I was hoping that since W.J. Bryan himself was non-dogmatic about a Young or Old Earth view of Creationism that the college would also be. It took some digging in the catalog but I found they promote YEC. Darn.
I thought the Bible was supposed to be dictated by an all-knowing God - not made up by some humans.
If God is able to perform miracles (virgin birth, death, resurrection, ascension) like Skammer believes, surely he can perform the miracle of communicating ahead-of-its-life knowledge to some primitive people. God doesn’t even need to be completely omnipotent and omniscient to do that… just powerful and knowledgeable enough, like some aliens might be.
Well, I’m convinced.
There are a bunch.
Don’t have time to go into all of them, but a few that stand out on the tip of my brain are:
–Paul’s and James’ opposing views on salvation through faith or through “works”
–the contradictory sequences of events in the Gospels’ Resurrection narratives
–the idea of God being the source of evil
–Luke’s dating mistakes in his account of the Nativity
There are more, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head. It’s also important to note that although apologists certainly have “resolutions” and “harmonizing explanations” for these, I find these to be hopelessly overreaching and implausible.
Kanicbird, I’m not even going to dignify this with a response.
What you’re doing is precisely what most Christians do when they meet an ex-Christian: commit the “no true Scotsman” fallacy: “You must never have been a REAL Christian!”
Whatever.
Ummm, no. Have you ever actually READ WJB’s testimony at the Scopes trial? He was as hardcore a YECist as has ever lived.
I think part of the reason for the clinging to literalism is that this brand of Christian lives largely on the basis of fear. They seem utterly terrified at the thought of anything but black and white, clear answers* that reinforce a regressive social outlook that believes that everything would be OK if things were just the way they used to be.
Moreover, I think a lot of these folks are terrified by the issue kanicbird unintentionally brought up: since people who leave the fold are dismissed as never having really been saved, there is constant anxiety about whether you are really, truly saved, no matter how solid your subjective belief is, or how many times you’ve said the magic words. I think this drives people to both cling to the black/white morality and strenuously shut out any input that might lead them astray.
BTW, here’s a fun rundown of contradictions in the bible.
*which ironically wind up being delivered by cynical or deluded teachers who have to riffle through the bible, choosing random, unrelated passages to string together to say what “God clearly and unambiguously commanded/foretold.”
I believe this works the other way also, fear of loss of salvation for the person leaving causes them to ignore things pointing to God. They just don’t want to deal with it as it is too much of a burden, normally fearing hellfire if they even think about it.
I was there at one point in my life, thinking I committed the unpardonable sin. Anything of God would be a reminder of that, and I avoided it.
But it’s a burden we were never made to carry. Salvation is God’s job, all we have to do is give our heart to Jesus, after that it’s God’s promise to save us, and a promise of God can not fail, though we can’t always see it.
I think this is along the right lines. What if God had dictated evolution in full scientific detail to ancient people? They wouldn’t have understood a word of it and wouldn’t have written it down or passed it on because it would have had no meaning to them.
It’s sort of like when your six year old kid asks about a complex subject. You dumb it down for them so that they can get the general concept to begin to understand it. You don’t immediately give a lecture like you were talking to a PhD because the kid would get zero information from it.
This is just me being pedantic but, the word ‘de-conversion’ makes no sense. You can’t de-convert You can only convert to/from something .
You might have a point. I dunno. I just use the term because it’s arguably less ideologically loaded than “apostasize”. 
Maybe we need to coin a neologism that neutrally but accurately describes the process of leaving one’s religion.
Yeah, people use that one on me all the time and it’s annoying. I was there, I know what I felt and believed. I had a close personal relationship with Jesus, he was my Best Friend, the Alpha and Omega, the Lord of All Creation. There was no greater comfort than faith in Him, no greater joy than submitting my will to His, no greater love than His love for me. In fact, I don’t think many of my Christian peers had a relationship with God as intimate as I did with mine.
Been there, done that. So believe me when I say I know exactly what it is I’m missing out on.
