SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Emmanuel Macron has been declared the President of France after early vote counts:
France has a new president. Emmanuel Macron – an independent centrist who has never held elected office – has won a resounding victory over far-right, nationalist Marine Le Pen in the most important French presidential race in decades, according to early vote counts by the French Interior Ministry.
In early returns, Macron had won an estimated 65 percent of the vote to Le Pen's nearly 35 percent, according to the French Interior Ministry. Le Pen has already called to congratulate Macron and conceded defeat to a gathering of her supporters in Paris.
Also at The Guardian (live), Washington Post, NYT, Reuters, and The Local.
From CNBC: Euro hits six-month high on Macron victory
CNN editorial: Why Macron's victory is reassuring ... and yet not
BBC has an article about Macron's potential choice of Prime Minister.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday May 08 2017, @04:48AM (4 children)
In comparison, I'm an atheist, but I celebrate Christmas and Easter.
So what? Lots of people celebrate Halloween by wearing slutty outfits but that doesn't make them religious. Christmas and Easter aren't religious either: Christmas was originally called Saturnalia, and is one of many winter-solstice festivals that pretty much every culture has. The gift-giving came from the Roman Saturnalia, and the fir tree came from Germanic pagan traditions. The Christians merely stole the holiday and renamed it. Easter has nothing to do with Christianity: its the name of a goddess of fertility, and the rabbit symbolism comes from that since rabbits are infamous for being fertile. Again, the Christians stole the holiday and appropriated it to get people to convert, except here they couldn't even be bothered to come up with a new name. I celebrate Christmas too because I think pagan holidays are fun (hence the decorated tree) and I think the Roman tradition of gift-giving is nice; I sure as hell don't tie it to Christianity in any way.
because the Christian religion informed the development of Western culture generally.
Bullshit. The Greeks and Romans created Western culture. Next time you go to court for something, notice that all the names for everything are in Latin: the mechanics of our legal system come directly from Roman jurisprudence, and the foundations of philosophy and medicine come from ancient Greece. When the Christians took over, Rome soon fell and we had the Dark Ages and 1000 years of backwards feudalism instead of civilization.
similar to how Christianity was more central to daily life in Europe hundreds of years ago.
Like when they burned people at the stake for heresy?
There is even a body of philosophical thought called Christian atheism.
That just strikes me as people clinging to churches because of tradition and wanting to be part of some community, and trying to rationalize their position. If you want to create a philosophy club, great, but being a regular member of a church which has particular beliefs they profess and evangelize, and refusing to accept these, seems insincere to me. If you don't agree with them, you should leave and form your own group, rather than being a fraud.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by julian on Monday May 08 2017, @05:50AM
Nowhere did I imply that the history of Western culture began with Christianity. Obviously Greek and Roman influences predated it--and I agree that Christianity was not an improvement, especially for science and philosophy.
The rest of that seems to be you getting angry at how some people choose to use language and define their terms. I'm perfectly happy with Christian atheism as an idea, it seems perfectly coherent to me even if I don't agree with it (Jesus was not a great moral teacher). And likewise I don't see any paradox in considering oneself to be a cultural or non-practicing Christian/Muslim/Hindu/etc. These phrases accurately track people's experiences and conceptions of themselves so I find them useful.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 08 2017, @12:06PM (2 children)
I celebrate Christmas too because I think pagan holidays are fun (hence the decorated tree) and I think the Roman tradition of gift-giving is nice; I sure as hell don't tie it to Christianity in any way.
That's good for you. It's your perspective. I'm not sure why you're so angry that someone else has a different one. I'm well-aware of the origins of Christmas, but most people don't know that much about it. Yet a LOT of people "celebrate" it some way even if they aren't really a "practicing" Christian in any other sense. They may or may not claim to be "Christian" overall, but they think of the holiday as Christian. What you have here is a version of the "etymological fallacy": just because Christmas may have relationships to various pagan festivals in its origins doesn't make it ONLY a pagan festival.
There is even a body of philosophical thought called Christian atheism.
That just strikes me as people clinging to churches because of tradition and wanting to be part of some community, and trying to rationalize their position. If you want to create a philosophy club, great, but being a regular member of a church which has particular beliefs they profess and evangelize, and refusing to accept these, seems insincere to me. If you don't agree with them, you should leave and form your own group, rather than being a fraud.
I'm shocked anyone modded this "informative" when by the end you clearly have either gone into pure "rant" mode or are just trolling.
The reality of the world is that almost every Christian denomination has "particular beliefs they profess," often in a detailed catechism or official set of doctrine somewhere. And yet, in most denominations, it's likely that a very large portion (perhaps most for Catholics) "practicing" members of that denomination don't believe in ALL of them. I mean, ask your average Catholic on the street -- do they REALLY believe that the bread IS the "body of Christ" during the Eucharist? I mean do you absolutely believe that it's transformed that way? And a lot will hedge a bit and spout some stuff that isn't really Catholic doctrine, but a lot will also just say they never understood that, and they view it more as a "memorial" to Last Supper tradition.
By your definition, these people "should leave" and form their own group, since they are "frauds." The Eucharistic doctrine is essential to Catholic belief, but how many Catholics REALLY believe it? And let's not even get into polls of Catholics on church doctrine on controversial political issues like contraceptives or abortion. This is a "No true Scotsman" fallacy. Or perhaps No true Irishman [irishtimes.com], for among Irish Catholics (according to that article), 8% don't believe in God, 15% don't believe Jesus is the Son of God, 18% don't believe God created man, and a full two-thirds say that transubstantiation doesn't occur and the mass is more of a symbolic remembrance. Even among regular mass goers, only half believe in this core tenet of transubstantiation. (To be fair, these sorts of polls depend on the place -- in Latin America, belief in transubstantiation is still quite strong, but not in the traditional Catholic bastion of Ireland.)
What your definition ends up with is saying that there's like 5 guys in Minnesota somewhere who are "actually" Lutherans (or whatever), because they really believe EVERYTHING their church says literally, without question. And Catholics and Lutherans, etc. are actual denominations with statements of faith and such that all must subscribe to. The "bar" is a lot lower for just claiming to be a "Christian." Who adjudicates that, exactly?
If somebody wants to call themselves a "Christian atheist," why should I have a problem with it? In fact, since you say you're agnostic and have left your church, I would think you should actually be in favor of such a thing, because it's actually HONEST ("I don't believe in God, but I still want to follow some moral tenets of Christianity" or whatever) rather than the loads of "practicing Christians" who actually don't believe what their faith claims.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 08 2017, @04:46PM
If you think that """every Christian denomination has "particular beliefs they profess," """, please explain modern Unitarianism. Or, it has been reported, Anglicanism. I can't find the quote I'm looking for but to paraphrase it "a religion so inoffensive that it interferes neither with a man's beliefs nor with his actions". (That certainly hasn't been the case at all times for either of them. Unitarianism used to be rather stricter than average, and Anglicanism used to have rigidly prescribed rituals, at least for the clergy.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @01:54AM
I'm not sure why you're so angry that someone else has a different one. I'm well-aware of the origins of Christmas, but most people don't know that much about it.
Begun, this Soylent War on Christmas has!