Doug replied to my Christendom vs. The World in Song Lyrics entry, and I'm responding to his (lengthy, thought-provoking) comments here. I'll respond in sections. (And I corrected your spelling, hope you don't mind.) :)

it seems like you have almost a hatred for christians, or I should say Christianity.

I'm not really sure how you got that out of that post, it certainly wasn't intended. Maybe because one of my (implicit) premises is that Christianity isn't true? Keep in mind, though, 95% of my friends at home are Christian, my family is Christian, I spent two years at Bible College and all of my friends from there are Christian... I certainly don't hate Christians, in fact I'm quite fond of a lot of them. Not only that, I spent most of my life as a very-serious-about-it Christian, so to hate Christians would be to hate... myself. Which I don't. Not even my previous-to-deconversion self. If anything, Christians still feel like my extended family.

I'm currently studying Sociology, I think Linguistics sort of counts as a sub-category to sociology (doesn't it?) which is a social science.

Linguistics is its own discipline, I believe it falls under social science. The reason you would run into it in Sociology is that pretty much all of the Arts disciplines are currently taking a "linguistic turn" as they move away from positivism (truth is unchanging) towards relativism (truth is determined by changing discourses). There are many sections of linguistics, here's a brief run-down: Phonetics: how we make speech sounds, Phonology: how we group speech sounds, Morphology: how we build words, Syntax: how we build sentences/phrases, Discourse Analysis, analysis of things larger than sentences. Another side of Discourse Analysis is the post-structuralist Foucault-ian version of discourse as a set of ideas and connotations around a subject that constructs how we talk about it. That's what my post is mainly about, this second type of discourse. I'm looking at the discourse of Christianity vs. The World.

You mention "Ideology rarely matches reality, though, it represents the interests of the dominant elite and explains and justifies those interests." I'm not sure if you were referring to Christianity specifically or if it was just a general comment.
but since I've been studying in a secular institution I realized that it's not much different than its own religion or some equivalent.

That's a general statement. I'll give you another example so you can see that it's not aimed just at religion. In this country, part of our ideology is that you earn money by working hard. That leads to the ideology that poor people are lazy and deserve their class, and rich people are hard workers and deserve their class. Now, that's not true across the board, seeing that one third of rich peoples' money is inherited, not worked for at all. But the ideology justifies and explains the interests of the dominant class -- the rich -- who would like everyone to believe that they deserve what they've got.

I would agree that secular institutions (in my example, capitalism) is like a religion (Christianity) in that it has an ideology that justifies the system, whether that's the ideology of Christianity=good, the world=bad, or the liberalist ideology that working hard=money.

Intellectuals are like their own elite. They have their own language, and there are many levels that one must pass to be an intellectual. only the very few in society can come out with Masters and PhD's. so in a way your comment; ""Ideology rarely matches reality, though, it represents the interests of the dominant elite and explains and justifies those interests." is just as easily applied to education, although I suppose that's no revelation.

You're right, there's a lot of hoops to jump through to be known as an intellectual -- financial resources to go to school, papers to write, courses to pass, language to learn, etc. You can't be respected as an intellectual and have the vocabulary of a construction worker, for example. Of course, you can't be respected as a construction worker and have the vocabulary of an academic either, it just doesn't fit. All those systems are in place to keep people in their groups, and that's one aspect of discourse analysis.

And of course Social Science is a science. all science aims to do is to make conclusions about us and our world through what can be measured and observed. That's why science doesn't look at or consider the possibility of faith or God because it can neither prove nor disprove God. But of course there is only so much that man can observe and measure and much of the time science asks more questions then it answers.

Science is about asking questions, and not about the supernatural, because the supernatural is, by definition, unproveable and there's not empirical evidence. The scientific method can't work with it. Why is science providing more questions than answers? Because science is about constantly improving the answers as more evidence comes in, so it constantly questions assumptions and old conclusions, rather than reaching The Truth and becoming static (like, for example, religion). I would say that's why the two are incompatible. Science doesn't take things for granted, everything is open to questioning and change.

A quote to rile you up re: biblical authority on science and religion: "If the bible is incorrect regarding matters that I can check and verify, why should I believe it is correct regarding matters that I can NOT check and verify?"

I guess i just don't like being labelled 'brainwashed' because I have faith and follow a religion. Karl Marx said how religion is the opiate of the people. and it can be if used in the wrong hands. but so can education, work, or anything else. It can all be used to control people if humans twist it that way. there's reasons why i'm a christian too, and not because I was raised/socialized to be one, or because i went to bible college. But rationally explaining everything I went through to decide that Christianity held absolute truth would take too long and be too boring.

Okay, two things:
1. I'm not saying that you're brainwashed. I'm saying that everyone's brainwashed. ;) We all live in societies that have ideology that justifies the interests of the dominant elite. Take the ideology about poor and rich people for example, that kind of shit is EVERYWHERE. And most of the time we can't see it because it's so ingrained that it's "common sense". I'm just looking at one aspect of the Christian ideology, which I can only do because I'm intimately familiar with it and because I've stepped out of the system and can look at it critically.
2. I'm not saying that you don't have reasons for your faith. I had reasons for my faith. I have reasons for my lack of faith. I'm just saying that we are also socialized by being raised in the church, and part of that socialization is this fear of leaving the church. Whether Christianity is true or not, there is this fear of leaving, and I'm just looking at some discursive representations of that and pointing out patterns and suggesting some ways that this might represent the interests of the dominant elite (the clergy, theologians, maybe even God).