Please do. I don’t know this one.
There are, to be sure, some really weird things in the Bible…
He gives a very strong indication that he thinks that the story of Jonah is literally true.
[QUOTE=Jesus (KJV)]
Mat 12:38 Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered, saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee.
Mat 12:39 But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas:
Mat 12:40 For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
[/QUOTE]
Earlier in that chapter, Jesus was saying he was greater than the Temple, and Lord of the Sabbath. And it doesn’t seem so outrageous to me that some people would very politely ask for some evidence that he’s all of that, rather than just another faith healer.
But Jesus replies that anybody who doesn’t just take his word for it must be evil and adulterous (he gets great PR about being meek and mild and perfect, but on many occasions, he’s an asshole). So he’s only going to give them one sign: the sign of Jonah. If that is his one and only piece of evidence, then he must think that Jonah was a real person, and really spent three days and nights in a whale’s belly.
Awkwardly, his one super duper sign is a failed prophecy, even if you believe everything the Bible says, because he explicitly says he will spend three days and three nights in the tomb, while he actually spends two nights and one day there, i.e. he goes into the tomb on Friday evening, and he’s out by dawn on Sunday.
Mans turning away from God. Man = humankind.
Something that happened during one of our evolutionary stages possibly.
Exactly how it happened doesn’t matter, the metaphor is there to remind (in simplistic terms) of absolute depravity.
If you really want to know more about it I suggest reading some theologians on the matter - who may or may not agree with absolute depravity. It’s a thread in itself that topic and we can bring such exciting things as pre destination into that mix as well.
There are theologians out there who think Neanderthal Man pissed off God?
If it might have been an earlier species, why stop there? Maybe the first critter that crawled out of the water was the villain in this scenario – little bastard got too much ambition.
Are you saying “The Fall” didn’t actually happen either-that it is a metaphor?
I’m happy to state my opinions on certain things when I can be succinct but lots of things would require very long essay/book length answers.
You seldom get a yes/no answer from a philosopher and theology is no different.
Anyway - it was a capital offence because people misunderstood the nature of the Sabbath. Jesus stated (from memory can’t remember chapter and verse) “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”, while doing things that you weren’t meant to do on the Sabbath.
I assume your point of you needing to know what day it was is you being obtuse, everyone was well aware of their “obligations” on the Sabbath and when that was meant to be. Given the nature of man though, we’ve fucked up the meaning of the Sabbath pretty much from the beginning.
Referencing a metaphor as fact doesn’t mean you think it’s fact, you’re just using it as shorthand to help explain your point. A minister I know references Noah in sermons as if he’s a historical person - I know that he thinks the flood story is not literally true. Every time he mentions the flood should he caveat it or just use the metaphor for the ends it was meant to be used for and we all leave happy?
My opinions:
Adam = No
Noah = Didn’t exist (he may be an amalgam)
Jesus gave many clues that we essentially had no idea what he was talking about so if you wanted you could use that.
Again, I personally don’t think the historicity of Old Testament characters is important (many others will disagree with me though).
By where they are going to end up do you mean after life?
I don’t think there should be any confidence; hope based on faith is all we have.
Most things come down to faith which I totally understand sounds like a cop out. Until you have faith it’s hard to imagine how it works. I think God is a bit like dark matter when it comes to metaphysics and theology, he’s needed to make the figures work, so to speak.
(And don’t bother saying ‘but if we find dark matter is wrong we will change our mind’ - I get it, I’m using it as a metaphor based on our current scientific understanding of the universe :))
A good book to help sum things up is Job.
Is it historical? No, but it’s the greatest piece of metaphysics there is when it comes to ‘understanding’ God.
To be honest I’m probably not the best person to be asking these things as my liberalism is such that I don’t believe any denomination has a monopoly on the truth. Due to our imperfect nature we are almost certainly getting a lot of things wrong.
I believe that if we had a long enough list of theological questions you’d be hard pressed to find two members of the same church matching 100% never mind cross denominational matches.
I’d recommend reading Karl Barth if you’re actually interested in theology.
His opinions will be far better written and argued than mine and will get you to the same place, i.e. Christian X thinks Y therefore some other Christians probably/possibly also think Y. Then you can add in “I don’t think Y”.
It happened - quite how it happened I have no idea.
At some point during our evolutionary process we essentially abandoned the pure acceptance of God and his will.
That’s the fall - from my perspective.
It’s just easy to sum it up as some guy eating a fig in a garden.
That’s much easier to conceptualise than understanding the actual point that humanity metaphysically ‘decided’ to make ourselves the centre of our universe instead of God.
You don’t know what it was, when it happened, or at what stage in mankind’s evolutionary development it happened…but you are absolutely sure it happened? Is it the fact that it’s sheer vagueness shields it from any fact-checking is what puts it in the “really happened” column rather than the “allegory/metaphor” column for you?
And you wonder why atheists don’t like debating people like you. It’s because you have vague notions, feelings, don’t care how it happened, why, or when, have no certainty about anything except a resurrection that would be pointless except for all of this other baggage that you struggle to put into any coherent form, likely because you know that it’s really really weird to talk about “the fall of man” when you can’t even name the species who “fell.”
