Polycarp on biblical literalism

[badchad]

Polycarp:

Regarding my questions in this thread:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2986284#post2986284

You wrote:

Assuming you won't object, I'll start a new thread, trying to set forth my thinking clearly, rather than responding specifically to you point-by-point, as my taking offense at what I saw as trolling and was apparently just you flagging what you saw as inconsistency and "cherry-picking" and objecting to them (but doing so in a tone that triggered hostility in me), has turned this one into a trainwreck. I will of course keep in mind what you've flagged and try to respond adequately to your points. I sincerely hope you'll participate in it, and perhaps we can resolve the questions you raise. I may be a few hours dealing with IRL needs and getting my thoughts together before I start it, though.

Are you still planning to follow through with your above statements?

[Tee]

I didn't think he was a strong Bible literalist in the first place. What do you want him to address?

[Polycarp]

Yes, and I apologize. But I'm only interested in Biblical literalism in order to combat it, or more precisely to combat its negative effects on others -- literalists are free to think what they like, but may not force it on others, IMHO.

I haven't been able to compose a statement of my belief system adequately structured and justified to be able to defend it against the challenges you raised in that other thread. But in view of your re-raising the question, I'll give it a go, right here. Post(s) setting forth a rough cut will follow.

[Polycarp]

I believe in God. Start with that statement, and let me make clear that the term "believe" is not to be construed as "intellectual acceptance of the existence of" but as "put one's trust in."

I do not comprehend God -- whatever and whoever He is, He's significantly more than anything I can wrap my mind around. I know Him in the sense that I know a person -- as an individual I can trust, who has made His goodwill known to me.

I understand Him as expressed in the traditional terms of Christianity, that being the medium through which I came to know of Him. I accept Him as who He purports to be through having had a number of experiences in my life that were, effectively, theophanies -- experiences of his real Presence accessible to me.

As a putatively omnipotent being, I am forced to accept the idea that He can if He wishes supersede the everyday generalizations of how things behave that we have codified as laws of science. I do not, however, believe that He does this as a general rule, if at all. It's my belief that He works through the Universe that He created and the laws that He instituted to govern its workings to achieve His ends.

Given that, I put a great deal of store in the workings of human scholarship and its abilities to tell us how the Universe works and what motivates human beings. Hence, I accept the Big Bang as the most probable cosmology, Darwinian evolution as amended through the work of DeVries, Gould and Eldridge, and others as the probable explanation of the diversity of life and its history, intelligent historiological research as giving the likely structure of what happened in the human past, and so on.

As a result of my theophanic experiences, though, I have come to know and love the Bible, and it was on this particular topic that badchad's questions seemed to revolve. In order to explain where I'm coming from here, I need to put forth a couple of quick anecdotes by way of analogy.

In The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill tells of returning from being appointed Prime Minister to find the Dutch ministers waiting to meet with him, having escaped from the onslaught of the Nazi invasion that day. In The Last Lion: Alone, William Manchester points out the impossibility of this, the actual meeting with the Dutch ministers having been the next day -- and notes that that particular point in time was a climactic one when many critical things happened simultaneously, and that Churchill had been juggling eggs with the fate of the world at stake for six years between that event and the time he wrote The Gathering Storm. Quite simply, although he was writing the history of events in which he played a leading part, his memory of precise details failed him at that point.

Continuing with the Churchill story, we find him arguing with the American Chiefs of Staff and Roosevelt later, and defending himself against an allegation that he was opposed to the Normandy Invasion. According to him, his position never changed, and it was that such a step should be taken when there was a reasonable chance of success, and put off until enough troops, landing craft, etc., could be put together to give it that reasonable chance of success. This attitude is an underlying theme in discussions of potential invasions of occupied France through his entire six-book history of WWII. In short, he is telling what appears to be an accurate account of the war, but it is subtly slanted to make the point of his stance on Normandy never having changed. When, for example, he discusses "Sledgehammer," the 1942 proposal to invade Brittany in order to draw Nazi troops off from the Russian campaign, he makes clear that he was willing to do it if it would have a useful effect on the Nazi-Soviet front but not if it would waste troops and materiel to no good end.

To change to another anecdotal analogy, in the Symposium and other dialogues, Plato puts words into the mouth of Socrates that the latter may or may not have ever said, but by wisely composing speeches for him, brings to life the philosophy which Socrates taught in a way that a dry account in finest Kantian language would never have done.

It is in this respect that I can read the Bible "seriously but not literally" (as Marcus Borg phrases it). Its contents speak to me in vivid detail of the nature of God's personality, of human nature, of what Jesus did and taught. That the Bible has a lot of mythopoeia in it is not a reason not to be interested in it, it's merely a token that those passages are to be read with an eye to what the author was trying to get across in saying what he did, not as some sort of literal, objective historical narrative.

Like Plato, the four Evangelists wrote according to the Classic custom of composing speeches for famous people that conveyed their ideas and teachings, and the nature of who they were, vividly and meaningfully. Like Churchill, they wrote polemically. Precisely what happened on the Sea of Galilee one stormy day, or on the hillside where the crowd of 5,000 men had gathered, I don't know. That doesn't matter -- it's the meaning that the Evangelists invest those stories with that is the key point for me. Luke's portrait of Jesus is one of a compassionate minister to the outcasts of society who condemned the "religion politicians" of the time (to use Libertarian's evocative term); John's portrait is, in context, a mystic who speaks in figurative language in which simple words like "light, bread," and even "word" are invested with special meanings. But the character of the man Jesus comes through in both accounts. Luke and John were not writing objective biography; they had no intent to. What they were doing was an effort to educate people who had heard of Jesus and His teachings, and become interested, in what sort of Man He was and what He said and did. And they succeeded in that -- He is better known to most people in the modern world than any contemporary or virtually any other man before or since. But they did not write objective fact and one is not obliged to read it as such. This, however, in no way obviates one's ability to get accurate meaning out of what they wrote. One must merely read with an eye to what their style was.

With regard to the miracle accounts, I have another anecdote for you: a real one, from my own life. And then a question.

One day in 1990, I was ending a vacation week from work, my wife having returned to work and due to go to our church for choir practice and then to pick up groceries before coming home. That afternoon, I had a massive heart attack. Our young friend and later ward Jay felt a strong urge to come visit me, though he had no idea that I'd be home, and followed the urge. He found me gray of complexion, sweating profusely, and in acute pain, ran and phoned the church to contact my wife, who drove home and rushed me to the hospital, where I was treated and eventually underwent bypass surgery. Had Jay not shown up, I would have been dead by the time my wife got home. In later months, he attributed that urge to God telling him to go see me.

From one perspective, my life was saved by the knowledge of the cardiologist at the hospital and his prompt treatment with a clot-dissolver and other stuff later. But how I came to get there in time is another question. Did God miraculously save my life? Or not? Or does it depend on how you interpret the facts I've just reported?

In his gospel, John never once uses the word "miracle" -- he always uses musthrion (musterion, with the meaning "sign") for the events we term "miracles." And they are supposed to be seen as signs that Jesus was who He claimed to be, or who John claimed Him to be. It's in that context that I read the miracle stories that seem to give everybody problems -- it would be possible to tell the story of my heart attack and survival as a "miracle story," or as the triumph of modern medicine and the kindness of a teenaged boy to a couple who'd shown kindness to him.

Likewise, the attribution of the genocide of the Canaanites and Amelekites and the killing of 42 boys who sassed Elisha by two bears to the command of God is, for me, a case of "passing the buck upstairs," little different from President Bush thinking that it's his Christian duty to lead us into an invasion of Iraq. Over on the Pizza Parlor, a very insightful poster named JoyC noted that it is quite easy to see the growth of the Torah not as God having dictated all those laws to Moses but as the gradual implantation of laws devised to handle situations gradually over hundreds of years into a document supposed to have been given by God as the Israelites' Source of All Law and written by Moses, the man whom He used as Lawgiver. In much the same way, the Congress claims that the Constitution authorizes the Defense of Marriage Act -- even though the question of whether gay people can enter into a legal marriage is one that would have left Madison, Washington, and Hamilton going "wubba, wubba, wubba" -- they found a clause in it that they could interpret to say that that law was authorized by it.

[Fixed symbol coding. -- MEB]

[Polycarp]

(If a moderator sees that string of accented vowels above that I do, and would be so kind as to convert it into the Greek musterion with the symbol font, I'd be appreciative.)

[The Flying Dutchman]

Thankyou badchad for giving us another window on Polycarp. His testimony, views, faith in God, compassion, and devotion to peacemaking, as well as his relentless advocacy for full acceptance for a clearly persecuted (in the name of God)segment of society, homosexuals, oh, and writing skills, leaves me in with supreme admiration. I am happy to be his friend.

[Liberal]

Sorry, but I gotta say "me too". Poly is my spiritual big brother, and I love him this much. [...arms stretched really really wide...] :)

[Polycarp]

For a bit more on my belief stance, let me cite the Baptismal Covenant of the Episcopal Church (and reflect to you that a straightforward naive interpretation of some of the statements in the part of it derived from the Apostles' Creed is not required):

The Baptismal Covenant

Celebrant Do you believe in God the Father?

People I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

Celebrant Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?

People I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.

He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

Celebrant Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?

People I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Celebrant Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

People I will, with God's help.

Celebrant Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?

People I will, with God's help.

Celebrant Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

People I will, with God's help.

Celebrant Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

People I will, with God's help.

Celebrant Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

People I will, with God's help.

[MEBuckner]

In his gospel, John never once uses the word "miracle" -- he always uses musthrion (musterion, with the meaning "sign") for the events we term "miracles."
By the way, Poly, I fixed your symbol coding, but the word musterion (http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/1045441831-3676.html) (musthrion), "mystery" or "hidden thing" or "secret", doesn't actually appear in the Gospel of John. I think you're thinking of semeion (http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/1045441988-1660.html) (shmeion) or "sign"; although semeion does seem to be his favorite, John also uses ergon (http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/1045443042-5476.html) (ergon) or "work" at least occasionally in miraculous contexts (John 7:3 (http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?passage=John+7%3A3&NIV_version=yes&language=english); John 7:21 (http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?passage=JOHN+7:21&language=english&version=NIV&showfn=on&showxref=on)); and in one place (John 4:48 (http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?passage=JOHN+4:48&language=english&version=NIV&showfn=on&showxref=on)) teras (http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/1045442330-87.html) (teraV) or "wonder". (Teras (http://www.bartleby.com/61/21/T0112100.html) could also be rendered "monster" or "monstrosity"; it's apparently not used that way in the New Testament, though it is used in verses like 2 Thessalonians 2:9 (http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/c/1045442817-6417.html#9) to denote "miracles" performed by Satan, as is, incidentally, the word semeion).

Another word used for "miracle" in the other gospels, but not in John, is dunamis (http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/words/1045443670-9169.html) (dunamiV), with various meanings relating to strength, power, or ability, but in some contexts rendered as either "mighty work" (http://www.blueletterbible.org/tmp_dir/c/1045443863-8310.html#20) or "miracle" (http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?passage=matt+11%3A20&NIV_version=yes&language=english), depending on the translation.

Incidentally, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "John never once uses the word 'miracle'"--miracle (http://www.bartleby.com/61/50/M0325000.html) is not a Greek word, but a Latin one, from miraculum, "thing wondered at", so anytime you see "miracle" in the New Testament, some Greek word has been translated. Did you mean that he doesn't use dunamis anywhere?

[Meatros]

Wow Polycarp, you summed up a lot quite nicely!

[Polycarp]

Buck, thanks for the fix, and also for the correction. You're right, of course -- I was doing that from memory, and confusing two things -- the use of semeion (sign) in John with the other material I'd studied at about the same time on the distinction between Magick and musterion in sacramental theology. My sincere apologies to all for having given fraudulent information. I think you're right about dunamis, which is (IIRC needs to be added here thanks to my last blunder!) the standard word for "miracle" in the Synoptics.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

A very succinct and asthetically pleasing summation, Poly, I eagerly await badchad's questions.

[Malthus]

I am quite interested in hearing about your "theophanic experiences". Is this the same as a "mystic experience", when the origin of the experience is a transendental diety?

My dictionary lists "theophany" as "a visible manifestation of God or a god".

[Polycarp]

Yeah, I probably should have used "mystical experience" -- I did not experience a vision but an inward sense of Presence and a not-quite-verbalized communication with Him, more or less analogous to the way one's thoughts race to an insight. It was a "theophany" for me -- an experience of Him as real as reading your post -- but I did not mean to suggest an objectively verifiable or falsifiable event.

[Polycarp]

With regard to badchad's questions to me in our last exchange in that other thread, maybe I'd better get my stance clear here:

First, I read Scripture with an eye to the total message of the book, and with particular reference to what genre of writing is being used at the moment. The Book of Jonah, for example, is a fable with the message that God wants repentance from and extends salvation to all people, including your enemies -- Jonah was sent to the Assyrians who were Judah's biggest threat, and balked at going. The fish story is a part of his trying to run away from God's will for him, and wherever he went finding God there. And when he finally did preach repentance to the Ninevites (who historically never repented and converted to worship of YHWH, by the way), he was pissed off that those sons of bitches got saved, even by his preaching. The gourd story that ends the book deals with God gently reminding him that He's in charge, and He's compassionate to all men. If one takes this as a literal account, one should be very cautious in visiting Disney World -- there are people there pretending to be the real characters of your favorite fairy stories! (Personally, my favorite writer of fairy stories is Armistad Maupin.... ;))

"Supernatural events" in the Bible are the writer's naive perceptions of what went on. I do not know whether any given one of them is a literal account or not, but it does not matter -- whether Jesus got up from the tomb on Easter Morning in a sort of Night of the Undead Messiah or not, some event occurred that convinced men who had known Jesus intimately for three years that although they'd seen Him dead, He was alive again. (David B. has an interesting "urban legend" explanation of this somewhere in the long-defunct threads here, which is not convincing to me but may help explain what went on to others who are similarly discomfited by the Resurrection stories.)

[Malthus]

Originally posted by Polycarp
Yeah, I probably should have used "mystical experience" -- I did not experience a vision but an inward sense of Presence and a not-quite-verbalized communication with Him, more or less analogous to the way one's thoughts race to an insight. It was a "theophany" for me -- an experience of Him as real as reading your post -- but I did not mean to suggest an objectively verifiable or falsifiable event.

Don't worry, I know exactly what you are talking about. :)

Trying to explain mystical experiences to those who have not had them is, I have found, ultimately impossible. Like trying to explain colour in words. Also, the word itself has unfortunate connotations of charlitanism or cultishness - no wonder people avoid it, it conjours up images of scamming Yogis.

For those of us that have had them, there is simply no denying their life-changing power. I myself am of the opinion that such experiences ultimately underlie *all* religions.

Interestingly, although (as far as can be gathered) the experience itself is fundamentally similar for all, it gets expressed in different ways. I think it quite possible that there is a physical explaination for them - but I in no way think that such an explaination robs them of their insight or importance.

[badchad]

Polycarp:

I believe in God. Start with that statement, and let me make clear that the term "believe" is not to be construed as "intellectual acceptance of the existence of" but as "put one's trust in."

I am unclear as to what you are saying here. Are you saying that you trust in god though you are not 100 percent sure that he exists? I know you tend to get upset that I take your statements and reword them, but I am trying to get a clear handle on what your position is, so feel free to clarify for me. If your not 100 percent sure that god exists can you estimate what percent sure you are that some god exists and what percent chance you think that he is of the christian variety?

I do not comprehend God -- whatever and whoever He is, He's significantly more than anything I can wrap my mind around. I know Him in the sense that I know a person -- as an individual I can trust, who has made His goodwill known to me.

I think this gets down to the crux. How can you know god as you would a person? Also how can you be sure he has made his goodwill known to you. You have posted that you have had some unfortunate things happen to you as well. Couldn't you just as easily said that god has made his badwill known to you?

I understand Him as expressed in the traditional terms of Christianity, that being the medium through which I came to know of Him.

I don't think you are making the claim that Jesus actually and literally came and spoke to you. Would it be accurate to rephrase this by saying you went through some very unlikely events, which would make anyone think there might be something there and because you live in the USA, christianity was the most proximal supernatural explanation?

As a putatively omnipotent being, I am forced to accept the idea that He can if He wishes supersede the everyday generalizations of how things behave that we have codified as laws of science. I do not, however, believe that He does this as a general rule, if at all. It's my belief that He works through the Universe that He created and the laws that He instituted to govern its workings to achieve His ends.

I take it from this that you don't put much credence in any of the miracle stories. In the last thread you seemed to be saying that you didn't believe in hell either. If I got this wrong please clarify. Do you beleive in heaven or any other afterlife?

It is in this respect that I can read the Bible "seriously but not literally" (as Marcus Borg phrases it).

Well, as Voltaire phrases it "A proverb isn't a reason." Heck, I read the bible seriously, but not literally, as I did The Iliad and The Odyssey. All three talked of gods and had moral lessons a plenty if you looked for them. How can you (without cherry picking) say the bible is any different?

Its contents speak to me in vivid detail of the nature of God's personality, of human nature, of what Jesus did and taught.

Plagues, floods, fire and brimstone, angel's with swords, hell fire for unbeleivers. This speaks to me vivid detail of god's personality (if he exists) and in our dog eat dog world, it actually fit's better than the nice god that you see. Note that to see your loving god, you have to ignore or explain away a lot of jealous, vengeful, murderous stuff. How can you say that your view of god's personality is right and the bad stuff is wrong? Back to the greek god's, at least they didn't make the claim of being all good and all powerful at the same time. In that sense I think you could make their existance a little more likely than your favorite god.

Precisely what happened on the Sea of Galilee one stormy day, or on the hillside where the crowd of 5,000 men had gathered, I don't know. That doesn't matter -- it's the meaning that the Evangelists invest those stories with that is the key point for me.

How can you say that doesn't matter? If the claim is that Jesus is god, and he demonstrates this by doing miracles, how can it not be important that these miracles didn't really happen? Isn't that the evidence. Otherwise all he has is sayings that you aren't sure are really his, as his biographers are obviously unreliable.

But the character of the man Jesus comes through in both accounts.

A stuck up compulsive griper who is never pleased with anything anyone else does, who might actually be able to have a good time if he would look at the bright side of things?:)

From one perspective, my life was saved by the knowledge of the cardiologist at the hospital and his prompt treatment with a clot-dissolver and other stuff later. But how I came to get there in time is another question. Did God miraculously save my life? Or not? Or does it depend on how you interpret the facts I've just reported?

Yes, it does depend on how you interpret the facts. It also depends on what are the facts. Regarding your friends visit, I have to go back to David Hume. Is it more likely that your friend showed up by coincidence and then came up with the story about his "strong urge" coming from god? It's unclear from your story whether he thinks it came from god or not but that is the implication I am recieving. Or was his urge no stronger than required for anyone to do anything?

Besides the question of the above fact. Look at how you spin your heart attack as a good thing as evidence for the existance of god. I got news for you. A heart attack is a bad thing! So instead of asking why did god help you, why not ask why he chose to screw you over like that? A fundamentalist could say that it was for your liberal interpretation of the bible sending people to hell.

Still aside from your bias in the story I would tend to explain it as such. Lots of people have heart attacks. Many survive. In a land where most people believe in god, most of them pray. Those that live tell of their miracle or whatever you want to call it. Those that die tell no tales. Of course I could ask the obvious like: Why did god save you and not stop plane crashes, huricanes, wars, yadda yadda.

Likewise, the attribution of the genocide of the Canaanites and Amelekites and the killing of 42 boys who sassed Elisha by two bears to the command of God is, for me, a case of "passing the buck upstairs," little different from President Bush thinking that it's his Christian duty to lead us into an invasion of Iraq.

While I agree, your still cherry picking (your term that fits well) what you want to believe over what you have good reason to believe.

First, I read Scripture with an eye to the total message of the book, and with particular reference to what genre of writing is being used at the moment. The Book of Jonah, for example, is a fable with the message that God wants repentance from and extends salvation to all people, including your enemies -- Jonah was sent to the Assyrians who were Judah's biggest threat, and balked at going. The fish story is a part of his trying to run away from God's will for him, and wherever he went finding God there. And when he finally did preach repentance to the Ninevites (who historically never repented and converted to worship of YHWH, by the way), he was pissed off that those sons of bitches got saved, even by his preaching. The gourd story that ends the book deals with God gently reminding him that He's in charge, and He's compassionate to all men.

Again your biasing what you believe. The bible is full (really full) of accounts of god not being compassionate to all men. Besides even if the details of the above account aren't to be taken seriously, I don't think the lesson is any good either. A better lesson could be that nobody is in charge, nature is a cruel place, so you better watch yourself because there are no fairy godmothers to look after you.

"Supernatural events" in the Bible are the writer's naive perceptions of what went on. I do not know whether any given one of them is a literal account or not, but it does not matter -- whether Jesus got up from the tomb on Easter Morning in a sort of Night of the Undead Messiah or not, some event occurred that convinced men who had known Jesus intimately for three years that although they'd seen Him dead, He was alive again.

Again, if Jesus did not really do miracles, what makes him different that a lot of other so called wise thinkers who attracted a following, that you chose not to worship?

[AvidReader]

Kudos to BADCHAD!!

Reference your rebuttal of Polycarp's argument: incisive, succint, pointed, and devastatingly discerning. Congratulatlions!!!

[Polycarp]

Originally posted by badchad
Polycarp:

I believe in God. Start with that statement, and let me make clear that the term "believe" is not to be construed as "intellectual acceptance of the existence of" but as "put one's trust in."

I am unclear as to what you are saying here. Are you saying that you trust in god though you are not 100 percent sure that he exists? I know you tend to get upset that I take your statements and reword them, but I am trying to get a clear handle on what your position is, so feel free to clarify for me. If your not 100 percent sure that god exists can you estimate what percent sure you are that some god exists and what percent chance you think that he is of the christian variety?

No -- my point in saying what I did is that I was not making an objective, metaphysical assertion about a putative entity to be termed God, but that I operate on a faith-based concept of trust in Something that I have come to know as God, in a relational setting. Obviously one cannot have a relationship with that which does not exist, in some way, shape, or form -- and for the same of argument I'll allow children's "imaginary friends" in the door here, and concede that my percept of God might conceivably be all in my own imagination (I have grounds to take the contrary position, which we can discuss later in this thread) -- but my position is not merely one of asserting that God objectively exists (on which I have no reproducible proof capable of satisfying the skepticism of another, merely interior, subjective proof sufficient for me) -- but that the key to knowing and understanding Him, so far as a human can, is in that relationality, that acceptance of a personal relationship with Him.

I am 99.99999% sure of His existence -- allowing for the remote possibility that I may be constructing a monumental post hoc fallacy on my own hallucinations, but not for a second truly believing that to be the case. "Of the Christian variety"? I want to deal with that in answering your next paragraph, if you don't mind.

I do not comprehend God -- whatever and whoever He is, He's significantly more than anything I can wrap my mind around. I know Him in the sense that I know a person -- as an individual I can trust, who has made His goodwill known to me.

I think this gets down to the crux. How can you know god as you would a person? Also how can you be sure he has made his goodwill known to you. You have posted that you have had some unfortunate things happen to you as well. Couldn't you just as easily said that god has made his badwill known to you?

Because He is, among other things, a person -- or at least has the attributes associated with personhood. Since (except for alien abductees if they are to be believed and the owners of genius cats if they are) no human being has ever dealt with another sentient mortal not a human being, there's a distinction between your and my personhood and His -- but it's one of his being an element of His nature; He's more than another person, not less and not skewed from the concept of personhood.

I'm not prepared to promulgate some sort of great conceptualization of the solution of the Problem of Evil -- but allow me to say this much on the goodwill/badwill question. He created a world in which it is possible for evil and hatred to exist and people to choose to do things which injure themselves or others, physically or spiritually. (And "spiritually" does not necessary mean "in a religious sense" -- contemplate the spiritual damage done to a gay youth by the ostracism of his peers and the condemnation of the fundamentalists, as dealt with in a different thread.) In living in this world and dealing with it, we find we grow emotionally and spiritually; I suspect that has a great deal to do with the reason He chose to produce it in the way He did. While He could plausibly have intervened to physically stop me from entering into situations where harm resulted, that would be contrary to his apparent "write a 'clean' operating program for the Universe and let it run" mode of operations. Instead, what He does is to work through his "operating system" by causing coincidence to happen and people of good will to intervene at the right times.

I understand Him as expressed in the traditional terms of Christianity, that being the medium through which I came to know of Him.

I don't think you are making the claim that Jesus actually and literally came and spoke to you. Would it be accurate to rephrase this by saying you went through some very unlikely events, which would make anyone think there might be something there and because you live in the USA, christianity was the most proximal supernatural explanation?

No, I didn't have a vision of a bearded Palestinian standing by my bedside and talking to me (though a now-deceased and quite rational aunt of mine did). Your rephrase is quite accurate save for the fact that I did have the mystical experience (I originally said "theophany") of a very strong sense of His Presence in which He gave me to understand some things.

I believe that the Trinitarian Christian formulation of how He is to be conceived is incomplete as an accurate description of Him but is IMHO the best of a wide range of such incomplete formulations. I affirm with the earliest Church that "in Jesus we see God" and don't demand anyone buy a particular metaphysical concept of how that may be true. I suspect this needs much more work to be a clear statement, but if I may I'll wait on your questions in order to know where to clarify it.

As a putatively omnipotent being, I am forced to accept the idea that He can if He wishes supersede the everyday generalizations of how things behave that we have codified as laws of science. I do not, however, believe that He does this as a general rule, if at all. It's my belief that He works through the Universe that He created and the laws that He instituted to govern its workings to achieve His ends.

I take it from this that you don't put much credence in any of the miracle stories. In the last thread you seemed to be saying that you didn't believe in hell either. If I got this wrong please clarify. Do you beleive in heaven or any other afterlife?

I "believe in" God. I see my task as to deal with the world in accordance with the two Great Commandments (love God, love your neighbor), and to trust Him for what may happen at my death. I don't rule out total annihilation of my consciousness, reincarnation, or any of a dozen other potential fates -- but I believe He has the situation under control, and I don't need to worry about it.

I confess to being totally at sea about the miracle stories. A lot of Scripture suffers from what I personally have termed the "Jacob Brown Effect" -- Gen. Jacob Brown having single-handedly effectively won the War of 1812 -- at least if you go to school about five miles from where he lived, as I did. Imprecision due to exaggeration, repetition of stories with consequent distortion à la the kids' game "Telephone," misinterpretation of what did happen, either by the observers or by others misconstruing their reports -- all these may have contributed to the phenomena reported. It's quite possible, of course, that they may be the literal truth -- that Jesus was able to cure a paralysis and tell the man to take up his bedroll and walk. But far more likely is that they were told by the early Christians, whether as made-up stories to illustrate a point that came to be regarded as true, misconstruances of what happened, or whatever, in an effort to stress to the rest of the world what a remarkable person this Jesus was.

Whether they are objectively true accounts, "sermon illustrations" that came to have an independent life, people repeating "urban legends" in the belief they were true, misunderstandings of actual events, or flat out lies, I don't know -- I suspect strongly a mixture of the first four in some proportions.

It is in this respect that I can read the Bible "seriously but not literally" (as Marcus Borg phrases it).

Well, as Voltaire phrases it "A proverb isn't a reason." Heck, I read the bible seriously, but not literally, as I did The Iliad and The Odyssey. All three talked of gods and had moral lessons a plenty if you looked for them. How can you (without cherry picking) say the bible is any different?

Because the Bible talks more directly about the God I know as a person. (So does the Koran, but IMHO the Koran is about 2% Allah and 98% Mohammed so far as inspiration goes.) I am personally not inspired or instructed by tales of Greek and Roman deities and their love lives and strange sense of justice, with the exception of the Prometheus story. (This is not true for the Norse stories, for which I have a great deal of fondness and from which I've gained a bit of insight.) I find few moral lessons in the Iliad and Odyssey, though in the works of Sophocles and Euripides I do see a great deal of insight into the human character and how man deals with his fellow man and with the world around him, sometimes tragically.

Its contents speak to me in vivid detail of the nature of God's personality, of human nature, of what Jesus did and taught.

