I heard you the first time, and I’m not insulting you: to be ignorant of Jesus’s summary of the law despite having read the New Testament many times is on a par with not knowing that he was supposedly born in a stable. You can stop with the scare-quotes, I think, in due deference to the authorities I’ve cited, whose opinions can perhaps be considered as meritorious as yours.
“I’ve read Einstein’s Theory of Relativity over and over again! What’s this so-called ‘matter-energy equivalence’ you keep going on about?”
Surely you must agree that’s extreme nitpickery if not worse. As I wrote in my first post: “Polls of Christian believers in the U.S. have found that a shockingly high percentage of them are ignorant the major aspects of their own belief system, including, for example, in their knowledge of the Bible. Only a minority of Christians could name the four evangelists / names of the four Gospels when asked…”
Please don’t tell me I have to repeat “in the U.S.” each and every time!
You are insulting me! And you are grotesquely over-stating the biblical literacy of the vast majority of American Christians, as the polls I’ve cited demonstrate! Answer that point, please.
And you are also grotesquely over-stating your case even when you unjustifiably assert that “the law” and the “Ten Commandments” are one and the same thing!
You’re hyping the hell out of your very weak arguments to deny the larger fact that most American Christians are ignorant of most of their beliefs and of the Bible. And that most American Christians are significantly more ignorant in general than most American atheists and freethinkers, at the very least by inferring this from the well-documented research that shows that religiosity is inversely proportional to education level.
First off, why would a person “of the book” who doesn’t believe in the writting of the New Testament be expected to know them? :rolleyes: So kindly stop wasting our time with these stupid little tidbits of information that are not able to contradict what we’ve previously said.
Internet links are NOT reliable references. I’d like to see the actual study to see if it can even be considered valid, and if it is, I will accept it as an argument. I can easily ask my coworker behind me (who is Christian) to tell me who Islam’s last prophet was and when/if he can’t answer I can proclaim that according to my study, 100% of Canadians don’t know.
Why not? The disparity between the ten commandments as written and elaborated on throughout the Pentateuch, and Jesus’ subsequent reimagining of those commandments can easily be dismissed as just one example of the many, many contradictions pervading the Good Book.
As I said earlier, Yahweh gives his people a great many incentives to obey the ten commandments, but love is definitely not among them. Fear of death, damnation, plague, pestilence, cursing, and beatings certainly, but not love. So from whence does Jesus get this idea that the ten commandments can be accurately summarised as (paraphrasing) “Love God and love thy neighbour?” He certainly didn’t get it from Exodus, where the emphasis is placed very much on fearing God and the punishments he allows thy neighbour to inflict. Jesus’ alleged “clarification” of the commandments strikes me as being a wholesale revision of their text and outright repudiation of the spirit behind them.
This is odd because Deuteronomy 4: 2 seems to rule out any such revisions, saying “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you”. It is quite clear that Jesus’ words in Mark 12: 30 diminish the intimidating force behind the original commandments. They also insinuate, without the slightest scriptural substantiation, that something called ‘love’ (a concept apparently alien to Yahweh) should be the main incentive to obey these commandments.
Moreover, Jesus himself said in Matthew 5: 18 that “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” The specific insistence on maintaining every last “jot” and “tittle” of the law seems to preclude even the slightest of textual revisions.
In summary, Christians who believe that Jesus’ rather fanciful summation of the ten commandments trumps the original commandments are faced with at least two problems.
Jesus’ summation of the ten commandments in Mark 12: 30 contradicts his own stated desire to uphold every “jot and tittle” of the law.
Jesus’ right to make such summations was pre-emptively denied him in Deuteronomy 4: 2. If Jesus truly was God, then his statement in Mark 12: 30 would constitute a truly remarkable event; that of an Omnimax deity admitting he made a mistake. Clearly, this observation poses further trouble for other areas of Christian belief.
As an atheist, I am thankfully free of the burden of untangling the vast Gordian knot of contradictions which constitute Christian dogma. It’s all just so much nonsense to me, and the sooner our species outgrows it the better. In conclusion I would simply observe that, while Jesus’ version of the ten commandments might sit better with modern liberal values, they are not a fair representation of what went before him. Consequently, I don’t think that a fondness for Mark 12: 30 is an adequate substitute for knowledge of Exodus 12: 1-18.
You’ve cited NOTHING to prove this. You’ve cited something that said American adults. Then you go on to say that most Americans are Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and now you’re saying that because they believe in a God, they must be Christian.
I’m sorry, but I don’t know why you’re calling others ignorant.
Sigh. You keep demonstrating the ignorance of believers, over and over again. Do you realize what a poor example you are for your cause?
My primary argument is that believers (at least those in the U.S.) are more ignorant than their atheistic peers, and biblical illiteracy is one of the examples I used, and I specifically discussed the widespread ignorance of the Ten Commandments. All believers “of the book” hold as sacred the text of the Ten Commandments, not just Christians! They are ostensibly the most important of God’s word, but few know them!
Then why did you ask for them???
Then go to the library and stop wasting our time with your ignorance!
What you’re doing is moving the discussion off toward details of the rights and wrongs of theology and away from where it started, which was ‘what is it that most Christians consider most important’. Whether or not this or that aspect of theology is right or wrong, or contradictory or logical, or whatever, is an entirely separate topic to the matter at hand.
What a bunch of shit. Did you not read my first post? My first post that I just quoted to you? Where I made it clear that I was speaking of Christians in the U.S. by actually writing “Christians in the U.S.”?
If it’s not ridiculous nitpickery, it must be intellectual dishonesty.
If you can’t take it, don’t deal it out. But am I truly insulting you when I draw attention to how little you seem to have absorbed from your multiple readings of the New Testament? Or am I accurately describing the execrable level of your knowledge? - because if it’s fair, it can hardly be called insulting.
I’ve not even touched upon that point - other than to wonder what in the world they preach and teach in those churches. But it seems they have been no guiltier than you, at any rate.
You’ll wear that exclamation point key out if you’re not careful. “The Law” in Biblical terms - the Law to which Jesus referred - would include the Commandments, not be a synonym for it. But since the Commandments are a subset of the Law, that which summarises the Law also summarises the Commandments, not so?
I’m sorry to hear that most American Christians are ignorant of most of their beliefs and of the Bible, but if your own twenty-year churchgoing and extensive Bible study failed to acquaint you with the fact that Jesus said something beginning “Hear, O Israel…” and ending “…on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets”, then how can you condemn your less-intelligent countrymen?
From which you can deduce a number of things, supposing the research to be valid; including, I suppose, that atheism and freethinking has proportionately little appeal among the less intellecual. What you couldn’t conclude, of course, would be that if you compare equally gifted Christians and atheists, you find the former to be more ignorant than the latter.
Where do you think iron comes from? I was under the impression it was produced in stars, the last element in the chain when the fuel in the star had been fused into ever heavier elements leading up to a supernova. The exploded star(s) form the raw material, floating in space, from which planets accrete. So any iron in a planet did indeed come from space.
Well, yes, but so did everything else. That iron is mentioned as coming from space sounds like it’s meant to be a distinction from everything else - perhaps meaning that the assertion is ‘iron came from space after the planet was formed’ or some such.