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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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If these sort of "if you just look at the material reality, you will discover you're completely wrong" arguments have been roundly dismissed in discussions about actual material reality, then why are wwe expecting anyone to take them seriously when the conversation is explicitly about religion?

Don't be so sure, at least for some the best path to atheism is autistically researching the origin of the holly books. When you see the profane and base materialness and petty power struggles of the Church's body it really sours the whole thing.

Sorry, I'm not sure I'm following.

I read you as saying that things are hard to interpret or make sense of, and so we can't trust people to do so, religiously or in real life.

I read the post I was originally responding to as saying that things are hard to translate, and so we can't trust translations. But that particular difficulty can be overcome by not using a translation, since we have texts. So then I was expressing confusion, since I wouldn't have expected that a muslim would consider the bible safe to trust if we read it in the original greek or whatever the way they would think of the Quran.

That seems to hold independently of whether things are hard to interpret or make sense of.

No, I'm saying that even when things are easy to interpret and make sense, people are still going to reject them, if they go against someone's preconceived ideas. Even if these people swear up and down they they're unbiased, and just searching for the truth.

On the other hand, when it comes to religion, most of them openly state they're a matter of faith, so why would you be surprised that people reject things that contradict their religion?

Probably! I still appreciated the question, though. Even with religion, sometimes you can have an interesting conversation with someone who is willing to take these questions seriously.