This Is Why Evangelical Christians Love Israel (VICE on HBO, Full Segment) - General

Do you think this guy is an accurate representative for evangelical Christianity generally?

Actually yeah, he does in a way because guess what? Christian Zionism, the core belief required for most of the biblical prophetic apocalypse bullshit, is inherent only to Protestants. Traditional Catholic thought doesn't have Zionism in it. The core tenancies of Conversionism, the importance of biblical authority and large Zionist beliefs place Evangelical Christians in a place where they are far more susceptible to doomsday rhetoric and political manipulation. Mormonism, a very similar religious system in terms of these core values, actively encourages their members to be preppers, etc, and holds a very strong doomsday centered belief. Of course not all Mormons are crazy doomsday preppers, but their religion is placed in a way that it is very susceptible to those messages. In that sense, I would say yes, he does speak accurately as a representative of a statistically relevant portion of Evangelical Christianity.

He's not the only to one to offer that perspective, so I don't actually need him to be the only focal point. There are more of them. There have been lots of christian preachers with large crowds who've been saying the world will end and we should embrace it for some time now. They may be wrong by all scriptural accounts you can offer but they exist and they do have listeners.

Can you demonstrate that? For example, here's a recent declaration of the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the actually representative bodies of a larger number of evangelical protestants: "WHEREAS, The Old Testament declares God’s promise to Abram, “I will make you into a great nation…. I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who treat you with contempt, and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:1–3); and WHEREAS, Israel represents the descendants of Jacob as an ethnic, cultural, and national entity (Genesis 32:28); and WHEREAS, The New Testament affirms that salvation is from the Jews and that God’s Word concerning Israel will be fulfilled (John 4:22; Romans 9–11); and WHEREAS, We are to pray for the peace of Jerusalem and for the salvation of Israel (Psalm 122:6–7; Romans 10:1); and WHEREAS, We share with the nation of Israel many values as the only democratic ally of the United States in the Middle East; and WHEREAS, The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement seeks to isolate the nation of Israel economically and socially; and WHEREAS, We are concerned by anti-Israel activities in this country within certain university campuses, academic and professional associations, and popular culture; and WHEREAS, We thankfully remember that we are indebted to the Jewish people, who gave us much of our Bible and our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, now, therefore, be it RESOLVED, That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, June 14–15, 2016, commit to bless Israel; and be it further RESOLVED, That we support the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign state and reject any activities that attack that right by promoting economic, cultural, and academic boycotts against Israel; and be it finally RESOLVED, That at this critical time when dangerous forces are mounting up against the nation of Israel, we recommit ourselves to pray for God’s peace to rule in Jerusalem and for the salvation of Israel, for the Gospel is “God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew” (Romans 1:16)." (http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/2266/on-prayer-and-support-for-israel) No mention of apocalypse, armageddon, etc. This is the type of support you will see for Israel within general evangelicalism, not some attempt to hurry along armageddon.

Imagine believing in magic and fairytales and making real world decisions based on it. I wish I could believe in some animes that much

Imagine going into a thread for no reason but to stroke your own ego.

I'm just laying down the law, none of these stories are real dude, and we shouldn't be talking about "real" or "fake" people of various religious sects or justifying their existence by saying they do good. We should abandon all fake beliefs and replace them with secular humanist beliefs, get people together based on compatible truths of the real world, not on incompatible falsehoods told by people trying to take control of people's minds.

What makes humanist moral and metaphysical beliefs in any way more real than those of other religions? Genuinely curious here.

I'm not. This is how Protestantism usually works in Europe: It's not practicing hypocrisy as a virtue. My personal experience was in an Americanized Apostolic congregation. Everything about it was stolen from Baptist and Evangelic practices. It's viewed as cooky and somewhat destructive in that they do exactly what American congregations tend to do. It runs virtue signaling charities only designed to look good. They actively and aggressively compete with other charities, going so far as to sabotage their work to make themselves look good. There are only 5 of those churches in the whole country. They're unpopular as fuck because people really don't have the patience for the illogical hoops they jump through to justify their doctrine and the behavior it brings forth. I went on a school visit in the states when i turned 15 and i observed the exact same shit over there. I've been observing these types of people getting into power and driving your politics over there for years now. You're aggressively sweeping this shit under the rug. It's not just me having that experience. Everyone forced to endure abstinence only education and all of that other cooky bullshit are suffering under it too and guess what, they don't receive that shit in church. They get "taught" that shit in school, because the bible belt is essentially a belt of theocratic states based on a branch of Fundamentalism that pushes virgue signaling and social status as more important than being caring and open with your neighbor. Where i am from, this shit is considered cooky and arguably child-abuse if children are brought to church. Meanwhile your government is actively steering into it and you want to tell me that just because YOUR community is great, i shouldn't apply MY personal experiences to Protestantism? Can you just take a step back and look at the bigger picture here? look at the mental state of your country and look at the mental state of mine. Take a moment to work out what kind of people are actively campaigning to hold yours back... Those would be evangelists, mormons and fundamentalists and they're not a minority (Utah). There's enough of them that they control legislation on a state and federal level. Where i live, we don't have that huge of a religious influence on politics and it would never fly.