That bolded bit is a bit of an exaggeration. Ancient people knew about the concept of a million (e.g. Revelation 9:16 talks about 200 million horsemen). From that they could talk about thousands of millions of years, things being trillionths of an inch (maybe that’s how big DNA is), etc. The Bible could explain everything right down to the 6 year old level (though the Bible doesn’t explain what a million is). Then it could build on that. The concept of the survival of the fittest and genes aren’t that impossible for young people to understand. There are plenty of children’s books that explain evolution and the origin of stars/galaxies, etc.
If Genesis is basically a dumbed down version of actual history, why does it say plants and dry land created before the Sun, Moon and stars? And it says flying creatures were created before land animals?
This is really what I was asking, and it is in no definition of a Christian that I’m aware of.
This is the conventional interpretation, which is quite different from what I was asking.
So the OP’s reason of dismissal is really invalid, the no true Scotsman defense.
But the other point that was brought up, the fear of eternal hell is very real and very damaging to a person, and can cause a person to turn away from things of God for their own mental health, and believe things that support their view, quickly dismissing any thing that brings up the possibility that they are condemned* as it’s just too painful to consider. The point that he is unwilling to even attempt to address it when he opened up the forum to do just that it telling in itself, and exactly what I suspected, citing a obvious invalid defense. If he needs to do that, I’m fine with it and wish him the best.
Also the pattern fits, we learn about Jesus, accept Him, which then Jesus has to lead us, which will mean to break away from organized religion, a great way is through atheism, which is a starting point of breaking away from one form of formal teaching to a way that seems to make sense.
- I do believe that the OP poster is saved, not condemned, but just being lead in the way through, at this time, atheism.
I believe you
You know this is an interesting point and I’ve never seen a Christian frame it that way. There is an excellent book called Doubt: A History which frames Jesus as a skeptic among the ranks of Socrates and Thomas Jefferson. In this historical work, the author identifies Jesus as a free-thinker, an innovator, and a rebel. That’s generally how I think of him too. (The book is not just about Jesus, it’s about skepticism throughout history, and it’s awesome. Highly recommended.)
You were asking about my relationship with the Lord when I was a believer, not-so-subtly suggesting that there might have been something missing, askew, or not-quite-right or -powerful enough, with it.
That’s just a reformulation of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
Dismissal stands.
I know that it’s inconceivable to you that someone who was once a “partaker of the divine nature” could ever leave, but it happens. Much more than you think.
Like olivesmarch, I was a committed, devout, fully “sold-out” believer in and lover of Jesus Christ. I felt that I knew him, spoke to him, and had an ongoing, deep, transcendent walk with him. Until I realized that it was all in my head. Think about that.
Here, you’re just hypothesizing and projecting. For Chrissake you don’t even know me, and you think you can psychoanalyze and spiritually dissect me from a few BB posts? I can’t recall seeing such arrogance and presumption in a very long, long time.
I’m not afraid of hell in the slightest. Far from shying away from uncomfortable doctrines, I charged into them head-on, trying to understand what they were really saying. But I assure you, hell was never an uncomfortable doctrine for me. Whether you believe that or not, doesn’t change its truth. When I realized that in all probability many Biblical doctrines are just absurd, I happily walked away.
Are you scared of monsters in your closet? Nope, neither am I. Childish fantasy. So is the idea of hell. And the reason I didn’t address anything about hell in my OP is that it’s not at all relevant. Christianity is a lot bigger than just heaven and hell, you know! As a matter of fact, during the process of my departure from the fold, I very rarely even thought about Soteriological/afterlife issues. I was concerned with simple TRUTH, whatever it was, and wherever I could find it. Simplistic, primitive concepts of eternal reward or punishment aren’t very sophisticated and don’t add much to the discussion of Christianity’s truth or falsehood. So I largely ignored them, without even so much as thinking about ignoring them.
Have you been talking to my mom? 
Seriously, you HAVE to believe that I’m not really “unsaved”. The Bible, in several passages, makes it clear that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to leave the faith once someone has fully partaken of it. The strongest of these passages is probably the one in Galatians.
