Eldarion Lathria

Neorask has done nothing to prove that the bible is true. And if there is an omnimax god, it is not the jealous, bloodthirsty, bad tempered desert shaykh of the bible.

Eldarion Lathria

lenrek

Oops...

PoodleLovinPessimist

Looks like neorask has scampered off; it's been three days since his last "one per day" post has appeared in this thread. At the very least it appears that he intends to keep us on tenterhooks for two or three weeks (if not longer) before he deigns to answer our objections to his supposed "proofs".

Yet another fundy who's all mouth and trousers?

jonesg

THe OT strikes me as proof that when the people obeyed the will of God, things tended to turn out good, when they fell into self will things went downhill. Its about results for a people, not necessarily a person.
Its seems to work better with averages, like quantum probabilities rather than predictors.

The NT ?, maybe its too soon to tell.

"if there is an omnimax god, it is not the jealous, bloodthirsty, bad tempered desert shaykh of the bible."

Maybe thats whate we are learning, God is Love and cannot be something otherwise.

jbernier

Ah - but why is it the most pleasing? Like us look at the line "no dogmas or rules to follow." Would we want to live in a world without any sort of rules to mediate human relationshps is absolutely scary? Is it really pleasing? No rules means no rules: No rules against murder, no rules against stealing, etc. Is this a world in which we would want to live? On this note, I think of the recent scandals within the Catholic Church. People have (quite properly) critiqued the Catholic heirarchy for their failure to enforce rules about the proper treatment of children; an excellent example of where most would agree that rules are a good thing. I suspect that in a world without rules, life would be nasty, brutish and short - thus we would all get to "some sort of 'heaven'" much quicker than in a world with rules. Would the absence of rules be the presence of complete freedom - or would none be free from the violence that would be unleashed?

The only way that this could be a pleasing world is if it is also one in which humans are not motivated to kill, steal, etc. Does that sound like what our world would be like without laws? I would suggest that the human condition makes such a world impossible: That without rules too many people would "show no mercy" to their fellow human being, resulting in violence unrestrained by any rules. The only way that this could occur is a transformation of the human condition. However, if the human condition is the problem can we reasonably look within the human for the genesis of this transformation - or must it come from without the human entirely? That is the crux of the question that you have begged by saying that an existence without rules is "pleasing": Can humans transform themselves and their relationships in such a way that rules are unnecessary, thus allowing for the existence of your most pleasing world?

I would propose that the gospel message proclaims the possibility of a world that has no need for rules precisely because, through the human response to the divine revelation that is the self-effacement of the Incarnation, the human condition itself no longer tends towards the behaviours that make rules necessary in the first place. The Incarnation operates as the rupture to the inescapable human cycles of violence and victimization that has made rules necessary in the first place: A rupture that could not come from the human precisely because our very condition is the problem and thus cannot be the solution.

jbernier

Absolutely. But why is that? Is it not because we are afraid of the alternative - an alternative in which there is no authority or structure for our activities? Are we not afraid of what our activities might become without that structure, what our neighbours' might become? I would suggest that it is precisely because we know what a world unrestrained by rules would look like.

This (and my previous post) are not an argument for "divine law." Rather, it is an argument that says that the very fact that we have authorities, structures, rules, etc., speaks to the fact that human relations are not by nature harmonious and that this in turn speaks to the nature of the human condition.

Do you have evidence that counters my argument about the human condition? Do you have a better explanation for why we seek structure and authority?

That having been said, the gospels do not begin with by eliminating feelings of guilt and responsibility. They begin by magnifying them. And this is absolutely crucial to the redemptive process, for what it does is call attention to that tendency towards selfishness and self-seeking in all of us: It calls attention to the fact that all too often we are all too ready to violate other people to fulfill our own desires and seek our own interests. Modern conceptions of the human person (liberal and conservative) want us to believe that humans are basically good, loving, people and that it is just the exceptional pathological or sinful person who engages in acts of violence. But what is the genesis of this exceptionality? Is it because they were abused as a child - in that case, would not the parent also be exceptional in this regard and thus we must ask from whence came their exceptionality. I am inverting this: I am suggesting that the overwhelming evidence of human history is that violence is not the exception but the normal tendency of human interactions. I think that this makes more sense of the constant existence of wars, domestic violence, etc.

The elimination of guilt is perhaps the last thing we want to have happen. It is good for people to recognize their own potentials for violence, lest they deceive themselves into thinking that they are better than they are. For that is the crux of my argument: That left to our own devices we each have the potential to engage in violence to achieve our goals (note that I have an expansive definition of violence which focuses upon the idea of "violation": That we are willing to violate others, even in the smallest ways, to get what we want).

The God of the Gospels is not an comfortable God! It is a God that says "This is my body, broken because of you. What you do the least of these you do to me, for I am the Victim of Victims. What you do to them - for good or for ill - you do to me." What does this do? It turns our attention from rules, from self-seeking and the rules which limit and govern it (for is that not the point of the structures we create, really?) to the very moment in which we act towards the other. For what we do to the other we do also to Christ, to Godself.

