First of all, ISiddiqui, thanks for actually having the cohones to come on GD and speak to us about it, so hats off to you for that. And glad you’ve got a sense of humor too. Only thing I might concentrate on more is slavery, because Jesus had plenty to say about it, but won’t be able to say much about it now until I get my word processor managing to copy and paste which isn’t working right now like it is supposed to. Just depends if others are also interested, and if it doesn’t get us too far off the OP.
Also, Wilberforce didn’t use scripture support for his abolitionist view, in fact, Hector Avalos says he frankly states to discourage others from using the bible as a discussion on slavery in Parliament. Stephen Tomkins authored a biography of Wilberforce, along with a sect which Wilberforce was associated with. Tomkins says that Wilberforce used a system of apprenticeships which wasn’t really that much different than slavery. One of his protégé’s recognized this and intervened to stop it. Contrary to some who think British abolitionists were basing it on biblical ethics, their works show otherwise.
We can disagree with what his message was, or that it was that great, the authors that were writing on his behalf just had too many things in it that concerned me deeply, nor did I find him all that forgiving, but not going to quibble about it. If it has made you a better person and you need it for inspiration, and it gets you through the day, don’t think you’re going to get much grief from me. Maybe later. JK
If you come back, get some attitude. It’s more difficult to debate when people are nice. Don’t do this again.
I do know that he indicates we must be slaves to God (or whatnot). Regardless, I would put all of that in my category of things appropriate for the time - not many abolitionist movements were going on then (well, Spartacus, but we know how that ended, I guess). It’s definitely something I wish Jesus or Paul spoke out about, don’t doubt that.
Wilberforce, for one, may not have used Scripture per se for backing his views, but his views were based on his faith and his belief that all men were equal before God. He was probably told to keep from using the Bible in Parliament because at the time religious exuberance wasn’t something that a gentleman was supposed to engage in. Evangelicals (which Wilberforce was) weren’t considered to be respectable. Wilberforce did write in his own journal, however: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners [moral values]”.
As for apprenticeship models and other forms of modern ‘capitalist’ slavery, we definitely do have blind spots at times, even if one of the things we are doing are honorable. I think it was noted up thread that MLK for all of his good work on racial discrimination and advocacy for the poor based upon his faith, was also quite a womanizer. The example of David may fit here as well.
Well, I think that something in Jesus’s message is fairly compelling even for non-Christians. There are folks in my church who don’t believe any of the supernatural stuff but think that what Jesus of Nazareth said was worth following (which was somewhat interesting to me, but sometimes the big tent of liberal Christianity is really weirdly big - I think the second time I attended my current church someone just came and sat next to me and said “I don’t really believe in any of this God stuff, but I like coming here” - I have tended to wonder what it is about me that people feel that they can easy confess things even if they’ve just met me; gave me extra thought to perhaps go to seminary one day ).
Ha! GD tends to frighten me most of time mostly due to the attitude. I find myself far more comfortable in Cafe Society, or Game Room, or IMHO, or MPSIMS. I stray in here usually to read/lurk. I post (sometimes regardless of my better judgment) rarely… I enjoy respectful discussion just because I’m trying to understand others as well as best I can. Works better when they aren’t engaging me to rip me a new one ;).
I agree. The United States wasn’t ready to abolish slavery when writing the Constitution – or even in 1861. We weren’t ready to accept gay rights until very recently. We still aren’t ready to give up eating meat or give up watching boxing matches.
But…c’mon. Don’t eat pork…and yet not one word about washing hands? We were ready for that. We were absolutely prepped and primed for just a hint about the germ theory of disease. It would have been the greatest boon in history. And God was dead silent on the matter. Why?
(My answer, of course, is that the people who were making up the stories about God didn’t know. Is there really a stronger answer?)
No idea. But I think part of the no eating pork wasn’t necessarily about disease (though it may have been), but also to set the Jews apart from their neighbors. I mean if it was really about disease you’d have people all around Israel saying… hey, they don’t get the same diseases we do, maybe they are onto something.
