sky4it

You are right spin I was being a little crabby. Ive been busy lately. If I had more time I would have responded. Course tis not like your always the most pleasant yourself.

Anyways peace and hope to see you around the corner.

-Jay-

Fair enough.

I have no plans to retreat from my statement. I stand firmly behind it. However, with respect to the Bible (or really anything else - the Bible isn't special in this regard): It's quite possible for me to understand someone else's perspective on it, and learn things from that perspective, and still consider that other perspective to be batshit crazy. Understand =/= agree with. The hypocrisy (your word, not mine) tends to be more pronounced in the conservative Christians of various stripes who show up in the forums to evangelize, and display either the unwillingness or the inability to consider, even for a few minutes, the position of the atheists and more liberal Christians here.

(ObDisclosure - I consider myself to be a liberal Catholic, and I consider Catholics to have at least as legitimate a claim on the term "Christian" as any other group.)

I'm not arguing that people don't have different perspectives and interpretations - that's trivially obvious.

I'm not disputing that people's understanding of things can change through time. That's also trivially obvious. (When I was a kid, I'd watch the Muppet Show and wonder why my folks were laughing at parts that weren't funny. Watching the Muppet Show as an adult, I understand that there were multiple layers of humor there. Same sort of thing, although I'm fairly certain that nobody asserts divine connections for the Muppet Show. A pity.)

But the issue here isn't that people have different interpretations.

The issue is why they have different interpretations. Joan picked some fairly dramatic examples, like hydrogen bombs, to illustrate that issue, because those examples are pretty close to black and white (Joan - I'm assuming your intent. Please correct me if I'm mistaken). Even so, you've got folks on both sides of the issue claiming Biblical support for their point of view. Why? For all the talk of "present truth" and such, it certainly could appear to an outside observer that both sides are cherry-picking the Bible to support positions they have an ideological interest in. This makes the instructions of the Bible subjective and not objective, and that's problematic for a collection of books that's claimed to be The Truth, regardless of how many Scripture cites you throw at it. It's an anomalous situation that we wouldn't expect to see if the Bible is what many Christians claim it to be. Anomalies are interesting.


2 Peter 1:20-21 is setting up for a warning (in 2 Peter 2:1) against false prophets that are expected to emerge - it's saying that true prophecy comes from the Holy Spirit. It doesn't so much mean "be careful how you interpret scripture" as it means "be careful because there are people out there who claim to be prophets that are really just making it up."

You assert there is more harmony. Perhaps that's because many people of faith haven't actually read the Bible all the way through. It's fairly uncommon, at least in my experience, to hear 2 Kings 2:23-24 read at church or discussed in Sunday school. It's more common, again in my experience, for the Old Testament selections to vaguely parallel the New Testament selections, which results in an apparent harmony that isn't really there. (I've had people tell me very confidently that there isn't a story about child-eating bears in the Bible...) Could the harmony you claim be explained by the fact that some (many? most?) people of faith only read the harmonious parts?

And no, I'm not averse to allowing those of faith to learn from each other. I encourage it, and applaud it. Unfortunately I just don't see it happening a lot.

You seem like a sincere and decent guy, sky4it. If I met you in a pub, I'd probably buy you a drink. Stick around.

regards,

NinJay

sky4it

Thanks, helps me understand your view a little better. I have seen it all NinJay, when I was a kid they had a guy named Bryan Ruud running around with garbage cans and telling people it was Gods will to fill it with green cash. Now there's a guy on TV who tells (presumably poor people that are broke) to send in there checks and by faith it is some kind of seed and they will reap a bank account of some size. Is this screwball stuff? Well hell yes it is. There is no practicality in it. There always will be people who abuse the bible, but people are abusing other things as well.

I dont disagree with the part that some people cherry pick for ideological interests. You know Heck the entire Calvinist movement is one big cherry picking machine. Is there a way around this? About all I can tell you is what I do. I approach the bible with a large degree of uncertainty, willing to learn something new today. I also dont depend on people to give me a perspective that i need. The Apostle Paul said he was "nothing" (I think) I think you have to let the bible teach you something as opposed to instructing the bible what it is saying. BTW, dont worry about me evangelizing anyone, I actually get along with non-christians and christians about the same. I also have deep differences with some Christians.

