Religious Typology Quiz
- Thread starter signalmankenneth
- Start date
Wow. You're more fucked up than I thought. Okay. Thanks, Pmp. Have a nice day, sir.
T. A. Gardner
Serial Thread Killer
I don't know... Trying to cram an octagonal peg into a triangular hole sometimes requires you tell the test giver "This won't fucking work..." That is to say, what do you answer when all the answers totally suck? There were at least a couple of questions on that quiz that referenced the bible directly. How should someone who isn't Christian answer that question? Even many Christians would have a hard time with it. If you were say, Eastern or Greek Orthodox?
Whoever developed that quiz didn't put much thought into it. It asked about going to heaven and hell but there was nothing about reincarnation for example. Same thing. The fit was so poor many questions were unanswerable for someone who isn't Christian.
It's an internet test, not the bolt on a ship.
Disagreed. The test was clearly for an American audience, not foreigners.
The quiz said, my best fit was Solidly Secular, are the least religious among the seven groups along with 17% of the public?!!
Are you a Sunday Stalwart? Solidly Secular? Or somewhere in between? Take our quiz to find out which one of the religious typology groups is your best match and see how you compare with our nationally representative survey of more than 4,000 U.S. adults.
You may find some of these questions are difficult to answer. For example, you may see yourself in more than one category or feel that none quite describes you. That’s OK. In those cases, pick the answer that comes closest, even if it isn’t exactly right.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/quiz/religious-typology/
My best fit was Sunday Stalwarts along with 17% of the public.
Color me shocked. lol
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Yup, internet quizzes are of no value. Just more clicks for that page.
But the worst part about those "personality quizzes" is that it literally just spits back to you what you tell it. There is no "learning" that comes from it. Just clicks.
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Some theologians think the "God of the Gaps" approach is ultimately corrosive to faith. That with each new discovery God gets smaller and smaller and smaller. At some point the questions we can't answer will be so esoteric that proposing "God" as the answer will actually provide no valuable insights to anything.
So they prefer that people believe in an invisible force that listens to their pleas, directs their lives, and takes them home when they die, is that what you're saying?
I suppose if you quit believing, you quit going to church, you quit donating to church, and that's very bad for the god business.
^ This is a proposal which has been tested out by a few physicists.
The fact is, a only a minority of the questions we have involve protons, quarks, quasars, biochemistry.
Socrates and Plato knew there was more to the human experience than study of nature.
On a day to day routine basis, very few humans are asking questions about quantum mechanics, chemistry, or zoology.
The most important questions routinely on people's minds are questions about fairness, equality, justice, morality, freedom, charity, mercy, pride, humility, and just how to live a meaningful life.
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I was thinking more "cosmology" and ultimate origins. I have little doubt that given the state of physics one day we will be able to answer many questions about protons, quarks etc.
There is definitely a place for philosophy in trying to understand the nature of what is around us. But it's also possible to explain most of our experience using physical aspects of the world alone. A good analogue would be taking psychedelics. They play around with the serotonergic systems in your brain and, with just the addition of a chemical one can wind up seeing and feeling (with absolute certainty) things that are in no way based on reality around them.
There is no "ineffible soul" which is our core being. All we need do is look at cases where the physical brain is damaged. Take the case of Phineas Gage who had a large pole driven through his head and he survived. But he apparently became a diametrically opposite type of person. Which version of Phineas was the one reflected by his "soul"?
Just go into any nursing home. See people who used to be one thing now rendered completely unrecognizable all because their brains are slowly decaying.
ANd therein lies the role of philosophy. We have this brain which is processing information and guiding our behaviors. Those are the things we want and the things which make for a stable social network which provides a survival advantage for the kind of animal that gathers in groups (like humans). That's when philosophy becomes important: how should one act in given setting?
But even then philosophy can't answer all those questions either. That's when the anthropological, psychological and sociological sciences become important. We are, after all, just another animal making its way on the globe. We are still beholden to all the natural drives animals have. We are just the ones blessed with this level of self-awareness and as such we are able to (occasionally) moderate our hungers.
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I don't even think it's a matter of organized religions. I think people naturally gravitate to the "God of the Gaps". The reason God was even invented in the first place was an attempt by early man to understand everything around him.
People will always invest those areas of their own ignorance with the imprimatur of God because it's an easy "placeholder", especially for questions that don't necessarily impact every day survival. (And by that I mean understanding how one's predators behave rather than assuming God will guide the predator to kill you when it is time for you to die. We don't usually just let it be "God's will"....we will investigate and learn what the predator is going to do.)
Science doesn't deal with teleology or answer teleological questions.
I will defend science against any holy roller as humanity's best method of acquiring and interpreting empirical information.
But it's an open debate whether science can give us universal, necessary, and certain knowledge about which we cannot be wrong. Not that philosophy or religion can either.
Wrapping up, questions about how to live a meaningful human life and to what metaphysical moral vision one is obligated to practice is not in the realm of test tubes, mathmatical equations, or particle accelerators. They are necessarily going to be in the realm of moral philosophy, religion, and social custom.
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And teleology is often meaningless. WHY does gravity obey in the inverse square law format? No reason.
MANY aspects of teleology CAN be addressed by science. Quite a few.
Agreed.
The unknown can be unknowable. But simply imagining something to be one way or another is not an improvement in knowledge.
I disagree.
And there's a very high likelihood it will largely be "imaginary" unless there is a way to "ground proof" it in reality.
Don't get me wrong: I love philosophy. I just don't think that it is some non-overlapping magisteria with science. I think the value comes when science provides the supporing framework for philosophy.
I think it was Murray Gell-mann who was attracted to his 8-fold classification system of subatomic particles because he was heavily into Buddhism and the 8-fold Way. It is extremely unlikely that there is some necessary link between the two. In this case the "philosophy" was a pretty metaphor. Not necessarily reality.
I take it to mean that we have some innate part of us that longs for the divine, but which doesn't require weekly fortifying through church attendance, Bible study, or the like.
Carmine
Loose Cannon
I long for grace, but grace is a secular word as well. Maybe that's why I'm more comfortable with it.
I don't hear it used for states of being that I don't experience or understand.
How do you define it?
Agreed on unknown.
A slight disagreement about imagination vs. improvement. The US was built upon an unknown, an imagined ideal. Same for going to the Moon. Same goes for most things that have never been done before; they were imagined first and turned into reality later.
OTOH, imagining that the Earth is on the back of a giant turtle is unlikely to ever be proved true.
I’d be shocked if it wasn’t!