Also, isn’t water somewhat less than plentiful in the Near East? I mean, even in Israel (most of the big cities were somewhat inland)?
Valid point: the notion that the prohibition on pork was a disease-prevention measure is controversial. I don’t believe it, myself, and hold with your view, that it was an “othering” measure, to keep the Jews separated from surrounding populations. (Likely as not, the Babylonians had bacon…and the Jews wouldn’t want to be like them.)
Still, if you’ve got enough water to live at all, you’ve got enough water to wash your hands, especially with women who have just given birth.
In my opinion, the idea of “unreadiness” as an excuse for Biblical ignorance of various matters is a weak excuse; there are a thousand and ten simple things that God could have taught people…and didn’t. Look at the lengthy business in the Torah about skin lesions, and how they must be observed carefully by the Priest. Clearly, health was of immense importance to the writers. There are rules for where to dig the camp privy: they knew some basic public health.
The early Jews were “ready” for the magnetic compass, for maps, for iron chariots, for signalling semaphores (much harder to descend like the wolf on the fold when the villagers have half an hour’s warning,) and so on, all things for which the people were absolutely ready. But God was silent.
That’s fine if it comes across as a weak excuse to you. The gradual expansion of the knowledge of who God is and how God’s people meander in their way to find out who God is (and they mess up A LOT) makes lots of sense to me.
I don’t actually think that God not telling His people about washing your hands to eat pork or compasses or whatever is necessarily essential for faith, but ok ;).
Apparently this is quite an interesting debate among Jewish rabbis. What in the world did this actually mean? Especially if one surmises that Exodus was written down eventually by people who were actually living in Israel and could look around see what was up (though apparently Israel’s cows do pretty well these days).
You certainly can, and the scholars who are not committed to finding a particular answer in the Bible do this. However the historical part gets compared to independent non-Biblical historical and archaeological work, and I’m not sure how a religious analysis would do something similar. We can say that the religious implications of God’s words during an event that never happened can’t be given much credence. But explanations of God’s reasoning behind events that did happen (such as disasters to Judah) are harder to analyze.
For instance the validity of the religious meaning of the Resurrection depends strongly on whether that historical event ever happened.
That’s the old view. Now we know some people don’t possess that moral sense, which makes individual responsibility and sin harder to define.
Know one claims divinity for MLK. For all things except the Bible, we evaluate the strength of the argument based on the argument - knowing that even the smartest of men get it wrong some time. If the Bible is special - and if it is not what the hell are all those churches doing here - we treat the part derived from God as correct and immune to argument. Sure modern religion tosses the nasty bits by saying they didn’t really come from God. But how do you tell which is which without a secular evaluation? Unless God sends us an edited copy, which he seems too busy to do.
Clearly, each reader disentangles the message his own way. And many are sure it is the way.
Is there no connection between these views? If Jesus was the son of God then what he says must be treated with more attention than what is said in a human-written document. How many Christians would say “Jesus, you may be the Son of God, but your ethical reasoning stinks.” Not many, including moderates.
Sure they do. It is the way of enabling them to reject the awful parts. Some people call them cafeteria Christians, but the metaphor is a lot more friendly is you see that the dishes they reject are putrid.
It’s the same damn answer I get over and over. You guys arrive at your moral position - and usually they are good moral positions - by rejecting chunks of the Bible as being man-made because, as far as I can tell - they don’t support your moral position. In other words, God and you agree, and anything in the Bible that contradicts this was written by people who were mistaken, possibly from their primitive moral sense. Am I close?
Say you started with a blank moral slate and studied the Bible. Do you think you’d wind up in the same position you are today? I doubt it. Far from an attack, I am saying that as far as I can tell you are a much better and more moral person than what you would be if you truly followed what is written in the Bible.
