Why do christians limit their reading material of extra-biblical sources?

IAC: Let's do it this way Med Woman, you go google all the extra-Biblical information which I've cited in many of my posts, and then maybe you'll run across from where I got the info. If you think I'm going to sit here and type in every book and article which I've read through recent years, you're nuts.
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M*W: I did just that, and this is what I found in all your vast hundreds of thousands of extra-biblical research:

After the Flood, by William Cooper (accounts of dragons in the last 2000 years found all over the world and in "official government records.")

The Genesis Flood, by Henry M. Morris (no description)0

Cities in the Sea, by Nick Fleming, 1971. (megalithic ruins)

Starlight and Time, by Russell Humphries (gravitational time dilation during creation)

Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, by Charles Hapgood (ice age shorelines)

Bones of Contention, by Gary Cuozzo (a dentist who wrote that homo erectus and Neanderthals were humans)

The Children of the Sun, by Perry (no description).

Barely a handful, and NONE of these works involved biblical research by biblical scholars and archeologists.

My point stands. You do no extra-biblical reading or research. You claim to be a geologist, a graduate from Dartmouth College, and the works you've cited above all deal with your professional work. This is not what I was talking about, and you know it. You thought you could dodge this one, but you didn't. You might be a geologist, but you are no scholar in christianity.

Where are your hundreds of thousands of extra-biblical research?
 
samcdkey said:
In high schools.

If they are not taught ethics from a religious standpoint, are they taught it from a secular standpoint?

(PS My school for example taught a class in moral science using stories based on characters from all religions)
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Parents have the responsibility to teach ethics.
 
PJ: Medicine Woman:

He is a graduate from Dartmouth. I've called them up and checked.
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M*W: I don't doubt his professional knowledge, I doubt his scholarly research in christianity.
 
Medicine*Woman said:
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M*W: Could you provide your source for 80% of the American population is christian?
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'
Heres one:
Eighty-three percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. Most of the rest, 13 percent, have no religion. That leaves just 4 percent as adherents of all non-Christian religions combined — Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and a smattering of individual mentions. http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/beliefnet_poll_010718.html
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another, but this one is mostly about religion in general:
Americans remain a people of great faith: 95 percent believe in God and just 11 percent have no religious affiliation, according to a survey released yesterday by Baylor University.http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060911-103338-8995r.htm
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And this from a table on demographics in the USA in the ever popular Wikipedia:
Total Christian 79.8%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
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SamCDKey:

Public highschools rarely, if ever, have a philosophy class, let alone one devoted purely to ethics.

Maybe one in ten private schools might have philosophy in highschool.

Religious private schools - mostly Catholic and such - generally do have moral education classes, where they discuss ethics from a religious and philosophical standpoint.

All colleges and universities that aren't specialized have philosophy and ethics classes.
 
The polls above are good examples of the incomplete results you can get from using small sample sizes, which don't effectively filter out accidental trends and biases (for instance, time of day or day of the poll call can have a greater likelihood of reaching a particular demographic over another).

The ABCNews.com poll sampled 1,022 adults. The Washington Times poll sampled 1,721 adults.

To be sure, the number of religiously deluded adults in the United States is high, particularly those that follow the various Christian cults or simply self-identify as "Christian." However, the data are far more interesting when larger sample sizes are used and more effective questions are utilized in the methodology. I recommend anyone truly interested in such demographics to look at the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) conducted in 2001 by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

The ARIS study sampled 50,281 housholds, replicating a 1999 study conducted by the Graduate Center. These two studies showed some interesting trends.

  • the proportion of the population that can be classified as Christian has declined from eighty-six in 1990 to seventy-seven percent in 2001
  • the greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001; their proportion has grown from just eight percent of the total in 1990 to over fourteen percent in 2001
  • although the number of adults who classify themselves in non-Christian religious groups has increased from about 5.8 million to about 7.7 million, the proportion of non-Christians has increased only by a very small amount - from 3.3 % to about 3.7 %

The number of people afflicted with the Christian mind virus in the United States is still abnormally large, and a many of hypotheses have been put forth to explain this. The most likely, to me, is the fact that we have a tradition of religious freedom which gives economic and governmental incentives and breaks for religious organizations. These organizations generally prosper quite well and are full-fledge corporations (tax-free) whose "CEOs" live lavish lifestyles and whose marketing directors are even willing to go so far as to have McDonalds and Starbucks as vendors in their mega-mall, mega-churches as a means to encourage people to attend.