I very much like the idea of Jesus as a skeptic. Such a concept is ALMOST tempting enough even to make me “follow” him again. :dubious:
I haven’t read D:AH (I will now, for sure!), but knowing the New Testament scriptures like I do, I have to say, I think the treatment of Jesus as a skeptic is accurate only in a very, VERY limited sense.
Yes, Jesus was skeptical, and indeed even highly critical, of the existing Jewish religious institutions. But ONLY of that Jewish religious power structure! In a larger, philosophical sense, he wasn’t a skeptic at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. He demanded faith. Blind faith, even. And the Church has preserved that tradition.
There are several passages in the Gospels that clearly depict Jesus’ anti-skepticism:
In one passage (John 20:26 - 31), when speaking to his Disciples, and specifically to “Doubting” Thomas, the original Skeptic, he tells them (I’m paraphrasing): “You have seen [i.e., Jesus in the flesh, resurrected], and believed. But blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believed!”
In another Gospel passage (Matthew 12:39, Luke 11:29), his followers ask him for a sign (to prove his Divinity, and the authority of his prophetic message). He responds: “Only a wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.”*
*[The “sign of Jonah” which was to be given to the people was Jesus’ three-day entombment in the “belly” of the earth, and his Resurrection. One might consider this a concession to the people’s skepticism, but note here that Jesus is demanding belief FIRST!]
And then you have the several passages that describe Jesus as saying that one must have faith “like a little child” in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven: Matthew 18:4, Mark 10:15, Luke 19:17. What is childlike faith? Obviously, not very skeptical: trusting, innocent. How is that congruous with skepticism?
There are a lot of other passages in the Bible, both OT and NT, that encourage and extol the virtue of pure faith. It seems likely to me that Jesus, despite his dislike for the Jewish leaders of his time, was very much rooted in the Biblical tradition of “faith first”. Other NT writers besides the authors of the Gospels maintain the doctrine of coming to God through a credulous, unskeptical faith. The Church is simply keeping with Biblical tradition in its historic emphasis on simplistic faith.
So I think that Jennifer Hecht (author of D:AH), despite her best efforts, fails to fully grasp the overall philosophical underpinnings of Jesus’ message. He might have been a skeptic, but only in a minuscule, extremely limited, highly circumstantial sense.
But again, I haven’t read the book yet, so I don’t even know exactly what she’s saying, or how she might deal with the above difficulties.
Kanicbird:
In re-reading the response/rebuttal I just posted, one line that you had written (that I had responded to) jumped out at me again, only for a slightly different reason, than when I first read it:
However you intended this statement, seeing that you’re a Christian yourself, I feel like I need to acknowledge that this is in a way, an incidental, perhaps-unintended compliment.
So, for what it’s worth, I appreciate it.
You probably don’t “see” Christ in me; you probably believe I’m saved simply because the Bible says that people can’t ever become “unsaved”, that I’m just going through a phase, yadda yadda yadda. (Like I said, this is what my mother thinks, too.)
But it seems that you accept and do in fact recognize (albeit tacitly and perhaps unconsciously) the validity and reality of my previous Christian experience.
So I thank you for that. I disagree with your assessment, but I thank you for the recognition.
I haven’t read the book in a while, so I don’t remember her exact argument either. My conceptualization of faith is very different from Jesus’ in the Bible. I don’t think faith and skepticism are mutually exclusive, but my version of faith is predicated on experiencing something consistently and trusting that it will continue to be there. It makes no sense to me to demand belief without evidence.
Yep. The Lego [tm] site is especially powerful, because it directly portrays many less-quoted parts of the Bible. And using those little bricks to make the people can be interpreted as saying the scenes are too horrible for realistic drawing.
Agreed that they are often implausible. The apologists assume that they have a sort of “high ground” because they are so devoted and have God on their side. So they assume that critics have the burden of proof.
The worst “answers” I have seen to flat contradictions show that they are willing to** make things up **to resolve the contradictions. Holy Moley!
- Og