Plagues, floods, fire and brimstone, angel's with swords, hell fire for unbeleivers. This speaks to me vivid detail of god's personality (if he exists) and in our dog eat dog world, it actually fit's better than the nice god that you see. Note that to see your loving god, you have to ignore or explain away a lot of jealous, vengeful, murderous stuff. How can you say that your view of god's personality is right and the bad stuff is wrong? Back to the greek god's, at least they didn't make the claim of being all good and all powerful at the same time. In that sense I think you could make their existance a little more likely than your favorite god.

Abso-fucking-lutely true. However, I have two points to make here. First is that it is IMHO not a dog-eat-dog world. The fact that I'm typing this on my home computer is, for those who have been members here over a few months, living proof of that -- it was a gift from two people whom I've butted heads with here in GD. I could go on at length on that. Second, Fred Phelps claims to be talking about the same God as I am -- but I totally reject his lunatic Hellfire-and-damnation scenario of who God is. The god who would create you, me, and Gobear and damn him for being what he created him as, is not one I believe in. Rather, what I see clearly in the O.T. (read in the order of writing, rather than the goofball order it's been assembled in) is an evolving understanding of God from the anthropomorphic Thunderer of Sinai who drops by Abraham's tent for lunch en route to destroy Sodom to the loving and compassionate but strictly tutelary deity of all the known world, from Persia to Tartessos, of Micah and the later chapters of Isaiah. The Gospels and First John culminate this process, and Paul's work is an attempt to mediate the freedom from judgmental legalism to live as joyful and ethical free men who are God's children by adoption and grace, to a world in which the concept of God as lawgiver and judge was no less prevalent than it is in most of Christianity today -- and in doing so, he ended up giving guidance to individuals and churches that in turn got cast into "God's word" and hence binding on everybody everywhere -- a concept I reject.

Precisely what happened on the Sea of Galilee one stormy day, or on the hillside where the crowd of 5,000 men had gathered, I don't know. That doesn't matter -- it's the meaning that the Evangelists invest those stories with that is the key point for me.

How can you say that doesn't matter? If the claim is that Jesus is god, and he demonstrates this by doing miracles, how can it not be important that these miracles didn't really happen? Isn't that the evidence. Otherwise all he has is sayings that you aren't sure are really his, as his biographers are obviously unreliable.

The miracles are signs. What He did and how He did them are secondary to what they convey. I said in the other thread that it is no less a miracle to transform a bunch of selfish people into generous ones willing to share their lunch around with strangers than to transform five loaves and two fishes into enough food for 5,000 (actually more; that was the count of adult men, and there were women and children present).

And his biographers are, within bounds, reliable. In his dedication to Theophilus in 1:1-4, Luke makes it very clear that he was employing the best standards of First Century historiography and sorting out the wheat from the chaff in reporting what Jesus actually said and did. In any contradiction of detail between the stories, I trust Luke, for precisely this reason. Matthew and John had agendas to push, but report a person of much the same character as Luke -- to reject Matthew's grasping at "this fulfills the prophecy of Zechariah" when the Zechariah passage is no such thing is not to say that he told mistruths -- he merely sees a fulfillment of prophecy in them that IMHO isn't really there.

But the character of the man Jesus comes through in both accounts.

A stuck up compulsive griper who is never pleased with anything anyone else does, who might actually be able to have a good time if he would look at the bright side of things?:)

You must have Jesus confused with Jerry Falwell!! ;)

Likewise, the attribution of the genocide of the Canaanites and Amelekites and the killing of 42 boys who sassed Elisha by two bears to the command of God is, for me, a case of "passing the buck upstairs," little different from President Bush thinking that it's his Christian duty to lead us into an invasion of Iraq.

While I agree, your still cherry picking (your term that fits well) what you want to believe over what you have good reason to believe.

Okay, I'm cherry picking. But I've seen enough people try to pass the buck, and some of them to blame God, that I see it as the likely explanation for why he's represented in Scripture as commanding things that are contrary to the ethics he taught later. "God told me to get pissed off with you over in the other thread" is a good alibi -- it gets me off the hook of not treating you decently, and is totally non-falsifiable. It puts the blame on Him for my uncharitable actions. (Doesn't happen to be true, either.) If I can come up with that as an easy out, instead of being a man and apologizing for being hostile to you -- as I do, here and now -- it seems to me likely that it would be a convenient way for Hebrew leaders to pass the buck. (Notice that even in the Adam and Eve story, Adam blames Eve and then God -- "the woman, whom You created, tempted me" and she blames the serpent. The J writer had shrewd insight into human nature!)

First, I read Scripture with an eye to the total message of the book, and with particular reference to what genre of writing is being used at the moment. The Book of Jonah, for example, is a fable with the message that God wants repentance from and extends salvation to all people, including your enemies -- Jonah was sent to the Assyrians who were Judah's biggest threat, and balked at going. The fish story is a part of his trying to run away from God's will for him, and wherever he went finding God there. And when he finally did preach repentance to the Ninevites (who historically never repented and converted to worship of YHWH, by the way), he was pissed off that those sons of bitches got saved, even by his preaching. The gourd story that ends the book deals with God gently reminding him that He's in charge, and He's compassionate to all men.

Again your biasing what you believe. The bible is full (really full) of accounts of god not being compassionate to all men. Besides even if the details of the above account aren't to be taken seriously, I don't think the lesson is any good either. A better lesson could be that nobody is in charge, nature is a cruel place, so you better watch yourself because there are no fairy godmothers to look after you.

Answered the first part of this already. Second part, YMMV. It's not how *I* see the world, and I think I have reason to prefer my view of it over yours.

"Supernatural events" in the Bible are the writer's naive perceptions of what went on. I do not know whether any given one of them is a literal account or not, but it does not matter -- whether Jesus got up from the tomb on Easter Morning in a sort of Night of the Undead Messiah or not, some event occurred that convinced men who had known Jesus intimately for three years that although they'd seen Him dead, He was alive again.

Again, if Jesus did not really do miracles, what makes him different that a lot of other so called wise thinkers who attracted a following, that you chose not to worship?

Those other wise thinkers (well, except Baha'ullah) did not presume to identify themselves as the access to the Godhead. I worship Jesus because he was a human aspect of the God in whom I believe, an avatar if you will.

And, if you gave me concrete and convincing proof that Jesus was not indeed who and what He is claimed to be, I'd still live out my life according to His teachings -- because I've been on both sides of the fence, and I like life, I like other people, and I like me better for living according to what He said.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Now that's the way to debate, badchad. You've raised some valid and challenging questions while tempering the snideness of tone that was present in some of your earlier exchanges. You've touched on some of the points that I would have touched on, although I think you've got a couple of swings and misses, too, but I won't say what they are. I'm interested in how Poly will respond. I'm enjoying watching this from the sidelines for the moment and I don't want to help either side. I think this could shape up to be a very good debate, with two very able opponents.

[Polycarp]

Diogenes, I would welcome your questions too. (As you'll have noticed, I was composing my answer as you made your post, and it precedes yours by less than a minute. Avid Reader, cheering sections are welcome here, but even more so are people who jump in and make their own arguments. Did you see problems that badchad didn't address?

Oh, and badchad, thanks for taking me up on the offer, reminding me of it, and arguing your case in good faith (that may not be quite the apposite term, but you know what I mean! ;)). I've developed a lot of respect for you since I finally got a handle on what you were saying. I look forward to matching wits with you further in this thread and others! :)

[Diogenes the Cynic]

I guess Poly responded while I was typing.

I have a question for you Poly, (and I think I may have asked you this in my "Questions for Christians" thread, but I'd like to clarify it again now)

Do you grant the same spiritual veracity to those who have mystic experiences of other gods as you do do to your theophany (I think it's a fair word for your experience) with Jesus. If a Hindu speaks to Krishna, do you believe that person is actually speaking to Krishna? If not, how can you know that you are actually speaking to Jesus. Visionary and mystic experiences occur in every religion, and those who have the experiences are all equally convinced of their reality. If the angel Gabriel told Mohammed that Jesus did not die on the cross, and Mohammed's experiences are just as real to him as yours are to you, then how do you know who's getting the real scoop? Are all theophanic experiences equally valid? If not, how does one know which ones are and which ones aren't? If they are equally valid, then how do we reconcile the contradictions?

[Polycarp]

Diogenes: Short answer -- "I dunno. Depends." ;)

Long answer: IMHO (and this is opinion, not belief) God is interested in getting His message across to people, and speaks to those willing to listen. Some of them will inevitably interpret this as a call to start a new religion, and most of them will hear it under the terms and categories of their own former beliefs and upbringing -- hence Buddhism is based on Hindu philosophy, Christianity on Judaism, not the other way around. (This furnishes an opportunity to flag the material just before this parentheses as a neglected part of the answer I should have given badchad.)

Whether it "fits" -- not in intellectual reason but in "style" and impact -- with the belief system I have is the criterion I use in gauging whether to pay any attention to it. The guy that starts preaching that Jesus is coming again to cleanse the world of the immorality of homosexuals, liberals, and Democrats has just convinced me that his inspiration comes from his own synapses. Every so often something in the Tao Te Ching refocuses my understanding of what's really going on. Julian of Norwich never fails to rivet me (I used to carry around a hazelnut, as a reminder of contingency).

It's not a question I have a good answer to. All I can say is, I trust my own experiences, and the things that seem congruent to it, and use a sense of "this doesn't feel right" or its absence to evaluate the others.

Ever run into Oahspe? Late 1800's "Bible" of sorts written by an absolute nut? It features a number of gods, two of whom are named Jehovah and Jehovih (don't ask) and angels that are transported around the universe in flying saucers called avilanzas. The book reads like somebody got Dal Timgar and Krispy Original in the same room, overdosed them with LSD spiked with something obnoxious, and then wrote down their hallucinations verbatim. (No offense to either poster -- if you can visualize what you might sound like while hallucinating, guys, and mix it with the interests of the other one as bizarrified by his hallucinating at the same time, and you two heterodyning off each other's reports of your hallucinations, you have a vague idea of what that book is like! :))

Oahspe is my ideal example of what a believable account of a religious experience is not like, just based on its total off-the-wall-edness. The Jesus experience of, IIRC, Ramakrishna is perhaps at the other extreme, along with some of the Christian mystics I like the most.

But this is an element of my metaphysics that is not at all resolved. And one reason I asked the Pagans to witness about their faith was to try to get a better handle on what's going on outside my own mind and comfort zone.

[Triskadecamus]

I get a bit lost in the metaphysics.

I read the works of Lao Tzu, and the philosophies of Kant, and Gandhi, Jefferson, and a few hundred others. I don't know if any of those people were the actual authors of the words purported to be theirs. I don't know if they knew the people they claim to know, or the events they claim to have seen. Yet I gain from these works a sense of knowledge, and understanding of the state of man. From that knowledge and understanding I have some rudiments of what serves as a philosophy. The philosophy is not true or false. It is just a map for me to find my way through the world of human beings, and their interactions and expectations.

I also read the works of Hawking, and Newton, and Kepler, and hundreds of others. I don't even understand the more abstruse elements of those works, and the bewildering complexities revealed by the giants standing on those shoulders. But it ends up giving me some rudiments of a science. From this, I have a limited and inaccurate view of what the universe really is. It is necessarily true that the view is wrong. It has always been wrong. All science exists because the answer is wrong. From the error of science comes the truth of science.

The faith I have in Christ is not the same thing at all. It doesn't matter to me that I don't know who wrote the Bible, who translated it, who printed the copy I currently have in the pile of books by my desk. I don't even know for sure, without looking what version it is. (OK, I checked, KJV, and also the NIV in drawer) I read it because it is a story told by some people who came to know God.

And as in the other cases, I don't understand all of it. I cannot prove any of it. I have little reason to credit the scientific validity of most of it. I know for certain that its geology is questionable, and its mathematics simply incorrect. Yet I find also that it contains great truth. And because of it, if not from it, I have gained that which is my faith. And because of that, I came to know God.

But then, if you had proof positive that there was no Jesus, never had been a Jesus, and that there was no God either, the faith that I have gained would still endure. It would be what sustained me in my grief at the loss of my Lord. It would be all that could save me, in a world of despair, without the Lord. And because of it, I would do as Gandhi taught. I would be the change I wanted to see in the world. I would try to be what Jesus wants me to be, even if He were not. Given that God is love, then if there is no God, still there can be love. And if there is love, there is God.

And it is truth even if it is told as a deliberate lie. Oddly enough, although the view of literalism cannot abide the fact that only one thing can be truth, yet truth is greater than all that is not truth. It is paradoxical. It is absurd. Yet still it is truth.

Logic is a great tool, for science. It is a poor choice of tools for understanding faith. Not impossible, but very difficult.

The person who finds the most errors, and lies, and false teachings in the world is not the person who has found the most truth. He is just the one who spends the most time looking for lies. Seek, and you shall find.

Tris
----------------------------------
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." ~ Carl Jung ~

[Elethiomel]

Polycarp, I too have a question. It is sort of an expansion on Diogenes's question. Also, I would like to state up here that I may make unwarranted assumptions or draw incorrect conclusions here, and if so, please correct me.

If a person were to have something along the lines of your theophany, but it resulted in a different form of belief system than yours altogether (say atheism ... I'll try to explain) while still having the same impact (I'll also try to explain this), would that also, in your opinion, be worth paying attention to?

Now, to try and explain the atheism line. Some people may not agree on my definition of atheism here - and it is a very loose one, IMHO - but I'll try to go ahead anyway, since that discussion really belongs in its own thread, as far as I understand these things.

A person has a theophany, and as a result that person believes that the unlikely coincidences he's experienced (i.e. the coincidences you explain as being a result of His working through his "operating system", or Divinely programmed and seeded RNG as I interpret it) are a result not of a divine, separate entity influencing humanity through some ineffable means - but rather that they are a result of human spirtituality in and of itself. When I say "human spirituality", I don't mean that of an individual, but that of the speices, a spiritual collective subconscious, if you will. As a result, this person lives his life according to some basic moral and ethical rules and tenets, that happen to happily coincide with the teachings of Jesus on how to treat your neighbour. Would you consider this theophany to be "real" and thus worth paying attention to?

In closing, I would like to mention that I'm rather new to Great Debates, not to mention the SDMB itself, and thus still trying to find my footing here. Feel free to ignore my post completely, say "you have no idea what you are talking about and/or your post makes no sense", or to point out what errors I have made. I would prefer the latter, though. Questions for clarification are also very welcome.

[Siege]

Elethiomel, I've been staying out of this because I know Polycarp can explain things far better than I can, and a lot less defensively, but your question I can answer.

As I've mentioned many times, two of my closest friends are Fundamentalist Christians, turned Atheists, turned Wiccans. The male half of this couple is the one I've talked most with about religion, and from what he tells me, in his Atheist days, he was as hard-core atheist as anyone I met. He's one of the people who got me to join Mensa, and, as he puts it, he used to go to Mensa gatherings, see people doing tarot readings, etc., and ask himself, "How can intelligent people believe this stuff?!" Sometime later, after what started off as legitimate research for a book he was writing, he had what he calls his, "Epiph-Wicca-ny". As I understand what happened to him and as I understand the term "theophany" it was definitely a theophanic event, and one in a religion which some would say is diametrically opposed to mine, yet I certainly acknowledge it as valid and real. We have a blast discussing religion, and he will get to this board one of these days. In the meantime, while he and I disagree on certain specific points, he and his wife are as moral and ethical as anyone I know, and I suspect they were so throughout their spiritual journey. Then again, I'm a very unusual Christian.

Welcome to GD, and I hope this helps,
CJ

[xenophon41]

I've stayed out of this discussion also, Elethiomel, because I have little to offer on this subject and much to learn. However, I can say from personal experience of having related an unconventional theophany that Poly would definitely respect a theophany which differs substantially from his own, as would many other Christians on this board. The point, I believe, is that God makes himself known in the way most communicable to the individual. ("Here I Am" rather than "This is how you must see me.")

And welcome to GD!

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Elethiomel,
The word for what you're describing is [i]non-theism[/b].

[Liberal]

Badchad wrote (to Poly):

Speaking for myself...

I am unclear as to what you are saying here. Are you saying that you trust in god though you are not 100 percent sure that he exists? I know you tend to get upset that I take your statements and reword them, but I am trying to get a clear handle on what your position is, so feel free to clarify for me. If your not 100 percent sure that god exists can you estimate what percent sure you are that some god exists and what percent chance you think that he is of the christian variety?Poly is drawing a distinction that you are not acknowledging. You are not required to draw the distinctions that he draws, but you are required to acknowledge them — particularly if you are going to query him about them.

The distinction is between the terms pisteuo (Strongs 4100) and gnwsis (Strongs 1108), the former signifying an intimate experiential comprehension, and the latter a sterile intellectual knowledge. For example, a man might understand hypothermia in the intellectual sense if he knows its clinical symptoms and its effects on the human body. But he has a very different kind of understanding about hypothermia than the man who has experienced its effects.

It is possible to have one sort of belief or knowledge without the other or both to varying degrees. A man from the Amazon might never have heard of toes even being cold, and yet when he has been deposited in Anarctica and his toes have frozen, he has every confidence that toes freeze and knowledge that freezing toes exist. Likewise, an Amazonian man might learn all the technical details of frozen toes from a visiting missionary, but be completely lacking in any ability to contextualize his knowledge since he has no frame of reference for cold. But it is also possible that he might learn about frozen toes and then experience his toes freezing, or vice-versa.

For many of us, including me, the pisteuo knowledge of God preceded the gnwsis knowledge of God. Only after experiencing the presence of God did I begin to research in earnest in order to come to a greater intellectual comprehension of Him, just as a man might have his toes frozen before he researches the literature to learn intellectually about hypothermia.

I think this gets down to the crux. How can you know god [sic] as you would a person? Also how can you be sure he has made his goodwill known to you. You have posted that you have had some unfortunate things happen to you as well. Couldn't you just as easily said that god has made his badwill known to you?Goodness is an aesthetic, and it is the aesthetic most valued by God. Love (agape, Strongs 26) is the means by which goodness is facilitated, and in fact, God Himself is Love — the Facilitator of Goodness. Knowing God as a person is knowing the One Who has facilitated goodness such that it is imparted from Him to you.

I am made in the image of God and in His likeness, which means that I am a spiritual being with freedom of moral will, just as He is. He freely and volitionally chooses to value goodness, and I am free to do the same. Because God is Love (the Facilitator of Goodness), whenever I experience love, I am experiencing God as a person.

Sin is the opposite of love; that is, sin is the obstruction of goodness. God values goodness so much that He does not sin. I, however, do not value goodness as much as He; therefore, whenever there is "badness" in my life, it is because I have obstructed goodness. Many men do not value goodness at all, and therefore resist or reject love, since love is the facilitation of goodness.

Whenever there is "badness", it is the result of choice by free moral agency. Since God never chooses "badness", that choice is made by other free moral agents, i.e., us.

I don't think you are making the claim that Jesus actually and literally came and spoke to you. Would it be accurate to rephrase this by saying you went through some very unlikely events, which would make anyone think there might be something there and because you live in the USA, christianity was the most proximal supernatural explanation?Once again, you fail to make a necessary distinction. Jesus teaches that man is a being with a dual nature — he is a physical being born of water (from his mother's womb) and a spiritual being born of God. Man is both physical and metaphysical. Indeed, throughout history, he has had an interest in both the world around him and the world inside him.

Because you recognize only the physical being and not the metaphysical being, you find it incredible that Jesus came and spoke to someone. That is because your reference frame is limited to a man being corporeal and speech coming from the larynx. You are like a man who cannot hear, and thinks of music as the movement of fingers up and down a keyboard. You do not comprehend the essence of what music really is.

Jesus speaks to our hearts. Webster's Unabridged defines this usage of "heart" as "the vital center; the innermost essence". His Holy Spirit places understanding into our moral fiber — our spirit — and only then do our brains comprehend.

Well, as Voltaire phrases it "A proverb isn't a reason." Heck, I read the bible seriously, but not literally, as I did The Iliad and The Odyssey. All three talked of gods and had moral lessons a plenty if you looked for them. How can you (without cherry picking) say the bible is any different?The Bible provided a moral philosophy that was unique and unprecedented: (1) Metaphysic — Eternal Love; (2) Epistemology — the Holy Spirit; (3) Aesthetic — Goodness; (4) Ethic — Perfection. The moral imperative given to us by Jesus is to "be perfect".

Note that to see your loving god, you have to ignore or explain away a lot of jealous, vengeful, murderous stuff. How can you say that your view of god's personality is right and the bad stuff is wrong?To see Einsteinian relativity, you have to "explain away" certain Newtonian principles. But that does not harm the credibility of relativity and its effects on gravity and the speed of light.

William of Ockham wrote, "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum." Here, you have violated his razor by introducing an unnecessary bifurcation. You have applied a moral judgment to an amoral context. There is nothing in the atoms that is either moral or immoral; the universe is morally neutral. What you have called "murderous" is nothing more than a restructuring of molecular associations. When God destroyed Sodom, for example, only the physical and temporal manifestations of the people died. Those were manifestations that were in fact born to die, and even without God's intervention would have died only a few short years thence. The significant manifestations — their eternal spirits — did not die. Therefore, there was no murder at all. What is real is not what is temporal, but what is eternal.

How can you say that doesn't matter? If the claim is that Jesus is god, and he demonstrates this by doing miracles, how can it not be important that these miracles didn't really happen? Isn't that the evidence. Otherwise all he has is sayings that you aren't sure are really his, as his biographers are obviously unreliable.Forgive me, but that sounds a bit disingenuous, as when you capitalize "Jesus" but not "God" using both as proper names, or when you capitalize the "Odyssey" but not the "Bible". You are doing what Jesus calls straining gnats and swallowing camels. Poly did not mean that Jesus might not have done His miracles, but that their significance is not in how they are described.

A stuck up compulsive griper who is never pleased with anything anyone else does, who might actually be able to have a good time if he would look at the bright side of things?I'm glad that you wrote that about Jesus. It helps to illustrate a point that I've been making for quite some time. Jesus is Who Jesus is. He loves you unconditionally, and He does not judge you. Rather, He establishes the truth and you judge yourself by it. You face east and say that the west looks dreary. You're drinking poison that has been labeled water. You're fighting an image from a dream in your mind with your eyes closed.

The very fact that you loathe what you present as Jesus is testament to your love of the One Who is. You despise your image of Him because you see nothing good in it, and that is as it should be. You are head and shoulders above the man who knows Who Jesus really is and hates Him in his heart even as he pays lip service by meaningless and vapid testimony. The man who despises evil and loves goodness is like God.

I got news for you. A heart attack is a bad thing!And I have good news for you!

The heart you speak of will die. It has been dying from the moment it pumped its first blood cell. The universe is dying. The energy that it has available to do work is decreasing exponentially and relentlessy. Your sun is merely blustering, destined to consume your earth and then die from exhaustion. It is no wonder that a man who puts his faith and confidence in such fragile things is a cynic and a pessimist. Whatever optimism he might have is as short-lived as what he treasures.

The good news is that none of it is real. The heart in your chest is a trivial thing. But the heart inside you that is stirred one way or another by these words is eternal and will never die. You oppress it now with your brain, but your brain too will die and its oppression will end. Whether you are youthful and myopic or old and hardened, what remains of your captivity is but a blink. You will be free.

While I agree, your still cherry picking (your term that fits well) what you want to believe over what you have good reason to believe.Suppose I proposed to you an epistemology described this way: it is circular in nature, depending upon its own axioms for its conclusions; it begs the question of its own validity by stating that its validity is dependent on its rules; it has multiple theories of truth, some of which conflict, and all of which rely upon its own antithesis for verification; and it has the peculiar property that if it is complete then it is inconsistent, and if it is consistent then it is incomplete. Would you want to believe anything it revealed to you? In case you do not know, I have just described deductive logic.

The notion that a revelatory epistemology is somehow inferior is primitive and jejune in its conception. In fact, if a spiritual metaphysic is taken as axiomatic, then a revelatory epistemology becomes a necessary one. What is reasonable depends on context.

Again your biasing what you believe. The bible is full (really full) of accounts of god not being compassionate to all men. Besides even if the details of the above account aren't to be taken seriously, I don't think the lesson is any good either. A better lesson could be that nobody is in charge, nature is a cruel place, so you better watch yourself because there are no fairy godmothers to look after you.We've already seen how you've gutted the context of compassion by presuming the universe and its atoms to be morally significant, so there's no sense in revisiting that. But here, you levy a charge of bias while yourself disregarding a priori the existence of something that is definitively necessary — a Supreme Being. Even if you deny a spiritual metaphysic, you are compelled to acknowledge that a greatest entity exists. Even your beloved Hume acknowledged as much, and regarded the universe itself as being "in charge".

Again, if Jesus did not really do miracles, what makes him different that a lot of other so called wise thinkers who attracted a following, that you chose not to worship?He is God.

[John Zahn]

Polycarp, I appreciate the time you’ve put into this thread, as well as the tone you and badchad have taken with this thread. I wrote this post last night, but it didn’t go through for some reason, and I didn’t want to take a chance of having duplicate posts, so I thought I would wait till this morning to make sure. I’ll be brief with what I have to say, but if you have time, I’m hoping you will elaborate further on this:

"Supernatural events" in the Bible are the writer's naive perceptions of what went on. I do not know whether any given one of them is a literal account or not, but it does not matter -- whether Jesus got up from the tomb on Easter Morning in a sort of Night of the Undead Messiah or not, some event occurred that convinced men who had known Jesus intimately for three years that although they'd seen Him dead, He was alive again.

Yes, that’s the way the gospel writers portray it in their stories, is that some event occurred with Jesus. If the miracles stories aren’t in the first drafts of the gospels as many scholars think, maybe no event occurred, you suppose? I doubt there is an event surrounding Jesus’ life that hasn’t been similarly recorded by writers before writing on figures such as Buddha and Krishna, and I also doubt if there is a single good teaching in his that isn‘t is theirs. Historians and scholars (minus conservative Christian’s) know all too well that they came before Jesus. Somebody obviously did some serious borrowing. Anyway, knowing how human’s tend to bend the facts, and human deceit is every day occurrence, why would one put more trust in a story that violated nature itself? This time in particular was known for its credulous writing. And I agree with your first sentence completely, but with the resurrection it does matter if some supernatural event occurred here to most Christians, does this not matter to you either? If you also have some serious doubt about the resurrection, I’m curious why you still prefer the Christian label? If you are solely into Christianity, not because of the miracles, but because of his teachings, we’ll have to do a board on this sometime, because I still think his teachings as a whole leave a lot to be desired too.

JZ

[Malthus]

Originally posted by Elethiomel
Polycarp, I too have a question. It is sort of an expansion on Diogenes's question. Also, I would like to state up here that I may make unwarranted assumptions or draw incorrect conclusions here, and if so, please correct me.

If a person were to have something along the lines of your theophany, but it resulted in a different form of belief system than yours altogether (say atheism ... I'll try to explain) while still having the same impact (I'll also try to explain this), would that also, in your opinion, be worth paying attention to?

Now, to try and explain the atheism line. Some people may not agree on my definition of atheism here - and it is a very loose one, IMHO - but I'll try to go ahead anyway, since that discussion really belongs in its own thread, as far as I understand these things.

A person has a theophany, and as a result that person believes that the unlikely coincidences he's experienced (i.e. the coincidences you explain as being a result of His working through his "operating system", or Divinely programmed and seeded RNG as I interpret it) are a result not of a divine, separate entity influencing humanity through some ineffable means - but rather that they are a result of human spirtituality in and of itself. When I say "human spirituality", I don't mean that of an individual, but that of the speices, a spiritual collective subconscious, if you will. As a result, this person lives his life according to some basic moral and ethical rules and tenets, that happen to happily coincide with the teachings of Jesus on how to treat your neighbour. Would you consider this theophany to be "real" and thus worth paying attention to?

In closing, I would like to mention that I'm rather new to Great Debates, not to mention the SDMB itself, and thus still trying to find my footing here. Feel free to ignore my post completely, say "you have no idea what you are talking about and/or your post makes no sense", or to point out what errors I have made. I would prefer the latter, though. Questions for clarification are also very welcome.

I too asked a similar question - I am of the opinion that the mystic experience or theophany is in all cases very similar, but diverges as the individual attempts to make sense of it.