First, not hating gays is not that sophisticated a moral concept. There are lots far more sophisticated things in the Torah which God expected us to follow. And I never said all evangelicals are evil. There were some supporting abolition, and some supporting slavery. Today there are evangelicals supporting measures to protect the earth. Good for them. That’s my point about you decide what you support, and then you can get it justified in the Bible whatever you decide.
Not like Christians treated the lower classes so great once they got into power. But Romans were more tolerant, in general.
The issue is that you want us all to be fundamentalists. But we’re not. We believe that fundamentalists have made an idol out of the Bible. We don’t think God hand wrote it. We believe that people inspired by God wrote it and we prayerfully consider the text in light of what we know of Jesus Christ and the message of God and see what God is trying to tell us in the here and now. I’m sorry if that is so frustrating for you, but that’s we approach our faith. The Catholics and Orthodox do similar (the Orthodox are the most interesting - I read an very fascinating blog post from an Orthodox Priest who indicated that the books of the Bible are not sacred because God decided they would be when they were written, but because the blessed community of the Church decided they were sacred and told the story of God and the community continues to affirm that sacredness). This is an entirely different way of viewing the Bible than the fundamentalists you may be used to.
For what its worth, I believe I’ve indicated that my world view actually DID change after reading the Bible. I was not in the blank moral state, per se, but I was on a different side of the moral and political divide (I considered myself very strongly a ‘moderate Republican’ back before my conversion and now I’ve become very much a leftist - and that’s from reading the Scripture; now, not that I’m saying moderate Republicans are bad [though I am very glad that more of the country didn’t vote for John McCain as I did in 2008 ] but I consider myself a better person due to reading Scripture and then joining a community that wanted to work out God’s love and grace in the world [When I started to read the Bible, I was in a Pentecostal, fundamentalist, church - they did care about the poor, but it wasn’t nearly as much as what I felt compelled by the Bible]).
They weren’t great, but they weren’t as bad as the Romans either. Lower classes were basically playthings (sexually as well as otherwise) for the upper classes.
I’ve had the benefit of several hours of sleep and rest and I am relaxed and I have taken a break from this topic. Upon reflection I have come to the conclusion that:
Saying that a reasonable minded Christian can use cognitive skills to choose to believe some of the miracles of the bible and choose to reject others is ABSURD.
Either you believe that God/Jesus/Moses has magical powers or you don’t. You can’t say the the “trivial” miracles are not real but the “important” ones are real. You can’t say, the story of loaves and fishes is a metaphor but resurrection or healing of lepers is real. That is an egregious case of special pleading and double standards.
And the motive is entirely self serving. In one case you want to use strict scrutiny and logic and critical thinking but in a case upon which the whole doctrine of the whole faith rests, you are willing to disregard such standards. Self Serving of the highest order. This is an absurd standard.
And what about all of the non christians burning and screaming in hell for all of eternity?
What about everyone God drowned in the flood and all the first born dead of Egypt from the story of Moses?
I do not have the ability that you have to partition a book into credible and non credible entries. If genocide and maniacal cruelty share the same body of work as peaceful loving messages, I am not, as you, so willing or able to disregard the first in order to keep the second.
I’m not sure what you are not getting here. The laws of nature prevent us from turning water into wine or feeding 1000 people from 6 loaves of bread, yes. God is a supernatural being (and Jesus was one third of the Godhead), so Jesus isn’t bound by the laws of nature, which is why He was able to do those things. By definition, a miracle means that natural laws are being overridden.
As for the demons and pigs, your argument appears to rest on the premise ‘demons don’t exist’, which is not one that most Christians share.
Your argument is premised on the idea that nature is a self-contained system, and that there is nothing outside of nature, and not subject to natural law (i.e. you’re a metaphysical materialist). I’m not, Christians in general aren’t, and if supernatural agents exist, then it’s not impossible for them to turn water into wine, multiply loaves and fishes, drive demons out of pigs, and do other things that violate physical law.
The positive reason why I believe these things happened is that I think it’s more likely than not that the Gospels are historically reliable documents, and they recount these events happening.
