Religous denominations

Discussion in 'Quackenbush's' started by elface, Dec 20, 2011.

  1. elface

    elface 250+ Posts

    While attending church for the first time in 5 years, I began wondering which denominations and/or religions has the most sinners. Since that seems hard to quantify, which ones have the most criminals? Or which one does the best job in socialization?

    After growing up Catholic, I'm pretty sure I know which one has the prettiest girls.

    Googling the query, all I got was that Baptists had a one percent lead over Episcopalians in divorce rates.
     
  2. gecko

    gecko 2,500+ Posts

    We're all sinners.
     
  3. El Sapo

    El Sapo Bevo's BFF

  4. OldHippie

    OldHippie 2,500+ Posts

    I'm a picker, I'm a grinner
    I'm a lover, I'm a sinner
    I play music in the sun.
     
  5. Longhorny630

    Longhorny630 1,000+ Posts

    I'm gonna go out on a limb and say atheism
     
  6. NickDanger

    NickDanger 2,500+ Posts

    I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that atheists are no more or less likely to be "sinners" whatever that means. More mass atrocities have been undertaken in the name of religion in my gut feel. The holocaust was done for the most part as an affront to religion, but the crucifixion, the crusades, 911, etc. were religiously motivated.

    If you define "sin" in terms of not worshipping a god, your limb is fine, but if you define it in philosophical terms, you are probably on the way to the emergency room with a broken arm from falling out of the tree.
     
  7. Coelacanth

    Coelacanth Guest


     
  8. bevo barry

    bevo barry 500+ Posts

    Don't know about the sinner thing, but Mormons have the most blondes.
     
  9. Longhorny630

    Longhorny630 1,000+ Posts

    Yah, Stalin is responsible for the most human deaths in the world and he was......atheist.

    But actually, usually the people that use religion as a justification for something are using religion as a cover for their true aims. Power, money, sex, religion usually ain't their ultimate goal.
     
  10. Coelacanth

    Coelacanth Guest


     
  11. NickDanger

    NickDanger 2,500+ Posts

    No, there isn't even a game to be played. It's a juvenile question to ask which faith has the most sinners without bothering to define faith or sin and even if you did you would never have enough time for all the trials to come to a momentary opinion. The people who are claimed to have killed the christian son were theists. THEY had concepts of faith and sin. It's just a really pointless exercise, but it's really, really stupid to claim that atheists are the biggest sinners without acknowledging that you have your own definition of "sin" and your own trial in your own mind that adjudicates one a sinner. There are a heckuva lotta Bhuddists and they don't worship a god and they probably have a lot of sinners. So what?

    Even if you could answer an inflammatory question like which religious denomination has the biggest douches, what would you DO with the answer?
     
  12. Perham1

    Perham1 2,500+ Posts

    I began wondering which denominations and/or religions has the most sinners. Since that seems hard to quantify....

    That would be rather easy to quantify.
     
  13. Coelacanth

    Coelacanth Guest

    Nick,

    To whom are you responding? I think maybe it's me, but I'm not totally sure.
     
  14. Perham1

    Perham1 2,500+ Posts

    First, as has already been noted, everyone is a sinner. Therefore, the religion with the most members is the religion with the most sinners. That is quite obvious, it seems.

    Second, this comment:

    I would contend, however, that the various secular causes are more apt to be hijacked by sociopaths than religious ones. That's what history seems to have shown so far, anyway.

    seems to have it backwards. Would it be possible to come up with a list? There are and have been many religious groups who have had psycho leaders. The very nature of religion tends to create the chance of an unbalanced power dynamic: strong, charismatic (maybe sociopath/psycho) leader with meek, obediant followers.

    Perhaps the above poster is thinking about despots and dictators, as in a political setting? You certainly have the big names, but in terms of sheer numbers, religion has that beat.

    Let's start with religious psychos: a whole lot of Catholic priests, a whole lot of Assembly of God preachers, Jim Jones, the San Diego suicide nutcase, Martin Luther and his virulent anti-semitism, popes who insist on calling birth control bad.

    Who do we have on the non-religious side of the ledger? Pot, HItler, Stalin.

    But since the poster has claimed that history has shown us that the secular causes are more prone to be hijacked than religious causes, perhaps he can enumerate some of them?
     
  15. Perham1

    Perham1 2,500+ Posts

    Yah, Stalin is responsible for the most human deaths in the world and he was......atheist.

    Within the context of this post that is not true at all.

    God, or the Christian god to be more precise, is responsible for far more human deaths than Stalin. Let's start with all the people, innocents included, that he killed in the Old Testament.
     
  16. Perham1

    Perham1 2,500+ Posts

    It's a juvenile question to ask which faith has the most sinners without bothering to define faith or sin....

    Let's define sin, shall we, not as a violation of a larger moral code, but instead as followers of a specific religion/denomination who do not follow the specific dogma of their church. That is, do those who voluntarily (I realize that this begs a rather large question) follow a certain denomination even bother to follow the specifc (again, not general moral rules) guidelines of that religion?

    The winner (really loser) is clearly the Catholic church. Something on the order of 80-90% of Catholics use/approve of birth control, which is verboten per the Pope(s).

    Talk about cafeteria Catholics....
     
  17. Dionysus

    Dionysus Idoit Admin


     
  18. Coelacanth

    Coelacanth Guest


     
  19. Dionysus

    Dionysus Idoit Admin


     
  20. Longhorny630

    Longhorny630 1,000+ Posts


     
  21. Dionysus

    Dionysus Idoit Admin

    I missed the intended humor in your post then, sorry about that.

    But uptight? Sir! I am zen. Just toiling to shine the light of reason in the world.
     
  22. Coelacanth

    Coelacanth Guest


     
  23. Gadfly

    Gadfly 250+ Posts

    I think you’d be hard pressed to find anything that compares to the deaths caused by WWII. WWII was caused by WWI, and WWI wasn’t caused by religious reasons. Although complex, WWI was caused by imperialistic and nationalistic reasons.

    Adding to Coel's thoughts could be a discussion of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment on authority and how man's value is so easily corrupted. This also explains the Bystander Effect and how good (dare I say religious) Germans could allow the holocaust to occur. It's easy to see that whatever morals are defined by a society (secular or religious) can be quickly removed under certain circumstances.
     
  24. Perham1

    Perham1 2,500+ Posts

    Absent a God, your only natural complaint about Stalin reduces to something along the lines of, "Well, he should have known better than to trust the Germans." And likewise, Hitler should have known better than to invade Russia.

    That is quite bizarre. I don't find that to be the only natural complaint at all, absent a god.
     
  25. jcdenton

    jcdenton 250+ Posts


     
  26. jcdenton

    jcdenton 250+ Posts

    Per Steven Pinker, Harvard psychology professor and author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined:

     
  27. Coelacanth

    Coelacanth Guest

    JC Denton,

    My last two posts on this thread anticipated and outflanked Pinker's argument.
     
  28. jcdenton

    jcdenton 250+ Posts


     
  29. Perham1

    Perham1 2,500+ Posts

    Hitler tapped into the anti-semitic writings of Martin Luther (and the general anti-semitic sentiment of Germany and most of Europe) when calling for violence against Jews. I wonder how many Lutherans are aware of that? I doubt the church brings this up in Sunday bible class.

    As I recall, Martin Luther was a rather prominent religious figure and even has a branch of Protestantism named for him.
     
  30. Coelacanth

    Coelacanth Guest

    JC Denton,

     

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