I also think that this experience is much, much more common than is generally believed.

Further, the people who experience them are not necessarily religious in any sense (I was not).

[Polycarp]

As Xeno said, I will not reject the good-faith account of someone who has experienced a theophany that differs from mine. Being of a compulsive-classifier nature, I will try to make my understanding of it fit into the system of how I understand God and his modes of revelation of Himself to us -- but I won't be upset, and certainly won't reject its validity, if I'm unable to fit someone's account into my system. I figure that God knows what He's doing, and it's not essential that I do. I've spent two years trying to expand my conceptualization of what's going on to allow for what happened to Freyr in his two distinct theophanic experiences (of YHWH/Jesus and of the Vana Freyr), and (which may be of particular interest to Elethiomel) we actually have a member here (of whose board name unfortunately I'm suffering a memory lapse) who is in fact a "soft atheist" as the term is used here who experienced a theophany. (I'll let him retell his story and how he's come to understand it, but it's well worth reading.)

With regard to Lib's posts, my stance is fairly close to his, differing only in that I don't demand that anyone reprocess their epistemological assumptions and come to a decision about essentiality/contingency to arrive at an acceptance of the reality of experiential phenomena, even though that leaves us with the old objective/subjective problem that's plagued these debates since day one. While I feel that anyone willing to take the time to work in the intellectual categories he speaks of will come to conclusions actually identical to his (though perhaps verbalized in quite different ways), I also feel that most people are less than willing to juggle metaphysical conceptualizations as he does. So I pitch my accounts of what I believe at a much less abstractualized level, even though that results in misunderstandings of the sort "Poly's god = magical sky pixie" from the language I'm forced to use in consequence.

Which is to say, Lib and I are saying the same thing -- but he's attempting to furnish objective and logical demonstrations of what I'm attempting to systematize by empirical means. Each technique has its virtues and its faults -- which is one major reason why God made us brothers in spirit and brought us together on this board! :)

W/R/T my heart attack, there's one element of that story I didn't tell. I did go for cardiac surgery, which was performed on the day before Easter. On that day, I was scheduled to do one of the Scripture readings at the Easter Vigil at our church -- and instead I quite frankly and nigh-onto-literally experienced that reading:

25 I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. 28 Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:25-28)

[Elethiomel]

Thank you, cjhoworth, and xenophon41, for welcoming me, and for explaining some of what I was wondering about. Thanks also to Malthus for further explanations, and of course to Polycarp, for his explanation. :)

Diogenes, thanks for supplying me with the word I was looking for. My first language is obviously not English.

I think I shall rejoin the lurker crowd in this thread, at least for a while, so I can have some time to think about how to put my further thoughts on this subject into words.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Libertarian
The Bible provided a moral philosophy that was unique and unprecedented: (1) Metaphysic — Eternal Love; (2) Epistemology — the Holy Spirit; (3) Aesthetic — Goodness; (4) Ethic — Perfection. The moral imperative given to us by Jesus is to "be perfect".
I have to quibble with your assertion that anything here is "unprecedented" (other than the Christian semantic associations). God was Love and compassion toward all living things was a primary imperative in religious thought long before Christianity. Epistimological authentication of the metaphysical through personal (mystical) experience is an essential pillar of Hinduism, and Buddha's Eightfold Path is a recipe for how to "be perfect." Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, though. Precisely what apect of Jesus' teaching do you believe was unprecedented.
And I have good news for you!

The heart you speak of will die. It has been dying from the moment it pumped its first blood cell. The universe is dying. The energy that it has available to do work is decreasing exponentially and relentlessy. Your sun is merely blustering, destined to consume your earth and then die from exhaustion. It is no wonder that a man who puts his faith and confidence in such fragile things is a cynic and a pessimist. Whatever optimism he might have is as short-lived as what he treasures.

The good news is that none of it is real. The heart in your chest is a trivial thing. But the heart inside you that is stirred one way or another by these words is eternal and will never die. You oppress it now with your brain, but your brain too will die and its oppression will end. Whether you are youthful and myopic or old and hardened, what remains of your captivity is but a blink. You will be free
I'm constantly amazed at how close you come to Buddhism in your worldviews. This paragraph could have come right out of a Buddhist primer. Buddhists call it "Maya," you have often called it a "mise en scene," but it's the same thing. I think it's a great credit to you that you have been able to arrive at these kinds of insights through such an iconic lens as Christianity. You don't mistake the symbols for the substance. To paraphrase Jesus, you're drinking from the cup instead of polishing it. I don't mean this to sound patronizing in the sense that I think you're showing "insight" by approaching a more Eastern worldview, I just mean to compliment you that you can think past the symbols.
In fact, if a spiritual metaphysic is taken as axiomatic, then a revelatory epistemology becomes a necessary one.
That's a mighty big "if" there, Lib. An axiom is an axiom only if it is mutually recognized as such. A spiritual metaphysic is far from a self-evedent truth.
But here, you levy a charge of bias while yourself disregarding a priori the existence of something that is definitively necessary — a Supreme Being. Even if you deny a spiritual metaphysic, you are compelled to acknowledge that a greatest entity exists. Even your beloved Hume acknowledged as much, and regarded the universe itself as being "in charge".
A greatest entity does not equal "God" in any meaningful sense.

[Meatros]

Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic
Do you grant the same spiritual veracity to those who have mystic experiences of other gods as you do do to your theophany (I think it's a fair word for your experience) with Jesus. If a Hindu speaks to Krishna, do you believe that person is actually speaking to Krishna?

This is an interesting question that I've been thinking about for a long time actually. I'm no closer to the answer than anyone, and I think Polycarp did a good job below (and in his original post).

IMHO (and this is opinion, not belief) God is interested in getting His message across to people, and speaks to those willing to listen. Some of them will inevitably interpret this as a call to start a new religion, and most of them will hear it under the terms and categories of their own former beliefs and upbringing -- hence Buddhism is based on Hindu philosophy, Christianity on Judaism, not the other way around. (This furnishes an opportunity to flag the material just before this parentheses as a neglected part of the answer I should have given badchad.)

I did want to add that I find it supremely interesting that there is a common chord that runs through most, if not all, religions. I think Polycarp hit on something here.

I think the reason for the interpretations and different religions lay somewhere in the minds of those who adhere to them. For me, what I know of Christianity feels *right*. I find useful tools in the bible that help me in my day to day living. I have found similar useful tools in other religions, I might find more, but I'm not familar with them (although I am taking steps to learn more).

I think Lib's post below (actually, the ENTIRE post) illustrates something that I firmly believe, which is God is operating on a far different set of rules than we are. For God to operate on what we call good and evil would be nonsense, IMO, because mankind's moral radar fluctuates (sp?) practically every generation.

William of Ockham wrote, "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum." Here, you have violated his razor by introducing an unnecessary bifurcation. You have applied a moral judgment to an amoral context. There is nothing in the atoms that is either moral or immoral; the universe is morally neutral. What you have called "murderous" is nothing more than a restructuring of molecular associations. When God destroyed Sodom, for example, only the physical and temporal manifestations of the people died. Those were manifestations that were in fact born to die, and even without God's intervention would have died only a few short years thence. The significant manifestations — their eternal spirits — did not die. Therefore, there was no murder at all. What is real is not what is temporal, but what is eternal.

I did want to applaud everyone in this debate, badchad (whom I think has backed off of the inflammatory button pushing aggressiveness) included. I'm learning a lot by reading the exchanges.

[badchad]

Polycarp
No -- my point in saying what I did is that I was not making an objective, metaphysical assertion about a putative entity to be termed God, but that I operate on a faith-based concept of trust in Something that I have come to know as God, in a relational setting. Obviously one cannot have a relationship with that which does not exist, in some way, shape, or form -- and for the same of argument I'll allow children's "imaginary friends" in the door here, and concede that my percept of God might conceivably be all in my own imagination

I think we are getting somewhere with the posability of god being in your imagination. Children's imaginary friends comes pretty close and I don't see how you can make any differentiation.

(I have grounds to take the contrary position, which we can discuss later in this thread)

I'm interested in getting to that as I think the grounds you are using to take the contrary position are faulty.

-- but my position is not merely one of asserting that God objectively exists (on which I have no reproducible proof capable of satisfying the skepticism of another, merely interior, subjective proof sufficient for me)

Would you acknowledge that people frequently use subjective proof to establish beliefs that are false. Would you also acknowledge that people have a tendency to believe and find evidence to support (adequate or not) what they want to believe? If yes would this acknowlegement increase or decrease your 99.99999% surety that god exists.

-- but that the key to knowing and understanding Him, so far as a human can, is in that relationality, that acceptance of a personal relationship with Him.

Sounds like a nonsense statement to me. I think to have a personal relationship he would actually have to interact with you. I don't think that experiencing an unlikely event, to which one got goosebumps qualifies.

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I think this gets down to the crux. How can you know god as you would a person? Also how can you be sure he has made his goodwill known to you. You have posted that you have had some unfortunate things happen to you as well. Couldn't you just as easily said that god has made his badwill known to you?
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Because He is, among other things, a person -- or at least has the attributes associated with personhood. Since (except for alien abductees if they are to be believed and the owners of genius cats if they are) no human being has ever dealt with another sentient mortal not a human being, there's a distinction between your and my personhood and His -- but it's one of his being an element of His nature; He's more than another person, not less and not skewed from the concept of personhood.

Objective cite please.

I'm not prepared to promulgate some sort of great conceptualization of the solution of the Problem of Evil -- but allow me to say this much on the goodwill/badwill question. He created a world in which it is possible for evil and hatred to exist and people to choose to do things which injure themselves or others, physically or spiritually. (And "spiritually" does not necessary mean "in a religious sense" -- contemplate the spiritual damage done to a gay youth by the ostracism of his peers and the condemnation of the fundamentalists, as dealt with in a different thread.)

I don't acknowlege a spirit. How about emotional damage?

In living in this world and dealing with it, we find we grow emotionally and spiritually; I suspect that has a great deal to do with the reason He chose to produce it in the way He did.

I still don't like your word spiritually as if you put in emotionally, physically and perhaps mentally spiritually is superfluous, unless you want to describe it as ones ability to fully assimilate societies favorite superstitious beliefs. Though I think this would be at the expense of one's mental growth. Still in your outlook you have in place the survivorship bias that I spoke of earlier. There is no growth in the gay teens who commit suicide due to the hardships they face. No growth in the people people killed in hurricanes, wars, disease etc. Your talk of growth is only for those with the relatively happy endings and the reality is that a lot of people don't get these happy endings.

While He could plausibly have intervened to physically stop me from entering into situations where harm resulted, that would be contrary to his apparent "write a 'clean' operating program for the Universe and let it run" mode of operations. Instead, what He does is to work through his "operating system" by causing coincidence to happen and people of good will to intervene at the right times.

I think you have contradicted yourself. If god wrote a clean operating system then he would not have cause these coincidences. Also, outside of survivorship bias, what makes you think that these coincidences are in your favor? What makes you think that these coincicdences happen any more frequently then they ought to given a world without a watchmaker?

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I don't think you are making the claim that Jesus actually and literally came and spoke to you. Would it be accurate to rephrase this by saying you went through some very unlikely events, which would make anyone think there might be something there and because you live in the USA, christianity was the most proximal supernatural explanation?
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Your rephrase is quite accurate save for the fact that I did have the mystical experience (I originally said "theophany") of a very strong sense of His Presence in which He gave me to understand some things.

I think this is one of your biggest errors. In an average lifespan I would estimate that one experiences millions of events. As such things that are one in a thousand come up frequently and one in a million events still come up from time to time. Spooky as they may seem it's simple probability that these unlikely events will fall upon us and psychologically are deeply memorable. Could even lead to the "theophany" you describe. I highly recommend the book "How we know what isn't so" by research psychologist Thomas Gilovich for more information regarding this and other ways humans tend to be subjectively sure about things they are objectively mistaken.

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I take it from this that you don't put much credence in any of the miracle stories. In the last thread you seemed to be saying that you didn't believe in hell either. If I got this wrong please clarify. Do you beleive in heaven or any other afterlife?
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I "believe in" God. I see my task as to deal with the world in accordance with the two Great Commandments (love God, love your neighbor), and to trust Him for what may happen at my death. I don't rule out total annihilation of my consciousness, reincarnation, or any of a dozen other potential fates -- but I believe He has the situation under control, and I don't need to worry about it.

What do you estimate the probability of heaven as paradise is, vs. annihilation of your consciousness? What do you think is the probability of hell as eternal torment?

I confess to being totally at sea about the miracle stories. A lot of Scripture suffers from what I personally have termed the "Jacob Brown Effect" -- Gen. Jacob Brown having single-handedly effectively won the War of 1812 -- at least if you go to school about five miles from where he lived, as I did. Imprecision due to exaggeration, repetition of stories with consequent distortion à la the kids' game "Telephone," misinterpretation of what did happen, either by the observers or by others misconstruing their reports -- all these may have contributed to the phenomena reported.

This wouldn't surprise me at all.

It's quite possible, of course, that they may be the literal truth -- that Jesus was able to cure a paralysis and tell the man to take up his bedroll and walk. But far more likely is that they were told by the early Christians, whether as made-up stories to illustrate a point that came to be regarded as true, misconstruances of what happened, or whatever, in an effort to stress to the rest of the world what a remarkable person this Jesus was.

I also agree with you that it is far more likely that these miracles did not really occur. However if Jesus really was god, I would think that the only way he could distinguish himself from other pretenders would be that he could actually demonstrate his miracles, rather than have people rely on second, third and worse hand accounts. Wouldn't you think so?

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Well, as Voltaire phrases it "A proverb isn't a reason." Heck, I read the bible seriously, but not literally, as I did The Iliad and The Odyssey. All three talked of gods and had moral lessons a plenty if you looked for them. How can you (without cherry picking) say the bible is any different?
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Because the Bible talks more directly about the God I know as a person.

Or maybe the god you think you know as a person.

I am personally not inspired or instructed by tales of Greek and Roman deities and their love lives and strange sense of justice,

Are you going to tell me that the bible does not describe some pretty strange senses of justice? I think I can give you plenty of examples, as many or more than described in the Iliad. Though I know with your nonliteral interpretation you'll just say those don't count for some reason or other or say that we are too small minded to understand the full wisdom of god, bla bla bla. I can apply such statements with equal ease to the Iliad, so if you have a less generic line of argument let me know.

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Plagues, floods, fire and brimstone, angel's with swords, hell fire for unbeleivers. This speaks to me vivid detail of god's personality (if he exists) and in our dog eat dog world, it actually fit's better than the nice god that you see. Note that to see your loving god, you have to ignore or explain away a lot of jealous, vengeful, murderous stuff. How can you say that your view of god's personality is right and the bad stuff is wrong? Back to the greek god's, at least they didn't make the claim of being all good and all powerful at the same time. In that sense I think you could make their existance a little more likely than your favorite god.
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o-fucking-lutely true. However, I have two points to make here. First is that it is IMHO not a dog-eat-dog world.

How many life forms do you think have had to be snuffed out or enslaved to sustain your existance so far?

Second, Fred Phelps claims to be talking about the same God as I am -- but I totally reject his lunatic Hellfire-and-damnation scenario of who God is. The god who would create you, me, and Gobear and damn him for being what he created him as, is not one I believe in.

Well, that is clearly the god of the bible, both old and new testiments. Again, which is the reason why I started this whole discussion. If you throw away much of the literal interpretation from the bible you throw away much of what you base your beliefs on. Yet you won't admit it. That is why I think your position and the position of all "reasonable nonliteral christians" is so intellectually dishonest. At least the literalists think they have proof of miracles and 1000 correct propheseys of the bible in which to base their beliefs.

The miracles are signs. What He did and how He did them are secondary to what they convey. I said in the other thread that it is no less a miracle to transform a bunch of selfish people into generous ones willing to share their lunch around with strangers than to transform five loaves and two fishes into enough food for 5,000

That's a bunch of BS and you know it. You get selfish people to share and I'll shrug my shoulders. Heck my mom used to do that all the time. You do the latter (in a way that I believe it actually happened) and then I'll be the one trying to rationalize my belief system.

And his biographers are, within bounds, reliable.

If they reported miracles that did not take place (and you think they did so) then I don't see how you can call them reliable. If they messed up on things like miracles, what makes you think they got the morality correct? If you think they did get the morality correct, how come you only follow the parts you like? God is far more wise than you, remember.

Okay, I'm cherry picking. But I've seen enough people try to pass the buck, and some of them to blame God, that I see it as the likely explanation for why he's represented in Scripture as commanding things that are contrary to the ethics he taught later.

When Jesus taught his ethics later he did say that not one tittle of his old ethics were to pass away. He just made his new requirements a little more stringent. Though if I recall correctly Jesus frequently contradicted himself, so you can probably come up with examples of the contrary.

It's not how *I* see the world, and I think I have reason to prefer my view of it over yours.

I think you put your preference first and created your reasons to fit.

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Again, if Jesus did not really do miracles, what makes him different that a lot of other so called wise thinkers who attracted a following, that you chose not to worship?
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Those other wise thinkers (well, except Baha'ullah) did not presume to identify themselves as the access to the Godhead.

I think this makes those other wise thinkers; (A) not liars, or (2) not insane. Either of which would make my listening to them more reasonable, though I don't think I would worship them.

I worship Jesus because he was a human aspect of the God in whom I believe, an avatar if you will.

Or so you think.

And, if you gave me concrete and convincing proof that Jesus was not indeed who and what He is claimed to be, I'd still live out my life according to His teachings

All of them or just the teachings you have cherry picked?

[Polycarp]

Would you acknowledge that people frequently use subjective proof to establish beliefs that are false. Would you also acknowledge that people have a tendency to believe and find evidence to support (adequate or not) what they want to believe? If yes would this acknowlegement increase or decrease your 99.99999% surety that god exists.

Yes, yes, and no -- it would do neither. My reasoning here is that subjective beliefs can, of course, be true or false; the proof must lie elsewhere. And it's certainly a truism that people tend to engage in wish-fulfillment fantasies -- believing in that which they want to. However, insofar as my conscious mind goes (and I do feel I have a good handle on my subconscious motivations, but we both know they can be tricky, so I'm putting in that reservation) what I experienced and its aftermath was nothing I had any real interest in experiencing, let alone desired. I was happy with my intellectualizations; to have them "come up and slap me in the face" as something real with which I'd have to deal, metaphorically speaking, was the last thing I wanted.


Sounds like a nonsense statement to me. I think to have a personal relationship he would actually have to interact with you. I don't think that experiencing an unlikely event, to which one got goosebumps qualifies.

With humbleness and absolutely no intent to get us back on a hostility kick, I feel that you're reading something into what I'm saying here. It may be that I have not made myself clear. I have indicated two things, interrelated but distinct, regarding my relationship with God: a single overwhelming event of great impact in which I came to recognize Him as Person and present to me, and an ongoing sense of the Divine Presence (metaphorically) "hovering" and from time to time noodging and guiding me in what I do. I think I can see where you got the one-shot "unlikely event" from my previous statements, but I thought I'd made the ongoing sense of presence clear, and I apologize if I failed to.

Me: Because He is, among other things, a person -- or at least has the attributes associated with personhood. Since (except for alien abductees if they are to be believed and the owners of genius cats if they are) no human being has ever dealt with another sentient mortal not a human being, there's a distinction between your and my personhood and His -- but it's one of his being an element of His nature; He's more than another person, not less and not skewed from the concept of personhood.

badchad: Objective cite please.

Sorry -- that was an assertion of my understanding regarding the God in whom I believe, not an objective definition I would expect you to buy into, in response to your question about how I could claim to know God as I would a person. I can refer you to Lib's efforts to demonstrate Him by logic, or to any number of theological treatises defining Him as a Trinity of three persons in one Godhead, but I'm fairly certain that's not what you meant by "objective cite!"

I don't acknowlege a spirit. How about emotional damage?

Acceptable. I meant "spiritual" in the sense in which one would read, in a non-religious account of someone's life, "His spirit was finally broken by this last indignity" rather than positing a metaphysical essence I cannot point to.

I still don't like your word spiritually as if you put in emotionally, physically and perhaps mentally spiritually is superfluous, unless you want to describe it as ones ability to fully assimilate societies favorite superstitious beliefs. Though I think this would be at the expense of one's mental growth. Still in your outlook you have in place the survivorship bias that I spoke of earlier. There is no growth in the gay teens who commit suicide due to the hardships they face. No growth in the people people killed in hurricanes, wars, disease etc. Your talk of growth is only for those with the relatively happy endings and the reality is that a lot of people don't get these happy endings.

In view of the fact that we're in essence debating whether "spiritually" has a real referent or not, you're kind of begging the question by the definition at the end of your first sentence! But I think Gaudere, moderator here and firm atheist, would use "spiritually" with reference to the mental/emotional impact that good art has on her, and I'll try to refrain from unnecessarily using it in our discussions here. And yes, I grant that there are tragedies and pathetic endings to lives, and that positing 'spiritual' growth -- intellectual and emotional maturity and character development -- as a possible partial answer to the Problem of Pain/Evil does in fact assume that bias. I said I didn't have an answer for it; I speculated on a partial answer. Is it acceptable to you that we table the question of why human pain/evil exists in a universe claimed to have an omnipotent and beneficient creator? That it does exist does not disprove Him, though it certainly suggests that something is haywire in the world if He is presumed to exist. (A wandering fundamentalist would pop in here and throw Satan into the mix as the explanation; I refuse to do so.)

I think you have contradicted yourself. If god wrote a clean operating system then he would not have cause these coincidences. Also, outside of survivorship bias, what makes you think that these coincidences are in your favor? What makes you think that these coincicdences happen any more frequently then they ought to given a world without a watchmaker?

You mean a good program should not have built-in safeguards against aspects of it crashing? I see the "coincidences" as integral parts of a monstrously complex Plan. And, of course, there's Eddington's (?) famous comment, "The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they demand them." I'm missing where you see a inherent contradiction in my comment -- please rephrase, and I'll try to answer better.

I think this is one of your biggest errors. In an average lifespan I would estimate that one experiences millions of events. As such things that are one in a thousand come up frequently and one in a million events still come up from time to time. Spooky as they may seem it's simple probability that these unlikely events will fall upon us and psychologically are deeply memorable. Could even lead to the "theophany" you describe. I highly recommend the book "How we know what isn't so" by research psychologist Thomas Gilovich for more information regarding this and other ways humans tend to be subjectively sure about things they are objectively mistaken.

Oh, absolutely! Peculiar little events happen all the time. For example, my wife and I liked Zager & Evans' one hit, "In the Year 2525" when it first came out. We probably had heard it once in the last 20 years until last week, if that. But in some work we were doing together where she was dictating and I keying in data, two adjacent entries were the number 25, and when she read it as "...25, 25..." we both laughed and began singing a snippet of the song. Oddly enough, we've heard it twice since then on the radio. After completing C&P answers to you, I'll address in brief in a separate post why I feel that I can reasonably assume that I did not hallucinate the original theophany and then construct the sense of presence to sustain belief in that initial event. (No offense intended in doing it that way -- it involves extended narrative and description of self-introspection, so it'll make for easier reading done as a continuous essay rather than Q&A style.)

What do you estimate the probability of heaven as paradise is, vs. annihilation of your consciousness? What do you think is the probability of hell as eternal torment?

I presume from the few descriptive passages associated with the promises made that whatever heaven may be, it's a sense of intimacy with God, comfortable and pleasurable, presumably with ongoing new input to pique interest to avoid any sense of boredom. In view of the fact that He promised it to those who follow Him, I'd give it 100% probability -- but it's not something I feel at all concerned about.

Hell is an interesting concept to try to decipher. I reject the Hell-as-vengeance-on-unbelievers style of belief; it's too much like "when my Daddy gets through with you, you'll be sorry you picked on me, you big bully!" But the two main threads of conceptualization regarding it are people in torment and the annihilation of the person. To grasp what is being said, I analogize it to the condition of a hard-drug addict. He may have had a wide range of interests and enthusiasms before getting hooked, but after he has gotten hooked and been a user for an extended period, he's effectively burned out much of what he had been. His interests narrow to the craving for the drug and to what he must do to get it; the relief from the craving is only momentary and leads to more craving; and what was vibrant in him is no longer there, merely an ash that once was a fire. IMHO, God's insight into humanity is such that He realizes that apart from Him and what He can provide, in the extreme long run everything will lead to that sort of addictive behavior for the individual -- and he will be in a state of craving and regret, without the possibility of restoring himself to what he had been. And that will be hell for him -- both torment and virtual annihilation of the real self, the reduction of the individual to remnants. God does not punish by sending non-believers to Hell; they choose to pursue paths that inevitably lead there by the very nature of mankind, and his offer to save them from it is always open.

I won't quote our long exchange on miracles -- but the Jews expected (and still expect) the Messiah to be the one who restores the righteous kingship to Israel and repels their enemies. Jesus didn't fill that definition. IMHO, he was not particularly interested in doing miracles; his interests were in the nature of personal relationships and the abuse of them by twisting the Jewish religion into a legalism, in what constitutes a fuller and richer life lived in harmony with one's fellow man. First Century culture was superstitious; any leader was supposed to have done miracles.

Are you going to tell me that the bible does not describe some pretty strange senses of justice? I think I can give you plenty of examples, as many or more than described in the Iliad. Though I know with your nonliteral interpretation you'll just say those don't count for some reason or other or say that we are too small minded to understand the full wisdom of god, bla bla bla. I can apply such statements with equal ease to the Iliad, so if you have a less generic line of argument let me know.

Nope, I completely agree. But you're (I think) operating on the assumption that the Bible is supposed to be (according to Christians) the infallible Word of God -- I see it as the record of their growing understanding of how He operates and what He wills. So the bizarreries in which our sense of justice is greatly perverted are attributed to Him, while Isaiah and Micah and Habakkuk start to get a grasp of what He really wants.

How many life forms do you think have had to be snuffed out or enslaved to sustain your existance so far?

Point taken -- even if I were a total vegetarian, I would have caused the failure to live of large quantities of wheat and peanut plants by eating a peanut butter sandwich! But I understood you to mean "dog-eat-dog world" in a quite different sense, effectively one in which altruism never exists and a nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw competitiveness is the dominant feature of existence. And even Darwinian theorists posit that cooperation and coeveolution rather than competition is key to their understanding of how life interacts.

Well, that is clearly the god of the bible, both old and new testiments. Again, which is the reason why I started this whole discussion. If you throw away much of the literal interpretation from the bible you throw away much of what you base your beliefs on. Yet you won't admit it. That is why I think your position and the position of all "reasonable nonliteral christians" is so intellectually dishonest. At least the literalists think they have proof of miracles and 1000 correct propheseys of the bible in which to base their beliefs.

Well, thank you! It is certainly wonderful to have you acquaint me with what I base my beliefs on; I had thought that I founded them on something completely different, and had been trying to explain that to you. I'll have to introduce you to His4Ever; you and she, being literalists, will get along just fine!

Perhaps I should not be offended -- but I'm going to let that paragraph stand, as a signal that you have pushed one of my buttons. I do not base my beliefs on the Bible. It is a very useful, if oftentimes flawed, reference point for information about God. I'd like a bit more explanation of why you see my position as "intellectually dishonest" before I argue the contrary -- it's your assertion; your turn to do the explanation and defending. I've tried to explain my position clearly and cogently; if there's a problem with it to the extent that you call it "intellectually dishonest," perhaps you'd care to spell out in detail what it is -- remembering that all our discussion of the Bible is to one side.

As for the rest of your post and the promised explanation of why I don't accept the "wish-fulfillment-hallucination" explanation of what I believe I experienced, I think on second thought I want to wait for your response. You've begun mixing apples and oranges in what you've said towards the end, and it feels like some of the remarks are personal potshots, so I will address them later when I feel less emotionally disturbed by them.

[Jodi]

BADCHAD, your last post IMO reveals your agenda, and frankly it's one that we've seen around here before.

You want POLY to prove that God (or "his" God) exists, by proof that is acceptable to you.

But if you just asked him flat-out to do it, he'd be the first to admit to you that he can't. God is supernatural (that is, outside the natural) and therefore not amenable to proof. But by the same token, He is not amenable to disproof, either.

