I’m gonna say naw on that. Hitler deserves to feel all the pain and misery he caused sequentially. Run him through that for the next few thousand years and I think we’re square.
As a punitive measure, I’d accept making him feel an amount of pain and sadness that compensates for all the joy he caused his victims to miss out on.
i.e. made up shit. Just like Aesop’s fables. But we don’t read them on Sunday morning, and don’t have people trying to teach about grape eating foxes in our schools.
What do you mean about allegory? And not the allegories on the Nile.
Allegories on the Nile? Well, that’s a crock.
Then explain the Sabbath if man is not to rest on that day, but it’s actually a undefined period of time?
I’m quite sure the OP was referring to biblical type miracles. Moses parting the Red Sea, Samson’s amazing strength, three men in put in a fiery oven but are not harmed because of their faith, Jesus walking on water, etc. Want to try again?
We certainly can of this particular god! Please explain of all the gods there are to pick from, believers decided, this one was the omnibenevolent, omnipotent bad ass they had been looking for all along and just has to be the real deal? Oh, and they love Him. Yeah, right…
Helpful to use quotes when quoting someone else.
Corbus52, it doesn’t look like you’ve read anyone else’s responses to any of these questions, and none of your answers actually add anything to the conversation that wasn’t there before. Care to come back and converse with us, and bring a little depth into the conversation?
Wonder how these one-timers are finding this thread. By my count, four different crusaders during the last two years were inspired enough to join SD and resurrect this thread, making this their first post and only post with the exception of Mike92 making it two more brief posts before petering out. So, Mike92, jck630, TheTruth1 and now Corbus 52 whose status will probably be another one-timer wonder, but yet to be determined.
They only do it because this thread has been closed and they can’t argue their cases there any more.
I din’t realise this thread was a zombie but I’ll answer your question then (on the off-chance you read it) then that’ll be that.
I was specifically talking about the garden of eden as an allegory.
If you want to think of it as ‘made up shit’ then feel free but certain philosophical truths about the nature of man require metaphor in order to convey the inexplicable.
Given Jesus spoke mostly in metaphors and parables it’s perfectly consistent to be a Christian and take some things as ‘fact’ and some as metaphor.
It seems that the modern atheist only likes to debate with bible literalists as that’s the position they themselves feel happiest opposing.
I wonder why that is?
…which puts it three resurrections ahead of Jesus…
This atheist doesn’t necessarily prefer biblical literalists at all, I just prefer somebody that will state their position clearly. At least with most fundamentalists, you tend to know where they stand. I have found that liberal Christians tends to hold their cards closest to their chest for the most part. I honestly rarely get to hear a liberal Christian’s position actually. What few brave liberal Christian souls state their position clearly, I have found it’s just as nutty as the literalists in what they believe.
E.g., the days in Genesis isn’t really meant to be a day of a 24 hour period, but some longer period of time. This presents lots of other problems if this whole thing was allegorical.
Is there any indication that Jesus treated the biblical characters of the OT and/or their stories as allegorical? Did he think Moses, Noah, etc , were actual historical people? And are the stories of Jesus crucifixion and resurrection treated as just allegorical by Christians today? I have found that the vast majority still stand by Paul, and that their faith is in vain if this didn’t happen. Their belief in the supernatural probably isn’t just limited to the resurrection either.
Of course, anyone can call themselves a Christian. I know of agnostic Christians, atheist Christians, why they still prefer to identify with the Christian label, I’m not sure. I can get the Jewish atheist who still prefers their heritage and their struggles and what not, but doesn’t take any of the stories at face value, nor would they be likely to believe in the supernatural. For the utmost liberal Christians, what few answers I’ve got from them, was because Jesus was a great teacher and lived such a good and decent moral life. But I don’t see this either.
If a Christian wants to just treat the stories as literature, I have no objection to that, but it’s truly more than that to them, isn’t it?
Well, it’s hard to debate with people who can shift the terms of the debate at will. If every time we start talking about some biblical story/mandate/rule the other side can just say “Oh, it’s allegory,” it gets really hard to figure out what the rules are.
So, if the Eden story is allegory, where did Original Sin come from?
The terms of the debate aren’t getting shifted, most people just assume that because person A is a Christian they must think x, y, and z.