Let me tell one person I really like that is Ann Coulter. Yet, I am not a Republican because I dont like what they have done with health care and the war. Yet, I undertand that people like Miss Coulter, if she wasnt a Republican, probably wouldnt have a career at all. So even the people that I like the best, even them, I have a few differences with. Still, if there was one person that makes me want to be a Rep. it is her.


It is also very much complicated by:
1) Tens of thousands of books written by christian authors which make people swamped with information
2) events like the Christian Crusades
3) Charlatans hucksters and posers

There is an interesting one or two verse covenant in the bible, its called the Salt Covenant in the Old Test and Jesus referred to it. What it mean? I think it means put a little salt in it. In whatever you doing. I think you could put the entire bible in that little salt covenant and have yourself the real thing. Because I dont think it is suppose to be difficult.

Now when people say God told us to go to war or God this and God that, you know they should just keep to themselves if they are that confident, the fact they have to mention it, is sort of predictive that they are manipulators.

The place that I asserted harmony is mostly in having a subset of moral values. When I was real young I got upset over all the differing doctinal formats. Sometimes just ask yourself a question, does what they are teaching matter to everyday life? If not, chuck it in the who cares bin. Plus you can chuck those that teach stuff that doesnt matter in the "they dont really talk about things that matter" container. I think to get through wether bible people or politicians or anyone else everyone needs a couple of those bins.

Your going to get a kick out of this one NinJay. I was listening to that station after the Lennox/Dawkins debate, and some preacher was on there telling people that "for him to have a drink was a sin" Most of my life I rarely if ever drank, now every other weekend I like to have a few. Was he right in saying this? Hell no he was dead ass wrong They called Jesus a winebiber, The apostle Paul said not to be drunk with excess. The problem is what is a persons excess? I have had to learn the hard way, lost my wallet a short time ago. I think excess for me is when I wake up the next morning and regret something I said or did. Now I had to learn that by getting a few scraps along the way. Anyway thats where the bible for me is fun, and i dont get all skinned up by this joe preacher's comments because he is short a couple of marbles. The cool thing to me is, Jesus called it a discipline. You descipline yourself, to maximize your fun or work, and the discpline keeps me from making an idiot out of myself.

Yeah, maybe we will pound down a few someday, stranger things have happened. For me its Jack Daniels sours. :wave:

regards,

NinJay[/QUOTE]

-Jay-

Sky4it - I appreciate your response and would like for the dialog to continue, however, if you don't object, I'd like to move this particular line of the discussion between you and me over to this thread where it seems to be a more appropriate fit. I also think that you probably have some good insights to add to that other thread.

Then way we can get back onto the original topic of the thread we're currently in - the presence of contradictions between Chronicles and Samuel/Kings and what those contradictions imply for the concept of Biblical inerrancy. Most recently the discussion had involved the two different accounts of the death of Josiah - on the spot (in Kings) vs back in Jerusalem (Chronicles).

Randel Helms, in The Bible Against Itself (or via: amazon.co.uk) discusses the contradictions in the context of Chronicles being a later history that the Chronicler intended to replace and suppress the history in Samuel/Kings. (It's been a little while since I read that book, and I don't have it in front of me to cite the specifics of his arguments). Barry Bandstra casts Chronicles more as reinterpretation of Samuel/Kings through the lens of time. Neither of these approaches necessarily invalidates either history completely, but both of them offer very reasonable explanations for the contradictions present between the two. Helms' perspective implies some historical revisionism in the interest of political ideology, while Bandstra's implies more of a cultural rationale. I'm personally inclined to think it's a mixture of the two, heavily influenced by political spin.

An interesting point is that neither of these positions requires any notion of inerrancy on the part of the author of Chronicles. Whether the Chronicler was motivated out of political bias or cultural interest, he felt quite free to change the details of the accounts he was re-telling. This suggests that the Chronicler didn't view Samuel/Kings as a divine, inerrant, perfect text but rather viewed it as he might any other document.

(Obviously there are other mundane possibilities - the positions presented by Helms and Bandstra don't preclude many other plausible reasons for re-writing Samuel/Kings.)

regards,

NinJay