So in your world it may be acceptable to play the odds as you see them and declare that it is more likely than not that God doesn't exist, but that's as close to a declarative statement on the subject as you can get and still be intellectually honest. And even that is just your opinion, totally unprovable and unproven. So you have your opinion about God's existence and POLY has his, and they're not the same. Quel suprise.. The only question is, When your position is no more provable than his, why are you busting his chops about what he believes?

Frankly, the "wish-fulfillment-hallucination" I see here is yours: If you insist that the only possible God is found in (and limited by) the words in the Bible, and you insist (disregarding all evidence to the contrary) that every Christian must worship this God (your god) as you say they do, then the hallucinations are yours.

In other words, and as POLY already said, if you think God is a wish or a delusion or a hallucination, then prove it. It's your thesis, so your burden of proof, and you're the one all hung up on proof anyway. So get busy.

[Liberal]

Diogenes wrote:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, though. Precisely what apect of Jesus' teaching do you believe was unprecedented.The entire philosophy as described. A philosophy may be identified minimally by its four core tenets — its metaphysic, its ethic, its epistemology, and its aesthetic. In addition, a philosophy may imply a moral imperative.

For example, Ayn Rand was not the first to suggest a metaphysic of objective reality (she was preceded by Hume and others), but her Objectivism was unique as a philosophy when the elements were combined: (1) Metaphysic — objective reality; (2) Ethic — self-interest; (3) Epistemology — reason; (4) Aesthetic — realism. The moral imperative that it implies is "be selfish".

I don't mean this to sound patronizing in the sense that I think you're showing "insight" by approaching a more Eastern worldview, I just mean to compliment you that you can think past the symbols.You might be interested in Kahlil Gibran's Jesus the Son of Man (http://www.christpath.org/sonofman/jesus.html). He and I are of one mind on Jesus.

That's a mighty big "if" there, Lib. An axiom is an axiom only if it is mutually recognized as such. A spiritual metaphysic is far from a self-evedent truth.Granted. However, in my beloved John 8, the Pharisees reminded Jesus that His testimony was not valid because He was appearing as His own witness. He replied to them, "I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me." It is sufficient for me that Jesus, His Father, and I mutually recognize the axiom.

A greatest entity does not equal "God" in any meaningful sense.Perhaps. But speaking for myself, I can conceive of no entity greater than He.

[Liberal]

Badchad wrote (to Poly):

Speaking for myself...

I think we are getting somewhere with the posability of god being in your imagination. Children's imaginary friends comes pretty close and I don't see how you can make any differentiation.Neurological scientist, V. S. Ramachandran, MD, Ph.D, was careful not to fall into your fallacy:

"Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experience in any way "inferior" to the more mundane truth that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are ever tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence — the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion — to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God." — Phantoms in the Brain

Would you acknowledge that people frequently use subjective proof to establish beliefs that are false.I can prove objectively that God exists if you will accept the definition of God offered by Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and the following two axioms: (1) it is possible that God exists, and (2) if God does exist, then He exists in all worlds that are possible. From those, I can derive a valid conclusion with deductive logic that God exists in actuality.

A far more interesting question, however, is whether you, upon being presented with a sound logical argument that proves the existence of God, would actually change your mind. Or is it a fact, as Jodi suspects, that you have an unmalleable agenda, and no amount of reasonable argument would sway you?

If you are willing to put your integrity where your mouth is, I offer you a challenge. If I put forward an argument as described above — defining God as that which, if existing, would exist in all worlds that are possible, and the two axioms I gave you — then if you find a logical flaw, I will renounce the existence God. If, however, you cannot find a logical flaw, then you must acknowledge the existence of God.

So which is it, is your interest in reason or in something else?

[MEBuckner]

I thought we'd pretty well established that this "God" of Necessary Existence need not be a self-aware or purposeful entity; did we even establish that this "God" is the creator of anything? In other words, whatever Hume's definition might have been, the "God" of that particular logical proof isn't really what almost everyone else means when they say God. Or did I miss something in one of those other threads?

[SentientMeat]

Note also that the mere conception of a being with this property renders the proof valid, even though this conception might occur without God existing.

[Liberal]

I really don't believe you mean that, unless you were among the tiny minority who considered Anselm's original proof to be valid. In fact, that proof, which conceives God into existence, has been roundly trounced universally, including here at Straight Dope.

I have spelled out the conditions of my wager to Badchad. Let him decide for himself whether he will accept them. I am presuming that he can read, and is capable of comprehending the definition of God that I gave him.

[Meatros]

Originally posted by Libertarian
A far more interesting question, however, is whether you, upon being presented with a sound logical argument that proves the existence of God, would actually change your mind. Or is it a fact, as Jodi suspects, that you have an unmalleable agenda, and no amount of reasonable argument would sway you?

I suspect that Jodi is right and that Badchad's is not interested in a free flowing exchange of knowledge. I could be wrong but it seemed to me as though Badchad was about to revert to his former button-pushing methodology in his last post (I hope I am wrong).

In any event Lib, I hope Badchad takes you up on your offer as I'm keenly interested in what you have to say in the matter.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Libertarian
You might be interested in Kahlil Gibran's Jesus the Son of Man. He and I are of one mind on Jesus.
Ah, Gibran, I should have guessed. I love Gibran. Here is my favorite Kahlil Gibran story from The Madman (http://nothingistic.org/library/gibran/madman/madman02.htm)

[Polycarp]

Six hours and a good rest after my post above that ended with an irritated reaction, I see little reason to change what I said.

Badchad, I apologize for bringing emotion into an intellectual discussion -- but you would have gotten far worse from a wide range of other believers, and far sooner. Which is, of course, no excuse for me! The point is, one's beliefs and are always of emotional value to one, and I try to do my best to "take my skin off and hold it at arm's length to see if I can see what you see on it" -- but like everyone else, I have my limits.

Quite simply and bereft of a lot of extraneous detail, the "proof" I promised -- and it's a probabilistic one, not a ironclad syllogistic-logic one -- that my theophanic experience was not an interior hallucination is this: I was at the time of the experience a very intellectualized, compartmentalized being, with emotions walled off and unexpressed. This was a somewhat sterile way to live, but one that worked for me -- I did not want the sort of emotional intimacy and commitment that I ended up with in consequence of having that experience. And I'm quite comfortable saying that that would include both conscious and subconscious motivation -- I shied away from situations that might involve such unwanted consequences, on a "gut reaction" basis. I do understand the reasons behind this, resulting from my upbringing, but they are moot to the point here.

The immediate results of the conversion experience were that the Bible and theology became "alive" to me, not intellectual topics for study and discussion but personally meaningful as well, that I felt a strong need to reach out and help those in need, and that ethics became not rules but a sequence of behavior that was both meaningful and the essential consequence of basic principles. But my emotions still remained "locked" and my life "arid" in that sense.

Seven years after having that experience, I felt the nigh-onto-irresistible urge ('sent by God' at least IMHO), totally out of character for me, to reach out to help a neighbor boy (M) in trouble. The consequences of that act brought a boy (C) who was his cousin's best friend and his brother-in-law-to-be into my life at a time when C desperately needed a man whom he could rely on, who cared about him as a person, and the consequences of C coming to rely on me as a father figure and a source of emotional stability were such as, combined with his own insightful personality, he drew me out of my emotional shell and "made me whole." This is the core event of what transformed my interior life (and his), and in absolutely no way could it have been foreseen by any party involved. To summarize the consequences would take pages of posts, but an incomplete but pithy way to represent it can be found in the words of the philosopher G. Brooks: "I could have missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the dance." Alternatively, take the middle verse of the Bette Midler song "The Rose" -- because I've been the person she describes and warns against becoming.

For the record, since it seems we're talking "Bible" at cross purposes, let me say quite clearly where I think there is validity in it, and where not. It's an anthology of writings produced over a period somewhat greater than 1,000 years, in a variety of genres and using a variety of literary techniques. It also exhibits a naivete bordering on the superstitious about events -- an earthquake is seen as God's wrath, for example.

In this it is no different from the hundreds of other writings that date from before the Renaissance -- each is a treasure trove of information about the culture that produced it and (usually) the belief system they held -- but when read critically, with an eye to what a phrasing meant to the culture that it was written in and for. To give just one example, the little gimmick about the trickster who guests with another and manipulates him into offering him bread and salt, symbolic of accepting him as a guest deserving of hospitality, in several non-Biblical stories from the Middle East, makes no sense until one realizes the paramount importance of the rules regarding hospitality in an arid and inhospitable land. The wiles of Odysseus are similarly to be read in the context of what Bronze Age Greece considered to be heroic, ethical, and their converses.

Okay, when one does take all this into account, along with the literary convention of "writing speeches" and a good dozen other conventional stylistic points, then one has a manuscript that can be read with some degree of cohesion, grasping the meaning behind the words used. (Another classic example: West Semites, as can be demonstrated from material outside the Bible, used a pithy figure of speech for "give X a higher priority than Y" -- it was "love X and hate Y." The hatred is not to be taken literally; it's metaphoric for "refrain from Y, even if it is good in and of itself, if it conflicts from X." Jesus several times uses this figure of speech, and it's essential to getting the meaning he intended, that one recognize that idiom and read his words in that context.)

When one has in fact done all this, one is left with a manuscript that conveys an evolving understanding of what YHWH is in terms of both character and relation vis-à-vis humanity as a whole. From being the vulcanism-and-earthquake tutelary deity of a tribe whose attitude can be summarized in the dyslexic "My god's bigger than your god" ;) he comes to be seen as the all-powerful shaper of the destiny of nations, who is as interested in the Assyrians as in the Israelites they conquered and who works through Cyrus the conquering Persian Emperor to achieve His ends. And all this culminates in the sometimes enigmatic person of Jesus -- and it's MHO that even to a skeptic as regards the religion founded on him, the character of Jesus, his style of discourse, his ideas and concepts, come across clearly when one reads the Gospels with an eye to where the writer of each is being polemic, where he's naive, where he's adopting literary custom foreign to our style of discourse, etc. (Diogenes, Moderators, I'd welcome some critique of that last set of comments.)

However, badchad, I really want to see a clear statement of in what way you see my belief system as "intellectually dishonest" before I pursue this discussion much further -- not only because my position has been attacked by that comment, and I deserve a clear demonstration of how your POV arrives at that conclusion, but also because it will help to shape our ongoing discourse if I understand more fully in what way you perceive it to be so.

[Liberal]

Meatros

Actually, he hasn't yet responded to my first post. I guess we'll see whether he responds to the second.

-----

Diogenes

Your link didn't work for me. Can you give it a second look?

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Oops, my link doesn't work. Link here (http://nothingistic.org/library/gibran/madman/) first, and it's the second chapter called "God."

[Liberal]

Oh, it is simply beautiful, Diogenes! Thank you so much for sharing that! :)

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Polycarp
When one has in fact done all this, one is left with a manuscript that conveys an evolving understanding of what YHWH is in terms of both character and relation vis-à-vis humanity as a whole. From being the vulcanism-and-earthquake tutelary deity of a tribe whose attitude can be summarized in the dyslexic "My god's bigger than your god" he comes to be seen as the all-powerful shaper of the destiny of nations, who is as interested in the Assyrians as in the Israelites they conquered and who works through Cyrus the conquering Persian Emperor to achieve His ends. And all this culminates in the sometimes enigmatic person of Jesus -- and it's MHO that even to a skeptic as regards the religion founded on him, the character of Jesus, his style of discourse, his ideas and concepts, come across clearly when one reads the Gospels with an eye to where the writer of each is being polemic, where he's naive, where he's adopting literary custom foreign to our style of discourse, etc. (Diogenes, Moderators, I'd welcome some critique of that last set of comments.)
I think you're right on with this assessment. The Bible reflects the evolution of religious thought as recorded by one extraordinary culture in the middle east. You're also right that the discernment of the "wheat from the chaff," as it were, vis-a-vis the gospels is greatly aided by identifying the paticular prisms and theological agendas of the authors. Matthew, for example, is the most Jewish in his presentation. Matthew's purpose is to show Jesus as the heir to both Moses and David, who symbolize the prophetic and political legacys of Israel. Matthew draws analogies (sometimes forced or extropolated) which are intended to support Matthew's thesis. Jesus (Matthew says) was of the lineage of David and was born in David's hometown of Bethlehem. He fled to escape a slaughter just like Moses. In the transfiguration, Matthew show Jesus standing with Moses and Elijah and makes us understand that Jesus is is the last and the greatest of this prophetic line. He is also the political Messiah in that he is the rightful heir to the throne of Israel. To Matthew, Jesus is both king and prophet, and is the greatest of both.

When we know this about Matthew, then we know when his narratives and commentaries are leading us in that direction. We may accept or reject Matthew's conclusions in this regard, but simply understanding his agenda allows us to make some informed judgements as top when Matthew is "spinning" and when he is presenting more objective Jesus lore.

The words of Jesus, himself, particularly those which derive from Q and other early sayings sources, are probably the most reliable indicator of who he really was and taught. The beatitudes, the parables, the verbal sparring with critics, etc. have a consistent tone, style and insight which are distinctly unique, recognizable and provocative. You can just tell that it's original to Jesus because of its character and voice. There are other sayings attributed to Jesus (particularly in John) which do not seem to share this character, which don't seem consistent with the core body of sayings around which the gospels were composed. Other times we may see Jesus "explain" certain statements and we suspect that the author was trying to clarify a certain saying of Jesus to more closely fit that author's own prism.

This manner of reading the gospels is not as arbitrary as it may seem at firts blush. Looking for characteristic "voices" embedded in text is a valid form of literary analysis. We have a strong core of basic sayings and teachings attributed to one Jesus of nazareth. The voice of these sayings is distinctly different from the authors who integrated them into personal narrative interpretations. We can tell, with some degree of reliability, who's taking when. It's still somewhat subjective but it's not just guessing either. When this method of analysis is applied to other historical works, (say Josephus, for instance) there is not much resistance or argument if historiographers say they can detect interpolations or forgeries which do not match the voice of the author. The Bible can be analyzed the same way, but, of course, the Bible is the Bible, and many people would certainly reject the validity of this kind of scrutiny.

[Algernon]

I am out of my league here, which is why I am a GD lurker rather than a participant. However, I am moved to post for two reasons.

First, to note that I believe that Poly is admired not only for his ability to conduct an irenic discussion, but also because he displays a higher than average inquiry to advocacy ratio. Inquiry in the sense of "help me understand how you arrived at your conclusion". It is a skill that is all too commonly absent. Great Debates is all too often two or more people advocating their opinions. Here is a great example from Poly....it will help to shape our ongoing discourse if I understand more fully in what way you perceive it to be so. Second, as I perused through the The Madman I ran across the following. This little story, to me, expresses (quite amusingly) how I often view Great Debates. (From the link above, provided by Diogenes... thank you.)The Pomegranate, by Kahlil Gibran
Once when I was living in the heart of a pomegranate, I heard a seed saying, "Someday I shall become a tree, and the wind will sing in my branches, and the sun will dance on my leaves, and I shall be strong and beautiful through all the seasons."

Then another seed spoke and said, "When I was as young as you, I too held such views; but now that I can weigh and measure things, I see that my hopes were vain."

And a third seed spoke also, "I see in us nothing that promises so great a future."

And a fourth said, "But what a mockery our life would be, without a greater future!"

Said a fifth, "Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are."

But a sixth replied, "Whatever we are, that we shall continue to be."

And a seventh said, "I have such a clear idea how everything will be, but I cannot put it into words."

Then an eighth spoke -- and a ninth -- and a tenth -- and then many -- until all were speaking, and I could distinguish nothing for the many voices.

And so I moved that very day into the heart of a quince, where the seeds are few and almost silent.

[Liberal]

Diogenes wrote:

The words of Jesus, himself, particularly those which derive from Q and other early sayings sources, are probably the most reliable indicator of who he really was and taught.My understanding is that Q is a composite document that was derived from the Gospels rather than the other way around. Am I mistaken?

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Libertarian
My understanding is that Q is a composite document that was derived from the Gospels rather than the other way around. Am I mistaken?
It is believed that Matthew and Luke used a common written source for many of the sayings of Jesus. This is thought to be the case because the word for word agreement in those gospels makes it far more likely that they used a common Greek source than that they were independently translated in exactly the same way by two different compilers. Q is the hypothetical reconstruction of this common source, (there are no extant manuscripts) so, while it is true that Q is derived from Matthew and Luke it is more of an "excavation" from those texts than a synthesis.

Q is not accepted by everybody. Fundamentalists prefer to believe that God can inspire the same translations for two or three or fifty different gospels if he wants to. The current scholarly consensus, though, favors the Q hypothesis.

[Liberal]

So, that would be a "no"? :D

[Diogenes the Cynic]

More of a "not exactly" ;)

[Liberal]

I don't mean to belabor the point, but if there has never been found any actual source document, then isn't "composite document" as reasonable a description as "hypothetical reconstruction"?

[Diogenes the Cynic]

A "composite" document would imply some combination of texts from two or more sources. Q is only the summation of those verses which are common to both Matthew and Luke. You're wrong only in the technical sense of the word "composite." A true composite would require at least some text which was not common.

[Polycarp]

If you'll pardon my jumping in on the "Q" bandwagon, I may be able to shed some light on the issue.

The basic question is what's been termed "the Synoptic Problem" -- the fact that the first three gospels seem to have a very common narrative thread and use much the same language, in some cases even identical terms, as if three supposedly separate accounts said "Jesus ambled along" instead of "walked" or "strode" or "journeyed." Yet each turns the individual brief accounts -- "pericopés" -- of things Jesus said and did to different ends, and (particularly in Matthew vs. Luke) sets his sayings in quite different contexts. Obviously there was some borrowing from one to another, and no firm tradition of what he said and did at what particular time.

Mark, the briefest of the three, seems to focus largely on what Jesus did, and Matthew and Luke amplify this with His teachings. This has led many critical scholars to believe that Mark was the first gospel, and that Matthew and Luke used it, making minor adaptations, as a frame story for their expanded accounts.

Most notably, Matthew and Luke relate many of the same discourses by Jesus -- parables, prophecies, and such -- yet assign them to quite different points in his ministry -- material not found in Mark. This has led scholars to posit a "Q" document or tradition, not now extant, that was a common source for them. Other than the obvious similarities of parables and discourses found in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark, there is no real evidence for its existence (with one exception). Scholars have extracted those common elements and put them together as a reconstruction of the hypothetical "Q" -- but it is merely a reconstruction from the extant Gospels.

According to the early Christian writer Papias, whose account has formed the foundation for the understanding of traditionalists (like His and her teachers), Matthew wrote first, then Mark, then Luke, and then John, hence the order we have them in.

But what Papias says is that Matthew gathered the logia of Jesus in the Aramaic language. The Gospel we have is written in good koiné Greek, with some Aramaisms intruded, and is not a collection of logia (best translated as "utterances, teachings, oracles") but a narrative account forming the frame story on which individual logia are gathered, largely in five long discourses -- which Luke totally rearranges.

IMHO, the textual evidence for the existence of Q is quite strong, but we have the problem of the absence of any copy of this apparently significant document, which the early church would have had strong motives to preserve.

On the other hand, why would Mark abridge the extant Matthew gospel, omitting great quantities of teaching, particularly if, as tradition has it, he was working from Peter's memories of his days following Jesus in the flesh 40 years previously?

My personal hypothesis on the origin of the Synoptic Gospels is as follows:

1. Matthew collects the logia of Jesus in Aramaic as a handy reference to what Jesus's teachings were.

2. This gets translated into Greek.

3. Working from Peter's memories and the small amount he knew personally from his youth, Mark produces a narrative account of Jesus's actions.

4. Somebody gets the bright idea to use Mark as a frame story for the Matthean collection of logia, inserting five "set speeches" composed of topical groupings of the logia. This becomes known as what we now know as Matthew. Over time, the Matthew logia collection fades out of use, since it's in place in Matthew and Luke (see 5)

5. Separately from the events in 4 and roughly contemporaneously with them, Luke does researches into the memories of surviving people who knew Jesus, including Mary his mother and the Bethany family (Mary/Martha/Lazarus). Armed with his notes from this, Mark, and the logia manuscript of Matthew, he puts things together in as close to historical order as he can, omitting the legends that had grown up over time (the boy Jesus resurrecting the bird killed by one of his playmates, for example) and including what he found to be reliable testimony of things Jesus said and did. Since he was more interested in time/place accuracy than topicality, his inclusions of the Q pericopes are in different places than the Matthew-editor's.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Polycarp
1. Matthew collects the logia of Jesus in Aramaic as a handy reference to what Jesus's teachings were.

2. This gets translated into Greek.
Papius claimed that Matthew collected the sayings in Hebrew not Aramaic. (Hebrew was the still the language of literature and scripture, even when the spoken language was Aramaic)

I share your hypythesis, though, that Papius' Hebrew sayings gospel may have been translated into Greek and become Q. However, this would require more of a recomposition of the Hebrew original than a straight translation. Q appears to have been composed in Greek rather than translated and its allusions and quotations from the Old Testament are dependent on the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Bible.

[Polycarp]

Thanks for the correction. Lib, does that answer your question about Q adequately?

[Liberal]

Yes. Thanks to both you and Diogenes for your responses.

[badchad]

Polycarp:

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Would you acknowledge that people frequently use subjective proof to establish beliefs that are false. Would you also acknowledge that people have a tendency to believe and find evidence to support (adequate or not) what they want to believe? If yes would this acknowlegement increase or decrease your 99.99999% surety that god exists.
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Yes, yes, and no -- it would do neither. My reasoning here is that subjective beliefs can, of course, be true or false; the proof must lie elsewhere. And it's certainly a truism that people tend to engage in wish-fulfillment fantasies -- believing in that which they want to. However, insofar as my conscious mind goes (and I do feel I have a good handle on my subconscious motivations, but we both know they can be tricky, so I'm putting in that reservation) what I experienced and its aftermath was nothing I had any real interest in experiencing, let alone desired.

In the other thread in which we started this, you wrote:

"I think that God does exist in a form that manifests Itself as a Person who loves me and whom I love in return."

As noted earlier I maintain that world as a whole is a fairly hard place and life if often problematic. Having a god who looks after and loves you sounds warm and fuzzy to a degree that many might be motivated to beleive it, even with scant evidence. So I don't think I can take your comments at face value that this belief is not something you would have no interest in or desires.

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Sounds like a nonsense statement to me. I think to have a personal relationship he would actually have to interact with you. I don't think that experiencing an unlikely event, to which one got goosebumps qualifies.
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With humbleness and absolutely no intent to get us back on a hostility kick, I feel that you're reading something into what I'm saying here. It may be that I have not made myself clear. I have indicated two things, interrelated but distinct, regarding my relationship with God: a single overwhelming event of great impact in which I came to recognize Him as Person and present to me, and an ongoing sense of the Divine Presence (metaphorically) "hovering" and from time to time noodging and guiding me in what I do.

Neitzsche would call the latter the "herd instinct in the individual."

I can refer you to Lib's efforts to demonstrate Him by logic,

Please don't. While I know you like him, I think he crosses the border into insanity when speaking of religious matters. I don't mean this as an ad hom, it's what I really think and why I won't be wasting any of my time engaging with him. However, if you think he has any points which are particularly meaningful to you in this discussion feel free to bring them up.

And yes, I grant that there are tragedies and pathetic endings to lives, and that positing 'spiritual' growth -- intellectual and emotional maturity and character development -- as a possible partial answer to the Problem of Pain/Evil does in fact assume that bias. I said I didn't have an answer for it; I speculated on a partial answer. Is it acceptable to you that we table the question of why human pain/evil exists in a universe claimed to have an omnipotent and beneficient creator?

Sure but only after pointing out that these tragedies seem to happen about as frequently as I would expect if there were no god in charge, or a god that doesn't care. As such I think the evidence fits my atheistic world view pretty well and I don't think I need to do any post hoc theorizing about growth and lessons.

That it does exist does not disprove Him

In your opinion. In mine he either wants the world good and can't do so or can make it good but won't do so. As such I think it may not disprove a being but it by definition disproves his being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, but of course we can't understand god's ways. I will agree that this is not the focus of this thread.

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I think you have contradicted yourself. If god wrote a clean operating system then he would not have cause these coincidences. Also, outside of survivorship bias, what makes you think that these coincidences are in your favor? What makes you think that these coincicdences happen any more frequently then they ought to given a world without a watchmaker?
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You mean a good program should not have built-in safeguards against aspects of it crashing?

A program desinged by a perfect being wouldn't need safeguards as it would never crash.

I see the "coincidences" as integral parts of a monstrously complex Plan. And, of course, there's Eddington's (?) famous comment, "The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they demand them." I'm missing where you see a inherent contradiction in my comment -- please rephrase, and I'll try to answer better.

I think the coincidences you see are nothing more than confirmational bias. That given equal probablity of events the world will screw you as often as it helps you leading to no evidence of a being helping you out and guiding you along. Though there is survivorship bias in that those who got really screwed are no longer around to talk about it. However testing my hypothesis in the past would be problematic, though I do think I could come up with a way to test my hypothesis going forward.

We could have you or someone else who trusts in the lord as a subject. Flip a fair coin 100 times. For every time it's heads the subject would get a hug from their most favorite person. Every time tails comes up they would be flogged. If floggs vs hugs came up as often as we would expect from chance then I think this would weaken the benevolent coincidence theory. You up for it?

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What do you estimate the probability of heaven as paradise is, vs. annihilation of your consciousness? What do you think is the probability of hell as eternal torment?
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I presume from the few descriptive passages associated with the promises made that whatever heaven may be, it's a sense of intimacy with God, comfortable and pleasurable, presumably with ongoing new input to pique interest to avoid any sense of boredom. In view of the fact that He promised it to those who follow Him, I'd give it 100% probability

So when you said this you really didn't mean it?

"I don't rule out total annihilation of my consciousness"

By the way are you basing your belief on god's or Jesus' promise here from other source than the bible. Jesus did make some other promises in this source that did not come true, I'm sure you are aware. So why the 100% certainty here? Perhaps that heaven was just another concept not to be taken literally.

Hell is an interesting concept to try to decipher. I reject the Hell-as-vengeance-on-unbelievers style of belief

Unless your source for Jesus' teachings is different from mine, I think this is what Jesus taught. I don't see how you can talk your way out of this and not have that emotional response saying "I'm lying to myself."

it's too much like "when my Daddy gets through with you, you'll be sorry you picked on me, you big bully!"

I agree. However I feel that heaven is too much like "if you are good boys and girls Santa will bring you lots of presents for Christmas." Remove your bias for accepting pleasant thoughts and I don't see how you can disagree.

God does not punish by sending non-believers to Hell; they choose to pursue paths that inevitably lead there by the very nature of mankind, and his offer to save them from it is always open.

Luke 12:5
But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which AFTER he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.

Matthew 13:41-42
The Son of man (Jesus) shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Romans 9: 14-20 NLT
What can we say? Was god being unfair? Of course not! For god said to Moses, “I will show mercy to anyone I choose, and I will show compassion to anyone I choose.” So receiving god’s promise is not up to us. We can’t get it by choosing it or working hard for it. God will show his mercy to anyone he chooses.
For the scriptures say that god told Pharoah, “ I have appointed you for the very purpose of displaying my power in you, and so that my fame might spread throughout the earth,” So you see, god shows mercy to some and just because he wants to, and he chooses to make some people refuse to listen.
Well then, you might say, “Why does god blame people for not listening? Haven’t they simply done what he made them do?
No don’t say that. Who are you, a mere human being, to criticize god? Should the thing that was created say to the one who made it, “Why have you made me like this?”

Now let me guess, unlike the passages you want to believe, these one's aren't to be taken literally. Do you see what I'm getting at?

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Are you going to tell me that the bible does not describe some pretty strange senses of justice? I think I can give you plenty of examples, as many or more than described in the Iliad. Though I know with your nonliteral interpretation you'll just say those don't count for some reason or other or say that we are too small minded to understand the full wisdom of god, bla bla bla. I can apply such statements with equal ease to the Iliad, so if you have a less generic line of argument let me know.
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Nope, I completely agree. But you're (I think) operating on the assumption that the Bible is supposed to be (according to Christians) the infallible Word of God -- I see it as the record of their growing understanding of how He operates and what He wills.

