christians beat people over the head with needing to accept christ as their lord and savior. evangelizing is what made christianity spread wildly like a chain letter. how are atheists or santa deniers the bad guys?
there were (are?) plenty of time periods where that evangelism was more than a little forceful. the imperialists and all
but yeah, the lack of evangelism built into judaism makes the recruiting harder.
yeah and us non-christians need to catch up and fight back thus telling small children that:
- santa is fake
- jesus is not god
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People who don’t respect others are the bad guys no matter what they believe.
Also everyone is religious. It’s not always God or a god that people worship, but everyone worships something.
Um, no, I don’t worship anything.
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I don’t think so. I think “how much do you believe” is a trait that varies a lot from person to person.
I know a guy who became an ultra Orthodox Jew as an adult. He a relative who was a militant atheist and another who had converted to catholicism and become a nun. That was a family that had a high underlying level of religiosity that expressed itself differently in different members.
But there are a lot of people who just never think about that stuff, do the rituals that their family likes, and go about their business.
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I worship naps, cats, and sparkly things.
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i worship money
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Job
Spouse
Children
Self
Money
State
Intelligence
Science
Power
Humor
Cars
Sports
God
Etc
Etc
Etc
Everybody worships something. It’s what makes the world go round.
You keep using that word, I don’t think you know what it means.
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1: to honor or show reverence for as a divine being or supernatural power
2: to regard with great or extravagant respect, honor, or devotion
a celebrity worshipped by her fans
Definitely not the first definition.
For me, not the second either. No I do not “worship” science. I understand it and use it as an explanatory tool.
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I think it’s a culture difference. People in evangelical circles (and probably others, but that was my background and what I can speak to) use “worship” to mean “prioritize.”
People who pursue wealth worship money. People who prioritize their dating life worship their partner. There are lots of language things like this in evangelicalism.
A little bit more background about this: evangelicals believe that the right pursuit in life is in worship of the Christian God. And so, a Christian’s priority should be to that end. Everything should be done with that in mind.
And so when someone has different priorities, i.e. is not prioritizing God and their religion, their “worship” (which is in their minds the default state of being) is being redirected elsewhere. If God is not being worshipped, something else is. That’s where it originated from.
Naturally, this is a very foreign concept to someone who isn’t immersed in this culture and doesn’t understand the language.
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Thank you for that perspective.
That’s weird. Thanks for translating.
I’m guessing it is a regional thing, and that is what he sees, and therefore the whole world’s people are like that.
Thats a heck of an assumption.
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Is it? I dunno. Nick is an evangelical pastor, IIRC. Evangelicalism is a whole cultural experience, I was raised in it, and the way he is speaking about this is so familiar to me. Maybe it makes less sense to someone who doesn’t have that lived experience? Maybe I’m way off base on what he meant, but I grew up hearing “worship” used in this exact way, I knew exactly what he meant when he said it and it didn’t occur to me that other people didn’t understand it until the confusion was expressed.
I’ll also add, this idea of everyone worships something is not limited to a religious idea. A lot of evangelicals actually quote David Foster Wallace, definitely NOT religious, on this subject, from his most famous work, This is Water:
This is Water
Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.
I’m saying that “if you don’t worship God, you must be worshipping something else” is a heck of an assumption.
Also, it requires the assumption that God exists.
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I think you misunderstood my post, and more specifically the point of view it was trying to represent. Or just as likely, I’m misunderstanding your response?
Why would an evangelical not start from the assumption that God exists?
Also at this juncture I think this whole tangent should be moved to its own thread.
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