Yeah, i’m with** TB** on that. There are many alternate logical conclusions.
would “it seems reasonable” or “it seems likely” be a better choice?
Sorry about the misuse of “only logical” but would you care to share a few of the many others available?
Ok.
- People have such different ideas because, although one is actually right, God himself played no role in the creation of it other than inspiration. It is the work of man and flawed.
- The message is in there, but the writers actually got lucky; it’s not something they deliberately put in there.
- God did play a role, but didn’t make it a kickass slamdunk gospel because that would remove the role of free will.
- The Bible does contain the message, but we’re just not smart enough yet to all get it, by design.
- Or because God chooses to let himself be constrained by evolution.
- We don’t all get it because evil outside forces are metaphorically (or literally! Your choice!) covering our eyes.
- What God believes is the true message is actually wrong; he’s not omnipotent. Thus the confusion arises from conflict between the Bible message and the actual true message.
- Same again, except there is no true message.
- All people who say they see something other than the true message in the Bible are lying.
- All people who say they see *any * message are lying.
All logical conclusions - though some more likely than others, depending of course on your beliefs.
I think this is a very reasonable position. From my observation, your position also includes throwing out stuff that is not justified either by logic or on the evidence, and the realization that a personal view is just that. Our common viewpoint seems to be “this is my belief, but I’m not going to force anyone else to follow it or act according to it.” So you’re not going to get an argument about it from me.
Snipping the list. I think there are two meanings of meaning here. Your’s is the inherent meaning in the Bible, and I didn’t check for completeness, but they all seem reasonable. Cosmosdan’s is the meaning that people get out of the Bible. Since there are so many potential sources of meaning in the Bible, none of which can be proven to be correct, the meaning someone gets out of it has to be personal. IOW, you’re both right.
I thought **cosmosdan ** was referring to the actual meaning of the book, rather than the meaning someone interprets from the book. I could have misread, though.
While I agree with you 100%, it is my experience that those who take the opposite view are [just as] often just as ignorant and ill-informed.
It seems clear to me that,
- Ignorance is much more pervasive than most would like to admit; (and never about themselves) and certainly much more pervasive at SDMB than those manning the “We’re smarter than everyone else on the internet” Kool Aid stand would like to admit.
and,
- Ignorance, and simple garden variety mediocrity,-------best as I can tell-------is pretty evenly distributed among both the theists and atheists here.
Golden Rule
ETA: Didn’t notice that Polycarp cited this already.
Yes. And the people who are non-literalists; who think their “liberal Christianity” is a balm that helps soothe the idiocy of the conservative/literalist Christians are a HUGE problem. They give cover, respectability and the comfort of conviction to the conservative/literalist Christians. By making the delusions seem halfway normal, they help keep society’s most destructive disease alive (the disease is ALL fundamental organized religions, not just Christianity).
You see a good amount of that “holier-than-thou” preening here on the SDMB from some of the “liberal Christians”. I hope they can move past this unfulfilling and hazardous compromise posture soon, because right now they don’t seem to even realize (or won’t admit) how much of the extant draconian, fundamentalist Christianity they are in a large part responsible for.
Please–either believe in the entire Christian Faith and its Bible as literal so we can just dismiss you as an idiot (but an honest one with conviction, at least), or admit that you are creating your own a la carte religion that might as well be Jainism for as much as it contradicts the Christian Bible. If you among the latter group, PLEASE just give it another name and drop the whole Christ shtick so we can marginalize the kooks who actually DO believe the fairy tales and get back to progressing as a civilization.
I did use “the only logical conclusion” incorrectly I think and I appreciate your list.
I don’t think anyone knows the “actual meaning of the book” so I don’t think I meant that.
It seems undeniable that everybody, be they believers or not, interprets the Bible differently. That’s what I was addressing.
Fair enough. I can certainly agree with that. 
Excuse me for being blunt and I’ll accept any rebuke the mods determine warranted but I’ve seen a lot of this type of post in which Liberal Christianity is somehow blamed for offering tacit support and justification for the beliefs of fundamentalists and literalists. IMHO it’s total bullshit.
People believe various things in varying degrees. That’s it. Welcome to humanity.
Why not blame the agnostics for tacitly supporting religion and get it over with. How about just blaming everyone who falls outside of of your personal parameters of belief for tacitly supporting the things you think are kooky?
Get off your opinionated high horse and get real.
My pastor quoted the statistic that we, as “evangelical” individuals, invite someone to services once every 22 years. Nobody argued with him.
They are quite literal, to the point of being creationist. And dogmatic out the wazoo. The rest of us find them rather embarassing, but, y’know, they’re German and all. 