Conveniently by your definition you can make god say just about anything you want him to. You make him fit your morality, not vice versa. Do you see what I'm getting at?

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Well, that is clearly the god of the bible, both old and new testiments. Again, which is the reason why I started this whole discussion. If you throw away much of the literal interpretation from the bible you throw away much of what you base your beliefs on. Yet you won't admit it. That is why I think your position and the position of all "reasonable nonliteral christians" is so intellectually dishonest. At least the literalists think they have proof of miracles and 1000 correct propheseys of the bible in which to base their beliefs.
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Well, thank you! It is certainly wonderful to have you acquaint me with what I base my beliefs on; I had thought that I founded them on something completely different, and had been trying to explain that to you. I'll have to introduce you to His4Ever; you and she, being literalists, will get along just fine!

I think His4ever is unreasonable to take the bible literally. I think that you think she is too. I think that you think that you are more reasonable than her in your outlook. I think you are wrong. I think believing in magic or believing in a supernatural morality or believing a supernatural being loves you based on such a shaky source requires an equal degree of irrationality as believing the earth is only 6000 years old while standing in a bed of fossils.

I think that most atheists on this board almost give you a pass on your superstitious beliefs because your geology and biology agrees with them and your morality more closely parallels what is often times their secular humanism than it does christianity. I'm saying that regardless of your admirable views on morality (which I emphasise are admirable), or your reasonable views on many scientific matters, your superstition still sucks. This is what pulled me out of my lurker mode.

Perhaps I should not be offended -- but I'm going to let that paragraph stand, as a signal that you have pushed one of my buttons.

The truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off.:)

I do not base my beliefs on the Bible. It is a very useful, if oftentimes flawed, reference point for information about God.

I'm pretty sure you said you follow the teachings of Jesus. Where other than the bible are Jesus' teachings in print?

I'd like a bit more explanation of why you see my position as "intellectually dishonest" before I argue the contrary -- it's your assertion; your turn to do the explanation and defending.

I think I have been doing so througout this thread and the thread when we started. I don't think I can be more clear than I have. When I compared your views to His4ever's a few paragraphs up, that is the best nutshell I can come up with.

You've begun mixing apples and oranges in what you've said towards the end, and it feels like some of the remarks are personal potshots, so I will address them later when I feel less emotionally disturbed by them.

I don't (generally) mean my remarks to be personal pot shots, however when you attack someones philosophy that makes up a large part of who they are it is hard not to feel it a personal attack. When one says they follow the teachings of Jesus and one points out a teaching of Jesus that they don't follow, I don't think that is a pot shot, though I expect it will get a visceral reaction. However, not to do so would be to teach with one hand tied behind my back.

Badchad, I apologize for bringing emotion into an intellectual discussion -- but you would have gotten far worse from a wide range of other believers, and far sooner. Which is, of course, no excuse for me! The point is, one's beliefs and are always of emotional value to one, and I try to do my best to "take my skin off and hold it at arm's length to see if I can see what you see on it" -- but like everyone else, I have my limits.

What if you were wrong in your outlook? You said that you would still live by your same moral code but would you want to know that you were wrong? Would you want someone to take the time to point it out to you, even knowing you would be offended in the process?

Seven years after having that experience, I felt the nigh-onto-irresistible urge ('sent by God' at least IMHO), totally out of character for me, to reach out to help a neighbor boy (M) in trouble. The consequences of that act brought a boy (C) who was his cousin's best friend and his brother-in-law-to-be into my life at a time when C desperately needed a man whom he could rely on, who cared about him as a person, and the consequences of C coming to rely on me as a father figure and a source of emotional stability were such as, combined with his own insightful personality, he drew me out of my emotional shell and "made me whole."

It took 7 years after your heart attack for you to help help someone? I'm not sure if I have your story straight, but I think that most people who have a brush with death want to make positive changes in their lives a little quicker. After which point you discovered that helping someone sometimes makes you feel better about yourself? I still don't think this makes the god hypothesis, let alone the Jesus hypothesis, sufficient nor necessary.

For the record, since it seems we're talking "Bible" at cross purposes, let me say quite clearly where I think there is validity in it, and where not. It's an anthology of writings produced over a period somewhat greater than 1,000 years, in a variety of genres and using a variety of literary techniques. It also exhibits a naivete bordering on the superstitious about events -- an earthquake is seen as God's wrath, for example.

I got ya. The bible is valid when it confers with your current view on morality. When it doesn't, it's not to be taken literally for any number of long winded post hoc excuses. Loud and clear.

In this it is no different from the hundreds of other writings that date from before the Renaissance

Again I agree. This is much of my point. Part of the problem is that you want to believe that the some of the magic Jesus and heaven stuff is for real. The bigger problem IMNSHO is that you want to maintain that it is reasonable to do so.

[Jodi]

BADCHAD --

What if you were wrong in your outlook? You said that you would still live by your same moral code but would you want to know that you were wrong? Would you want someone to take the time to point it out to you, even knowing you would be offended in the process?

Personally, I'd want to know I was wrong. I'd be less excited to have someone inform me that I was wrong, when what they really mean to say (all they really can say, in intellectual honesty) is that it is their unproven opinion that I may be wrong. Then it's like someone telling me that a color I think is pretty, is not really pretty. Annoying, in other words. Disproof is compelling; opinion less so. You know the old saying: Opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one.

It took 7 years after your heart attack for you to help help someone?

I'd just point this out as an example of you walking the line of being a jerk, and egging POLY into disengaging from further discourse with you. He did not say for the seven years after his heart attack he did nothing. If a person says "In X year, Event A took place; in X+7 year, Event B took place," you cannot infer that nothing else took place in between. This is not religion, it is basic logic. But by making this leap, you again obliquely insult POLY by drawing an unsupportable conclusion that nevertheless insinuates bad conduct on his part. I'm not saying he won't talk to you further in light of comments such as these, but I will say I wouldn't be surprised if he chose not to.

I got ya. The bible is valid when it confers with your current view on morality. When it doesn't, it's not to be taken literally for any number of long winded post hoc excuses. Loud and clear.

:: Patiently :: If someone takes the time to in good faith explain their position to you, and at some length at that, and you in return choose to construe the courtesy of that detailed explanation as "any number of long-winded post hoc excuses," you are once again inviting the other conversant to disengage from further discourse with you. And he may. But as I said in the other thread, do not delude yourself into thinking that if you succeed in alienating your opponent into silence by insulting him repeatedly, your possession of the field will be construed as a "victory" by anyone who cares enough to follow this thread. It won't be. That's a tired old tactic here in Great Debates, and one that is widely understood to be beneath anyone who could actually support their position through relevant and persuasive argument.

Part of the problem is that you want to believe that the some of the magic Jesus and heaven stuff is for real. The bigger problem IMNSHO is that you want to maintain that it is reasonable to do so.

Actually, the problem at this point is that you've failed entirely to explain why it is not reasonable to believe in that "heaven stuff." As I've already said: It's your thesis; you prove it. Oh, wait, that's right -- you can't. Better go back to insulting POLY, then. Eventually even he will get fed up and wander off, and then you can congratulate yourself on "winning" this "debate."

[Jodi]

Oh, and thanks to DIOGENES and POLY and LIB for the explanation of the particulars of Q. :)

[Liberal]

Jodi

You're welcome! But Badchad has declared me insane. :D Huzzah!

-----

He wrote (to Poly):

Speaking for myself...

As noted earlier I maintain that world as a whole is a fairly hard place and life if often problematic. Having a god who looks after and loves you sounds warm and fuzzy to a degree that many might be motivated to beleive it, even with scant evidence. So I don't think I can take your comments at face value that this belief is not something you would have no interest in or desires.If I thought a man were lying to me, or I had to examine the interstices and penumbras of his post to discern his meaning, I would not debate with him. But apparently, you have your reasons.

Sometimes love is warm and fuzzy, but sometimes it is not. It depends, of course, on what you mean by love. If love is a flood of chemicals in the brain, then love is always warm and fuzzy by definition, since the very chemicals themselves are designed to cause warmth and fuzziness.

But if love is the conduit of goodness, then love can cause sorrow, pain, and even dispair. How? Easy. Not everyone values goodness. Many of us delight in a beautiful summer rain, and aim our faces at the sky as we play catch-the-drops with our tongues. But some of us cannot bear even to have a drop fall on our countenance, and so we run for the nearest shelter that will provide an obstacle to the rain.

Neitzsche would call the latter the "herd instinct in the individual."No. Morality is what Nietzsche called "the herd instinct of the individual". It sounds like you've confused his views on morality with his views on conscience: the sting of the herd. He postulated that at one time, man disdained to be alone physically. He then extrapolated that conjecture into another, namely, that early man sought out not only the physical presence of others, but their validation of his worth as well. Of course, his premise presumes that an individual early man was just as content to be universally condemned as to be validated. It is actually fairly incredible to imagine that a man being beaten about the head and shoulders with sticks and stones is on his knees pleading, "More! Oh, please and thank you!"

Please don't. While I know you like him, I think he crosses the border into insanity when speaking of religious matters. I don't mean this as an ad hom, it's what I really think and why I won't be wasting any of my time engaging with him. However, if you think he has any points which are particularly meaningful to you in this discussion feel free to bring them up.I suspect that you ignore me because you find my argments formidable. Just as you are wont to neglect in general the full implications of what you say, so have you forgotten here that there is a gallery present. Its members are likely to interpret your ignoring me as intellectual fear — particularly since I have not been rude to you, but have addressed you point for point. But while you may feel free to pass on debating me, I will continue to assail your argument, tear it into pieces, and identify your fallacies. So, suit yourself. :)

Sure but only after pointing out that these tragedies seem to happen about as frequently as I would expect if there were no god in charge, or a god that doesn't care. As such I think the evidence fits my atheistic world view pretty well and I don't think I need to do any post hoc theorizing about growth and lessons.And yet, you do. In fact, that is why you are here. If it didn't matter to you one way or the other, you wouldn't care about whether anyone shares your worldview, or whether Poly holds his. You are theorizing growth and lessons post hoc your observations about the world around you. You posit growth as the shedding of what you perceive as superstitions and you declare the lesson to be that there is no god.

Even so, your view is naive and otiose. Things are bad enough with so many people obstructing goodness so much of the time. If there were no goodness facilitated at all, I shudder to imagine the moral chaos. There would be no charity at all; there would be only the warm and fuzzy feelings brought about by doing whatever is necessary to rise to the top. All other men would be a threat to you by their very existence, and humanity would be a Nietzscherian nightmare of murder, consumption, and rape.

In your opinion. In mine he either wants the world good and can't do so or can make it good but won't do so. As such I think it may not disprove a being but it by definition disproves his being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, but of course we can't understand god's ways. I will agree that this is not the focus of this thread.It is in fact simple to understand, depending on your epistemology. You have not established that forcing goodness upon a person against his will is itself an act of love, or facilitation of that goodness. It rather seems to me that forcing goodness upon a free moral agent who is not interested in what you offer is akin to tossing pearls to a herd of swine.

You have failed to show that God's offer of goodness on His part is tantamount to a reception of goodness on your part. Even a staunch materialist like yourself can look around him and see countless examples of unrequited goodness, people who are good to others but who are spurned and abused in spite of their goodness. You blame one free moral agent (God) for the sins of another (me).

A program desinged by a perfect being wouldn't need safeguards as it would never crash.You have not established that God's "program" crashes.

We could have you or someone else who trusts in the lord as a subject. Flip a fair coin 100 times. For every time it's heads the subject would get a hug from their most favorite person. Every time tails comes up they would be flogged. If floggs vs hugs came up as often as we would expect from chance then I think this would weaken the benevolent coincidence theory. You up for it?It is interesting that a man who cowers away from a challenge offered to him offers up one of his own. But unlike my challenge to you, yours to Poly is disingenuous and Neanderthal in its conception. God submitted Himself to be flogged by vicious and spiteful men who, like you, presumed that their display of evil proved his impotence.

The believer in your test would rejoice equally in the hugs and the floggings, and would interpret both as God's facilitation of goodness. After all, when the rug of temporality is pulled out from under your feet, you stand naked in your immorality while the one whom you are hugging and flogging stands clothed in God's own righteousness. Your coin flip test proves nothing except that you are capable of evil.

By the way are you basing your belief on god's or Jesus' promise here from other source than the bible. Jesus did make some other promises in this source that did not come true, I'm sure you are aware. So why the 100% certainty here? Perhaps that heaven was just another concept not to be taken literally.A rather astounding claim. I know of nothing that merits accusing Jesus of breaking promises. He bore the sins of the world. He gave Himself over to its judgment. He rose from the dead. And He returned in His full glory and power. What promise do you think He did not keep?

Unless your source for Jesus' teachings is different from mine, I think this is what Jesus taught. I don't see how you can talk your way out of this and not have that emotional response saying "I'm lying to myself."Because I'm intellectually honest. The fact that you are free to choose heaven or hell is definitively contrary to your notion that hell is for vengeance. Vengeance is "infliction of punishment in return for a wrong committed" (American Heritage). Inasmuch as God is willing to forgive your wrongdoings, your charge that He is vengeful is dishonest.

I agree. However I feel that heaven is too much like "if you are good boys and girls Santa will bring you lots of presents for Christmas." Remove your bias for accepting pleasant thoughts and I don't see how you can disagree.The only man we know of who is in Paradise with Jesus is a convicted criminal. Therefore, your argument rings hollow.

But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which AFTER he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.I have the power to shoot my wife, but that does not mean that I compel myself to do so. Interestingly, the entire context of the snippet you've provided confirms what I've already told you about your errant perceptions of what you call God's "murders".

I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him. — Luke 12:4-5

Death of the body is trivial. That is the point of the passage. For one who decries cherry-picking, you seem enamored of it yourself.

The Son of man (Jesus) shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.And here are the rest of those cherries:

The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear. — Matthew 13:41-43

I have ears. And what I hear is that His angels will escort us to wherever we want to go. Why would God force people who despise goodness to remain in His company? That would be rude.

You also quoted Romans, but sometimes Paul had his share of bad hair days. I can't speak for Poly in this, but I do not worship Paul. If we are to allow Badchad his erroneous interpretations of the teachings of Jesus, then the least we can do is allow Paul the same.

Now let me guess, unlike the passages you want to believe, these one's aren't to be taken literally. Do you see what I'm getting at?What, did you think you were opaque? :D

We take the teachings of Jesus about heaven figuratively as well. We don't really think that heaven is a field with a pearl, or a house with rooms, are any of the other images in His parables on heaven and hell. That's the whole point of parables. They are metaphorical analogies.

Conveniently by your definition you can make god say just about anything you want him to. You make him fit your morality, not vice versa. Do you see what I'm getting at?Yes, but you're wrong. By describing God as the Facilitator of Goodness, I am indicting myself since I often obstruct goodness. If I were fitting Him around my morality, I would describe Him as the facilitator of whatever I enjoy.

I think His4ever is unreasonable to take the bible literally. I think that you think she is too. I think that you think that you are more reasonable than her in your outlook. I think you are wrong. I think believing in magic or believing in a supernatural morality or believing a supernatural being loves you based on such a shaky source requires an equal degree of irrationality as believing the earth is only 6000 years old while standing in a bed of fossils.I rather think that if I were to deny God's existence, it would be like "believing the earth is only 6000 years old while standing in a bed of fossils". When I see His grace and power all around me, I am a fool if I deny Him. Just because you are blind does not mean that I would see the world more clearly if I would put on a blindfold.

I think that most atheists on this board almost give you a pass on your superstitious beliefs because your geology and biology agrees with them and your morality more closely parallels what is often times their secular humanism than it does christianity. I'm saying that regardless of your admirable views on morality (which I emphasise are admirable), or your reasonable views on many scientific matters, your superstition still sucks. This is what pulled me out of my lurker mode.I cannot imagine a more pointed insult aimed at the atheists on this board. I have seen the testimony myself from many atheists here who have expressed how they envy him his faith, and how they wish they could share it. You accuse them basically of pitying Poly for what they perceive his delusion. But in fact, that's exactly what you and the other few hand-stabbers here do. You are very much like the man who has declared, "I believe it is bad luck to be superstitious."

I'm pretty sure you said you follow the teachings of Jesus. Where other than the bible are Jesus' teachings in print?Ah! Then you at least accept the Bible as an authentic account of a historical figure. You will then accept that His Pentacostal return imbued countless others with the authority to give accounts of His teachings. Here is one (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0394431243/qid=1045745485/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_2/103-2082026-2378269?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). And here is another (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558747435/qid%3D1045745556/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-2082026-2378269). There are quite a lot of them.

I think I have been doing so througout this thread and the thread when we started. I don't think I can be more clear than I have. When I compared your views to His4ever's a few paragraphs up, that is the best nutshell I can come up with.But it still doesn't make any sense. You have an incredibly bizarre discernment of prudence. You refuse to debate a man whom you view as insane, but choose to debate a man whom you view as dishonest. If your purpose for delurking were as you have stated, it would seem that you would dismiss the dishonest man and target the insane one. After all, every argument from the dishonest man is disingenuous and may be given a boilerplate response of "You're a liar". The insane man, however, would make for a much more interesting debate. He would be like the proverbial box of chocolates.

So, why do you bother explaining anything to a man whom you perceive as immoral? Oh, wait. You actually believe that Poly's morality is, what was your word? Admirable, I believe. Yes, that's what you said. In fact, you felt a calling to emphasize that his views on morality are admirable. But he is dishonest. But his morality is admirable. But he is dishonest. But his morality is admirable. Do you see what I'm getting at? ;)

The fact of the matter is that there is no more intellectually or morally honest person than Poly, and I know that for a fact. Just the other day, as one example among many, I called him out for what I perceived as a moral infraction. His response? He thanked me, and he expressed regret for what he had done.

I don't (generally) mean my remarks to be personal pot shots, however when you attack someones philosophy that makes up a large part of who they are it is hard not to feel it a personal attack. When one says they follow the teachings of Jesus and one points out a teaching of Jesus that they don't follow, I don't think that is a pot shot, though I expect it will get a visceral reaction. However, not to do so would be to teach with one hand tied behind my back.Oh, dear lord! :eek: You mean you presume that you are teaching here? :D

[...shudder...] That's rather like the football coach teaching advanced English, isn't it? I mean, you don't even believe that Jesus is Who He says He is, so how can you presume to teach about what He is saying? Bizarre. At any rate, your admission does much to bolster the agenda theory about you.

What if you were wrong in your outlook? You said that you would still live by your same moral code but would you want to know that you were wrong? Would you want someone to take the time to point it out to you, even knowing you would be offended in the process?I disagree with Poly here. I myself am not intrinsically good. I love goodness, but not because I am good; rather, I love it because I need it. Just like I need an aspirin when my head hurts. But if I thought that goodness did not exist, I cannot imagine the monster I would become. I rather think that I would take out my migraine on everyone around me.

It took 7 years after your heart attack for you to help help someone? I'm not sure if I have your story straight, but I think that most people who have a brush with death want to make positive changes in their lives a little quicker. After which point you discovered that helping someone sometimes makes you feel better about yourself? I still don't think this makes the god hypothesis, let alone the Jesus hypothesis, sufficient nor necessary.Since you're presuming to teach, you might wish to work on your expository skills. I fear that you would teach that the theme of Atlas Shrugged is from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

I got ya. The bible is valid when it confers with your current view on morality. When it doesn't, it's not to be taken literally for any number of long winded post hoc excuses. Loud and clear.You are certainly loud, but you are as clear as mud. I bet that at your parties, you play pin the donkey on the tail. :D

Again I agree. This is much of my point. Part of the problem is that you want to believe that the some of the magic Jesus and heaven stuff is for real. The bigger problem IMNSHO is that you want to maintain that it is reasonable to do so.Um, the Scarecrow is in Oz. Poly and I are over here.

[Algernon]

[all quotes are Libertarian's]

I am a relative newbie, and merely a bystander here, but I have a couple of questions. If they could be addressed it would add clarity to my own thought process. Thanks.

Things are bad enough with so many people obstructing goodness so much of the time. If there were no goodness facilitated at all, I shudder to imagine the moral chaos. There would be no charity at all; there would be only the warm and fuzzy feelings brought about by doing whatever is necessary to rise to the top. Can you help me understand what leads you to this perspective? I'm not convinced that one needs to have goodness facilitated. From my personal perspective, the goodness that I attempt to display is internally motivated.
Oh, dear lord! You mean you presume that you are teaching here? That's rather like the football coach teaching advanced English, isn't it? I mean, you don't even believe that Jesus is Who He says He is, so how can you presume to teach about what He is saying? Bizarre. At any rate, your admission does much to bolster the agenda theory about you. It seems to me that "teaching" was perhaps a bad choice of words. I read this as badchad trying to educate and elucidate regarding his personal beliefs and opinions. I don't see a problem with that, even if that could be characterized as an "agenda". On the contrary, isn't that what this forum is for? Am I misguided?

[Liberal]

Algernon

Who can say? Only you know for sure.

An opinion is a fine thing. I express mine here often, and on a variety of topics from cheese to chess. Sometimes, I witness about my personal beliefs. I've done that on everything from Jesus Christ to Andrew Jackson (the Indian hater).

But Badchad is neither opining nor witnessing. He is debating. He is responding to Poly in a point-counterpoint, line-by-line parsing of Poly's posts.

It is exceedingly remarkable, to me at least, that a man believes he can educate a dishonest man, and he has said that he finds Poly to be intellectually dishonest. You don't need a Bible to tell you the folly of trying to teach business ethics to a snake oil salesman. Moreover, if Badchad is elucidating, then what he is attempting to elucidate is Poly's position, and not his own. He is sharing practically none of his own worldview (other than that he is an atheist), and yet is picking every nit that he can manufacture from Poly's worldview, fashioning points out of straw, and then arguing against them.

With respect to goodness and its facilitation, you are right that it comes from within you. Jesus Himself teaches, "The kingdom of heaven is within you." That which is in you that values goodness is spiritual. Metaphysical. The goodness that is within you comes from your heart, where you are created in the image and likeness of God. It is by love that you express goodness so that a hungry man is fed, or a naked man is clothed, or a lonely man is visited. Whenever goodness flows from you to another moral agent, recall this discussion so that you will know that it is the conduit through which that goodness flows that I worship and call God. Or love.

[Polycarp]

I think Libertarian and Jodi, between them, have said most of what I need to say. Two comments remain, though:

1. I had my conversion experience in 1983. I was led to do a lot of things in the interim. The heart attack was in 1990, the life-changing experiences with the kids in 1991. I know that my exposition of what happened in my life was not clear, and I happened to highlight three critical points with eight years between first and third. I didn't mention, for example, the work my wife and I did between 1984 and my heart attack with the Urban Mission and Christian Care Center -- because that was not essential to the exposition of the impact of my experiences on how I was personally changed by them.

2. It's my contention that the Bible is, not a standalone unitary document containing "God's Word" (it itself says it isn't -- read the first and last verses of the Gospel of John as proof) -- but rather as the evolving understanding of the Jewish people and the group among them called to follow Christ of whom God really is. Isaiah 6, 53, 55, 58, 61, and 65, Ezekiel 34, 36, and 37, and almost all of Micah, but particularly 6:6-8, serve as examples of this growing knowledge of the nature of God and the morality which he taught. Any one of the people intent on finding 'Biblical contradictions' can show you an equal number of passages where the writer ascribes to God the condoning or even commanding of genocide, hatred of others, and so on. What you've described as "cherry picking" is attempting to figure out what from this mass of confusing evidence is supposed to be the "real picture of God" -- and I find that in the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels -- keeping in mind that each writer had his own personal agenda and paints Jesus from a slightly different perspective, but reading past the individual portraits to the Man they all illuminate different aspects of.

This differs only in the fact that it relates to religious belief from doing much the same thing with Herodotus, Hecataeus, Tacitus, and Livy to get information about the history and cultures of which they wrote, weeding out the superstition and naive legend they report alongside factuality. To accept that a group called the Blennyes existed in North Africa and did X, Y, and Z, at the time Herodotus wrote does not require that I also accept that their faces were mounted on the front of their abdomens, as Herodotus reports with apparently a straight face!

[Algernon]

Thank you Libertarian for responding to my questions. I appreciate it. Your answers provided the additional clarity that I was seeking.

[John Zahn]

Originally posted by Libertarian
We take the teachings of Jesus about heaven figuratively as well. We don't really think that heaven is a field with a pearl, or a house with rooms, are any of the other images in His parables on heaven and hell. That's the whole point of parables. They are metaphorical analogies.

That’s understandable about many parts of heaven being figurative that you describe, but what about any aspect of it? According to his teachings, does eternal life await for a few of his followers in some kind of heaven? Very few Christians would be believers if it didn‘t promise this. And the resurrection is important to even liberal Christians, is it not? Parables are often put there by others to help understand a story. This isn’t always the case with Jesus‘. Not all that heard his parables were meant to understand them, they were supposedly esoteric.

I mean, you don't even believe that Jesus is Who He says He is, so how can you presume to teach about what He is saying? Bizarre.

Even among Christian scholars there is often heated debate over his teachings, especially his parables so Christians don’t have a lock on it. Some certainly seem more plausible than others. There are over 35,000 different Protestant sects of Christianity alone. Badchad asked why would a Christian follow some of Jesus’ teachings, but ignore others. Being an atheist doesn’t prevent one from understanding what some/many of the teachings are saying. His interpretation may not be the correct one for one sect or for any one believer, but it may very well be for another. You’ve got at least a 1/35,000 chance of being right at least once in any sect. :D Then you‘ve got millions of individual Christians that too, interpret the way they think it should be interpreted. I’m no scholar myself, but to quote Mark Twain, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”

He bore the sins of the world. He gave Himself over to its judgment. He rose from the dead. And He returned in His full glory and power.

So did many other crucified saviors that came well before him as has been pointed out. You seem like a very well read person to me so surely you‘ve read about comparative religions and seen their parallels with the Bible. Why do you keep thinking Jesus is so unique?

Since polycarp had wrote that people were convinced that some event happened, and when he didn’t address a one page post I wrote earlier addressing this which dealt with the resurrection, I’m hoping you can, but keeping this in mind: If the higher critics are correct that the miracle stories aren’t in the original drafts of the gospels, how can a believer be so sure of any event happening?

JZ

[Polycarp]

John, I apologize for missing that in dealing with badchad's rather lengthy disquisitions on my thinking.

In very quick summary form: Something happened on that first Easter morning that led people who had known Jesus intimately and were quite aware He was dead to believe He had arisen. It's not a dateless, placeless event symbolically associated with the "burial" of the seed grain and its "rising to new life" -- though the early Church did make much of that parallel, borrowed from the mystery religions, to be sure!

And while I personally would have no problem with the idea of the dead body of Jesus of Nazareth being raised and revivified, I don't think that's what happened. Prior to this He had been seen as a human being like any other, a miracle-worker to be sure according to the accounts, but limited by the constraints of the human body. After the Resurrection He appears inside locked rooms, is unrecognized by two of His disciples until He breaks the bread, vanishes and appears like an IL&M special effect in a particularly cheesy SF movie. Yet they're convinced it was Him -- and they place a big point on "the resurrection of the body" (see the Apostles' Creed on this).

Key to me here is two things: (1) the afterlife in both Jewish and Greek thought was one of being a powerless ghost, flitting to and fro but with no ability to do anything, other than perhaps to scare someone superstitious. Whatever happened was the farthest thing in their mind from seeing a ghost. (2) Paul goes into the doctrine of the Resurrection in great length in the 15th chapter of I Corinthians -- and to me one point is signficant: "It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body." (I Cor. 15:44) Whatever one of these things is, it's not limited by what mortal man can do (cr vv. 35-53 of that chapter). And it's the farthest thing from what the Greeks and Jews conceived of as the nature of the afterlife.

Over and above this -- and in consequence of it -- the communion of all believers is for Paul the Mystical Body of Christ -- and one sees Christ in each and every one of them (or at least one is supposed to, and they'd better be making an effort to be showing Him to people). This is very much metaphorical, but does convey a salient point about how His work is supposed to be carried out.

I need to get offline; I'll be glad to expound more on how I read this in response to questions, if you like.

