SecularFuture

Not a bad point.

SecularFuture

Pyrrho
lib•er•al
-- 1a) Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.

-- 1b) Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.


con•ser•va•tive
-- 1a) Favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change.

-- 1b) Traditional or restrained in style: a conservative dark suit.


For a world that is constantly changing, what’s so darn great about conservatism?

Pyrrho

Please notice the quotation marks around the word "liberal" in my post. (If I had been using the word with its normal usage, I would have no need for the quotation marks. It was a way to indicate a nonfundamentalist as opposed to a fundamentalist Christian.)

And please see my responses to "seebs" (above) for an explanation of what I mean, and why I regard a nonfundamentalist position as inherently more irrational than a fundamentalist one.

seebs

You've still got it backwards.

People wrote down things they already believed, and thought were important.

And once again, we see typical fundy hermeneutics put forth as the one Revealed Truth. Nonsense!

When taken with awareness of who He was talking to, and the idioms of the time and place where He was speaking, we find that this means something much different from what you seem to think it means.

They are not ignored; they are *superceded*.

You chose the worst possible examples - the passages that fundies, too, do not follow. Why? Because the new testament tells us not to.

You're still making a false dichotomy. There are intervening states.

If I write an autobiography, and I'm not lying, you get pretty good information about my feelings. My friends could write a biography that would tell you something about my feelings. Someone who never met me might have a very hard time.

This is not an all-or-nothing game.

And, wonder of wonders, *those ways were used* in the Bible, repeatedly. People have known that Genesis is a myth for at least two thousand years, because it's *written as one*.

Maybe you should read them. Augustine was the guy who argued that it was *OBVIOUS* from the text of Genesis that creation did not take place in six literal days.

This, it seems to me, is purely inflammatory material, contributing nothing to the conversation. Surely you can do better.

Pyrrho

You are still missing the point. Yes, people wrote down what they thought was important, and it was important to them before they wrote it down. But the fact that people NOW believe in Christianity is based upon what was written down. Without that, what do you think people would believe today?



Once again, you totally sidestep the issue, and fail to give any reason at all why you should be believed. One of the essential components of being rational is having reasons for one's beliefs. Yet you provide none. Why is that?



This is too, too funny, right after I have given you something from the New Testament, supposedly even the words of Jesus, in which he explicitly states that one should follow absolutely all of the old laws in exact detail! You are really great at proving my point with your example, in which you ignore the Bible even when the relevant portion is presented to you!



You again fail to explain your position regarding this, but let me be even more explicit. Let us consider the proposition, "God wrote the entire Bible himself." Let us not quibble over whose hands were used to hold the writing instrument. Now, either:

1) God wrote the entire Bible himself.
2) God did not write the entire Bible himself.

There is no middle ground in this, the one is simply the denial of the other, and one must be true, and the other false. To keep this simple, fundamentalists say that 1 is true. Presumably, you say 2 is true. At this point, let me ask, why do you pay any attention to the Bible at all? Perhaps if you attempt to answer that question, we will get to the root of the matter with you.



Please provide a reference for this claim. Where, precisely, did Augustine say this?

seebs

Sorry, but no. Your claim was that all of Christianity has to rest directly on the Bible, and it's just not so. After two thousand years of playing "telephone", we might have some pretty weird stuff, but the essence would probably still be there.

1. Who ever said I was completely rational? I just said I was internally consistent.
2. You haven't exactly provided sound argumentation to support your allegations.

Several of my fundamental beliefs are purely axiomatic. I cannot prove or disprove them, I know this, so I just picked axioms until I could make useful progress. There is no *reason* for this; after all, reason depends on the idea of logic, and logic is one of the unproven axioms. I have faith in logic; I don't have any way of *knowing* that it works without begging the question.

This is an interesting theory. We can explore the idea that this is what that passage means, but if we try that, we quickly run into contradictions, suggesting that this interpretation is the wrong one.

Well, let's see. It is true that either:
1) God wrote the entire dictionary himself.
2) God did not write the entire dictionary himself.

However, this doesn't mean a dictionary isn't useful.

The problem here is that you're playing the game of saying "God did not write the entire Bible himself" and demanding that people treat it as if it really means "God wrote no part of the Bible".

