Hijack:
I :Dlove:D reading your posts, badchad, but using the quote thingy would make it a lot easier to read.
Keep on postin 
end hijack:
:eek: 666, must post now, sorry 
When I do use it, I always use it with other versions. It makes the meaning very simple, and sometimes makes it easier to explain things to other people.
I think the only reason people do not like it, is because it’s not a deep translation. People expect to hear thee and thou.
What parts, in particular, do you think are misleading? Just curious.
Once a belief is known to be a fact it ceases to be a belief. A belief, by definition, is not known to be a fact. Maybe this is just a semantic distinction but I think it’s a reasonable one.
Just out of curiosity, can you name a religious belief that is known to be a fact?
I agree, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t still do it. I know you’ve participated in evolution threads so you know that Intelligent Design has believers despite the fact that no intervention can be shown. Adherents simply regress to another level of “Goddidit.” You can say that (correctly) that intervention cannot be distinguished from non-intervention but that does not equal falsification because there has been no specific prediction which is subject to a test. Fasification requires predictions. If a religious belief (such as ID) does not make a testable prediction it cannot be falsified.
I think we’re both looking through different ends of the same lens, here. My original point was that a religious belief that Jesus was a Martian is no more or less legitimate on its face than a belief that Jesus was the son of YHWH. It’s all just assertion. I think both assertions are equally absurd. I’m not arguing that a case can be made for Jesus being an alien, I’m saying that NO case can be made (from a scientific standpoint) for either assertion so a debate about which assertion is more legitimate is like debating over the color of Darth Vader’s underwear. Both sides are starting with unproven assertions and neither side can ever “win” such a debate because there are no agreed upon predicates.
Why?
How?
I hope neither party named will find it offensive that I found it wryly amusing that Jersey’s 666th post was one expressing aggreement with and appreication of badchad!
Diogenes the Cynic:
Alright let me try out this quote thingy.
I accidentally submitted my last post before I had a chance to edit so it got a little screwed up.
While I will agree that just about everything in the bible is contradicted somewhere, the praise god or else message is frequent and long running. I suppose an objective measure would be to take a ratio of praise god or else verses vs. the contrary and compare it to any other claim to a central message of the bible and see what comes out on top. It would be a lot of work but I bet my claim would be a run away winner.
Sorry, I misread you. I think I posted one response to many before getting some sleep last night.
While I will agree that he would allegedly heal folks on Saturday, he did endorse the old law, and made mention of a few rules himself. Also his compassion rings hollow as according to him, both you and I have it coming for an eternity, for the grave crime of skepticism.
I think the 99% confidence on the 25% of stuff is awful high considering it was a good number of years before even Mark is said to have been written down. That just leaves a lot of time for the imagination to overcome wrote memorization.
In reply to TVAA
I think this goes back to my original beef. As an atheist I will agree that it is equally likely that Jesus was a Martian as he was the son of god. However, the claim that either is an equally valid “interpretation” of the bible is false if we use any kind of logic at all. The bible clearly says that Jesus was the son of god, while it makes no mention of the planet Mars. To come up with the latter one is not interpreting or taking anything from the bible but rather making stuff up. The same goes for the Episcopalians allowing divorce for reasons other than fornicating. While you may have been parroting the Episcopalian stance (which I mistook as your own views) I still maintain that their lackadaisical views on divorce did not come from any interpretation of the bible (much like your Martian example) but came from somewhere else. As such I don’t agree with the claim that the Episcopalians views on divorce is anywhere close to being equally valid compared to the claim made by JerseyDiamond, if we are using the bible or more specifically the instructions of Jesus as our starting point.
Jesus never espoused any notion that belief had anything to do with going to Heaven…and he didn’t believe in Hell either, the concept of eternal Hell did not exist in first century Judaism (or now, for that matter). Hell got into Christianity by way of the gentiles, not through Jesus and not through any Jewish tradition. I know we’ve been over this before (Jesus talked about Gehenna, not Hell) but I think it bears repeating. The only way Jesus could have known about Hell was if he had some kind of supernatural vision of the future and I know you don’t believe in that. Really, if you’re going to make that argument to a non-believer you’re making an argument for the supernatural. Is that what you really want to do?