I heard it was a turtle.
That’s right-It’s turtles all the way down…to Hell!
I have no interest in debating Old Testament theology.
Given that, it was probably a mistake to post saying I think Genesis is allegory.
You do all realise that pretty much every bible scholar thinks it is an allegory though?
Why should I care how it happened?
Does that change the state we as a species are in right now?
Did we fall as homo sapiens or before then? What does it matter?
If you can tell me theologically why it matters then I’m happy to listen.
In a way it’s a bit like having opposing views on the state of nature.
Those that believe in the fall are essentially taking a Hobbesian point of view on the core nature of man, whereas the atheist is probably more akin to Rousseau.
Debating how that nature arose is essentially pointless as the real debate lies in how to deal with it (whatever one it is you think is correct).
I suspect that makes even less sense - you’d be better off talking to someone that is RC about the fall as they seem more into it than I am.
The fall is more a metaphysical concept rather than anything else, so putting it into a “happened” bracket is a bit difficult as I think we always have been fallen.
The story is there to remind us of our true nature, difficult as that is to accept.
Does that make more sense?
I don’t actually like using terms like the “fall of man” to be honest as I think it’s misleading, but that’s the terminology we have to work with and I’m not clever enough to come up with new theological terminology that explains it better.
When someone asks a question, the “real debate” should involve the question being asked. When someone dismisses the question as unimportant and/or pointless then tries to steer the conversation to a supposedly more “real debate”, it just looks like hand-waving to me. What does it matter when we fell as a species? I’d say it matters a damn sight more than you seem to think, because I can’t recall anyone bringing up the premise that “The Fall” might have come early on in our evolutionary cycle. If you want to drop bombs like that into a debate, it would be nice if you could maybe cite some theologians, or at least elaborate just a mite on the topic.
But if we are “intrinsacally sinful” and there was no fall, where we became sinners through an act, then we are even the less to blame and God all the more.
Kelly: “Hey, you guys are debating politics. Why don’t you ever debate people who don’t have a political party? Huh? I bet I can guess why.”
Morgan: “Okay, what are your political beliefs?”
Kelly: “Oh, I don’t care about politics but both parties are awful.”
Morgan: “Why?”
Kelly: “Why should I have an answer for that? Why are you trying to pin me down? You should read political stuff.”
Morgan: “I believe you have your answer.”
Often the long-winded answers are no answer at all, but just an attempt to obfuscate and misdirect, so I’m glad you prefer to be succinct, and I will try to do the same.
The writers writing on Jesus’ behalf often had him speaking out of both sides of his mouth, he also said he didn’t come here to cancel out the laws of Moses but to fulfill them.
Of course it was man that once again fucked it up, god always carries his get-out-of-jail-free-card with him wherever he goes. Most people in that day didn’t have the luxury to hear over a thousand years later Jesus’ spin on the matter. Knowing what the Sabbath was all about was important to know as a Jew if you valued your life. I think Moses, or those who wrote on behalf of him, knew very full well how blood thirsty their god was.
Well, once you know a person’s position, I agree with you, it’s generally no longer to mention it as a metaphor each and every time, but since everybody that identifies as a Christian, has an infinite amount of answers, which I’m sure they all think is the right one, it’s important to establish what they accept or don’t as literal or not. I think today over 50,000 different Protestant sects of Christianity alone, and as individuals, they vary considerable as well. So lest you think atheists only want to address the literalists, don’t think you are not getting a chance to explain your version.
So in a nutshell, it sounds like you’re treating it all pretty much as non-historical persons along with non-historical events, with it falling in the realm of literature and mythology, but making the exception for Jesus. Why? What did it for you and convinced you the resurrection was an actual historical event?
And although it’s possible there may have been some kind of a historical Jesus, what is your take on his exorcisms, and other supernatural stories? Are those the parts that helped convince you he was resurrected? Or, other than the resurrection, perhaps this too is just more metaphor and allegory. If so, just trying to understand how a liberal Christian still clings to this aspect.
You seem to be somewhat unclear on a few religious aspects. What specific thing turned you away from atheism?
In what way is it a bomb?
Nobody knows what happened with regards to the fall.
It’s all supposition.
My supposition is that I believe in total depravity, I also don’t think that animals have such a thing. Given I believe we evolved from ‘lower’ life forms, at some point there must have been a transition from animal to man (so to speak) which is presumably the same point we fell. That’s about as far as I’ve taken it as it’s not a subject I give much thought to.
I’ve not read anywhere near enough about the fall to have formed a properly cohesive opinion about it (as you can tell by previous posts).
We can’t all be like Thomas of Aquinas and have treatises on everything theological. Barth didn’t finish his Church Dogmatics, and it looks like I won’t finish my half arsed thoughts on the fall.
I’m not quite sure how my saying Genesis is an allegory spiralled into this…
I’m unclear exactlyhow we fell, not quite sure why that should make me an atheist though.
What I could do is ask the two ministers I know what they think and get two different answers.
Not sure if that’ll help because I don’t see the fall as being a key piece of dogma so I’m at liberty to agree with one of them or ignore them both.
As I’ve said before, there are a great number of denominations for a reason.