Okay.

Donkey toaster Heimlich elevator.

These are also a string of words.

Perhaps serial killers are in part curious about how other people manage to go through life without feeling the need to kill and they find churches a safe place to study them.

The only one I don't see as fitting in is Heimlich

Donkey: The one who Jesus rode into town on...

Toaster: A simple Machine

Elevator: A complicated machine

Heimlich: No room to manuver??

NO. JBKlyde. I picked those words randomly. They DO N O T mean anything. Probably 99.99% of everything you'll see every day does NOT have a secret, hidden meaning. C'mon, dawg, that's not a good habit.

What I meant to say is, "words are JUST WORDS."

You probably can make a pattern out of anything.

Should you? NO.

Thanks for expressing that flint, I was trying to figure out whether and how to tell him.

On subject, some people have a dark side that the constant pressure of organized religion keeps dormant. Unfortunately, many more are taught by organized religion that they are evil so they need to keep attending. It is a hard trap to escape when you're born to it.

Honestly, I do think there is a certain amount of this. It's hard to say because I've only ever had one or two other people hint at maybe winking and nodding towards me. Nobody wants to get caught out as the only intelligent person in the room. I think the big thing is that the higher up you go in intelligence (by which, for clarification, I mean a kind of spiritual intelligence, which is completely different from academic intelligence,) the more you realize that the details kind of don't matter. But just like you have to wait until a kid is old enough before explaining certain realities of life, you can't openly admit to a more generalized "all roads lead to heaven" or "God is all of us plus science" kind of philosophy in front of other church members, because you don't have that convenient age/size thing to give you a clue about where they are on their path.

There are several Bible passages about how you shouldn't do anything that will weaken someone else, even if it's not something that's a problem for you. In practical terms, this would be like not drinking in front of an alcoholic, but in the original context it was talking about spiritual rituals. Is it critical that the meat be blessed? No, but if it's important to the guy next to you, then it's better for him that you respect the context, especially since it shouldn't matter one way or the other to you.

I actually witnessed something like this in real time once: there was a pastor whom I respected and suspected was higher on the spiritual intelligence ladder than he let on. He was giving a sermon on not allowing yourself to be trapped by small symbols, and specifically used the example of a physical Bible. It was the word of God, yes, but it was also just paper and not The Word, because The Word was immutable and larger than one book, etc. As a demonstration he casually tossed his open Bible on the floor and allowed to it sit there, pages crumpled.

Long story short, some people were of course offended, the elders met with him, and the next week his sermon was an apology on how he was wrong--not wrong in his original assertion, but still wrong to do something that would be offensive and weakening to the faith of others. (Weakening because the less-spiritually-intelligent churchgoer might say, "This pastor is not Godly! I will leave this church. In fact, I should stop believing in God all together because pastors are all hypocrites...") So yeah, he was basically admitting that from now on in the pulpit he would be treating a physical thing with respect, but he would be winking and nodding at those of us who had understood his point from the previous week.

Right, so if it's all a big wink-and-nod from the top, what's the point? Well, for me there are a couple of reasons.

1.) Corporate (as in, group meetings, not just belief in your own head) religion is a survival trait. Studies have shown it. Doesn't matter whether it's Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Quaker--people who go to some kind of church live longer, are happier, recover from health issues more quickly. It doesn't really matter to me whether that's because of the support of a social network, or the health benefits of basic calm introspection, or some divine interventionary response to prayer, or because there are an infinite number of universes and our brains are actually capable of choosing which universe our consciousness ends up in through the power of intense positive thinking. Being and participating in this place is statistically going to be good for me and my family--especially my family, because who's to say if my children will turn out spiritually intelligent, or the kind of person who truly needs the moral structure of a church? We do our best to turn our children into little copies of ourselves, but it would suck if they got to adulthood and I hadn't given them something it turned out they desperately needed. The wrong church can be damaging, no doubt, and as with every parenting decision it's of course incumbent upon me to choose one that isn't. But the wrong school can be (has been) damaging to my kids; that doesn't mean they shouldn't go to school, it just means I have to find the right school.

2.) Church includes a charitable imperative that secular institutions, try as they might, have not yet been able to replicate. They try, don't get me wrong. Non-church-goers (I won't even say atheists, because I know atheists who go to church) certainly donate to charity all the time, and there is nothing to say they can't be just as generous. But in my personal experience, I've never met a non-church-goer who gives a literal 10% of all their income to charity. By comparison, the number of churchgoers I know who give the full tithe are too many to count. Now, granted, part of that goes to running the church itself, and one has to choose carefully to avoid wasteful, lavish, or scamming churches, just as one has to choose carefully among other charities. But even running the church itself is useful for those at the bottom of the ladder who need that structure, so what's the difference between giving to MADD, versus keeping a church afloat when one or two of their attendees are only staying sober 'by the power of their Savior?'