Q was probably written well before Mark, but really, this is like Mark Twain’s line about Homer. There is an extant store of sayings and parables, some of which are independently sourced, that show the same “voice” as far as rhetorical style, ethical themes, vocabulary, theology, etc. This core of sayings can be distinguished from other parts of the gospels they are embedded in (and computers can be used to separate literary text into the different voices or styles which compose it). We can, with some degree of certainty (if one is not bound by any religious preconceptions) locate which parts were the earliest and which parts were embellishments by a later author. With Q, for instance, we can clearly see that Matthew and Luke both used the same source for a lot of the sayings, but they used them in different orders and sometimes used them to make different points.
Excavating Q isn’t guesswork. You find all the stuff that’s word for word the same in Matthew and Luke (and differs from the narrative styles of both Matthew and Luke) and you have Q. There are some other sayings in Luke that have an unknown source but I’ll just stick with Q right now. Q contains the beatitudes and some other famous stuff like the Lord’s Prayer. It’s all one voice, one style, one person. It’s not a committee, not a collection of disparate sayings. This stuff pretty clearly stems from one person. The tradition is obviously that it was said by Yeshua, an itinerant teacher from Galilee in the first half of the first century. Now that’s fine with me. We have nothing better to go on so I’ll call them the sayings of Yeshua. If it wasn’t really Yeshua, then (to paraphrase Twain) it was somebody else of the same name. Somebody said that stuff, and it was the same somebody and it was a different somebody than the authors of the gospels. We can usually tell, or make a damn good guess, as to when a gospel writer is putting his own words into the mouth of Jesus. If it matches Luke’s literary style and does not com from Q, it’s probably Luke talking and not Jesus. If an author has Jesus making reference to the destruction of the temple forty years before it happened then obviously Jesus couldn’t have said it.
There is plenty of room for ambiguity and argument in some cases but in other cases it’s a no brainer. Just because you don’t believe in the historical truth or religious tradition of a document doesn’t mean it can’t be subjected to an empirical analysis which might extract some authentic historical kernels. It really isn’t as arbitrary or impossible as you seem to think.
So let me put this all a different way: I am 99% sure that some of the sayings in the gospel were said by a single person who was not one of the authors of the gospels. How does that sound?
We might as well call that person Jesus, what the hell. It’s no more unreasonable than calling Homer Homer or calling Aesop Aesop.
You’re making an assumption that both denominations share some common belief that the Bible is the infallible word of God and that it needs no further elicidation. That is not the case. It doesn’t matter what the Bible seems to “plainly say” if you’re reading it without the guidance of the Holy Spirit (in the case of the Episcopals) or to make a case for my Martian interpretation let’s say the Bible is actually written in a special code that only certain chosen prophets can understand. I am one of those prophets and I have been gifted by the Invisible Pink Unicorn with the ability to read and understand the true words of the Scripture not the phony stuff written to fool the hoi polloi. I am now here to tell you that the Bible says quite clearly that Jesus was a Martian from Mars.
I know what you and JerseyDiamond think the Bible says but you’re reading it wrong. You don’t have the vision to see the true text.
Is my scenario any more irrational than Jersey’s assertions? I may be full of shit but can you prove I’m full of shit?
** So I don’t believe that the Earth orbits the Sun?
This is a highly unusual interpretation of “belief”.
To be honest, there aren’t many, but there are a few. The location of the supposed Tomb of the Theotokos, for example.
** Yes. Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. That doesn’t mean that their perspective is a valid one.
** The claim is “A, not B or C”. If it can be shown that A cannot be distinguished from B or C by any means, the claim has been falsified. A divine interevention that cannot be distinguished in any way from divine non-intervention is not a divine intervention.
Fair enough. I would be a lot more careful about the way you phrase things – I understand what you meant, but I also know what you said, and it’s dangerous for the one to not match the other.
You know the Earth orbits the Sun. You’re not taking it on faith. It’s not a religious belief.
How is that a religious belief?
It’s not any less valid than any other religious belief, or maybe I should say it’s no less valid than any other supernatural assertion.
It doesn’t have to be distinguished it only has to be asserted. The assertion makes no particular prediction and thus can’t be falsified by simple lack of observation. New assertions can always be invented to explain away the seeming lack of distinction. That’s why ID is not a scientific theory. It makes no testable predictions.
