eheffa

I agree that Watchman Nee is off the wall but his works were part of my early youthful hunger for understanding.


I am beginning to appreciate the distinction here and apologize for using what appears to be a rather loaded / pejorative term.

-evan

eheffa

This is a helpful summary.

It does seem that the Gospels were not front & centre as the authority on the person of Jesus until at least the mid-second century & probably later.

-evan

spin

And quite understandable as well. One usually turns to the recommendations of the society in which one's friends and companions live.

What we aspire to here is to gain control of the tools we need for us to find out, understand and analyse for, and by, ourselves. It's a community effort. And our aspirations mightn't live up to the reality, but it's an attempt to get it right along as objective lines as we can.

The notion of an apology in the sense we understand it here, is to speak in favor of some position. It is not in itself objective, but the bias of the speaker for the position. The red flag comes when we note the "not objective" part of apologetics. This doesn't mean that the position advocated by the apologist is wrong, but that their position is one that they are too biased to know. The only real way to know how good something is comes from its confrontation with opposition, so seeking out different perspectives will usually clarify the validity of what interests you.

We need a yardstick by which we measure what we know. An apologist, as an apologist, doesn't have one.

And there's no need to apologize because you have to learn some time.


spin

eheffa

Well I am no scholar either & perhaps have no business asking questions here...:redface:

The internal inconsistencies & contradictions of the Gospels effectively rule out the possibility of their being inerrant; i.e. they are certainly not inerrant.

OTOH, could they be inspired but simply flawed; either in the originals or the subsequent copies? ( perhaps God wanted the human flavor to include human frailty.) Do these stories come across as inspired when they do not appear to be eye-witness accounts, when they differ on significant details and Matthew & Luke clearly cribbed parts of Mark (as well as Josephus perhaps) to get their story-lines? None of these issues alone are fatal to the "inspired" hypothesis but together they make it look like the Gospels are a pretty man-made man-inspired work. I still feel like a heretic in writing this but can't help feeling that there is no good alternative to this conclusion.

-evan

spin

Except that's the reason for the forum... to ask questions and confront biblical literature and history in order to get a better understanding. So knock off the :redface: , ok?


spin

eheffa

[QUOTE]I would understand that these are pragmatic arguments for religion - providing social structure etc. They are of course no help in determining what is actually grounded in reality vs wishful thinking.

I understand that one needs to identify one's presuppositions and prejudice to guard against the inevitable reaffirmation of the comfortable faith. Many of the Judeo-Christian presuppositions are quite powerful & run very deeply. It takes a lot of weeding to root them out to even attempt to start with an un-biased examination of the evidence.


Thanks for your thoughts.

-evan

eheffa

Hmmm. I didn't appreciate this nuance. Thanks for setting me straight.

-evan

eheffa

In his book "Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (or via: amazon.co.uk)" Julian Baggini makes the interesting comment that if you were take a hundred scientists with differing ideas on an issue and after bringing them together for discussion, testing and further experimentation you would eventually reach a consensus. Take a hundred theologians and start with a consensus statement and after discussion and more discussion, you will eventually come away with a hundred different views on the subject. I have paraphrased his statement but it does point to the fact that theology is by nature not about verifiable claims & it is therefore reasonable to ask where unverifiable beliefs should have any merit or weight in our thinking.

-evan

judge

I think this is a good point, and WRT to knowledge of god, I think this is not unexpetced. God is not some fact as far as I can tell like the facts we explore in the natural world. God is endlessly multifacted, and so one person might understand god differently to myself but this would not mean there understanding was not as good as my own.

This seems to me a problem with religion, when someone insists that their concept is the correct one or that their way is the only way. On this point I think I ned to look beyond traditional attempts to extract this view from the bibel as well.

So yes, people disagree about god (and then theology too), but this does not mean that evidence for god is not verifiable. Two areas might be (a) prayer and (a) a deep change that happens within a person that does not seem to be the result of merely human power.

I had an experience maybe three years ago where I prayed (and I was really in need...or so I thought he he) and I thought my prayers were answered, and so I sent more prayers of thanks, only to realise at the 11th hour that my prayers were actually not answered. It was a very difficult situation for me.

So I said "thats it, I am never praying like that again". Now, I could have at that point decided there was no god, after all I prayed and nothing happened, but instead I thought, maybe I have the wrong idea about god, maybe I have no idea how to pray.
So I have made an effort to get rid of god, that is to get rid of all my old ideas about god and experiment with things like prayer. To try things and watch and learn.
The more I continue on this path the surer I become about the truth of the matter, or certain realities.
So in this sense I am verifying things for myself. Also I discus these things with others who have an interest and learn from them and their experiences too.
As for theology, I have an interest but try to give it less and less place in my thinking. The only theology which I think is really important is for me to see and understand that eternal conscious torture in hell is actually not taught in the bible or by Jesus.
This is such a poisonous idea that it really does need to be refuted.

But as for most theology, too often it gets used to divide people up into "us and them", and that idea can't IMHO work for too much longer., so yes lets give it less and less space.
Hope I haven't waffled on too much.

judge

Maybe, it might be more accurate to say we don't know whether they were or not in earlier times.