If God (assuming He exists, for the sake of discussion) wrote 99.99% of a book Himself, then that book would be VERY interesting, even though God did not write the whole thing.

In other words, there are many potentially describable books which are not written 100% directly by God, but which are nonetheless very interesting.

Merely saying "not entirely written by God" does not get us to "entirely written not by God"... And even if it did, there is still the vast gap between "written by X", "written by those with knowledge of X", and "made up from whole cloth".

You seem to love the false dichotomies here. Why?

http://www.holycross.edu/departments...ne-Genesis.htm

That's not the best web page I've ever seen, but his discussion ranges far afield, and directly addresses the difficulties of trying to understand the creation story as literal "days".

The Jews have been understanding that story in a very different light for a long time, and after all, it's in their language. (Speaking of which, grab a Strong's sometime and look up word #3117.)

It's a beautiful story, but it's not a history; creation stories have a sound to them which is similar to, but distinct from, history.

It seems to me that you're simply playing the same ludicrous false dichotomies that traditional Christian fundies do; this, in the end, means you have accepted the irrational and bogus arguments you're so fond of attacking.

Pyrrho

seebs, I will confine my remarks to the main part of your post, and not bother with the rest presently, as this is already taking too much time.

No, I have not treated it in that way at all. But, if you say God wrote part of it, which parts do you say he wrote? And why do you say those parts?



If you were to say (though you are still being unclear, so you may mean something entirely different) that God wrote most of the Bible (over 50%), but we have no way of knowing what parts he wrote, then the book would be useless for determining the truth about anything. This is because we would have to use some other means for determining which parts of the Bible might possibly have been written by god, and which parts are safely discarded. There would always be the danger of picking the wrong parts, so it would be a book that could not possibly be trusted. And this would apply to all of it, because we would not know which parts were reliable and which parts were not. So we may as well throw it away, and figure things out for ourselves, as it cannot be a reliable guide to action, and everything in it that we would ever use would need independent verification anyway. So why not just stick with the independent verification, since the book adds nothing to it that we can ever know to be true?

We can, if you wish, treat the matter as one of those "brain teasers", and say that we have a book, written by two people, one who always writes the truth, and one who does not always write the truth. Let us say that the one who always wrote the truth wrote over 50% of it. We still would be in no position to judge which things in the book were true and which were not, from reading the book. Absolutely everything in it would need to be compared with something external to the book for us to be able to determine if it were true or not. So, since we would need to use external sources for everything in it, why bother with the book at all? I suspect that this is the source of your claim that I am embracing a false dichotomy. But the simple fact is, a book that is known to contain, say, only 75% truth without knowing which parts are true, is not one that can be relied upon at all.

If you literally mean that God wrote 99.99% of the Bible, there would still be the problem above to a degree, and, you would then be faced with god writing some of those troublesome laws that you seem to wish to discard. (By the way, if you discard the words of Jesus in Matthew 5, there is also the troublesome thought that god must have been wrong before, if he needed to change the laws from what he said before.) But, more to the point, why would you believe that 99.99% was written by god?

Now, if you mean to suggest that you can specify which parts God wrote and which parts he did not, then the matter would be different. Then the questions would be, which parts did he write, and how do you know this?

seebs

I don't say he directly wrote any of it; I think He *inspired* it.

And we could start with 1 Corinthians 13.

It would not provide certainty. It might provide very useful insights.

However, it's not "50% perfect truth, 50% lies". It's "everything there because someone was trying to communicate something important"; if you take the time to learn your way around, you can get a lot of very good information from it.

However, all of your material depends on the assumption that anything not written by God is necessarily false. In fact, the Bible as a whole, taken as the kind of writing it actually is, is very useful. It contains good insights into the human condition, useful advice, and a great deal of information about how people wrestling with the concept of the Divine have come to understand it. Even if there were no God, the Bible would be a useful book for anyone hoping to understand humans.

Anyway, the false dichotomy - either directly penned by God, word-for-word, and literal, or entirely useless - is still false.

SecularFuture

Pyrrho
I personally think belief may be the foundation to Christianity. I’m sure that a belief in a god came first, and through their belief – their bible was written. Just a theory.

SecularFuture

fromtheright
Prove it! The burden of proof is on you, brother. You’re the one who is making a positive claim. Can you support it?