There is another dimension here, also. The Gospels (and Paul will really play up this idea) are not only to identity Christ with the victim to also identify themselves with Christ. Now, think of the logic here: Christ=Victim; Christ=Me. Therefore, Christ=Victim=Me, or Victim=Me. In identifying with Christ we are identifying with all victims, possible and actual! Thus the idea of doing on to others as we would have done on to us: We are to literally imagine ourselves in the position of the person towards whom we are acting. When we go to commit murder we are to imagine ourselves being the one murderer. Self-seeking is thus not simply overcome or ignored, but turned against itself entirely.

This is not comforting; this is awesome (in the traditional sense of the word: An object of great awe) and turns us to an ethic of love, not an ethic of rules.

That is very true. That is why my approach is to suggest that the Gospels (a) correctly diagnose the human condition and (b) offer the only effective solution for which I am familiar to that condition. Properly speaking that this does not make them "true"; however, if they can be said to correspond to human reality then it does suggest that they are at least philosophically meaningful. Note, I am focusing on the gospels simply because I am a Gospels scholar: It's what I do so it is what I know.

Note that I have no interest in going where Neorask wants to go in using this to prove that homosexuality is immoral. For me, when we engage in polemics against homosexuals we demonstrate that we are not living the ethic of love - for we are not putting ourselves in the position of the victim of our polemic and asking if we would want to be so treated. Of course, it also helps that I am in complete favour of same-sex marriage and am proud of Canada's recent court decisions that make same-sex marriages a legal reality.

PoodleLovinPessimist

show_no_mercy is, I think, commenting not on our own rules, but rather on the arbitrary rules supposedly created by a god just to demonstrate its superiority.

We don't need a god to establish rules against murder or stealing; we can manage that much on our own.

Well, if the "incarnation" is operating in this manner, it's operating very slowly. Western Liberal Democracy appears to work much better.

PoodleLovinPessimist

The point is not whether we seek structure and authority. We do. The question is whether priests can effectively provide such structure and authority on the basis of divine revelation. I say no. I say the worlst secular democracy is better than the best theocracy.

If it works for you, that's fine, but as a basis for governing a society, it's a complete flop, as a millennium of Christian mis-rule in the West has proven.

This technique is showing a lot of promise. The reality is probably somewhere in between. Humans are, by nature, neither especially evil nor especially good; a person's upbringing will, for the most part, determine the degree of his or her socialization.

For the most part, this is accurate. We only have to go back a few tens of generations, though, to where abuse, violence and exploitation and oppression was the usual. We did not even begin to climb out of this hole of abusive socialization until we abandoned the idea of universal guit.

Violence is the usual tendency. It did not become unusual until we decided that violence was neither normative nor natural.

Guilt is a fine emotion. What we want to get rid of is the inculcation and exploitation of guilt, which probably preceded but was certainly perfected by the Christian religion.

Guilt is a very different thing under canonical Christian doctrine. Guilt is actually divorced by doctrine from actual deeds; it starts with original sin, and it has been most extensively attached not to violence but to sexuality, and not to deeds but to thoughts.

But we don't need to invoke god to fix this; democracy works better.

This is a very benign interpretation of Christianity. All I can say is that the text of the Christian Bibles apparently do not compel this interpretation particularly strongly, as it is most definitely not the most common interpretation. This sort of argument is best directed at existing believers, not atheists.

You fall into the same trap here as the more mainstream interpretations and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is not self-seeking per se that is to be overcome, it is the exploitation and oppression of others. To abandon self-seeking altogether is, by definition, to permit ourselves to be exploited. Being exploited by a god (or, more specifically, the priests who claim to speak for a god) is no better than being exploited by a person.

I'm all for an ethic of love.

I do not believe this to be the case. I think the diagnosis is wrong. We are not sinful by nature, nor are we virtuous by nature. We are, rather, to some degree what we physically are, to some degree what we are created by our parents and our society, and to some degree what we create ourself to be. I don't believe the Gospels really get this, or if they do, they don't communicate it particularly effectively.

Nor do they do this. They offer no real "solution". At the cost of presumptuously telling you what you think, I suggest that your liberal and humanistic interpretation of Christianity is as much or more influenced by ten or fifteen generations of liberal humanistic secular philosophy than by the texts themselves.

badger3k

I wondered whether he would be back, since he missed his third day. But don't forget this is his religions holy time, so he may be too busy with family or whatever to even want to post. Who knows?

I hope he comes back, I want to hear the rest of this "proof".

jbernier

Ah, but where is the idea that all are equal - and all are equally worthy of protection - come from in the first place? Let us look historically. I would suggest that we will find that it comes from the gospel message itself - that Wetsern liberal democracy is precisely an outgrowth of the impulse towards "neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, slave nor free in Christ Jesus."