I'm just going to say I obviously disagree with you, but I'm not going to make this thread some pissing contest of you telling me people are bad and me disagreeing. I sincerely hope you've found happiness and I'm sorry for any bad experiences you went through.

No metaphysics required, that's what religions essentially are, after all. The best type of worldview would be one that focuses on the well-being of sentient creatures, humans a bit more sentient requiring a bit more consideration, the pursuit of truth and increasing the well-being of all sentience, humans first, over wishful thinking, the use of the scientific method and peer review in order to find that truth, and cultivating a culture of extremely logical and rational people that are reasonably skeptical of everything they're told, especially things with no evidentiary basis, one where people act based on things that can be evidently proven, not on stories that people pass off as fact.

Is this moral system based on anything? Why value the well being of humans over other beings, why pursue truth at all costs? What I'm getting at is that this moral system is no different from those of religions besides instead of being based on metaphysical reasoning its based on arbitrary valuing of things like the well being of others and rationality (not that its a bad thing) in being somehow more true or more false; Morality makes no claims as to what is but rather as to what ought to be, and thus is forever outside of the realm of being true or false. Hell (heh), if anything religious resting of their moral systems on some higher metaphysical absolute authority almost makes it sound less arbitrary than the alternative. You say this as though religious thinking has to necessarily clash with scientific thinking, which is merely false because science makes no claims on oughts, and religion doesn't necessarily have to make claims on what is (physically). What is humanism if not a religion where the supreme deity is Man (though one less organized around holy texts)?

It's within our psychology as social creatures, it's an innate sense we have, or most have. We can tap into that sense of empathy and sympathy that most people have as the basis of our morality, it's much more real for me than "arbitrary." Rationality is within our psychology as a problem-solving species, we need to have some ability to think things through or else we would've died in the jungles long ago from lack of tools and stuff. This stuff is REAL.

You've done the same in political threads, which is why people are attempt to cover the giant mountain of irony you're currently sitting atop of. "Liberals", the nebulous incompetent boogeymenwomengenderneutralnoun that plague your existence and misconstrue everything you say and make you look all means and peepeehead on the forums. But Christians, it's so different, it's so not the same thing, you have to look at each case individually and with a magnifying glass cause CONTEXT IS SO IMPORTANT GAIS WHY ARE YOU IGNORING IT, THAT'S WRONG. You seriously can't tell how you've been doing exactly what you decry as blanket negative generalization for years?

Religious thinking does clash with science, because if you use the scientific method/thinking on religion then there's no way you can believe it as TRUE, at best you'd pick out some useful lessons it has just like you would from any other fictional thing.

You want to quote me specific, then be my guest. I've already clarified the difference in this thread.

I disagree. As humans with sentience, our primary goal shouldn't be "sentient creatures / humans first" it should be "prolonged survival of life in general first". Human needs often run counter to the needs of the planet, to the point where our short term needs are actively fucking over our long term needs. Humans will maybe be able to survive in space/hostile planets in the coming decades, but what's the fucking point of achieving that bleak existence if we kill all other known life in the universe (all life on earth) just to make our situation marginally better in the short term? Your "objective truth" here is no more objective and thorough than the "objective truth" of any religion, you've just dressed up your methodology of obtaining scripture as being based in evidence, when there's clearly room to debate outcomes, futures and ideas even within evidence based study, that's actually kind of the core of academic study. I'm not even religious, I'm apathetic to the entire notion of religion or god, so there's no bias here when I say this, you've done nothing but substitute conventional theological speculation for your own constructed dogma.