Which may not be the case, or may not, so the best place to start is by debating particular theological points rather than assuming the other person thinks x so you start arguing against x.
There’s a whole lot of denominations out there for a reason.
Original Sin came from the fall - we use a metaphor to describe what happened.
It’s theologically interesting stuff with no actual correct answer (that we can grasp anyway).
The debate starts with specific theological points, but it gets hard to debate a specific theological point when you get an answer like this.
What was the fall? What happened? Who did it happen to?
If there’s no actual correct answer, why do you believe in it?
The “fall” as I understand it , was when Adam and Eve were cast out of paradise for listening to a snake and eating some fruit.
The poster I was replying to says that’s allegory.
I find most Christians perfectly happy to state their positions on different matters.
Who cares how many days there were, it’s irrelevant to the point of the story.
By and large Jesus talked about the patriachs as real individual historical people.
Doesn’t mean he thought they were, pretty much every Christian minister will speak of them in the same way but not necessarily think of them as actual historical people.
You’d be hard pressed to find a Christian who states the resurrection didn’t happen. Almost all will (should) go along with Paul on that one; everything else is up for grabs.
There’s peole that believe angels are active in the world. Does it really matter if they think that? I don’t think so.
Indeed, people are funny when it comes to religion.
Correct. Atheists generally give Christians the benefit of the doubt, because there’s no point in debating irrational people.
So we assume that Christians believe that the Bible generally means what it says, and that metaphorical or allegorical passages like the Song of Songs are easily seen to be intended as allegory or parable or whatever, and always have been.
We do them the courtesy of assuming that they are not too stupid to see that if a passage is taken literally by virtually all of Christendom for 1800 years, and is only called “allegorical” after modern science or history or archaeology shows that its literal meaning is absurd, then those passages were NOT intended as allegory. Those passages are simply wrong.
We do them the courtesy of assuming they are intelligent enough to see that if the Papal scholars who condemned Galileo explained their reasoning by saying that the heliocentric theory was “….formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture, according to the literal meaning of the words…”, then it was clearly the official and long-standing position of the Church (the Catholic Church, not some fundamentalist Baptist church) that the Bible’s accounts of cosmology were meant to be taken literally.
We do them the courtesy of not assuming that they are so irrational that they now dismiss almost everything miraculous or absurd or contradictory or factually wrong in the Bible as allegory, but still maintain that the Resurrection must be lliterally true, because it’s in the Bible.
This is all interesting, but death is the end. Almost 40 years ago I walked out of Sunday school thinking, “this is a load of crap.” Nothing has changed since. I regret nothing.
Also, I can show you a passage in the bible that not only doesn’t consider the fetus human, it doesn’t consider the mother one either.
Good, I’m hoping you’re one that has no problem stating your position in a clear and straightforward manner if you’re one such Christian. The days are important and relevant on many fronts, this is one. Why was it a capital offense to work on the Sabbath, even something as simple as picking up sticks, or making a fire on that day of which it certainly mattered to them that it was to be taken as a day as we know it, not some length of time. If my life was at stake, I would hope to know whether or not the Sabbath was on a Saturday or Sunday, or it referred to some other length of time.
This isn’t clear to me. You say, by and large Jesus talked about the patriarchs as real individual historical people, but in the next sentence, doesn’t mean he thought they were. It doesn’t clarify it any more when you say Christian ministers speak of them in the same way, but not actual historical people. Skip everybody else, what is your opinion? Is Adam historical or not, and did he live to 930? Willing to consider Noah and the flood as both an actual person and historical event occurring too? Does Jesus ever give any clue that they were really not historical people and the stories were meant to be allegorical? If you’re all in with Jesus being resurrected, and he can be this mistaken on where we came from, where does a Christian get any more confidence on where they think they are going to end up with this character?
I tend to agree with you here, although there are rare exceptions. And what led them to this conclusion? Was it evidence based and using logic, or strictly an emotionally charged tug at the heart strings, and basically it all coming down to wishful thinking and a faith thing?
Outside of this board, it has little to no impact on most folk, but if someone wants to argue for the existence of angels in GD, it might be slightly amusing to me, but not by much.