[John Zahn]

I appreciate it, polycarp. I purposely kept my post short hoping you would find time to address it, but knew you had an a rather lengthy inquisition to attend to. :) I was beginning to think you was purposely ignoring me. Grrrr.... I’ve got a few questions, but most of it would take us further away from the OP and would create a major hijack. I’ll get them in here and there through other threads. Get some rest.

Thanks again,

JZ

[Polycarp]

My pleasure, John, and ask away.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Polycarp
In very quick summary form: Something happened on that first Easter morning that led people who had known Jesus intimately and were quite aware He was dead to believe He had arisen. It's not a dateless, placeless event symbolically associated with the "burial" of the seed grain and its "rising to new life" -- though the early Church did make much of that parallel, borrowed from the mystery religions, to be sure!
I wonder if your familiar with John Dominic Crossan's controversial theory that "Easter Sunday" actually occurred over a period of years. Crossan argues that it was not a single historical event on a specific day, but a decade long series of events, visionary experiences and evangelism which "resurrected" Christ in a spiritual sense. The emphasis on a physical, bodily resurrection was unique tp Paul, and in fact he fixated on the resurrection to the exclusion of everything else in Jesus life and ministry. In the gospels we do not see the resurrection as being the definitive event in Jesus' life. (There is no resurrection at all in Mark).

Crossan further argues (very controversially) that Jesus was never taken down from the cross. It was exceedingly rare for Romans ever to remove crucifixion victims for burial. (so rare, in fact, that of the thousands of people crucified by the Romans, the reamins of only one victim have ever been recovered) That was part of the horror of crucifixion. The body was left on the cross to to be desecrated by carrion birds and dogs. There was no reason they would have made an exception for Jesus. Crossan basically asserts that the apostles woulde have scattered after Jesus' arrest, and that none of them were witness to the crucifixion itself (which would have been a routine and unremarkable affair for the soldiers who carried it out). To paraphrase Crossan, by the time Easter Sunday rolled around, those who cared about his whereabouts did not know where he was, and those who knew did not care. This would have been an unacceptable fate for the body of Christ by the time Christianity was picking up steam, therefore, according to Crossan, Joseph of Arimathea was an apologetic fiction invented by Mark to provide Jesus with a proper Jewish burial.

I've only presented Crossan's conclusions in a highly summarized form, and there are far more substantial arguments for them than what I have presented here, but I think they're intersting nonetheless.

[Liberal]

John Zahn wrote:

That’s understandable about many parts of heaven being figurative that you describe, but what about any aspect of it? According to his teachings, does eternal life await for a few of his followers in some kind of heaven? Very few Christians would be believers if it didn‘t promise this. And the resurrection is important to even liberal Christians, is it not? Parables are often put there by others to help understand a story. This isn’t always the case with Jesus‘. Not all that heard his parables were meant to understand them, they were supposedly esoteric.He taught that "God gives the Spirit without limit." (John 3:34) He said that He brought a sword. That does not mean that He came to wage war, but to divide the world in two. His Word is like Ockham's Razor, slicing through the bullshit and separating truth from lies. His message was so simple that He thanked His Father for hiding its meaning from the learned and wise, and revealing it to simple-minded people and little children.

Those who understand His parables are those who are seeking what He is saying. For example, people who seek mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation see in the parable of the Prodigal Son a story about themselves leaving home and returning to a loving father. But those who are score-keepers, who seek vindication and recognition for their good deeds see in the same parable a story about watching someone undeserving being showered with attention while they are ignored.

He taught that many are called, but few are chosen. This means that He pours out His goodness fully and indiscriminately, but many people do not value goodness and so reject Him. How could someone not value goodness, you might ask. Look around you. Each man's heart is betrayed by what he treasures. How many people treasure having material success, wielding political power, and executing petty justice? When you have found one among them who values goodness above all else, you have found God.

Even among Christian scholars there is often heated debate over his teachings, especially his parables so Christians don’t have a lock on it. Some certainly seem more plausible than others. There are over 35,000 different Protestant sects of Christianity alone. Badchad asked why would a Christian follow some of Jesus’ teachings, but ignore others. Being an atheist doesn’t prevent one from understanding what some/many of the teachings are saying. His interpretation may not be the correct one for one sect or for any one believer, but it may very well be for another. You’ve got at least a 1/35,000 chance of being right at least once in any sect. Then you‘ve got millions of individual Christians that too, interpret the way they think it should be interpreted. I’m no scholar myself, but to quote Mark Twain, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”You couldn't be more right. When a name does not identify its bearer, the name is worthless and meaningless. It isn't a matter of no true Scotsman; rather, it is a matter of there is no Scotsman. Christendom is a body politic, but the Body of Christ is a body of faith. God does not divide in accordance with the divisions that man has made. He uses His sword to slice squarely between those who value what He values and those who don't. He values goodness above any aesthetic. He is the Facilitator of Goodness; that is, He is Love.

Interpretations arise because of mediation. Only when men see God face to face for themselves will the interpretations end. Some men, during their earthly lives, see God more clearly than others do, and speak His words with greater clarity. What they teach about God is close to the truth. Others see God only very dimly, and what they say about Him might rightly be suspect. Those who know Him know which witch is which. But one thing is for certain: a man who declares that God doesn't even exist is in no way speaking on His behalf.

So did many other crucified saviors that came well before him as has been pointed out. You seem like a very well read person to me so surely you‘ve read about comparative religions and seen their parallels with the Bible. Why do you keep thinking Jesus is so unique?For the reasons that I've already explained — the four tenets of His philosophy. You're right that I have read much about this, and what I have found is that there are many claims and little evidence. From Osiris to Mithras, the parallels to Christ are no more statistically significant than the parrallels between the sun and a tennis ball.

But I did not mention those things about Jesus in a context of showing Him to be unique. I mentioned them in a context of showing that He kept His promises. I asked Badchad to cite any promies that He had allegedly broken.

[John Zahn]

Lib, I appreciate your explanation on the parables. If there is an answer in there about heaven being something more than just figurative, I missed it. I’m not seeking proof of it, only your opinion if it exists anywhere other than in some metaphorical form.

He taught that "God gives the Spirit without limit." (John 3:34) He said that He brought a sword. That does not mean that He came to wage war, but to divide the world in two. His Word is like Ockham's Razor, slicing through the bullshit and separating truth from lies. His message was so simple that He thanked His Father for hiding its meaning from the learned and wise, and revealing it to simple-minded people and little children.


You don’t strike me as a simple-minded or as Matthew describes someone with a child-like mind that one needs in order to get to heaven, so maybe you and Polycarp both had better start looking for a loophole. Seriously, the whole notion that the parables are hidden from learned and wise, but revealed to simple- minded people and little children that seek him out wouldn‘t survive a simple demonstration. And there are plenty of atheist scholars that I’m sure have as much understanding of some of those parables as the most learned Christian scholars, so unless little children were coached ahead of time, they would probably never understand what probably most, if not all of those parables meant. This looks like a promise that has been broken.

For the reasons that I've already explained — the four tenets of His philosophy. You're right that I have read much about this, and what I have found is that there are many claims and little evidence. From Osiris to Mithras, the parallels to Christ are no more statistically significant than the parrallels between the sun and a tennis ball.

Virtually all religions have tenets that deal with some kind of a ethical code of good and love. I think some scholars have traced down probably all of the good teachings of Jesus to some precedent. Other religions talk about a Holy Spirit. Mithras and Osiris were sun gods as you already know. In a tu quoque manner, Tertullian responds to one of his critics: You [Pagans] say we worship the sun; so do you. Mirthras and Osiris have other similarities to Christ, but not as much as they have found with Krishna and Buddha. Do we have any disagreements on who was established first? Other than conservative cites that won’t give an inch, it seems established that Jesus is definitely the latter. Unless all my sources that I’ve read from are faulty in their scholarship, I don’t understand why one would say the parallels of Jesus are not statistically significant. Surely you see it as more than just coincidence. Since you’re already familiar with the parallels, there is no reason to start comparing them.

But I did not mention those things about Jesus in a context of showing Him to be unique. I mentioned them in a context of showing that He kept His promises. I asked Badchad to cite any promies that He had allegedly broken.

Thanks for the clarification. Of course the biggest promise he made is eternal life in some kind of heaven, which I think that’s how most read it, and since we can’t demonstrate one way or the other if this is true, maybe we can concentrate on a couple of others. It seems he kind of got all of those end times messages wrong, but again it has various interpretations to where conservatives sees no problem at all, while I think most liberals would have a wide array of opinions on whether or not he got it right or not. Another point of contention I have would be when Jesus said he didn’t come here to cancel the laws of Moses, but to fulfill them. Setting aside what is in Romans and other parts of the NT of what Paul says about any of the new law, and only concentrating on what Jesus has to say in the Gospels, did he cancel the laws of Moses or not?

JZ

[dalovindj]

I can prove objectively that God exists if you will accept the definition of God offered by Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and the following two axioms: Please provide the definition. I was unable to find the exact definition he uses. I did however find this little blurb:Hume also adds the point that even if we could validly infer that there is a necessarily existent reality it would not follow that this reality is anything other than the physical universe as a whole. For this might itself be eternal and uncaused. Which illustrates the problem pretty well. The way you seem to define God in that proof does not rule out God being a non-aware, non-sentient, process. I've brought this up several times, MeBuckner and a few others have as well. If this is true, then you and badchad would not be talking about the same thing and your challenge would not have much of a place in this debate.

So, provide the definition please. Or don't. Of course, it would then appear that you ignore me because you find my argments formidable. There is a gallery present. Its members are likely to interpret your ignoring me as intellectual fear. But while you may feel free to pass on debating me, I will continue to assail your argument, tear it into pieces, and identify your fallacies.

DaLovin' Dj

[Polycarp]

DJ, you bring up the exact point where I find it difficult to deal with "deductive proofs of God" -- when you start with axioms about "necessarily existent phenomena" and such, it becomes very tricky, and requires theological prestidigitation, to turn that into a Trinity of which one Member is a teacher who walked the roads of Galilee. Not impossible -- but very difficult.

That's why I work from an empirical perspective. He is -- I know Him to be -- and what He's done in my life is profound, and something that I can share. There are clear objections to the historical and anecdotal evidence for Him, but they can be dealt with on a fair basis, without recourse to any fancy dancing.

(This is not to slam Lib, of course -- I am amazed at his ability to work the modal logic that links abstract first causes and the One who spoke to him and me. But it's not the path I'm called to walk in witness for Him, and that's all I'm saying in the above.)

I've seen a wide number of writings that attempt to "explain" the Resurrection, though not Crossan's. Spong, for example, sees it in the disciples gathered in the Upper Room where they'd had a meal with Jesus three days before, that Sunday evening -- and when Peter breaks the bread at the meal, and is brought to vividly recall Jesus doing so and the events that followed, he has a satori in which he realizes that they -- the eleven sitting at table -- are the ones called to carry on Jesus's work -- to be for others what He had been for them.

Me, I'm standing by what I said -- something happened. It wasn't an Urban Legend that became known as truth some 40 years later; it wasn't exclusively a symbolic recognition that "His truth is marching on" though that surely played a large part in it. What that Something was, I refuse to guess. It might have been a bodily resuscitation, it might have been a visitation by Jesus's surviving spirit, it might have been a theophany, it might have been hallucinatory, or it might have been something beyond our frame of reference. But the abrupt change in the apostles from the rather cowardly and doltish characters they portrayed themselves as in the Gospels to the fearless witnesses of Acts is profound enough to require some cause that convinced them that it was not the end when Jesus died.

Oh, and just one final comment on the story of the Prodigal that was mentioned earlier, the context is that he's telling this story to the Pharisees and scribes (Luke 15:1-3), and while the point of the repentance of the younger son and his welcoming by his father should not be missed, one key element is the attitude of the elder son, the "good son" who followed his father's commands. It's a message against self-righteousness and judging of others as much as it is one of sin and repentance.

[Freyr]

Polycarp wrote:

I've spent two years trying to expand my conceptualization of what's going on to allow for what happened to Freyr in his two distinct theophanic experiences (of YHWH/Jesus and of the Vana Freyr), and (which may be of particular interest to Elethiomel) we actually have a member here (of whose board name unfortunately I'm suffering a memory lapse) who is in fact a "soft atheist" as the term is used here who experienced a theophany.

Poly, I think part of the problem is that you're viewing the experience from a monotheistic paradigm. I had problems, too, but after getting out of that mindset, the puzzle solved itself. I realize it would be rather difficult for you to reconcile this with your own faith but that's how I solved the problem.

[Liberal]

John Zahn wrote:

Lib, I appreciate your explanation on the parables. If there is an answer in there about heaven being something more than just figurative, I missed it. I’m not seeking proof of it, only your opinion if it exists anywhere other than in some metaphorical form.Sorry. I didn't see that in your question either. :D I thought your question was about who could understand the parables.

It's not that I think heaven is "in some metaphorical form". I don't even know what a metaphorical form is. The metaphor isn't a form; it's just an instructive analogy. Heaven is like a field with a pearl, for example, that is bought by selling all of one's possessions because of the fact that a man values the pearl (not the field) more than everything he owns. It doesn't mean that heaven is in the form of a pearl.

You don’t strike me as a simple-minded or as Matthew describes someone with a child-like mind that one needs in order to get to heaven, so maybe you and Polycarp both had better start looking for a loophole. Seriously, the whole notion that the parables are hidden from learned and wise, but revealed to simple- minded people and little children that seek him out wouldn‘t survive a simple demonstration. And there are plenty of atheist scholars that I’m sure have as much understanding of some of those parables as the most learned Christian scholars, so unless little children were coached ahead of time, they would probably never understand what probably most, if not all of those parables meant. This looks like a promise that has been broken.Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I am utterly simple-minded in matters of faith. Yes, I can expound on them at great length, tying them together with fancy rhetoric and sound principles of logic. But that part is just so much crap. It is for the benefit of those who don't get the underlying simplicity: God values goodness more than any aesthetic; Love is the facilitation of goodness; God is love. It's so simple that a child knows what this kind of love is, whereas a learned man — theist or atheist — who burdens the gospel with piddly shit about doctrine is merely obfuscating the message.

Virtually all religions have tenets that deal with some kind of a ethical code of good and love. I think some scholars have traced down probably all of the good teachings of Jesus to some precedent. Other religions talk about a Holy Spirit. Mithras and Osiris were sun gods as you already know. In a tu quoque manner, Tertullian responds to one of his critics: You [Pagans] say we worship the sun; so do you. Mirthras and Osiris have other similarities to Christ, but not as much as they have found with Krishna and Buddha. Do we have any disagreements on who was established first? Other than conservative cites that won’t give an inch, it seems established that Jesus is definitely the latter. Unless all my sources that I’ve read from are faulty in their scholarship, I don’t understand why one would say the parallels of Jesus are not statistically significant. Surely you see it as more than just coincidence. Since you’re already familiar with the parallels, there is no reason to start comparing them.Apparently, you're of the opinion that if I don't find the alleged parallels to be significant, I'm wrong. Noted. Disagreement logged. :)

I know of no other philosophy wherein the metaphysic is Eternal Love, the ethic is Perfection, the epistemology is the Holy Spirit, AND the aesthetic is Goodness. (It isn't pieces; it's a unit. Recall One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when MacMurphy said that the broken cigarette wasn't two nickels, it was "shit".)

I would characterize Buddhism, for example, this way: a metaphysic of True Permanent Reality, an ethic of Self-Realization, an epistemology of Total Supreme Enlightenment, and an aesthetic of Tranquility. Whatever similarities there might be that exist between the Buddha and the Christ, the Buddha will achieve his enlightenment when he sees the Christ.

Thanks for the clarification. Of course the biggest promise he made is eternal life in some kind of heaven, which I think that’s how most read it, and since we can’t demonstrate one way or the other if this is true, maybe we can concentrate on a couple of others. It seems he kind of got all of those end times messages wrong, but again it has various interpretations to where conservatives sees no problem at all, while I think most liberals would have a wide array of opinions on whether or not he got it right or not. Another point of contention I have would be when Jesus said he didn’t come here to cancel the laws of Moses, but to fulfill them. Setting aside what is in Romans and other parts of the NT of what Paul says about any of the new law, and only concentrating on what Jesus has to say in the Gospels, did he cancel the laws of Moses or not?I know of no "end times messages" that He got wrong. He said that He would return before their generation passed, and He did. He said that they would suffer greatly, and they did. He fulfilled the Laws of Moses, just as He said. Why is that a controversy?

[Polycarp]

Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I am utterly simple-minded in matters of faith. Yes, I can expound on them at great length, tying them together with fancy rhetoric and sound principles of logic. But that part is just so much crap. It is for the benefit of those who don't get the underlying simplicity: God values goodness more than any aesthetic; Love is the facilitation of goodness; God is love. It's so simple that a child knows what this kind of love is, whereas a learned man — theist or atheist — who burdens the gospel with piddly shit about doctrine is merely obfuscating the message.

Perfect! God grant that I may someday be that eloquent! :)

[badchad]

Polycarp:

I think Libertarian and Jodi, between them, have said most of what I need to say.

How about, how you say you follow the teachings of Jesus and then reject his "Hell-as-vengeance-on-unbelievers" teachings?

How about other stuff that Jesus taught that I don't think you will follow or agree with? Need I give examples?

Now if their are teachings of Jesus in the bible that you don't follow, I can only think of 3 reasons. One that you don't think that Jesus actually said a particular teaching because his biographers were unreliable. As such I would think that you should hold all his teachings suspect. Another would be that you don't have enough respect for his teachings to do what he asks. The last being a combination of the above 2 worded so nicely so that not even the Pope would take offense.

Do you have another reason that I'm missing?

It's my contention that the Bible is, not a standalone unitary document containing "God's Word" (it itself says it isn't -- read the first and last verses of the Gospel of John as proof)

See now this is just what I am talking about. You are obviously taking the above mentioned verses as being true of something because it suits you, yet have no problem completely discounting "God's word" when it doesn't. The above mentioned quotes are a classic example because you really have to use some ingenuity to get them to say what you want. Lets look at them.

John 1:1
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Most literalists that I have spoken with take "Word" (figuratively, hehe) as meaning Jesus. As such when god was flooding the planet Jesus was right there with him, helping make the rain. Now you may have another meaning for "Word" but I don't see this as even remotely saying that Jesus was quoted somewhere other than the gospels. I wouldn't even classify this as weak evidence in favor of your point let alone "proof."

John 21:25
"And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen."

This just says that Jesus did lots of stuff that wasn't recorded. Considering he didn't live that long, I would think that saying the world couldn't contain the books required to document this is at least a slight hyperbole. Still it only says that the books should be written it does not say that they ever were.

And why are you talking about "gods word" rather than Jesus' word since you distance yourself from the former?

Any one of the people intent on finding 'Biblical contradictions' can show you an equal number of passages where the writer ascribes to God the condoning or even commanding of genocide, hatred of others, and so on.

Yes, and you discount this. Perhaps they are right and this love stuff is wrong. That would be consistent with you not having answers for "the problem of evil."

What you've described as "cherry picking" is attempting to figure out what from this mass of confusing evidence is supposed to be the "real picture of God" -- and I find that in the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels -- keeping in mind that each writer had his own personal agenda and paints Jesus from a slightly different perspective, but reading past the individual portraits to the Man they all illuminate different aspects of.

Yes, and in the gospels Jesus was the god of hellfire. All that lip service about love and yet he will cast you into a lake if fire forever for simple disbelief. As I said way back, at least the OT god just smote you and got it over with. Not fair, by any means but a lot better than what Jesus describes.

So here we are full circle again.

[Polycarp]

Badchad, I am not in the mood right now, for reasons you can see in other threads if you care to, to respond levelly and without offense to this.

For now, let me ask you two things:

1. What commands of Jesus you see me failing to follow? How do you arrive at the conclusions I am not? (It may be that you do actually see me as failing to do so, and I'm just either falling short of what I strive to do, or being incompetent at communicating what I'm doing, so don't take this as hostile -- you've made an assertion; I'm asking for clarification or specifics, so we can discuss it, that's all.)

2. Is it your contention that because Sir Isaac Newton failed to take relativitistic effects into account, the Principia Mathematica and his works on physics are useless? Or that one can get nothing out of Shakespeare because of his reference to the sea coast of Bohemia? What I'm hearing you saying here is that for you, as for some of our fundy. friends, the Bible is an all-or-nothing, black-or-white proposition -- that it might contain both truth and falsehood, and that there might be a way to determine which is which, is foreign to your view. If that's wrong, please correct me -- but it seems implicit in your attempts to prove my views inconsistent.

Yes, and in the gospels Jesus was the god of hellfire. All that lip service about love and yet he will cast you into a lake if fire forever for simple disbelief. As I said way back, at least the OT god just smote you and got it over with. Not fair, by any means but a lot better than what Jesus describes.

Separate debate, sir. Nowhere in the gospels is Jesus described as the god of hellfire; I assume you're being metaphorical -- but by doing so you're buying into an evangelical paradigm on what Jesus's teachings on the afterlife were. It would definitely be worth discussing, but I don't believe I've contended anything on this topic here, so if this is intended to refute my imagery of the Evangelists as four artists painting Jesus's portrait from differing viewpoints, I think it falls short of addressing what I had to say.

[Mean Girl]

Jumping in...

I'm a biblical literalist, and I have two questions that (hopefully) pertain to this discussion. I was thinking of chiming in but I better ask them first:

1. Why do you feel the source of the bible has any bearing on the truth of what it says?

2. Are you referring to biblical literalism as opposed to an allegorical or spiritualized hermeneutic, or simply giving label to the idea that people believe that Jesus really did walk on the water, or get up from the grave, or make a man who had never walked suddenly get up?

I don't get over here enough - you guys do have great discussions.
MG

[Mean Girl]

Yes, and in the gospels Jesus was the god of hellfire. All that lip service about love and yet he will cast you into a lake if fire forever for simple disbelief. As I said way back, at least the OT god just smote you and got it over with. Not fair, by any means but a lot better than what Jesus describes.

Actually, what Christianity says is that those who perish do so because their sin is not atoned for. I guess you could say that an indication of this is that they do not believe.*

Which is a fancy way of saying that somebody has to pay the debt of sin you owe to God. Not for your specific sinful actions, but for being a characteristically sinful person. You have a fallen, human nature.

Either you accept Christ's payment to God for your sin or you pay for it yourself - and that includes the lake of fire.

The NT standard of righteousness is indeed more merciful than the OT.
MG


*This would be a good place to insert that in the OT, after the Exodus, the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years until the entire first generation - everybody over 20 years old - perished. It is important to note that ALL of those who perished 'believed' in God. Not one was guilty of disbelief. They had seen God part the Red Sea, and heard His voice, and asked Moses to go talk to Him on their behalf because they were so scared by His presence. But, though they believed inGod, they did not believe what God said. That was the crucial difference then, and it probably has importance now as well.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Mean Girl
Which is a fancy way of saying that somebody has to pay the debt of sin you owe to God. Not for your specific sinful actions, but for being a characteristically sinful person. You have a fallen, human nature.
Why do I owe any debt to God? I don't think I'm a "characteristically sinful person." I [i]know[/] my wife and child are not. I don't owe anybody's God a damn thing, and even if I did, I can think of nothing more absurd than a blood sacrifice.
Either you accept Christ's payment to God for your sin or you pay for it yourself - and that includes the lake of fire.
Wow, very Chickian, and also unbiblical. Hell as a place of eternal torment does not exist in the Bible, and even if Jesus did teach such a thing (which he didn't) that would support badchad's assertion that God is an angry, hateful monster, unworthy of a moment's love or devotion. Fortunately for Christians, the New Testament cannot be used to prove that God throws people in Hell.

[Clark K]

BadChad, you have proven yourself quite adept at arguing about the size, shape and variety of every tree. Too bad you have no ability to recognize the forest.

You seem to think Christians must accept every part of the Bible as true and that those who "cherrypick" are guilty of hypocrisy and logical contradictions. Perhaps there would be some merit to that discussion if religion were a game of logic and people had to justify accepting some portions of the Bible and not others.

But the point Polycarp keeps making _ and this is the forest you cannot recognize _ is that this is not just an issue of logic but also of emotion and faith. He believes he knows God/Jesus in a direct, personal way. He believes that gives him insight into what portions of the Bible are literally true, what portions are parable or poetry and what portions are misinterpretations of God's word by fallible humans.

It is as if someone wrote a biography of someone you know. You would read it and recognize some portions as dead-on accurate, some as basically right but with some details wrong and some just flat wrong. You would not feel bound by logic to accept the entire biography or reject it entirely. You would use your knowledge to sort the valuable parts from the useless.

Now, you are free to believe that Polycarp is mistaken about his religious experiences. You can argue that he wanted a change in his life and so invented/imagined his theophany. But you cannot disprove his claim and you cannot argue that he must accept or reject the Bible in its entirety.

At least, that's my interpretation as an atheist.

PS -- I always find Polycarp's comments on religion to be helpful and thought-provoking. Yours, however, are not. They seem to be motivated by anger and petulance. Perhaps you could take a step back and think more carefully about the views Poly is offering.

[Meatros]

Originally posted by badchad
How about other stuff that Jesus taught that I don't think you will follow or agree with? Need I give examples?


I think Lib mentioned this, but I figure it bears repeating: You have been cherry-picking bible verses and taking them out of context.

It still seems to me as though you want to raise up a strawman to attack an individual's (Polycarp's beliefs. As far as I can see you've been applying motives to his posts. Granted you haven't only insulted Poly, you have consistentally though.

I think Clark K raised a good point about you missing the forest.

Also, I found your attack on Lib to be terribly tasteless. You dismiss him and his good points with a quick raise of the hand, declaring his views on religion to be insane. Of course I'm sure that if you were required to give any proof to this you would most certainly cherry-pick from his points as you seem to love to do (with the bible that is).

[dalovindj]

DJ, you bring up the exact point where I find it difficult to deal with "deductive proofs of God" -- when you start with axioms about "necessarily existent phenomena" and such, it becomes very tricky, and requires theological prestidigitation, to turn that into a Trinity of which one Member is a teacher who walked the roads of Galilee. Well, Lib doesn't claim to be doing that:Regarding DJ's point, I agree with him. This proof says nothing about the nature of God . . . It assigns to God, as existence, a predicate that is also existence of a particular kind. Any consideration about God being Jehovah, of the divinity of Jesus, or that sort of thing is entirely outside the scope of the proof.So "God" by Lib's definition does not mean "Jesus". It doesn't mean "the god of the Bible". It doesn't mean "Allah". As a matter of fact, it doesn't mean "an aware being", it doesn't mean "a good entity", it doesn't mean "a sentient creator", it doesn't mean "a him" (capital OR small H).

The fact that the definition of Lib's "G" does not include awareness means that he and badchad are speaking of two seperate things when they say God. It also renders the logic proof worthless to this conversation. It is a trick that Lib plays to make his faith-based worldview seem reasonable. It is an intellectually dishonest trick. When he continues to ignore the point (no matter who raises the objection - i.e. "I wasn't addressing you!") and constantly brings up the proof as evidence of a god in the classic sense of the word (aware, powerful, choice-making creature), he is doing himself, and all who read, a disservice.

DaLovin' Dj

[Kempis]

Your post was excellent, short and thought-provoking. My favorite kind!

Originally posted by Clark K
You seem to think Christians must accept every part of the Bible as true and that those who "cherrypick" are guilty of hypocrisy and logical contradictions. Perhaps there would be some merit to that discussion if religion were a game of logic and people had to justify accepting some portions of the Bible and not others.
[/B]

With all due respect, I don't like your calling logic a game. :) Those of us who haven't had a spiritual experience thus far in our lives have nothing else to go on in our pursuit for the truth. Also, your later assertion that religion was also emotion and faith do not convince those of us who have experienced these two things being used as a force of destruction. I believe that emotion and faith are both based in logical thinking... for example, being afraid of Hannibal at the gates can only happen if you logically knew that Hannibal was powerful and dangerous, or if the people around you are very afraid and you had faith that they knew what they were talking about.

As it relates to the OP, Polycarp's theophany also follows logic. If God is guiding him in what parts of scripture are true, then Polycarp would have to be insane to not follow the advice of the Almighty. However, the rest of us can't know if Polycarp is really hearing God or his own intellect. We need some logical proof that the former is happening.