As real as the propensity of men and women, scared and confused, attributing all kinds of myths and stories as explanations to things they do not understand or cannot understand and building justifications for ways of life outside said myths. Humanism doesn't hold some kind of monopoly on rationality and to claim moral absolutism as a biotruth is making a huge stretch here. Is this not a naturalistic fallacy, by the way?

The null hypothesis does make a claim on the metaphysical, it would say that the metaphysical does not exist.

The null hypothesis is a logical shortcut, a hypothesis indeed as the name suggests, because saying a thing not proven to exist is false until proven otherwise in practical terms actually means that a statement not based in fact is useless, in that it's truth value cannot be determined. The existence of the metaphysical is one such thing that cannot be proven and exists in the realm of faith and philosophy alone, but to claim it concretely doesn't exist is to make a logical leap that would necessarily be faulty, even if useful in everyday inquiries. One cannot ascertain the truth value of a thing one cannot interact with or observe by definition, can one? As for your second point, from what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong: Are you not saying that we value human life because it helped us survive in the jungles or something, and because it helped us survive you conclude that it must be true all human life has inherent value and worth? How is this not a naturalistic fallacy? How is this not a logical leap, deriving an ought from an is?

In agreement with Newb here, secularism and religious belief can easily go hand in hand. If they were completely incompatible we wouldn't have one or the other in modern society, either due to natural disasters, plagues, human caused genocide, etc.

It's starting to feel like the new strat for a cult leader run is to just also name your cult Christianity so people can't tell the difference

Its truth value is said to be 0, that it is untrue, because it is the only useful assumption until you get evidence. If you don't operate on the null hypothesis then you aren't doing science, you're assuming your scientific work has something without any evidence. That doesn't mean you can't test for it, or attempt to find it, but you never assume some sort of relationship without evidence. If metaphysics can never be proven, observed, interacted with, used, or shown to exist in any way, then in what way does it exist? It definitely doesn't exist in the reality we live in, perhaps only in our minds as a result of an improper null hypothesis? It helping us survive in the jungles "or something" is a FACT, and evolution tells us that things that made individuals in our species not die tend to get put into the genepool. It doesn't give anything inherent value, nothing has inherent value, but it shows us that, evidently, reliably, predictably, we have a sense of empathy. Just as you cannot deny the truth that we can see, you cannot deny that we have an inherent sense of valuing other's lives. That's my source of morality. Metaphysical claims DO necessarily clash with science, because to propose that your scientific hypothesis is "metaphysical" is assuming that such a thing exists at all, a violation of the null hypothesis. You would, of course, be correct in positing that your findings are "physical" if they are indeed true, but to put some magical qualification on the type of physics is absurd, and assuming the fanciful concept that you cannot explain whatsoever exists at all.

What the hell are you talking about? I'm not saying metaphysics exists, I'm saying you cannot make any claims towards it non-existence as a fact because it cannot be falsified. To claim otherwise is to do so on absolutely no basis, an error in logic that a person supposedly concerned with rationality should take issue with. Metaphysics is not a concern of science because metaphysics, or anything unfalsifiable and outside of experience, is useless to science as a method. Metaphysics as a concept aren't a kind of physics, but everything that lies outside and of which all phenomena is a consequence. Whether it exists or not is a thing unanswerable to science, which is precisely the reason it is the domain of philosophers, the religious, and cultists, as opposed to scientists. Nothing in your empathy of valuing the lives of people necessitates that all human life has value, a claim made by Humanism as a moral system. It is dogma, plain and simple. An ought, "all humans out to be treated with respect and dignity and humans are of paramount importance", from an is, "most humans possess a functioning sense of basic empathy and the ability to connect to people emotionally". I'm not for religion, quite the contrary; I'm against any and all arbitrary fixed ideas which suppose more than they logically should out of some delusion they are being objective and secular.

Then why the flying fuck are you talking about metaphysics...?

... because the religious is concerned primarily with metaphysics, and thus does not contradict science, which does not, by necessity? I'm saying scientists shouldn't, and indeed do not, engage with it, not you and me having this discussion.

The logical conclusion of having a sense of empathy is wanting others to be happy, because empathy makes you feel what others feel...?

What you want is what you want, your personal will, not an absolute system of morality like Humanism which claims you must value every human, not because empathy makes you want to do it, but because you just gotta, else you're a bad person (dare I say, a sinner?)

You should read more on the topic and listen to more arguments on how these things have been discussed.

Because I don't think metaphysics has any value whatsoever and think empathy is a good basis for our morality? Okay, wanna give me some?