Bumble Bee Tuna

Here's my basic problem with "cherry picking".

WHY do you believe?

I can never find a good reason.

At least fundies can say "I have decided to have faith that the Bible is true. From that faith, I derive all of my beliefs". But a cherry picker? You have no foundation to your beliefs. When choosing your theology, you are essentially looking at the Bible, and deciding to "believe" in the things that you think sound good. How do you decide what parts of the Bible to believe? I don't see any way to do so rationally. The entirety of the Bible was decided to be Canon by the early Church. If you can't trust the early Church's decision, how can you believe anything?

Basically it comes down to, where do you derive your beliefs from? Not from the Bible, not from the Church...what's left? Your personal ideas? Surely you realize that your own personal ideas were made up. You made them up yourself!

A fundy can at least bank on the slim chance that the Bible is not a bunch of lies. A fundy can at least bank on the slim chance that the church got it right. But you KNOW that your beliefs are lies, if you made them up yourself!

You also have this problem: What you're doing is having preset beliefs, and then picking the parts of the Bible that agree with those preset beliefs. Why bother with Christianity then?

I think the best thing you could do for this thread is to write an in-depth description of your beliefs, and explain HOW and WHY you came to those beliefs. Tough to really discuss it without knowing those things.

-B

Rational BAC

Have not really forgotten you guys. Nor have I cowered off in terror at your very intelligent posts.

Been out of town for the past weekend plus and just now did a system restore on my 'puter and it seems OK for now.

I actually work for a living believe it or not. (part time anyway). Will get back to this discussion sometime this coming weekend.

But what is this "moved" crap? As far as I can tell I haven't moved with this "Cherry Picking" thread to any place or from any place.

Oh well, at least the thread is still here.

Again -------will get back to you sometime this weekend--"Lord willing and the creek don't rise"---------as they say (and no offense to atheists or tree huggers intended)

Mageth

Name me one Christian that doesn't at least occasionally cherry pick from the bible. Even those that believe the bible is the literal, infallible word of god don't agree on interpretations of everything it says. They will, for example, pick a cherry from the bible, and when presented with a plum from the bible that contradicts that cherry, declare "that's a cherry, not a plum."

Rational BAC

Just bumping this up to the top so I can find it easier later on this weekend.

Cheers y'all-------

Peter Kirby

This is the best response to "cherry picking" that I've seen yet. Of course, the OP didn't include very much info on what is believed, so it is entirely possible that Rational BAC has the Confucian Analects next to his Bible. The decision to make the Bible the text of choice for the pickin's seems to be culturally determined.

best,
Peter Kirby

Tercel

Mmmm fruit salad ~drools at mouth~
Actually though, there's nothing quite like good cherries...

Literally speaking: Is there anything good those other religions have got which Christianity ain't got already?

Tercel

Yup.

Er, it's the OT that's mostly garbage and contains the talking snake, not the NT. You are correct: The standard moderate Christian position appears to be that Genesis 1-11 is non-literal. Instead, we believe it tells theological truths through non-literal means: Like Jesus' parables did.

Try again.
1. Just because we reject the snake story as literally false does not mean we reject the doctrine of the Fall.
2. No one denies the sinfulness of man so even were we to reject the doctrine of the Fall we could still posit a need for Christ.

Tercel

No they can't. What they can decide is that Christianity is true. They can't reasonably decide that the Bible is true short of exhaustive analysis of all Biblical and nearly Biblical books or an acception of the authority of the Christian church.

Of course we do: Logic. If we accept that Christianity is in general the most true religion (for whatever reason we find justifies this) then we can apply a few truckloads of logic to arrive at various levels of certainty regarding the different Christian teachings.

Everyone is partial to accepting things that they think sound good. I doubt you or me escape this trap much better than anyone else.

A logical combination of the authority of the Church, rational argument, modern scholarly analysis, what other Christians for the past two millennia have thought etc can yield a rational decision.

Where do you derive your beliefs from? I can't see your attack here as being anything but hypocritical.

Er, actually the early Church councils put the Apocrypha in the Bible - so the fundy would be banking on the chance that their modern church got it right.
But if the fundy can bank on arbitrary things, why can't the cherry picker bank on their beliefs being truth?

Tercel

I'm very much not sure what the results of such a survey would be, but I think it would be very interesting. It all depends how you define "Christian". If the definition is that the person gives a positive response to "would you call yourself a 'Christian' or do you believe the Christian God exists?" then I'd say chances are the majority would answer "True" - athough there would be a slight problem since many of those that would put True are probably too nominally Christians to be able to actually comment on the contents of the OT, not having read it.

In short, my experience lends me to strongly disagree with the "utterly bonkers" sentiment.

Clutch

Tercel, since BAC seems to have indefinitely many computer problems, maybe you could have a go, then:Though my cognitive defects are many, I do believe I have a epistemically principled approach to biblical interpretation, at least: At a minimum, do not accept claims that you would not accept if given today by comparable means of report.

Messianic and miracle-worker claims are relatively common even today, and have bases in fact that are knowable by much more reliable means than a handful of ancient stories of unknown provenance, each written at least decades after the purported events. Yet I, like virtually all committed theists of any stripe, do not believe these claims -- eg, David Koresh, Sai Baba, and so forth.

Since you presumably do not believe that Sai Baba is a holy miracle worker -- though correct me if I'm wrong! -- but presumably believe that Jesus was, then you owe a story. The story must explain your differential attitudes, given how much more immediately, widely, and confirmably the former stories are evidenced over the latter. That's what being a principled Cherry Picker requires.