motorhead

I think this is on the right track. Protestants set up the Bible as the one and only authority for their doctrine. Problem is people are fallible and will come away with many different interpretations. Hence, the reason there are thousands of different Protestant denominations.

The Bible was never intended to be the one and only authority for doctrine. The NT came together in the first few centuries of the Church. If I understand correctly, it came together as a result of many Christians writings circulating amongst churches and questions started to come up as to which ones were the right ones to be used in the Church. Through a long process and much debate, the Church finally settled on the 27 books of the NT as representing orthodox Christianity.

This did not mean that suddenly these 27 books were the one and only authority. The Church is the final authority, as it was instituted by Jesus and he promised it to be guided by the Holy Spirit.

Zeichman

I think this is pretty accurate... "Sola Scriptura" and all. Additionally, from what I understand, Fundamentalism is an early 20th century reaction against Neo-Orthodoxy (which was a reaction against 19th century Liberal Christianity, which was a reaction against Deism, which was a reaction to... screw it.)

But I think judge is probably right for the origins of such thinking.

slaveofOne

Other psychological factors...

How many of you have ever felt personally attacked when someone questioned or challenged your atheism, naturalism, and such? Were you ever offended by someone saying something or using something related to Christianity in their life or expression that obviously stood in contradiction to your own life and claims? I'm sure many of you have. Love is the law, as a 1st century rabbi said it. And we all want that, so we tend to feel unloved, frustrated, disturbed, whatever, when that love is not displayed. We also tend to identify ourselves with our beliefs, hopes, and so forth--the more so the stronger those beliefs, hopes, and such are.

So Christians are no different. For whatever reason, they come to believe scripture is error free and literal and it comes to mean something very personal and important to them. Then when someone comes along and starts poking at it, it feels like someone is poking at them. It doesn't seem like love to them any more than when a Christian says they want to pray for you.

So what is the response? Well, just look in these forums and you'll see people wanting to know how to respond to Christians who say they'll pray for you... These atheists are looking for a way to authenticate themselves in the midst of something else that seems (or may in fact be) unloving. This is no different than some of these Christians. Someone comes against their important beliefs, hopes, etc, and causes them to feel unloved or disturbed. So they do as the atheists here in these forums did--they seek ways to authenticate themselves, which obviously includes substantiating and perhaps guarding their beliefs.

Mike Elphick

Do you have a reference for this statement? I'm discussing Genesis with a Catholic creationist and it would be most useful to know what the Catholic Church's teaching is about this.

Toto

See this thread in the E/C Forum:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=139581

yalla

This might help...from the website of JF Allward
"The most disastrous consequences must follow upon our believing that anything false is found in the sacred books....If you [even] once admit into such a high sanctuary of authority one false statement, there will not be left a single sentence of those books, which, if appearing to anyone difficult in practice or hard to believe, may not by the same fatal rule be explained away as a statement, in which intentionally, the author declared what was not true." --St. Augustine in Epistula, p. 28.


Edited to add:
After posting this I thought i'd go and read the relevant document.
I can't find it...not even sure it exists...the letters of Augustine, 100s of them are all numbered and that's no help.
Can anyone put me on target please?

andrewcriddle

Letters of Augustine Letter 28 (XXVIII) to Jerome Augustine is not concerned here with errors in Scripture in the sense of mistakes but with opposing the idea that Scripture could contain passages which deliberately mislead us for our own good.

Andrew Criddle