Do not think that the Bible is divinely inspired at all. Just man’s feeble and errant attempt to convey through oral tradition and eventually put down on paper supernatural events that happened 2000 years ago.
Why did God choose not to get personally involved in the creation of the Bible? Haven’t a clue. Ask Him. —But He didn’t.
The Old Testament is a fairy tale. The NT has some truth in it but have to pick and choose what that is. Who gets to pick and choose? -------------- Me.
badchad, you have little to no support here for your harassment of Mangetout, from either his co-religionists or your fellow non-believers.
Fighting ignorance does not mean badgering inoffensive religious believers into a no-win situation. If he answers your questions, you get to say “GOTCHA!”, if he doesn’t answer them, you get to say “COWARD!”
Whereas the actual reasonable people watching this pathetic attempt at bullbaiting are just shaking their heads and calling you a moron. Sorry, not the Pit…substitute “thinking how pathetic you are” for “calling you a moron”.
While I do agree with you, badchad, on the basic principles of the Bible being just a collection of moralistic fables and stories, I cannot see that the style of debate you’ve chosen is at all productive.
One cannot have religion without a huge dose of faith. Faith, as classically defined, is the belief in something that cannot be proven true or false.
Unfortunately, the Bible is made up almost entirely of stories that cannot be confirmed. You know it, he knows it, and so does everybody else.
Berating him because he cannot prove the unprovable is not the way to engage in intelligent debate on this kind of subject.
how about you explain your answers to the questions you raised in this thread way back when?
I’ll quote your questions (the first 2 anyway) with your objection now:
Could you explain this further? As I read it, it seems that you are just making a statement that don’t like the questions mentioned for various reasons. However, I don’t see it as an answer to those questions or an explanation as to why they aren’t good questions. Also I don’t see how accepting a young earth serves the wishful thinking of man remotely to the extent that belief in immortality does and that accepting the literality of the former only strengthens the claim to the latter. Ergo you and the fundamentalists have the same bias for wishful thinking about the same stuff. It just seems that you skip some steps in where you stop applying a rational argument and let faith take over.
My questions are legit. I started by asking them nicely, twice, and only got perturbed when you ignored them. The two big things that set me off into my “bad” mode is when people give what I think are evasive answers to good questions or ignore those good questions giving the pretense that they have good answers. Be straight forward with me and I’ll do the same for you.
My first question would be; given all that errancy what makes you think that said supernatural events ever happened at all? My second would be; why do you believe in the supernatural events told in the bible and not other ancient texts (I’m assuming you don’t believe in Zeus et all, of the Iliad fame)?
Here I ask why you don’t accept any of the OT but do accept any of the NT? First I would be surprised if everything in the OT was made up and even more surprised if any of the NT miracles weren’t made up. I can accept that you pick and choose, therefore my last question would be do you have a rational basis to do so, especially with regards to the supernatural stuff?
If I had ample support for my cause I wouldn’t post at all. The only reason I challenge the non-fundamentalists is that my voice is not superfluous on that topic. Second, since when do I need support? Third, I’m only trying to debate him on a debate forum, it’s not like I’m banging garbage cans outside his house when he tries to sleep, so why do you call what I am doing harassment?
Now you’re the one assuming he doesn’t have any good answers for his questions. There is a possibility (though I think it remote) that he will have a genuine reasonable answer to which I can’t say “GOTCHA.”
I don’t think I can fully agree with that. While admitting that proving something absolutely true of false is hard to do (i.e. maybe god did create the world 6000 years ago with old looking fossils already in place to fool those with little faith) I think there is pretty strong evidence against god of the bible being both omnipotent and omni benevolent (cite the Christian problem of evil). Taking these things into account I would define faith as the belief in things which at least on outward appearances seem unlikely.
That is true and the bible is also made up of stories which seemingly have been confirmed to be false, i.e. a global flood.
This is where I think you misunderstand my argument. I’m not asking him to prove the unprovable. My argument is that Mangetout believes in claims that seem unlikely based to a large degree on “a combination of wishful thinking, trust, dependence and fear” which is identical to what he criticizes young earth creationists of using rather than rational judgment. This I think makes his stance somewhat hypocritical, but that’s me, and I am giving him his chance to better explain why it isn’t.
Thank you for this response; It seems that perhaps I am unfairly holding (my (no doubt selective) perception of) your past history against you and that this has caused me to stray beyond the edge of reasonable; If we really can keep things simple, civil and reasonable I’ll be happy to have dialogue.
I’m at work right now, but I’ll try to get back this evening to pick it up.
