You are arguing with Christians and atheists alike, dictating what a “true Christian” believes. You have been attacking both the current iteration of Christianity and the historical incarnations.
Your efforts are…odd, to say the least.
Q: What do you call a book with a talking donkey (that is supposed to really talk)
A: Odd
It comes down to faith.
What possible purpose can be served by denying someone’s faith?
Stopping the spread of religion.
Seriously, that is my answer. I’m not trying to be sarcastic or hyperbolic or anything like that. We try to stop the spread of sexism and xenophobia. I’m not saying religion is in the exact same category as sexism and xenophobia. But it does separate people, create divisions, hinder science (not so much in 2015), it makes people insensitive to suffering (everything is OK, God is in control, wait until we get to heaven, etc), it affects public policy, and, raising kids to believe in hell and eternal torture is, I feel, a form of child abuse.
I’m not saying all religious people are like that. But a climate of religiosity in general makes it easier for people who do espouse such problematic ideas, such a climate makes it easier for their ideas to linger and propagate.
Q: What do you call a person who reads a text dealing with a talking donkey, and assumes that the only possible or legitimate reading of the text is that the donkey is supposed tor really talk?
A: Very odd indeed.
When you do so from a position of ignorance, you’re not going to accomplish anything. If you want to stop religion (and good luck with that!), you need to actually take the time to learn about it, rather than just spouting off pre-conceived notions.
I just finished Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, an excellent history of Christianity that makes this abundantly clear. From Ebionites to the Marcionites, from the Gnostics to the Dyophysites to the Orthodox to the Catholics, Reformed, Lutherans, Socinians, Anabaptists, Pentecostals, Wesleyans and Hesychast, the tree of Christianity has been branching since the very beginning. There are literally hundreds of different interpretations of the preacher from Galilee and the religion he inspired.
As to the Biblical literalism, I’ll quote MacCulloch:
[QUOTE=Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years]
Fundamentalism is a distinctively Protestant idea, because it centres on the Reformation way of reading the Bible. Reformation Protestantism turned its back on most of the ancient symbolic, poetic or allegorical ways of looking at the biblical text, and read it in a literal way.
[/QUOTE]
Literalism of the sort that Robert163 scoffs at goes back about five centuries at most, and only really became a fundamental aspect of Evangelical theology in the 1870s.
Well, religion is less popular than it used to be, so we are making some progress.
Call me ignorant if you want… but I do in fact know a lot about the bible… the talking snake… the talking donkey… the fact that the Israelites did not want a king but eventually wound up with Saul… the race of giants/angels… Jewish law coming from Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy… the prophets imploring Israel to return to Godly ways… the story of Caleb and Joshua… Moses not being eligible to enter the promised land… the magical powers of Elijah and Elisha…
Those are just a few random topics I thought up without pause and without having to look anything up. I could make a longer list for the NT, if you like.
Am I an expert on the bible? No. But you don’t need to be an expert to know that stories of talking snakes and talking donkeys and raining fire down from heaven are false, lies, made up stories… just like Mother Goose or Heracles or Thor. Or Spiderman.*
*Wait… at some point someone made up that story about the talking donkey. Just like Stan Lee did when he created the character of Peter Parker/Spider man.
Well, “lies” is a bit strong. Do you call nursery rhymes like Mother Goose “lies”? Novels like Pride and Prejudice? Do you really live in a world in which there are only two literary genres, viz, [journalistic historical reportage] and [every else, conveniently bracked as “falsehood” or “lies”]?
Yes, we know. It’s not a problem. Why would it be? I am genuinely puzzled as to why you would think this provides any basis for a powerful critique of religion.
Ok, look, let me say my comments are about religion in general… I have actually enjoyed talking to you on this thread and I find your comments to be articulate and well focused and that you make some good points.
The reason why I call them lies is I see no difference between the person who made up the story of the talking donkey and some late night TV preacher healing people in wheel chairs. They did it for money or prestige or power. I’m talking about the person who made up the story of the talking donkey.
Some people have said the talking donkey was intended as a metaphor at the time it was created and had the same intention whenever the story was repeated. While I will concede that this may have been possible, it seems more likely that sometime long long long ago, the equivalent of our late night TV preacher made up the story of the talking donkey… and added it to the body of magical stories that already existed.
I don’t see why you’d say “it seems more likely” that the story was made up with intent to deceive, as you describe. The story is obviously an artificial construct designed to call attention to a point. Even if we were to grant the possibility of an actually talking donkey, what the donkey is reported as saying is not what we would expect an actual talking donkey to say in the circumstance described. Hence, even if actual talking donkeys are possible, this doesn’t look like one.
To avoid seeing this all the reader would have to approach the story already committed to the fundamentalist literalist mindset that I have been accusing you of exemplifying. But there’s no evidence for this, and I can’t for the life of me think of any reason to assume it. And if the observation that this kind of mindset is a distinctively modern phenomenon is correct, it seems wildly unlikely that the original intended readership could have had it, or that the creator of the story could have expected them too.
