That Christians have multiple interpretations of the Bible is my entire point. You said that the Bible can only be interpreted in one way, and that’s incredibly wrong.
My whole effort in this entire thread has been to lay out a very brief and superficial survey of the incredible diversity of Christian thought. Some people see heaven one way, and others see it very differently. Aquinas says one thing and Calvin says another, and Oral Roberts says something completely different.
Even the principle that “The Bible is the only source of truth” is not accepted by all Christians. You tried to make out that it is definitional – you said it comes from the definition of religion – but that’s nonsense. The definition of religion has to go a long, long way beyond just the Bible.
How do you get 6 different, equally correct, equally incorrect version of Deuteronomy 21:18-21? It would seem to me only one correct version exists. Moses, would insist, there is only one.
Who are you to say you know better than Moses what Moses said when he said it?
Yes, but which is the ---- correct — version? What Moses had to say about unruly children or what Tom, Dick, or Harry has to say about what Moses said? (My question was rhetorical).
[SIZE=“1”]Deuteronomy 21:18-21
“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.[/SIZE]
It’s an obscure passage that doesn’t interest me, Only atheists obsess over things like that. I doubt if most Christians have even heard of it. I doubt you’ll find any that believe in it.
And it has nothing to do with the concept of Heaven.
Not if it is the same god who who wants you to stone people to death for being drunk and unruly. Some people, most decent people, would call that a bad example of character, and not want to spend eternity worshiping such a deity.
Fundamentalist biblical literalism is a phenomenon of modernity, as of course is “new atheism”. So they have more in common than either of them would probably care to admit.
And one thing they have in common is an instinctive assumption that strict literalism is the “correct” way to read any text, or that any text with any claim to importance must be written in a literalist genre rather than any other genre.
Yes but lots of christians take the concept of hell literally. Stoning unruly people to death… condemning unbelievers to eternal torture… both are examples of a brutal sadistic god.
I find it hard to believe that a pioneer on the plains of Oklahoma in the 1840’s, with a 3rd grade education, is going to think that the story of the Garden of Eden, or Noah’s Ark, or Christ walking on water or Christ being resurrected from the dead… that they would view any of these stories in any other capacity than “literal”.
The 1840s are very much in the modern era, Robert.
A lot of believers took the stories as factual in the absence of any better evidence, but were happy to acknowledge better evidence. For example, at first glance the world appears to be flat, and there are biblical texts which treat is a flat, and readers probably took this to be accurate. But once investigation showed that the world is round, that view was accepted, and we have no record of any significant number of Christian believers refusing to accept that view on the basis that it was contradicted by the bible. Augustine, in fact, points out the stupidity of such a stance.
It’s only in the modern era (by which I mean from the sixteenth century onwards) that we have conflicts of this kind, and I suggest that’s because believers start to ead biblical texts with a literalist mindset than they didn’t have in the past. We should note that Ussher’s famous calculation, fixing the creation of the world in 4004 BC, dates from this period. he arrived at this date by applying modern techniques of scholarship and textual interpretation to ancient texts. Much before this time, nobody seems to have thought that this would be a particularly useful or interesting exercise, partly because they didn’t havemodern techniques of scholarship and textual interpretation.
As it happens, unbelievers also read biblical texts with a literalist mindset than they didn’t have in the past; the person who says that the world must have been created in seven days because Genesis says so, and the person who says that Genesis must be dismissed because it says that the world was created in seven days are both employing the same literalist reading of Genesis. They both assume that if it can’t be read as dispassionate journalism, it can’t have any value.
You are trying to put the Holy Spirit in a GPS box. It’s more like a father trying to explain things to a 4 year old. The 4 year old really has no idea why the father is telling him things and sometimes really doesn’t even get what is trying to be explained and, at many times, will ignore it as a result.
But we are flawed and unable to fully comprehend everything. We can be gently guided, but sometimes we won’t listen to the small still voice. (though to be fully honest, I believe most of what we deem our ‘conscious’ is simply the Holy Spirit speaking).
Or put it this way, Jesus’s parables can sometimes be very difficult to fully figure out. But the point is to try to figure out the deeper truths through wrestling with those stories and try to live by what Jesus taught. Jesus didn’t give a list of “do this” and neither would the Holy Spirit.
I was under the impression that Christianity, from 500AD to 1500AD would be something that most of us would not recognize. For the most part the bible would be more or less the same, for the people that knew how to read, but common ideas of Salvation, Charity, Purity, The Trinity, Tithing, The Devil, Sin, etc, pretty much anything that could have a “philosophical as well as religious” explanation would be very different from what we have in 2015 or had in 1985.
I could be wrong. That is the impression I have. But not from study of the history of religion, as details as a side issue I picked up in my interest in Celtic History and the history of the Vikings and the Anglo Saxons.
So, I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t see much use at all comparing religion in 2015 or 1985 to religion in England or Germany in 1208 AD… I was under the impression they were so different as to be similar in name only…