The variety of interpretations of scriptures (and the variety of what's called "scripture") seems to me that there's no one guiding spirit, but rather multiple human intellects with all their wonderful differences in culture, upbringing, wisdom, etc.

Originally posted by Clark K
PS -- I always find Polycarp's comments on religion to be helpful and thought-provoking. Yours, however, are not. [/B]

I think badchad is presenting good arguments, though he also has been a little sassy. Polycarp has been more dignified, but others opposed to badchad have been far more mouthy.... and he has been mellow about it. I thought he needed some defending on this. ;)

-k

[Mean Girl]

Hi dude,

Why do I owe any debt to God? I don't think I'm a "characteristically sinful person." I [i]know[/] my wife and child are not. I don't owe anybody's God a damn thing, and even if I did, I can think of nothing more absurd than a blood sacrifice.


Your opinion isn't the one that matters. It doesn't matter what you think of you; it matters what God thinks of you, because He is the one with the power to judge you.

If you don't believe that, then it's obviously not a problem. :)

Wow, very Chickian, and also unbiblical. Hell as a place of eternal torment does not exist in the Bible, and even if Jesus did teach such a thing (which he didn't) that would support badchad's assertion that God is an angry, hateful monster, unworthy of a moment's love or devotion. Fortunately for Christians, the New Testament cannot be used to prove that God throws people in Hell.

Chickian? What a lovely ad hominem. Not necessary to answer.

Unbiblical? Ok, I'll post some scripture even though I doubt you will look at it...

Hell exists as a Biblical concept, a place of torment, and the torment is everlasting:
Matthew 5:22 (Anyone who calls his brother 'fool' will be in danger of the fire of hell.)
Matthew 10:28 (Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.)
Luke 16:23 (In hell, where he was in torment, [the rich man] looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side.)
Mk 9:48 (In hell, the worm does not sleep and the fire is not quenched.)

Fire is a characteristic of hell, and both the soul and body are destroyed there. It is a place where people are in torment. The worm does not die and the fire is not quenched; therefore, hell is said to be everlasting.

I honestly don't know where you came up with the idea that God doesn't send people to hell. It certainly is in the New Testament, and it's quite clear:

Revelation 20:10-15 --
10 And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beaast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence, and there was no place for them

12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.

13 The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done.

14 Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death.

15 If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Also, you see from v 10 that the lake of fire is in fact eternal torment. And, those who are judged go into the lake of fire with the devil, the Beast and the false prophet.

So, my question to you is,

Who throws these people into the lake of fire? The devil, beast and false prophet can't do it - they are in the lake of fire. And, they have no right to judge a man's works. That can only be done by God; indeed, Jesus said he did not come to judge, and saved man is never allowed to judge; sinful man would not logically judge himself and throw himself into the lake of fire.

So who throws them there if it isn't God?

And, if that makes you assert that God is a monster rather than cry for his mercy, I am not sure what to say. :)
MG

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Mean Girl,
You've conflated a few things which you believe are references to the Christian notion of "Hell" but when those things are understood in their proper linguistic and literary context, they are nothing of the sort.

Let's take the Matthew quotations first. The word translated as "Hell" is actually the Greek word Innon (Hinnon). The Valley of Hinnon ("Gehenna" in Hebrew, "Gehennon" in Aramaic) was (and is) a real valley southeast of Jerusalem. It had reputedly been a site for child sacrifice in ancient times. In Jesus' time it was a garbage dump, especially for animal carcasses and for the bodies of criminals. Fires burned perpetually (and worms did not sleep) in the valley in order to destroy the rotting corpses. The Jews believed that a body, once it had been consumed by fire, could not be resurrected on judgement day.

Jesus was making a statement about utter annihilation, not eternal punishment.

Revelation is highly metaphorical in nature, and the "lake of fire" is again, a place of annihilation not torment. (Torment is only for the devil and his minions). It's all allegorical anyway. It's revenge fantasy against the Romans.

Hell was not a Jewish concept. None of Jesus' followers would have known what he was talking about if he had mentioned a place of eternal torment.

Pictures of Hell (http://what-the-hell-is-hell.com/HellPhotos/) today.

[tomndebb]

Hell was not a Jewish concept. None of Jesus' followers would have known what he was talking about if he had mentioned a place of eternal torment.You were doing fine until you got here. I'm not sure you can justify the absolute declaration you have made.

Certainly, the Christian notion of hell, as it exists today, was not a part of Jewish theology. However, Jewish apocryphal works from that period had borrowed the imagery of the fires of that valley and used them as metaphors for punishment that was temporal and, occasionally, eternal. There are cryptic references to it in the Assumption of Moses and in the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch. In Esdras Gehenna indicates a furnace within sight of Paradise (much as it appears in Luke's story of capter 16). 1 Enoch makes several references to it in the context of a place of torment and punishment.

Christians may have added the "eternal" aspect to it or they may have simply picked up an idea current in some Jewish thought at the time, that then fell out of favor among the Jews after the theological retrenchment following the fall of Jerusalem. However, I am not persuaded that the contemporaries of Jesus would not have understood a reference to a place of continuing torment.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

The far more prevalent view was that of Hades (or Sheol) as a sort of underground holding tank for the dead. (The concept of the soul, itself, was not strongly developed yet, the dead were just seen as sort of insubstantial shadows awaiting their bodily resurrection) and while some Greek notions of torment in Taratarus may have crept into this view, Sheol was still: a.) a temporary place, not a permanent one, and b.) was for everybody not just for bad people. The Jews believed that judgement day would involve a mass resurrection of the dead, after which the bad people would be annhilated in fire (the "second death" of Revelation) and the good people would live in a new paradise on Earth. Much of the apocryphal imagery you cite is poetic or metaphorical in nature not literal (The story you alluded to in Luke refers to Hades, btw, not Gehenna).

Having said all that, it was probably still an overstatement on my part to say th apsotles would have had no concept at all of otherwordly punishment, but I still think annihilation was the greater fear and I'm pretty sure they would hav been baffled by Dante's visions.

[Meatros]

Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic
Pictures of Hell (http://what-the-hell-is-hell.com/HellPhotos/) today.

Oh jeez...that DOES look like hell....:D

[Polycarp]

Originally posted by Meatros
Oh jeez...that DOES look like hell....:D

"Well, remember that a little urban planning can improve anything, even Texas!" --"Jerry Farnsworth" ;)

[Meatros]

Originally posted by Polycarp
"Well, remember that a little urban planning can improve anything, even Texas!" --"Jerry Farnsworth" ;)

Actually I've been to Hell (http://www.caymans.com/~caymans/Go_To_Hell.html) and let me tell you, it was hot! :D

[Polycarp]

The Hell Chamber of Commerce websiote (http://www.hell2u.com/). (And you thought you had a tough marketing job! ;))

[Meatros]

Now that's funny!

[IzzyR]

Originally posted by Polycarp
"Supernatural events" in the Bible are the writer's naive perceptions of what went on. I do not know whether any given one of them is a literal account or not, but it does not matter Whether they are objectively true accounts, "sermon illustrations" that came to have an independent life, people repeating "urban legends" in the belief they were true, misunderstandings of actual events, or flat out lies, I don't know -- I suspect strongly a mixture of the first four in some proportions.It would seem that you are backing off from your earlier positions here. Here you are accepting the notion that the accounts were intended to be literal, in the first quote, and in the latter three possibilities of the second.But you're (I think) operating on the assumption that the Bible is supposed to be (according to Christians) the infallible Word of God -- I see it as the record of their growing understanding of how He operates and what He wills. So the bizarreries in which our sense of justice is greatly perverted are attributed to Him, while Isaiah and Micah and Habakkuk start to get a grasp of what He really wants.I do not base my beliefs on the Bible. It is a very useful, if oftentimes flawed, reference point for information about God. I'd like a bit more explanation of why you see my position as "intellectually dishonest" before I argue the contrary -- it's your assertion; your turn to do the explanation and defending.OK, but then you agree that the Bible itself - as it was originally written and intended to be understood - does NOT support (all of) your positions. But you disagree with it, feeling that it is flawed in parts etc. This is similar to the position advocated by Libertarian earlier.

Whether it is intellectually dishonest would depend on whether you attempt, in other discussions, to present your viewpoints as being supported, or even consistent with the "true" interpretation of the Bible. You appear to be admitting here that it is not. You can not turn around elsewhere and claim that it is.Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic
The Jews believed that a body, once it had been consumed by fire, could not be resurrected on judgement day.What is the basis for this (bizarre) assertion?

[Kempis]

Originally posted by Meatros
Oh jeez...that DOES look like hell....:D

Geez, what a site! :eek:

[Polycarp]

OK, but then you agree that the Bible itself - as it was originally written and intended to be understood - does NOT support (all of) your positions. But you disagree with it, feeling that it is flawed in parts etc. This is similar to the position advocated by Libertarian earlier.

Izzy, I'm quite confident that I can find a statement of yours somewhere on this board that the Internet, "as it was originally written and intended to be understood," will refute.

Unless (and I concede the good faith of those who believe this) you subscribe to the theory that the Bible was inspired verbatim by God, so that every word in it is there precisely because God intended it to be said in precisely that way, then my sardonic suggestion about the Internet is a precise parallel.

Even on the assumption that the reputed authors of each book are in fact the actual authors (which is questioned by leading scholars), the Bible is the product of:
Moses (Gen 1:1-Deut 34:4, Psalm 90)
Joshua (Deut 34:5-Josh 24:28)
Phinehas (Josh 24:29-33)
Samuel (Judges, I Sam 1:1-24:22; no serious scholar thinks Opal had anything to do with it;))
Anonymous author 1, sometimes thought to be Samuel (Ruth)
Anonymous author 2 (I Sam 25:1-II Sam 24:25)
Jeremiah (I -II Kings, Jeremiah, Lamentations)
Ezra (I-II Chronicles, Ezra, Neh 7:6-12:26, 12:44-13:3)
Nehemiah (Neh 1:1-7:5, 12:27-43, 13:4-31
Anonymous author 3 (Esther)
Anonymous author 4, perhaps Job or Elihu (Job)
Anonymous author 5 (Psalm 1)
Anonymous author 6 (Psalm 2)
David (Psalms 3-9, 11-32, 34-41, 51-65, 68-70, 86, 101, 103, 108-110, 122, 124, 131-133, 138-145
Anonymous author 7 (Psalm 10)
Anonymous author 8 (Psalm 33)
Sons of Korah (Psalms 42, 44-49, 84-85, 87)
Anonymous author 9 (Psalm 43)
Asaph (Psalms 50, 73-83
Anonymous author 10 (Psalm 66)
Anonymous author 11 (Psalm 67)
Anonymous author 12 (Psalm 70)
Anonymous author 13 (Psalm 71)
Solomon (Psalms 72, 127, Proverbs 1:1-22:16, 25-29, Eccl., Song of Songs)
Heman the Ezrahite (Psalm 88)
Ethan the Ezrahite (Psalm 89)
Anonymous author 14 (Psalm 91)
Anonymous author 15 (Psalm 92)
Anonymous author 16 (Psalm 93)
Anonymous author 17 (Psalm 94)
Anonymous author 18 (Psalm 95)
Anonymous author 19 (Psalm 96)
Anonymous author 20 (Psalm 97)
Anonymous author 21 (Psalm 98)
Anonymous author 22 (Psalm 99)
Anonymous author 23 (Psalm 100)
Anonymous author 24 (Psalm 102)
Anonymous author 25 (Psalm 104)
Anonymous author 26 (Psalm 105)
Anonymous author 27 (Psalm 106)
Anonymous author 28 (Psalm 107)
Anonymous author 29 (Psalm 111)
Anonymous author 30 (Psalm 112)
Anonymous author 31 (Psalm 113)
Anonymous author 32 (Psalm 114)
Anonymous author 33 (Psalm 115)
Anonymous author 34 (Psalm 116)
Anonymous author 35 (Psalm 117)
Anonymous author 36 (Psalm 118)
Anonymous author 37 (Psalm 119)
Anonymous author 38 (Psalm 120)
Anonymous author 39 (Psalm 121)
Anonymous author 40 (Psalm 123)
Anonymous author 41 (Psalm 125)
Anonymous author 42 (Psalm 126)
Anonymous author 43 (Psalm 128)
Anonymous author 44 (Psalm 129)
Anonymous author 45 (Psalm 130)
Anonymous author 46 (Psalm 134)
Anonymous author 47 (Psalm 135)
Anonymous author 48 (Psalm 136)
Anonymous author 50 (Psalm 146)
Anonymous author 51 (Psalm 147)
Anonymous author 52 (Psalm 148)
Anonymous author 53 (Psalm 149)
Anonymous author 54 (Psalm 150)
"The wise" (Proverbs 22:17-24:34)
Agur son of Jakeh (Proverbs 30)
King Lemuel (Proverbs 31)
Isaiah (Isaiah)
Ezekiel (Ezekiel)
Daniel (Daniel)
Hosea (Hosea)
Joel (Joel)
Amos (Amos)
Obadiah (Obadiah)
Jonah or anonymous author (Jonah)
Micah (Micah)
Nahum (Nahum)
Habakkuk (Habakkuk)
Zephaniah (Zephaniah)
Haggai (Haggai)
Zechariah (Zechariah)
Malachi (Malachi)

To this number modern scholars would add the Jahvist, or two Jahvist sources, the Elohist, the Priestly writer, the Deuteronomist, the anti-monarchic and pro-monarchic Samuel sources, the Chronicler, Second and Third Isaiah, Second Zechariah, and a host of others.

In the New Testament, we find:
Matthew (Matthew)
John Mark (Mark)
Luke (Luke, Acts)
John (John, I-III John, Revelation)
Paul (Romans-Philemon)
Anonymous author 54, perhaps Paul (Hebrews)
James bar Joseph (James)
Simon Peter (I-II Peter)
Jude (Jude)
Again, modern scholarship would dispute the authorship of many of these books, attributing them to anonymous authors adopting the early leaders as pseudonyms.

One can easily find examples of literal eyewitness historical accounts (cf. Acts 27:2-8), personal opinion (I Corinthians 7:12-13), fable (Judges 9:8-15), poetic exaggeration (Psalm 97:3-6), symbolic vision (Ezek 37:1-10), and a wide variety of other literary styles.

Common sense, if nothing else, tells one that a variety of authors writing in a variety of styles will produce a compilation that cannot
be taken as a unitary source of identical accuracy and inspiration.

All I am doing is saying that I read a given passage of Scripture as what I perceive it to be, and that I find my touchstone in learning about God from its contents in the elements common to the four portraits of Jesus in the Gospels -- the message from Him that comes through past the individual authors' personal focuses.

[IzzyR]

Originally posted by Polycarp
I'm quite confident that I can find a statement of yours somewhere on this board that the Internet, "as it was originally written and intended to be understood," will refute.Anything is possible. ;)

But the important point here is that if indeed you do so, it will merely mean that my statement has been refuted. It will NOT mean that my statement is not to be taken literally. Huge difference.All I am doing is saying that I read a given passage of Scripture as what I perceive it to be, and that I find my touchstone in learning about God from its contents in the elements common to the four portraits of Jesus in the Gospels -- the message from Him that comes through past the individual authors' personal focuses.OK. But again, what this means is that you are rejecting part of the Biblical message - in this case, that which you've decided is part of the author's personal focus. This is not the same thing as saying that the correct interpretation of the message is in complete accordance with your own. Something to bear in mind, as I believe this tends to get blurred, in other debates.

[Mean Girl]

Mean Girl,
You've conflated a few things which you believe are references to the Christian notion of "Hell" but when those things are understood in their proper linguistic and literary context, they are nothing of the sort.

Let's take the Matthew quotations first. The word translated as "Hell" is actually the Greek word Innon (Hinnon). The Valley of Hinnon ("Gehenna" in Hebrew, "Gehennon" in Aramaic) was (and is) a real valley southeast of Jerusalem. It had reputedly been a site for child sacrifice in ancient times. In Jesus' time it was a garbage dump, especially for animal carcasses and for the bodies of criminals. Fires burned perpetually (and worms did not sleep) in the valley in order to destroy the rotting corpses. The Jews believed that a body, once it had been consumed by fire, could not be resurrected on judgement day.

Jesus was making a statement about utter annihilation, not eternal punishment.

Revelation is highly metaphorical in nature, and the "lake of fire" is again, a place of annihilation not torment. (Torment is only for the devil and his minions). It's all allegorical anyway. It's revenge fantasy against the Romans.

Hell was not a Jewish concept. None of Jesus' followers would have known what he was talking about if he had mentioned a place of eternal torment.



This is such a badly flawed argument I hardly know where to begin. I didn't conflate anything - the theology of hell is based on many things, not the least of which is the concept of gehenna.

You actually did get the Jewish history right, except that you called it Jewish. If we are going to be nitpicky here you need to properly refer to them as Israel, because, when read in proper literary and historical context, you will find that not all Israelites are Jews. ;) Jew was a name applied only to the descendants of Judah and Benjamin and their Levites. IOW, the Southern Kingdom of Israel. The other ten tribes, the Northern Kingdom, were also Israel, but never referred to as Jews.

Now, about the rest of what you posted. Are you trying to say that because Jesus didn't use our English word "hell" that somehow it doesn't exist? Gehenna and paradeisos as facets of Sheol were very real; the example of Lazarus and the rich man is generally interpreted to be an example of both. If you don't believe the scriptures that say the rich man was in torment over there in Gehenna I'm not sure what else will convince you.

And, the fact that our christian concept of Hell was not a Jewish concept does not in any way disprove its existence. I'm sure it wasn't a Babylonian concept, or a Hindu concept, either. That's not anywhere near the point. The point we are discussing is whether it is a New Testament concept. The fact that you don't consider it a Jewish concept is utterly irrelevant.

I guess when Jesus mentioned the place where the worm never sleeps and the fire is never quenched, nobody knew what he was talking about? Or are you saying it was only a literal place and never a spiritual one? Jesus made it a spiritual one with the example of the rich man and Lazarus. He used their garbage-dump as a name for it, and said it was a place where the body and soul were destroyed. He referred to it as a place where God sends people who don't listen to Him. Did they think he meant God puts them in the rubbish dump?

And, the Lake of Fire in Revelation is part of the revelation given to John in 95 or 96 A.D. - revelation (apokalypsis) means unveiling, and I'm quite sure this was new to pretty much everyone in the church at the time. But that's why it's called 'revelation.'

It's strange, I see you as someone very intelligent but unable to let go of your presupposed ideas of what God is like. You really can't imagine him punishing anyone? You can't imagine that God would presume to judge man?

Like I said, if you don't believe it, that's fine, just don't try to redefine christianity for your purposes. I'd rather you just said you didn't believe it than do that. Christianity and the bible do not support your conclusions.

MG

[Mean Girl]

Sorry about that wink thing, it's a typo, not sarcasm.

[badchad]

Polycarp:

1. What commands of Jesus you see me failing to follow? How do you arrive at the conclusions I am not? (It may be that you do actually see me as failing to do so, and I'm just either falling short of what I strive to do, or being incompetent at communicating what I'm doing, so don't take this as hostile -- you've made an assertion; I'm asking for clarification or specifics, so we can discuss it, that's all.)

Just to clarify, I didn't say follow but rather "follow or agree with." That gives me a little more material.

For starters there is that whole don't get angry thing, but I'll grant you that it's something your falling short of, and doing a better job than in the last thread. But hell, I'm just a guys with a keyboard, I'm not killing babies.

There is Jesus endorsement of all the old testament stuff in Matthew 5:18-19:
"For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven."

Getting into the specifics of all that would be quite lengthy but I think you get the idea.

Then a favorite would have to be Matthew 5:42: "Give to him that asketh thee..." or Luke 6:30: "Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again."

I recall asking you to send a check but I don't think we determined an amount yet. How much you got?

On divorce I don't know anything about your personal situation but on a recent thread you said that it was alright for His4ever to get one from her first husband for reasons of abuse while Jesus said in Matthew 5:32 said fornication was the only legitimate reason for divorce. In other areas he doesn't give any good reason.

Again I don't know about your personal situation but since your morals seem pretty humanistic I don't think you would be against saving for retirement or a rainy day, while Jesus supposedly said in Matthew 6:19-21

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

and Matthew 6:25-26:
"Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?"

Then there is the mean Jesus stuff.

Matthew 10:34
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."

Luke 14: 26
"If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my disciple."

Luke 19:27
"But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me."

I don't think you agree with the mean stuff. Thus making your morality (according to todays views) superior to that of Jesus rather than following that of Jesus.

And finally as a believer shouldn't their be signs following you such as a lot of healed formerly sick people? Mark 16:18. We won't mention the poison this time:).

Is it your contention that because Sir Isaac Newton failed to take relativitistic effects into account, the Principia Mathematica and his works on physics are useless?

Of course not, however if Newton's writings and formulas were so flawed that his message was uninelligiable without erasing better than half of his stuff and substituting our own then he probably wouldn't be giving him near so much credit.

Or that one can get nothing out of Shakespeare because of his reference to the sea coast of Bohemia?

If you want to classify the bible as fiction with a moral (we can debate the attributes of the moral later) then I'll agree with you. But if you think heaven or the christian god is anything more than part of that fiction, then I think the bible should be held to a higher standard than Shakespeare.

What I'm hearing you saying here is that for you, as for some of our fundy. friends, the Bible is an all-or-nothing, black-or-white proposition -- that it might contain both truth and falsehood, and that there might be a way to determine which is which, is foreign to your view.

Your wording hear is a little unclear but I think I get what you are saying and it is a fair charactacture of my view. The bible has so much contradition in both old and new testaments that it is impossble to tell what is true and what isn't, regarding both facts and the moral message on how to live one's life. If you have an objective method, free of self serving bias I'm all ears.

Separate debate, sir. Nowhere in the gospels is Jesus described as the god of hellfire; I assume you're being metaphorical -- but by doing so you're buying into an evangelical paradigm on what Jesus's teachings on the afterlife were.

I'll let Meangirl's post stand as my justification of Jesus being god of hellfire. You are free to call that an analogy, metaphor or whatever, but you are being inconsistent when you think heaven as a nice place is literal.
.

[badchad]

Diogenes the Cynic:

Jesus was making a statement about utter annihilation, not eternal punishment.

Matthew 25:46
"And these shall go away into EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT: but the righteous into life eternal."

[badchad]

Kempis:
I think badchad is presenting good arguments, though he also has been a little sassy. Polycarp has been more dignified, but others opposed to badchad have been far more mouthy.... and he has been mellow about it. I thought he needed some defending on this.

Hey, thanks:)

[Mean Girl]

ya wrote:

There is Jesus endorsement of all the old testament stuff in Matthew 5:18-19:
"For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven."


Ok, so, my q to you is 'what does "till all be fulfilled" mean?'

My understanding is that this is a contextual link with Christ saying 'it is finished.' In other words, at the cross, all was fulfilled.

I could be wrong in this, but I find it odd that you would hold christians to the Law when we are saved by a better covenant - that of Grace.

MG

[badchad]

Mean Girl:

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is Jesus endorsement of all the old testament stuff in Matthew 5:18-19:
"For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ok, so, my q to you is 'what does "till all be fulfilled" mean?'

Heck if I know.

My understanding is that this is a contextual link with Christ saying 'it is finished.' In other words, at the cross, all was fulfilled.

I may not know when "all be fulfilled" is but I do think I can know when "heaven and earth pass away" or at least till earth passes away, which it seems isn't yet. So biblically I would guess the end times.

I could be wrong in this, but I find it odd that you would hold christians to the Law when we are saved by a better covenant - that of Grace.

I would only hold them to the law because Jesus in the above mentioned verse (and a couple other places IIRC) was holding them to the law. Sure one can make mistakes and be forgiven, but I think they should at least make the effort. Maybe they gave up on the law when some Christian decided bacon tastes good.:)

BTW, love your handle.;)

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Mean girl said:

You actually did get the Jewish history right, except that you called it Jewish. If we are going to be nitpicky here you need to properly refer to them as Israel, because, when read in proper literary and historical context, you will find that not all Israelites are Jews. Jew was a name applied only to the descendants of Judah and Benjamin and their Levites. IOW, the Southern Kingdom of Israel. The other ten tribes, the Northern Kingdom, were also Israel, but never referred to as Jews.
I said "Jews" as a matter of convenience. It was immaterial to the argument since they all had the same views on the afterlife.
Now, about the rest of what you posted. Are you trying to say that because Jesus didn't use our English word "hell" that somehow it doesn't exist? Gehenna and paradeisos as facets of Sheol were very real; the example of Lazarus and the rich man is generally interpreted to be an example of both. If you don't believe the scriptures that say the rich man was in torment over there in Gehenna I'm not sure what else will convince you.
Sheol was not a place of eternal punishment, it was an underworld akin to Hades (really it was pretty much the same). Sheol was where everybody went, not just bad people. Paradise was not "Heaven." The Jews believed that they would have eternal life in a restored Eden on Earth. The Lazarus parable refers to Hades not Gehenna. Luke was a Greek, though and probably just substituted his underworld for what he thought Gehenna was. Gehenna did have a metaphorical meaning in that it was considered to be an unholy place and it was where the bodies of criminals were destroyed. It was also within sight of the future "Paradise" of Jerusalem. This was a poetic image intended to illustrate the the contrast on the day of judgement when the dead would be resurrected (from Sheol). The good would go to etrnal life and the bad would be destroyed by fire. The Valley of Gehenna was literally where they imagined that the wicked would be cast.
And, the fact that our christian concept of Hell was not a Jewish concept does not in any way disprove its existence. I'm sure it wasn't a Babylonian concept, or a Hindu concept, either. That's not anywhere near the point. The point we are discussing is whether it is a New Testament concept. The fact that you don't consider it a Jewish concept is utterly irrelevant
It's not a NT concept either, as I have shown, but the Jewish part is relevant because Jesus was a Jew who was speaking to other Jews about Jewish concepts.
I guess when Jesus mentioned the place where the worm never sleeps and the fire is never quenched, nobody knew what he was talking about?
They knew exactly what he was talking about, he was talking about the very real Valley of Gehenna.
Or are you saying it was only a literal place and never a spiritual one?
Precisely.
Jesus made it a spiritual one with the example of the rich man and Lazarus. He used their garbage-dump as a name for it, and said it was a place where the body and soul were destroyed. He referred to it as a place where God sends people who don't listen to Him. Did they think he meant God puts them in the rubbish dump?
As I said, the Lazarus parable references Hades, not Gehenna. Gehenna was a little more than just a garbage dump, though. It was specifically the site which was used to destroy the bodies and souls of the wicked. It was literally a God-forsaken, stench-ridden fiery pit. Nobody wanted to be cast into it, even after death.
And, the Lake of Fire in Revelation is part of the revelation given to John in 95 or 96 A.D. - revelation (apokalypsis) means unveiling, and I'm quite sure this was new to pretty much everyone in the church at the time. But that's why it's called 'revelation.'
Apocalyptic literature was highly symbolic and coded. Revelation was about God's punishment for the Romans and the restoration of Israel. The lake of fire thing was an allegorical way of illustrating God's punishment for Rome, the emperor, and the enemies of Israel in general.
It's strange, I see you as someone very intelligent but unable to let go of your presupposed ideas of what God is like. You really can't imagine him punishing anyone? You can't imagine that God would presume to judge man?
I don't beieve in a formal deity at all, but speaking rhetorically:
I think that God would have to be at least as merciful as I am. If I would not consign people to eternal punishment, then neither would God. If God tortures Hindu children for being Hindu, or gay people for being gay, or atheists for being atheists, then God is not good and he will get no respect or recognition from me. I will have a God of love or no God at all, and if that means Hell for me, then Hell is the only righteous choice.
Like I said, if you don't believe it, that's fine, just don't try to redefine christianity for your purposes. I'd rather you just said you didn't believe it than do that. Christianity and the bible do not support your conclusions.
I don't claim to be a Christian at all, so I have no need of "redefinition," (redefined from what, btw? Who decided Christianity has been conclusively "defined?") but I'll reserve the right, thank you very much, to study and think and draw wht ever conclusions I find most satisfying to my own mind and heart.
I'm not sure which "conclusions" you're referring to in your last statement, but I would say that the ethos I take from Christianity can be taken from two quotations from Jesus and one from the first letter of John:

Matthew 22:36-40
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Matthew 25:40
The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

I John 4:8
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

These three verses comprise a complete and satisfying philosophical system for me, and I feel perfectly comfortable in jettisoning the rest as just commentary.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

badcahd posted:
Matthew 25:46
"And these shall go away into EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT: but the righteous into life eternal."
The phrase "Eternal punishment" in its original Greek is kolasin aiwnion (kolasin aionion). "Kolasis" means punishment, penalty, correction. It does not mean torment or torture. The penalty was permanent annihilation. I would also point out that "aionios" which literally means "without end" also has a variety of idiomatic nuances. It is often used, for instance, to simply mean a lifetime, or as a generic term for a "long time." Since eternal torture was not a concept Matthew would have been familiar with, and since all of the other gehenna references in Matthew pertain to destruction by fire rather than Dante's Hell, i would imagine that this one does too. (unless you think that Matthew had psychic powers and knew that hell would become a Christian concept)

[Freyr]

I know, weird title, but let me explain the relevance.