What I said matched what I meant. I said that all religious beliefs are equally valid and they are.
Can you can give an example of a religious assertion which you think is valid? Then can you show me how that assertion may be distinguished from an invalid assertion?
Alright, TVAA, I’m going to play the other side of the fence for a change, because this topic is of great interest to me.
A=God exists, and intervenes
B=God exists, but does not intervene
C=God does not exist
I prayed for rain on Friday night. It rained on Saturday. Obviously, God intervened.
Please show that “A cannot be distiguished from B or C by any means”. In other words, please falsify “A” based on your method quoted above.
** This is elementary logic. The argument
If A, then B.
B.
Therefore, A.
is invalid.
Intervenes how? That’s the key here – the claim that an intervention occurs but has no specific properties is identical to the claim that no intervention occurs. That takes care of A and B.
Exists how? If God has no effect on the universe, it makes no difference whether He “exists” or not – technically, existence is interacting. Without a specific nature of existence, B and C cannot be distinguished.
I think she was anticipating your claiming she shouldn’t post without his say-so.
And i am unmarried, so I can say anything I want.!
vanilla, another believer in the pre-trib rapture.
Ah, but we’re talking religious belief, not logic. You attempted to show that “God did it” can be falsified. I’m asking you to do so.
I assert that I prayed for rain. I assert that it rained. I assert that “God did it”. Please falsify.
He made it rain
Who here, other than you, has made the claim that “intervention occurs but has no specific properties”?
I agree. Unfortunately, you’ve just falsified both B and C, by your own method, leaving only A – God exists, and intervenes.
** I’ve already done so – your conclusion is invalid.
** How do you distinguish between the times when God makes it rain and the times He doesn’t? The response “God did it” is not adequate.
Without such a distinction, there’s no difference, and your claim is without merit.
IDers who maintain that their theory is not falsifiable.
But A isn’t left. Without settling on a way in which God can be said to exist and/or intervene, A, B, and C are not distinguishable.
Everyone knows Cecil is in control of the weather!
You know, TVAA, some of your posts remind me of catching a catfish when you’re actually fishing for bass. You don’t really want it, and it’s slippery and intentionally hard to grasp. Usually, you just cut the line, kick it back into the water, and forget about.
Unfortunately, I started this particular discussion, so I can’t do that.
No, you haven’t – no, it isn’t. Two can play that game.
When I pray for it, it’s an intervention – when I don’t, it’s not. (Remember, logic has nothing to do with religious belief)
But that’s exactly my assertion, and that’s exactly what you said you can be falsified.
Yes, it is. Go look. You’ve falsified B and C with your method, but haven’t been able to falsify A.
I just told you how he intervened. I prayed, he made it rain.
Are we having fun yet?
** And that’s the only difference?
Then you’re the one causing the rain, not God. (And if it has nothing to do with logic, it’s invalid by definition.)
Yes I have, and by the same methods as B and C. Without there being ways in which God can be said to exist and intervene, the claim is invalid.
No, you’ve told me what the intervention was. How did God accomplish the intervention?
Exactly! That’s why ID is unfalsifiable.
It’s scientists who say that ID is unfalsifiable, not IDers. The fact that it’s unfalsifiable is what makes it worthless as a theory. You seem to have the impression (correct me if I’m wrong) that if a hypothesis is unfalsiable then that means it retains some sort of default presumption of validity that must be debunked. It’s just the opposite. Falsifiablility is what gives a hypothesis credibility. A testable prediction is what separates a legitmate hypothesis or theory from bullshit speculation and assertion.
Which is precisely why it’s a false model of the world – it can’t be a model of the world.
** Bingo! The IDers reject the idea that their pet theory can be disproven by accepting everything, and that makes it impossible to derive any conclusions from it.
I don’t have this impression, and I’m not sure why you think I have it. There are plenty of IDers who would agree with that idea, though – if there’s no way, even in theory, for ID to be proven wrong, it must be right! They don’t understand that there is no truth without falsehood – if the theory doesn’t exclude anything, it doesn’t include anything either. If it can’t be wrong, it can’t be right either.
Clearly the One Truly Theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything cannot be disproven, but for a different reason – the evidence that would disprove it cannot arise.