OK, two points:
1- If you start taking away the things that are “obviously” scientifically impossible (I am paraphrasing you in my own words, not attacking your comment), or, obviously a simple literary device and nothing more… what is left? How do we judge the Resurrection under said criteria? I think you would agree with me this is a very important question.
2- Am I to really believe that in a very Archaic, non literate, pre scientific culture, that stories of talking snakes and talking donkeys and creating humans out of the rib of another human… or world wide floods… or raining fire from the sky… why would I believe that 4000 years ago those stories were not viewed as the literal truth?
Oh, in addition, the analogy I made to the late night TV preacher and healing people in wheelchairs for money, prestige or power… how is that any different that the origin of the story of the talking donkey?
Well, these are two different texts written at different times by different people for different audiences, and only much later bound between the same covers. So we can read them independently of one another and arrive at different conclusions about genre, intent, effect, readership, etc.
In each case we can read the text critically. The donkey text simply doesn’t read like something intended to be taken literally, for the reasons already pointed out. The fact that Balaam expresses no surprise at all when confronted with a talking donkey is a bit of a clue, really. As is the fact that the story itself doesn’t treat the talking donkey as remotely surprising.
The gospel accounts of the resurrection read quite differently - the forensic detail, the claims that are not made (no account of the resurrection itself, no claim that there was any actual witness to the moment of resurrection), the fact that the stories treat the resurrection as amazing - all give the impression of a text that the author wants you to take as factual narrative. Now, you might well decide not to take it in that way, on the basis of your experience suggesting to you that resurrection is simply impossible. But I don’t think you have assume that, because the gospel authors intended you to treat their text as factual, the donkey text author must have had the same intention
Why would you believe that they were? Did pre-literate, non-scientific people know less about donkeys than you do? I suspect they were probably more familiar with donkeys than most of us. is there some dictionary I have failed to consult in which “pre-literate” means “credulous” or “stupid”? I don’t see why their pre-literate status would prevent them even in the tiniest degree from noticing the highly artificial nature of this story.
For that matter, your literacy and scientific education doesn’s seem to have equipped you to notice the highly artificial nature of this story. So the assumption that literate and scientific people are better equipped to read texts critically is plainly not a universally reliable one. In fact, as already pointed out in this thread, the growth of fundamentalist literalist readings of scripture seems to be associated with growing literacy and growing scientific education.
Not to be slow-witted or anything, but how is it remotely the same? We don’t know the author of the donkey story, we have no reason to think that he created it for money or prestige or power, and even if we assume that he did create it for money or prestige or power, you haven’t suggested any reason at all for thinking that his actually benefiting from the story depended on anybody accepting it as factual. Even if we assume the base motives you impute for no reason whatsoever to the author, I don’t see how that helps your case that the story must have been intended to be taken literally.
But this is a thread about religious beliefs. Is this really the place to engage in cultural warfare?
The criterion that is left is faith. What do various people believe about the Resurrection? It’s a fascinating topic, even if you don’t believe in it. There’s tons to discuss.
This, too, is fascinating. No one knows exactly how literally ancient people viewed their religious stories. Did Hesiod and Homer believe in a literal Olympus with a literal Zeus? Or were they aware – given that they sat down with pen and ink and created stories about them! – that the stories were only fictional yarns?
Did Snorri Sturlsson believe in a literal Odin, or did he take it as metaphor?
Likely there is a blend, a fuzzy boundary, involving some literal belief, some metaphorical belief, and a lot of “not really thinking about it too hard,” especially in the rank and file of the faithful.
I know a young woman who believes in the Bible…except she doesn’t believe in the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt. She believes that a good and loving God wouldn’t have committed that kind of mass murder. She thinks that the story is told wrongly in Exodus, and that what “really” happened was closer to the story of Abraham and Isaac. God threatened to kill all the first-born of Egypt, but didn’t actually do it.
She believes in the Bible. Except for parts that she doesn’t.
To say, “She isn’t really Christian” is beyond absurd: she most certainly is.
You’re way too hung up on an absolute dichotomy, in crystalline black and white, but human belief works, like human morality, in lots of shades of gray, if not actual 24 bit color.
No, you really don’t know a lot about it. You may have read the Bible. But your definition of who is and who isn’t a Christian leaves pretty much most Christians out. Do you really think you know more than people who have studied this for decades? By your logic, Catholics and Orthodox aren’t Christians. Do you really think you know more about Christianity than the largest and oldest sects of Christianity out there?
I’ll be blunt: nine years of Catholic school and three years at a Catholic college tells me you don’t know jack, kid. I believe I’ve suggested before you might want to see if you couldn’t get in touch with a Jesuit. They LOVE this kind of thing.
(Sola scriptura, the idea that Christianity is based on the Bible alone is not a universal tradition. You really, really should take a Biblical studies course, or a history of Christianity class if you’re interested in this.)
And…why does a modern, literate, enlightened, scientific society believe in UFO aliens, ghosts, dowsing, luck, or that the President was born in Kenya? You can’t just point at the ancients and say, “Look, how stupid.” We really haven’t come all that far in 7,000 years!
In order to try and conform with the written/unwritten rules of the board I started my own thread on this topic… if you chose to reply.
If you want, copy/paste to here: new thread