstar3]

8. That points to each other.

Theology: Argumentative logical circle-jerking.

[laconicsax]

9. If an argument is based on false premises, is it really logical?

[darkstar3]

11. Good point.

Perhaps instead of the word "logical" I should have used "referential." I shouldn't post while half-conscious...

[TZ]

10. Does anybody remember...

There was an article in Time I think about a book that showed how Rabbi's and other religious figures REWROTE parts of the bible to make it agree with relgious political thinking of different eras? I remember reading it and I would LOVE to post it in R/T as an example of how full of wholes the Bible is, that at best it should be taken only as a guide.