Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mark From: mark@utzoo.UUCP (mark bloore) Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: theology = head hair Message-ID: <3443@utzoo.UUCP> Date: Tue, 3-Jan-84 22:58:37 EST Article-I.D.: utzoo.3443 Posted: Tue Jan 3 22:58:37 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 3-Jan-84 22:58:37 EST References: <1605@utcsstat.UUCP> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 84 we seem to be approaching this problem (why are so many christians ignorant of christianity) in quite different ways. you are looking at individual behavior and the individual's reasons for it. you would go to a church- goer and say "why don't you know more about your faith?", or to a church leader and say "why don't you care that your people have never heard of thomas aquinas?". what i am doing is looking at the whole population and asking "what kind of churches can one expect to get under these conditions?". (actually, i don't feel up to predicting things from scratch, so what i am really asking is "are the churches i see consistent with the nature of the population and my ideas about how churches rise and fall?"). i don't care about individual actions or motivations, only about what proportion of the population acts in certain ways. i make certain assumptions about the people and culture we are dealing with: 1 some (perhaps most) people want, for whatever reason, to belong to a church. 2 there is more than one church to choose from. 3 it is fairly easy to join or leave a church, or at least to move between them (ie no social or legal pressure against it). given these conditions, it follows that a church which is good at getting and keeping converts, for whatever reason, will tend to grow (at the expense of the others, probably, but that doesn't really matter). if one church is significantly larger than the others, then the average behavior of its members will dominate the average behavior of all church members, ie it sets the tenor of the times. this has nothing to do with "quality", only numbers of people. with another assumption: 4 churches appear and disappear fairly readily. one finds that the longevity of churches is important too. churches which don't last long (say, they are good at making converts but can't keep them) won't have much overall effect on the population's average behavior. my point is that the "average church goer and average church leader" will belong to a church or churches which are, for whatever reasons, popular and durable. to address the original question, one needs a datum about the population: what fraction (call it I for ignorant) of church-goers don't care to study their religion? if I is small then it won't have much effect on what sort of church may dominate, but if it is large then the successful churches will be ones which somehow take it into account (NOT necessarily consciously). it is my contention that I is large. this means that a new church which requires study of its converts will not grow very large and/or won't last long. either way, you won't see much of it. an established church which starts to push its people to study will shrink and perhaps die. again, it won't contribute much to the "average church goer". a church which teaches its leaders to be tolerant of a large I will prosper. it does not matter what the doctrinal justification for this tolerance is, nor how individuals live with it. it does not even matter if some rail against it, so long as they don't have too much effect. and, of course, there is no reason that a church can't combine brilliant theologians with ignorant congregations. is short, my answer to "why aren't church leaders trying to educate their people?" is that doubtless some are, but their churches don't grow large or don't last long, so these leaders don't make much noise in the world. whether this is a good or bad thing is an entirely separate issue. now, as for why most jews are well-versed in judaism, i can suggest two possibilities: one is that judaism and jewish culture are very strongly linked, and it is the culture that is responsible for keeping people within the faith, and getting them to study it. if it is socially difficult to stop being jewish, then making people study is affordable. also, it is not easy to become jewish, so in fact judaism doesn't really fit into the framework i outlined above. the other possibility is that judaism has come up with a way (again, not necessarily consciously) of getting people to study despite a large value of I, or even of reducing I. in this case, if it went looking for converts, judaism might get a following which was both larger and better-educated than christianity's (if it were at least as good at making converts, that is). mARK bLOORE univ of toronto {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!mark