I'm in my 606 Arch. course and we're going over old archaeological classification systems. The Midwestern was used in the middle part of the 20th century when lots of data was coming in from WPA projects and archaeologists needs some way of handling the data. From this, the Midwestern Taxonomic system was developed. The problem with the Midwestern System is that it gave equal weight (or relevance) to all the artifacts.

I haven't been following on the details of this thread, but it seems that BadChad is saying that all parts of the Bible have equal importance and relevance as the others. The Decalogue carries as much divine import as the fact that on the first Palm Sunday, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. And by ignoring the detail of what Jesus was riding on that day is like breaking all 10 Commandments.

I'm not trying to put words into BadChad's mouth, but that's what I'm reading from him.

[Polycarp]

I appreciate the thoughtful answer, Chad (and your courtesy in this thread -- we got off on a bad start, and I'm very pleased at the tone of the debate we're having -- thank you for being patient with me!), and as it happens, I don't have time at the moment to give it the full reply it deserves. I'll try to take time later, but let me address this much:

One of the things scholars bring to Biblical exegesis is the concept of "Semitic dichotomy" -- the phrasing of such a statement as follows in Hebrew/Aramaic styling would be not "It's a matter of common taste that all good men should prefer Brie over Roquefort when eating cheeses" but "You should love Brie but hate Roquefort." Things like "He who does not hate father and mother for My sake...." are to be read in that context, not as literal absolutes but as relativistic points. In a related Pit thread, Joe Cool is not saying that he's prepared to leave Jersey Diamond if she differs from him on some minute theological point, but rather that in choosing between accepting her view and what he believes God to be saying to him, he would have to pick the latter. (And Jersey would, I know, back him on that.)

Jesus also omits what we'd say in Modern English quite often: "Insofar as it's possible for you...." This is to be assumed when He paints ideals. He does, occasionally, make a point to say that "all men are not called to this, but only those to whom it's directed" -- i.e., those whom the Holy Spirit convicts of failing to do the particular thing he says. For Francis of Assisi, obeying the Evangelical Counsels meant a radical disowning of all personal property and the claims of anything secular on him; but he recognized that not all people were called to this, and himself founded the Third Order for those called to follow Christ after Francis's example but not convicted to a literal following of the Evangelical Counsels.

I believe that it is possible to get a precise picture of what living out the life counseled/commanded by Christ is supposed to involve from a reading of Scripture that is informed by scholarly study of how the various parts of it came into being and what literary genres they represent. You've several times made a comment on the Bible as though it were a unitary entity -- for me, as I think for most people, it is not, but a collection of works written by those whose lives God had touched, and "inspired" by Him in a sense I don't wish to pin down right here and now, but which requires to be taken in a sense that excludes verbatim dictation of the words used. Rather, it might be understood more in the sense that a Constitutional scholar might attempt to decipher what the Constitution "means," being guided by writings of the Founding Fathers, past precedent, his sense of the ideals being enshrined in the phrases used, etc.

That's a start on a response; I'll do better as I have time later.

[Kempis]

One thing I noticed with Polycarp's list of books is the lack of Deuterocanonical books.

As it relates to taking the Bible literally (or considering the Bible inspired), it seems to me that the religious tradition of the reader comes majorly into play here... Catholic, Protestant, Coptic, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. I'd like to hear how fundies and not-so-fundies answer this problem for themselves.

So, some of the debate here being about Gehenna or whatever seems silly to me that people are basing their arguments on their own version of the Bible as an authority straight from God, as opposed to a collection of books sanctioned by a committee of people. One of my favorite things about Christianity has been it's lack of undeniably holy scripture, unlike the Mormons or Moslems.

-k

[Polycarp]

Kempis, I come from a Protestant tradition originally myself, and was addressing my comments to a gentleman whom I believe is of Jewish ethnicity and heritage, from his statements in various threads (that's an assumption, on which I'm very willing to be corrected). In any case, I stuck to the Tanakh and the canonical New Testament in my list -- I'm well aware of Jesus ben Sirach and the Song of the Three Holy Children, but had no interest in muddying the waters further with them.

So, some of the debate here being about Gehenna or whatever seems silly to me that people are basing their arguments on their own version of the Bible as an authority straight from God, as opposed to a collection of books sanctioned by a committee of people. One of my favorite things about Christianity has been it's lack of undeniably holy scripture, unlike the Mormons or Moslems.

Yeah. It's one of the big problems with any discussion of this type that everyone seems to work with the evangelical conception as default paradigm -- even if only to use it to disprove God, the Bible, and for all I know the existence of Babelfish! The longstanding tradition of Biblical scholarship and the beliefs of knowledgeable devout people that the Bible is a collection of works by human authors, inspired by the Holy Spirit in one way or another but not high-definition ultra-high-fidelity reproducers of His words and quite capable of human error when they weren't listening to His proddings closely enough, is something that has to be painstakingly set forth every time. And verily, ofttimes it pisseth me off! ;)

[Meatros]

Two things:

First Polycarp- Is that "Babelfish" a reference to Douglas Adam's Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy? (I just started to listen to it on tape at work, and I got to the part about the babelfish before leaving the office today, so I'm curious).

Second- Regarding this:

So, some of the debate here being about Gehenna or whatever seems silly to me that people are basing their arguments on their own version of the Bible as an authority straight from God, as opposed to a collection of books sanctioned by a committee of people. One of my favorite things about Christianity has been it's lack of undeniably holy scripture, unlike the Mormons or Moslems.

Are there any books that compare the different Christian beliefs (as in all of the "popular" divisions)?

(BTW, Poly, I'm still in the process of ordering the other Christian books you recommended to me, so if any of the previously recommended books mention the differences let me know).

[Mean Girl]

Diogenes, I love ya, but again, a post full of a lotta words with very little substance. I understand you don't believe in christian concepts, and that's cool with me.

Bad - Thanks. And be nice to Poly! He's awesome.

Ok, you wrote:
I would only hold them to the law because Jesus in the above mentioned verse (and a couple other places IIRC) was holding them to the law. Sure one can make mistakes and be forgiven, but I think they should at least make the effort. Maybe they gave up on the law when some Christian decided bacon tastes good.


Have you read what Romans and Galatians have to say about the Law? Jesus quoted the Law because when He was alive Israel was still under the Old Covenant. The New Covenant of grace didn't take effect until His resurrection. The Old Covenant is not binding on the New Covenant christian. First, because as Gentiles we were never given the Law in the first place, and second, because Christ has fulfilled the Law on our behalf.

Be careful with this, because Paul did write that if you attempt to attain righteousness through the Law, you will be judged by it. So if you've ever mixed wool and cotton, failed to tithe a tenth of all your possessions, missed offering a sacrifice when you made a deal with someone, or gone more than 30ft from your house on the Sabbath (which is Saturday), then you'd better not be trying to keep the Law, because you are already guilty of breaking all of it.

Peace, dude.

Generally.

I think a lot of people have different understandings on what literalism means. To me, literalism does not mean that Jesus' exact words are quoted verbatim in scripture. It does mean, that whatever words are used, be it king James English, Greek, Latin, Chinese, whatever...the truth of God is in those words.

However it managed to be recorded, the truth we need is in there. I don't know if everyone spoke the exact words recorded, but I have no doubt that God is capable of communicating His truth perfectly using fallen human messengers. To me, the point is not the fallenness of the messenger; it's the power of God.

MG

[Polycarp]

Mean Girl, I have no problem with your last two paragraphs as you understand them -- they resemble what our beloved Duck Duck Goose over here said about the original "Fundamentalists" before the name was purloined by the extremists whom people around here love to dump on.

The problem with what you said is in how some people apply it -- for example, because the ninth chapter of Zechariah condemns those who live in Gaza (the Philistines, in context and in his time), therefore the Palestinians who now live there are under his judgment too. Because a law is set forth in Leviticus and not explicitly removed by God's act in the New Testament, therefore it is proper for a Christian majority to force all people to live by a human law echoing it.

You've seen the picture before, and you and I are agreed that it's not a matter of law but of grace. But I insist on reading the Bible in a manner such as to avoid even having to go to that principle -- laws given to the Children of Israel as a local and tribal legal code are not the laws He necessarily wants Christians living under the Law of Love proclaimed in the New Testament to abide by.

I need to have a long talk with you, MG in private, to clear up what happened and try to make clear how I felt and feel. Expect a PM sometime soon. You're pretty awesome, too!! :)

Meatros, there are such books, but it's very much a case of comparing apples not with oranges but with champagne, Shakespeare, and The Two Towers -- the focuses of different groups' beliefs vary so strongly, and the emphases are so strongly felt, that it gets really tough to structure a categorization. For example, how do you feel about Arminianism? (Probably three-quarters of the Christians on this board, to say nothing of agnostics, neopagans, and miscellaneous unclassifiable folk, will say "Whazzat?" -- but your typical Reformed scholar will wax eloquent on the falsehoods of Arminian doctrine.) On the other hand, the Blessed Theotokos is important in Orthodox thought, but why she is important doesn't fit into the Catholic/Protestant line of thinking at all. It's that sort of take-a-doctrine-and-run-with-it thinking that makes things so abysmally hard to compare. Might be interesting to start a thread asking how different Christian groups see specific issues, if you like -- I can field Episcopalian and Liberal Christian, and sometimes can explain the Catholic or mainline Protestant view. We've got scholarly Catholics, one or two Evangelicals, a Calvinist or three, and I can chase down a committed Orthodox convert of my virtual acquaintance and invite him to field a question if something comes up on Eastern Orthodoxy.

[badchad]

Mean Girl:

Bad - Thanks. And be nice to Poly! He's awesome.

I'll try, but I'm sarcastic by nature:). For what it's worth, my free time is very limited and the only reason I am responding to him at such length, is I think he has the tools to get what I'm saying.

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I would only hold them to the law because Jesus in the above mentioned verse (and a couple other places IIRC) was holding them to the law. Sure one can make mistakes and be forgiven, but I think they should at least make the effort. Maybe they gave up on the law when some Christian decided bacon tastes good.

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Have you read what Romans and Galatians have to say about the Law? Jesus quoted the Law because when He was alive Israel was still under the Old Covenant. The New Covenant of grace didn't take effect until His resurrection. The Old Covenant is not binding on the New Covenant christian. First, because as Gentiles we were never given the Law in the first place, and second, because Christ has fulfilled the Law on our behalf.

Yeah, I've read them. The reason I have been trying to quote Christ as much as possible is because if I start quoting Paul, someone can, will and frequenty does say that for whatever reason he doesn't count because he's not Jesus.

I have to remember my audience and my arguement on this thread is not with the literalists of the bible but with those who take everything with a grain of salt, water down the scripture but are still 100% sure that Jesus said what they want him to say and didn't say what they don't want him to say, even though the bible says he did.

Be careful with this, because Paul did write that if you attempt to attain righteousness through the Law, you will be judged by it.

Without looking it up I'll take your word for it as it sounds correct but state that Paul contradicts himself and gave a pretty big list of don'ts as well, that if you don't follow you still end up in hell.

Galatians 5:18-23
"But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law."

I'll save for another debate that if you let Paul in then you can kiss free will, and free will as a reason for the problem of evil goodbye. Though for this particular debate, I know that the liberal interpreting christians will say that part doesn't count.

Also if you accept Paul I'd have to ask, "who let this woman into a public debate on religious matters anyway?:)

However it managed to be recorded, the truth we need is in there. I don't know if everyone spoke the exact words recorded, but I have no doubt that God is capable of communicating His truth perfectly using fallen human messengers. To me, the point is not the fallenness of the messenger; it's the power of God.

I agree with you. If god of the bible really exists and he really cares, then I think he would have no trouble inspiring a clear and coherent message, and this debate would not be happening. Nonfiction writers do it all the time without divine inspiration. Now if god didn't really exist and a bunch of guys were just writing down their superstitious thoughts, based on their current environment and what superstitions were handed down to them form their ancestors, then I think things would be, well, just like they are.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Don't forget emarkp. I think he does a great job explaining LDS.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

That's what I get for not previewing. That last post should have followed Poly's.

[badchad]

Diogenes the Cynic:

quote:
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badcahd posted:
Matthew 25:46
"And these shall go away into EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT: but the righteous into life eternal."
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The phrase "Eternal punishment" in its original Greek is kolasin aiwnion (kolasin aionion). "Kolasis" means punishment, penalty, correction. It does not mean torment or torture. The penalty was permanent annihilation. I would also point out that "aionios" which literally means "without end" also has a variety of idiomatic nuances. It is often used, for instance, to simply mean a lifetime, or as a generic term for a "long time." Since eternal torture was not a concept Matthew would have been familiar with, and since all of the other gehenna references in Matthew pertain to destruction by fire rather than Dante's Hell, i would imagine that this one does too. (unless you think that Matthew had psychic powers and knew that hell would become a Christian concept)

For Christ sake (parden the pun) Diogenes, would you listen to yourself. So when Matthew as quoted above says that the righteous go to life eternal, that means they go to life *of a normal lifetime*? What kind of sense would that make?

If your not careful Lee Strobel will be looking to interview you for his next book.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

For Christ sake (parden the pun) Diogenes, would you listen to yourself. So when Matthew as quoted above says that the righteous go to life eternal, that means they go to life *of a normal lifetime*? What kind of sense would that make?
Fair enough, but it's really the interpretation of punishment as torment that I object to. Do you think that Matthew (or Jesus, or whoever) had supernatural knowledge for how the concept of Hell would develop?

[badchad]

Diogenes the Cynic:

Fair enough, but it's really the interpretation of punishment as torment that I object to.

Being cast into a lake of fire by any other name would burn just as bad.

Do you think that Matthew (or Jesus, or whoever) had supernatural knowledge for how the concept of Hell would develop?

Well no, I don't think they did but Jesus at least was supposed to.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

Being cast into a lake of fire by any other name would burn just as bad.
Only temporarily. Then you're annihilated.
Well no, I don't think they did but Jesus at least was supposed to.
Well, I don't believe that. The point is that from a purely historical (non-supernatural) standpoint, Jesus could not have been talking about Christian Hell because it hadn't been invented yet. If you're an empiricist then you can't use the Gehenna quotations to prove that Jesus condemns people to eternal torment. To do so would show a belief in the supernatural.

[Mean Girl]

Po-ly...Bad-chad...hello...

Because a law is set forth in Leviticus and not explicitly removed by God's act in the New Testament, therefore it is proper for a Christian majority to force all people to live by a human law echoing it.


This is what I devote my entire MB life to trying to debunk...that we are not under law, but under grace. It's absolutely incorrect theology. :)

We approach the same issue two different ways. We are both literalists in the true sense of the word. But, you're a very flexible literalist, and I go the other way. I believe that the answers to all these things are right there in scripture if it's hermeneutized correctly (I know that is NOT a word).

What a field day Habs would have with 'hermeneutized'...

Ok, so then Badchad wrote:
Without looking it up I'll take your word for it as it sounds correct but state that Paul contradicts himself and gave a pretty big list of don'ts as well, that if you don't follow you still end up in hell.


Which is a REALLY interesting concept. The lists Paul gave in Galatians 5 are, in his words, "works of the flesh." Those who do works of the flesh to earn righteousness will fail, no matter whether that work is following the Law or not.

But...the things a christian does are not works of the flesh. His contrast is that the fruit of the Spirit - our works - are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control.

And sums it up by saying against such things there is no Law. Which is not the same as saying, "There's no law against parking here!" ... It means that the Law does not apply to the fruit of the Spirit - the Spirit transcends the Law (you have to read a bit more about the law as paidagogos for this to make total sense - the law is inferior to grace (see Hebrews and Galatians).

Now, admittedly, if that were all we had, it would be a weak argument and stealing a base logically. After all, who says that those who have the fruit of the Spirit can't also be doing 'works of the flesh'? And, it is not the 'sinful action' that is important - it is whether it is a work of the flesh or not.

This is why context matters. Because the whole thrust of Paul's argument is to prove we are not under Law:

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contraryy to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.

And, adding in what Paul says about the same thing in Romans 8:

Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. You, however, are not controlled by the sinful nature, but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.

So a person with the Holy Spirit in him will not do the works of the flesh; he may sin, but he is still considered righteous by God because God's Spirit lives in him. And, tying Paul's theology together, we have the Spirit, so we are led by the Spirit. And if we are led by the Spirit we are not under law.

I don't believe in free will, so I don't know if there's a need to start a new topic. Hehe.

Also if you accept Paul I'd have to ask, "who let this woman into a public debate on religious matters anyway?

No, you wouldn't, because I do not have authority over you, and debating is not the same as teaching.

I like you. :)
MG

PS: Diogenes - Yeah, I'd say that Jesus had supernatural knowledge of the future conceptual development of hell. He was supernatural, after all, so it is not illogical for him to have supernatural knowledge, and since revelation comes by either Father, Son, or Spirit and they are all facets of the same God, I can't see how you'd come to any other conclusion. Of course He knew.

[badchad]

Diogenes the Cynic:
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Being cast into a lake of fire by any other name would burn just as bad.
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Only temporarily. Then you're annihilated.

I thought you had just conceeded the eternal/everlasting part of the punishment and were just debating whether punishment and torment were the same thing. They sound pretty close to me. Perhaps it's a matter of perspective; I punish you, you torment me. Regardless neither of us would like it.

quote:
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Well no, I don't think they did but Jesus at least was supposed to.
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Well, I don't believe that. The point is that from a purely historical (non-supernatural) standpoint, Jesus could not have been talking about Christian Hell because it hadn't been invented yet.

Could be he was inventing it. He was starting a new movement. Could also be from a purely historical standpoint all this stuff was just made up and Jesus never said any of it. Not even the stuff you like.

If you're an empiricist then you can't use the Gehenna quotations to prove that Jesus condemns people to eternal torment. To do so would show a belief in the supernatural

Well, I don't speak greek, and don't think it worth my time to learn so I'll defer to the various translaters of the bible, divinely inspired or not. But for the purposes of this discussion Matthew 25:46 avoids your distinction and supports mine and mean girl's point well enough.

[Meatros]

Originally posted by Polycarp
Meatros, there are such books, but it's very much a case of comparing apples not with oranges but with champagne, Shakespeare, and The Two Towers -- the focuses of different groups' beliefs vary so strongly, and the emphases are so strongly felt, that it gets really tough to structure a categorization. For example, how do you feel about Arminianism? (Probably three-quarters of the Christians on this board, to say nothing of agnostics, neopagans, and miscellaneous unclassifiable folk, will say "Whazzat?" -- but your typical Reformed scholar will wax eloquent on the falsehoods of Arminian doctrine.) On the other hand, the Blessed Theotokos is important in Orthodox thought, but why she is important doesn't fit into the Catholic/Protestant line of thinking at all. It's that sort of take-a-doctrine-and-run-with-it thinking that makes things so abysmally hard to compare. Might be interesting to start a thread asking how different Christian groups see specific issues, if you like -- I can field Episcopalian and Liberal Christian, and sometimes can explain the Catholic or mainline Protestant view. We've got scholarly Catholics, one or two Evangelicals, a Calvinist or three, and I can chase down a committed Orthodox convert of my virtual acquaintance and invite him to field a question if something comes up on Eastern Orthodoxy.

I see, that makes sense and to be honest I was thinking this might be the case.

[IzzyR]

Originally posted by Polycarp
One of the things scholars bring to Biblical exegesis is the concept of "Semitic dichotomy" -- the phrasing of such a statement as follows in Hebrew/Aramaic styling would be not "It's a matter of common taste that all good men should prefer Brie over Roquefort when eating cheeses" but "You should love Brie but hate Roquefort." Things like "He who does not hate father and mother for My sake...." are to be read in that context, not as literal absolutes but as relativistic points.From a language standpoint, this is untrue. However, context can differ, just as it can in English (as you subsequently point out). So I would regard an attempt to summarily wash away any and all inconvenient statements in this manner as weaselly "handwaving". But if you analyze case by case, you could sometimes make such an argument.

Diogenes, you may have overlooked my question. To repeat:Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic
The Jews believed that a body, once it had been consumed by fire, could not be resurrected on judgement day.What is the basis for this (bizarre) assertion?

[Diogenes the Cynic]

badchad said:
I thought you had just conceeded the eternal/everlasting part of the punishment and were just debating whether punishment and torment were the same thing. They sound pretty close to me. Perhaps it's a matter of perspective; I punish you, you torment me. Regardless neither of us would like it.
It's "everlasting" only in the sense that the annhihilation was permanent. It was the "second death." There would be no resurrection this time.
Could be he was inventing it. He was starting a new movement. Could also be from a purely historical standpoint all this stuff was just made up and Jesus never said any of it. Not even the stuff you like.
It's very unlikely that he was inventing anything. Jesus was a Jewish Rabbi ministering to other Jews. I don't believe he had any intention of starting a new religion. Everything he taught was based on solid Jewish teachings. Jesus almost certainly did not ever claim to be the son of God or the Messiah during his lifetime. Those were interpretations that came about after his death. Also, you still can't get around the fact that Jesus used the word "Hinnon" not Hell. Why would he use a real place which fit in with traditional Jewish beliefs about the resurrection and judgement if he really meant something else?

Could it all be invented? Sure, but again, it's unlikely. We have a basic core of sayings (about a quarter of what's atrributed to Jesus in the gospels) which derive from multiple independent sources and which are consistent in their message and their rhetorical style. We can't say with certainty that they are original to Jesus, but we can say with some confidence that they appear to derive from one person. It doesn't really matter to me if Jesus said it or not. I'm not a Christian, so what do I care? BTW, when did I ever say I "liked" any of it? As a matter of fact, I do like some of it, but I also like some things from the Koran, the Tao Te Ching, The Upanishads, Shakespeare, Monty Python, The Beatles and any number of other things. Why do I have to know who said something to like what they said?
Well, I don't speak greek, and don't think it worth my time to learn so I'll defer to the various translaters of the bible, divinely inspired or not. But for the purposes of this discussion Matthew 25:46 avoids your distinction and supports mine and mean girl's point well enough.
This really is a cop out, chad, I'm surprised at you. Well, I do know Greek (and it would be quite worth your time to learn it, I assure you. If you're going to debate the meaning of Bible verses you should know what they say) and I have a Greek New Testament right here in front of me. I can look at the verses in question and see the word Innon used repeatedly. I can look this word up in my hand, dandy lexicon and, voila, there it is "Hinnon" is the Valley of Hinnon. I can also call upon my own academic background in religion and religious history as well as many years of independent study in these areas to know what the Valley of Hinnon was and what it symbolized to the Jews of first century Palestine. Also, FYI, not every version of the Bible translates "Hinnon" as "Hell." Many contemporary translations get it right now.
As for Matthew 25:46 "avoiding my distinction," how do you figure that? Now you're hanging your entire thesis for Jesus being a god of hellfire on a single phrase "eternal punishment" which had a distinctly different meaning in its linguistic and historical context than what you think it means. Maybe this tact would have some rhetorical effectiveness on fundamentalists or even some more moderate Christians, but I'm an agnostic. Occam's razor says that if the Christian concept of Hell didn't exist yet, then Jesus probably wasn't referring to it.

[Diogenes the Cynic]

IzzyR,
I'm sorry, I guess I missed your question when the pages changed. Well, I first heard about the destruction of the body preventing the resurrection in an Old testament class in college. I'm pretty sure I've also read it in some of Elie Wiesel's writings but googling around now, I can't really find any support for it (other than that orthodox Jews are opposed to cremation) so now I don't know if that's a real belief or not. Maybe it's not a universal belief, I don't know. Wiesel was a Hassidic Jew in his youth so maybe it was a more specific belief to Hassids or I may have just been flat out misinformed about it.

[Polycarp]

Izzy, it was never my intention to suggest that speakers of Semitic always used the love/hate dichotomy and its parallels where we'd use more nuanced phrases in English -- but that it was far more common to do so, just as Spanish uses the reflexive far more often than we do. They have and willingly use the passive voice -- but typically a Spanish speaker will describe something as "doing itself" (idiomatically) where we'd say "was done" -- and it was my understanding that First Century users of Aramaic (as everyday language) and Hebrew (as the tongue of formal discourse, much as educated people in the Renaissance used Latin) tended to use the stark love/hate good/evil hot/cold dichotomy much more often, and quite often idiomatically. I'd welcome clarification on this point from anyone familiar with the situation, as I'm basing something rather important on this bit of information.

[IzzyR]

Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic
Wiesel was a Hassidic Jew in his youth so maybe it was a more specific belief to Hassids or I may have just been flat out misinformed about it.I don't think there is any difference in Hasidic belief about such matters, so I suspect the latter. There have been quite a lot of Jews burned at stake and elsewhere over the years, and I've never heard of a notion that they might not be able to get resurrected.Originally posted by Polycarp
it was my understanding that First Century users of Aramaic (as everyday language) and Hebrew (as the tongue of formal discourse, much as educated people in the Renaissance used Latin) tended to use the stark love/hate good/evil hot/cold dichotomy much more often, and quite often idiomatically. I'd welcome clarification on this point from anyone familiar with the situation, as I'm basing something rather important on this bit of information.Possible. I think it is more common in the Talmud. For example, a homiletic interpretation of a verse might go "don't read it as saying X (the word as written) but as saying Y (some alternative spelling or pronunciation)". The intention is not to deny the plain meaning (X), but to add an additional interpretation (Y). But I don't know if it is a language thing as much as a style of Talmudic discourse. Even today, there are differences between the type of language you might use in a speech or literary work and what you might say in ordinary conversation, and differences between types of speeches or types of literary works as well. (In general, I would imagine that we are very hampered in studying ancient languages in that we don't have much access to the language that ordinary people spoke or wrote).

Of course it is possible that the NT had a similar style. For that, you would have to be familiar with the NT.

[Polycarp]

I have to remember my audience and my arguement on this thread is not with the literalists of the bible but with those who take everything with a grain of salt, water down the scripture but are still 100% sure that Jesus said what they want him to say and didn't say what they don't want him to say, even though the bible says he did.

Well, I do grasp that point clearly -- but I feel that there is an underlying theme to what Jesus said that is easily abstractable from the rest of the material in the Bible and which does furnish a key to ethical living and to "the means of grace and the hope of glory." I respect that YMDoesV, but I don't see myself as being intellectually dishonest in looking honestly for that underlying theme and trying to live by it. And I don't discount that there are places where Jesus says things that don't "fit" the worldview that I'm comfortable with -- and they press me to seek out more truth from Him.

However, that Jesus said something does not necessarily mean that He believed the literalness of it. In the parable of the rich man and the beggar, he was trying to focus on ethical behavior of the rich toward the poor, not on painting a picture of the afterlife. Granted, He made references to Adam -- so does David B., who certainly doesn't believe in the literal truth of Scripture. And that Luke uses the terms "sunset" and "sunrise" does not imply that he was divinely inspired to propound a terrestricentric cosmos, only that he used the traditional figurative terms just as you or I would. I see the references to Adam in much the same way. If you constructed an analogy in which you made reference to Lancelot, I wouldn't assume from that that you believed that Le Morte d'Arthur was history, only that you needed to metaphorically refer to ideal knightly behavior, and picked Lancelot as a useful, commonly-shared image of that.