Hey, c’mon guys. When you get right down to it, “religion” and “faith” are all about whatever gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. You can argue logic all you want, but as disponibilite so eloquently illustrated with his/her post, faith is most often not just belief in the absence of proof, but belief in spite of any proof or logical argument to the contrary.
Some people feel warm and fuzzy inside with the thought that the Bible is the literal word of God and that God would never allow his words to become corrupted. Other people feel warm and fuzzy inside with the thought that the entire Bible can be disregarded except for the part which says people should love God and love their neighbors. And other people feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing that they are perfectly capable of being good and moral people without having to abandon logic and believe that any part of the Bible was divinely inspired.
Warm and fuzzies are impervious to reason. When somebody claims to justify their “cherry picking” of the Bible based on a detailed analysis of the text, knowledge of the historical context, etc., I am the first (well, maybe the second) to cry “BULLSHIT!” If somebody is honest enough to admit that they believe what they believe because it makes them feel good, however, I say live and let live. If it makes you feel good to cherry pick and you’re not inflicting your beliefs on others, it’s no skin off my nose.
I admit freely that what I do believe about Christianity is solely faith based----reason has nothing to do with it.
Here is what I do believe by faith-------Jesus was God come down to Earth in human form–for what reason I am not absolutely sure, but probably to demonstrate personally that an afterlife does exist and to give tips on how to live this temporal life.
The rest of it—original sin, the trinity, etc etc is for me quite debateable–I take none of that on faith. Argue a position to your heart’s content, make a good enough rational case and I probably will agree with you. But I will still remain an unshakeably believing Christian.
I don’t think it’s right to claim that the “literalist” interpretation offered by Orthodox Jewery is “older” than any other primitivist movements.
Let me submit that the origin of religious literalism is a direct response to the way scientific authority developed in the 19th Century. A direct correlation between a materialistic attack on religion and an “anti-modernist” backlash within the realms of fundamentalist religion is still being played out. The ironic thing is the whole tenor of the discourse has changed. For better or worse, metaphor has lost and “literalism” on both sides of the debate has won. This is, unfortunately, to the detriment of the religious side of the debate because their texts are written without the modernist “literal” intent ascribed to them by modern Orthodox Jews, Fundamentalist Christians, etc. One need only look deeply into the history of human story-telling to understand the basic truth that “literalism” is a modern interpretation of the religious scriptures.
So much for Faith. The sun will not “come up” tomorrow and never has. Rather, the earth will continue to turn on its axis as it has for billions of years. I think this illustrates a salient point in that Faith has nothing to do with what is True, and everything to do with what a person finds convenient or necessary to believe.
I was hoping we could start by your providing answers to the fundamentalist questions you posted above or providing a solid rationale as to why they are not good questions. Again if you feel you are not up to this just say so.
However since you ask basically I think that believing in any of the Christian supernatural claims or miracles (not coincidence miracles that happen every day but genuine according to Hoyle breaking the laws of physics kind of miracles, i.e. Jesus rising from the dead or walking on water), are unreasonable unless you have very strong evidence to the contrary. It’s the whole outstanding claims requiring outstanding evidence thing.
Along the same lines the claim that this character Jesus was really god and the creator/savior of the universe. I think this is especially unreasonable thing to believe considering all we know about him was written in a book of which (I think) you and I don’t think should be taken at face value.
Also I think it logically impossible to believe in an omnipotent and omni benevolent god who created this world. You know, the “Christian problem of evil.”
These latter things are topics I have discussed at length before and I am more than willing to do so again with you here. However, the first questions that you raised and I quoted earlier regarding the fundamentalist positions were (I thought) worded really well and I would like to see you address them first as I think those questions/arguments from the fundamentalist perspective are quite strong.
My argument is not with you then. Rather with those who think that their Christian beliefs are based on reason. Still I wish you would rethink you methods for determining reality as it is exactly this kind of thinking (or lack there of) that allows people to crash airplanes in to buildings and stuff like that makes the world a lesser place for all.
In contrast to your enlightened approach to the world that allows leaders to starve millions of people to death to encourge other people to march boldly into the future of rational enlightenment?
I can think of several examples of faith (as I defined above) being consistently inferior to reason (while the opposite I can’t think of any), and they aren’t all religious in nature. I think I know what you getting at above, however I can’t say how reasonable the unnamed leaders you are talking about were when laying out their plans, in hindsight it seems they weren’t very reasonable but then maybe you had to be there. Still, if you want to start a new thread debating the merits of reason vs. faith in areas which can be objectively measured I’ll be glad to join you.