One could argue that they don't necessarily agree with all the things the church is going to spend their money on, like anti-abortion policies or the like, but again that only comes down to choosing a church that fits your priorities. Our particular church mostly stays away from that kind of work, taking only separate donations for a local charity that provides baby stuff and maternity clothes to women who have already chosen to keep their unplanned babies. They instead focus on hands-on stuff; buying actual groceries for families who have lost their incomes, doing free repairs on the car of a single mom, going down to the site of the wildfires a couple summers ago and demolishing and clearing burnt structures for days at a time... I saw plenty of donation boxes around town at that time, "dump your old clothes in here for fire victims," which were nice and all, but let's be honest, they were minimal-effort kind of stuff. The people alongside me covered in soot were all from church organizations. And I myself would almost certainly not have been there, were it not for the information and organization disseminated by our church. I would have still felt bad for the victims, yes, maybe donated a few times at the grocery store when they asked if they could add $3 to my bill, but if I didn't go to church I would not have been out there laboring for two days. I wouldn't have even known where and when to show up, and I wouldn't have wanted to go all by myself. They got more goodness out of me, and more out of all their other members, than any secular institution ever has.

3.) My in-laws were missionaries, and at least nominal church attendance when they visit would be necessary to keep the peace anyway. So hey, free brownie points.

Okay. I'll think about that.

Right off-hand, I'd think, "There has to be a better way!" but I can't think of what it is, immediately.

Unless...it's uprooting your entire family and moving them 2,000 miles away to a place where you believe people share your best values--and not just on Sunday, actually all day, every day. For the reasons you've stated here, I think I've just moved my family to a place where we will be waking up in the morning at church, going to church all day, and laying down at night in a bed that is inside the church...which is our entire cultural ecosystem*




I love the story about the Pastor throwing the Bible on the ground. What you should have done is made an aggressive attempt to identify every person who was smart enough to understand what he was saying and, then, START YOUR OWN CHURCH. I've always liked smaller churches.




*and also, our church doesn't include ignorant, hateful beliefs

There have been a few attempts to create the same sense of weekly community and charity minus the religion, most prominently one in the UK that calls itself "Sunday Assembly." Maybe they'll become more widespread.

As of now, we've got a farce of massive proportions on our hands. Society hasn't cracked this one yet. People like yourself value the positives of the church and try to disregard the negatives. People like myself, stubborn bastards, refuse to 'be a part of' almost anything--like a feral beast, when we smell something funny, we raise our hackles and back away, fangs bared.

As for the people who 'play church' on Sunday, how many of them actually buy into the whole fairy tale? Is it possible that maybe half of them have serious doubts about the veracity of some of the more outlandish bits? But, like yourself, where else are they going to go?

So we've got a--I can't think of more fitting word here, and I am using the literal meaning, so political correctness be damned--what we've got here is a retarded feedback loop. I propose that ALMOST NOBODY is actually satisfied with the current state of affairs. It's just got so much momentum, and excuse me for saying so, nobody has the balls to stand up and say anything about it.

The Pastor throws the Bible on the ground, and then next week he apologizes.

How many people in the room are gritting their teeth, but nobody does a damn thing about it.

Fuck. That.

Don`t know if this is the right Forum but it`s called Grooming and it was done to me from the age of 6. All very acceptable behaviours, to build up the pretence of normalcy. That`s why it`s so devastating and life altering for the perp to then betray that trust with someone who has yet to form their identity. It robbed me of all the securities any human being deserves and everyone I`ve met in my life since that time, has been met with suspicion. I call him the monster in the room. It`s all a façade and to date I have not let it go.

One word, and you won't like it:

Faith.

I dunno sometimes words have double meanings.. I m building a stairway to heaven.. I really don't have time for all the nonsense that goes on inside the "four" walls of the confounded church.. gossip is stupid I don't even do it with my family.. If every one were like Vanilla Ice the world would be much better place... aka :quick to the point to the point NO FAKING; unfortunately fake people are drawn to church because it gives them a shield of illusion to the out side world and once that illusion is uncovered that's how God weeds them out.. the people who truly Love God keep going, the potential psychos never return.

Faith is only a learned behavior...taught to you when you were young. You were born an atheist.

Faith, spirituality, religion...brainwashing.

Faith just means believing something without evidence, which brings you back to Flint's original question.

My answer would be that "intelligent people" doesn't have a concrete meaning; conspiracy theories can be incredibly detailed, and exhibit high intelligence and ingenuity. But the conspiracy theorist has started with the conclusion and worked backwards to mesh all new information into that conclusion.