Another hypothesis for the existence of so many different christian cults in the U.S. is that they cater to a need to socialize.

ARIS (2001). American Religious Identification Survey. The Graduate Center for the City University of New York.
 
Hey Skin, if the Christian "mind virus" has swept America, what's the disease called which has swept the Middle East?

And what is a "mind virus," do you have a reference for that?
 
SkinWalker said:
The polls above are good examples of the incomplete results you can get from using small sample sizes, which don't effectively filter out accidental trends and biases (for instance, time of day or day of the poll call can have a greater likelihood of reaching a particular demographic over another).

The ABCNews.com poll sampled 1,022 adults. The Washington Times poll sampled 1,721 adults.
I recommend anyone truly interested in such demographics to look at the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) conducted in 2001 by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

The ARIS study sampled 50,281 housholds, replicating a 1999 study conducted by the Graduate Center. These two studies showed some interesting trends.

  • the proportion of the population that can be classified as Christian has declined from eighty-six in 1990 to seventy-seven percent in 2001
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  • Dude, small sample sizes or no, the figure I quoted was 80 percent. The figure you quoted from your more accurate survey was 77 percent, which rounds to 80%. Big difference there.
 
The trends were the important parts of my post. No one disputes that religious nutters are a large portion of the U.S. population. Its a fact painfully aware to the world. It makes us the laughing stock of the global community.
 
IceAgeCivilizations said:
Hey Skin, if the Christian "mind virus" has swept America, what's the disease called which has swept the Middle East?

And what is a "mind virus," do you have a reference for that?
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your suffering with the very disease (called religion, sub named xianity, in the middle east sub named islam) you wont understand you've had it, until your cured. that is the nature of the beast.
a mind virus is religious blind faith/delusion.
 
So that includes Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism (which is a faith, the faith that there is no God), and all the other religions, which is therefore almost everybody, so Skin, if you leave the faith of Atheism, what do you go to next?
 
SkinWalker:

The trends were the important parts of my post. No one disputes that religious nutters are a large portion of the U.S. population. Its a fact painfully aware to the world. It makes us the laughing stock of the global community.
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I am aware of no nation that laughs at the United States for being religious, considering that religious people are in the majority (even if perhaps not zealously) in most countries, and in world population, only 3 percent are Atheistic, and 14 percent non-religious.

Religion, being popular, is not truly a world-wide ridiculed affiliation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism#Demographics
 
lol! atheism a Faith, lol! again, you people are so funny. roflmao!
take a look in the dictionary, you might get a surprise.
we can have faith in a thing, yes but that does not make it a "Faith" per se.
lol! lol! lol! you people are so funny.
 
In fact, I'll venture to say that professing Atheists, who say that they know that there is no God, are liars, as they cannot possibly know that God doesn't exist, and they know that.
 
IceAgeCivilizations said:
In fact, I'll venture to say that professing Atheists, who say that they know that there is no God, are liars, as they cannot possibly know that God doesn't exist, and they know that.
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no atheist actually says there is no god, what they do say is it is unreasonable to believe there is a god, it would be infantile to say there is no god, as you could never be a 100% sure, we could not look under all the nooks and crannies in the universe, but you can be 99.9%, just as I could never for sure know there wasn't a big giant bumble bee living on the dark side of the moon.
it is therefore unreasonable to belief gods exist.
 
geeser said:
no atheist actually says there is no god, what they do say is it is unreasonable to believe there is a god, it would be infantile to say there is no god, as you could never be a 100% sure, ....
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Ye're describing an agnostic, not an atheist.

Baron Max
 
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