True story, I’ve undoubtedly told before:
Me (newly converted from Catholicism): So, what’s the difference between us and the ELCA congregation 3/4 mile away?
Asst Pastor: We’re Norwegian and they’re Swedish.
Me (I’m not fully knowedgable how Lutherans work, but I’m from St Paul and know how this conversation goes. And being partially Norskie I know I fit in.): So, the Missouri Synod parish in the middle is German?
Asst Pastor: Yeah.
FWIW, although I’m an atheist, I think cosmosdan’s point is well taken. Folks in the center are not responsible for the fringes. This is true of all religions, all politics and, indeed, all philosophies.
Apologetically evangelical, perhaps? A Lutheran church near me announced that they were joining some crusade to recruit Jews. The rabbi of a temple said “we don’t really need this,” and the Lutherans, embarrassed, dropped the idea. I can imagine other evangelicals who would have argued.
Responsible for them? Not at all. But that’s not enough.
Imagine how the fight against creationism would go if the response of a scientist was that we should believe in evolution because it shows us how connected we are to other life. That’s a worthy reason but a poor argument. Looking at the evidence, and the science, works far better. We can see that creationists kind of think that morality matters in this area by the common argument that teaching evolution is wrong because we’d have sex like monkeys if we believed we were related.
The problem with liberal religions (not only Christianity) is that they only seem to have the moral argument against fundamentalists. That I agree with many of their moral teachings does not make me want to join their church, and I suspect the same happens from the other side.
The difference between cosmosdan and the liberal Christians is that he was willing to let the dogmas out and clearly label each belief with its level of justification. That’s why I agree with him even when I don’t agree with him.
This argument has become common ever since Sam Harris put it in writing and it became popular among those atheists who spend most of their life quoting more famous atheists. I figure someone should put this absurd idea to rest.
Liberal Christians give “cover”, “respectability”, and “comfort” to literalist Christians, eh? Literalist Christians are general out in the open and quite willing to engage in high-profile conflicts with just about everyone. They neither want, need, nor have cover in any sense. So much for “cover”. Now respectability is merely the state of receiving respect from a sufficiently large portion of society. Any particular person either respects literalists or doesn’t; the presence of liberal Christians doesn’t change that. That takes care of “respectability”. As for comfort, I’m not quite how any literalist is supposed to take comfort from people who aren’t literalists.
Actually I don’t see any of it.
Oh dear. So here you are trying to tell me how fulfilling my religion is. Charming. As for hazardous, if liberal Christianity causes me to wander over a cliff, I guess you can laugh at me on the way down. As for the claim that we’re responsible for fundamentalist Christianity, that’s absurd even by atheist standards. If that were true, then fundamentalist Christianity would only exist in places and times where liberal Christianity also existed. Since that isn’t the case, the claim is false.
Since I’m doing neither, I see no reason to admit to either. Good day.
Voyager, I’m not sure I understand. The point you concede is the only one about whch I feel strongly for purposes of this discussion. The assertion was made (Post #70) that liberal/centrist Christians are responsible for fundamentalists by giving them cover. I disagree. You agree with my disagreement, but say it’s not enough. My apologies, but I don’t follow the rest. What is it that you think liberal/centrist Christians should be doing?
For my part, I will say that the main difference I observe between fundamentalist and liberal/centrist Christians is that the former tend to have more of an impulse to say what you and I should be allowed to do, whereas the latter tend to be happy to stake out only the ground for how to live their own lives. Fundamentalist Muslims tend the same way as fundamentalist Christians, only more so (in places where they have enough political clout to pull it off); fundamentalist Jews (and a lot of other sects) do not. To me, that’s the difference which matters.
BTW, to put my views in context vis-a-vis the OP, even when I was a Christian, I subscribed to the view (to me, perfectly obvious) that the NT is merely a collection of human-recorded accounts. Whether the events actually occurred is the question, not whether the accounts are literal or inspired.
I don’t think Liberal Christians can do anything and still remain Christians. They are personally living their life in a good way, and not bugging anyone else to live the way they do. But, the moment you open the door for any kind of deity with an overriding morality, you open the door to having those with a different sense of that morality talking about God not wanting a woman to have an abortion.
You say the important thing is whether the events of the NT happened, but as far as I can tell a Christian of any stripe will say they accept that these things did happen on faith. Even if you decided you wanted to live exactly like a Christian, you’d have an excellent reason for not enforcing your way of life on others - that you doubt its roots. One who takes the Resurrection to be true doesn’t. They feel the need to consider some parts of the Bible true, and others false, but I’ve been looking for a sorting algorithm beyond “it seems right” and I’ve never found one.