Well, it was not that line about not rejecting one who wants to borrow from you that I was thinking of. It was this:
So maybe you were thinking of one rule and I another; but still they would both apply to you equally, wouldn’t they? And if so, since you see the necessity (or utility) in rationalizing your position concerning all this (you did in the last post anyway), with the quote that you WERE adhering to (not rejecting one who borrows from you), what makes this one different? I’m not trying to be snarky, I’m serious- why follow one and not the other, ignoring the possibly that they are possibly incompatible?
I can’t seem to work out how ‘quote within a quote’ sorry if it’s unattractive or unclear.
Also- by the “why would you come back serious flaws in the game you played in the OP” you don’t mean me, do you? Just wondering…
I would also love to hear a response from MSWAS to my question in post #95!
As an atheist, I understand all the arguments made by **Dio **and those supporting him. However, I respect the hell out of anyone who honestly strives to meet the impossibly high expectations set for them by the Christian God. Jesus knew these were lofty goals for his followers to meet, but that was kind of the point; one should never stop trying to better themselves, or through their faith and works, help better others. I obviously have a huge problem with those who would try and take away a woman’s right to choose, or tell two people that their love for one another is amoral, but I can understand where they are coming from. My support for their beliefs ends when it impacts the actions of others.
You will never convince a single person that their God does not exist by pointing out logical inconsistencies in their holy books. They can, however, be persuaded to see that their beliefs are not those of many others, and therefore deserve no primacy. But to try to talk someone like mswas (who I don’t know from Adam but seems like a pretty stand up dude) that his beliefs are worthless because of historical or moral inconsistencies, is bullshit, and helps no one at all. Instead, try and see that people like mswas and ITR and tomndebb are actually really trying to be the best people they can be, just like you and I heathen atheists. How we get to that end should be unimportant to you, if you really believe there is no internal punishment awaiting us after death.
Nah. My first post was just a way of pointing out that the OP was silly and the recent post simply noted, again, that your argument is founded on a misperception. I do not adhere to the “every word of scripture is literally true” theology–a theology that is less than 200 years old and is only embraced by some fundamentalists, christian and atheist.
Go ahead and tilt at those windmills. There are only one or two posters who believe in the ideas you are attacking and they rarely post in this Forum.
I’d never try to convince anyone that their God does not exist, or really attack their faith at all. My intention is defense only, tp provide solid counter-argument against those who attempt to justify their philosophical, moral, and political opinions via the Bible. With the line of argument I introduce in my admittedly far too snarky article, you should be able to stop any Biblical literalist dead in his or her tracks, as well as nearly all pertinent forms of Biblical justification. This, if we are lucky, will shunt the debate to the more productive track of talking about actual issues, on common terms.
But there can be no common terms here. If your outlook on life is guided primarily by the tenets of your faith, appeals to disregard that faith will be dismissed, just as if someone asked you to disregard your disbelief in God and “see it from their side”. The two sides are mutually incompatible. All that can follow is debate, which is wonderful. The problem, though, is that this debate seems to begin and end with both sides feeling like the other is missing the point. A Christian walks away thinking that we atheists are only attacking minor points in an ancient holy book, and we walk away thinking that the Christian is deluding themselves by not seeing these (to us) gaping inconsistencies.
My point is that belief is God can NOT be undermined with logical arguments. God, in and of itself, is completely illogical, and to believers, this is what entitles Him to the name “God”. They aren’t worshiping Jesus because he was just a dude with some real groovy ideas, he was literally God on Earth. Any inconsistency is therefore man’s misinterpretation of His teachings.
That being said, if we all agree to disagree, Great Debates would get real boring, real fast. But if we can keep the above in mind, we can keep the snark out of the argument, and actually begin to have a civilized dialogue. While I don’t believe in the specifics of what the average Christian believes, there are way more of them than there are of me, and therefore their collective knowledge far surpasses mine. For that reason, I’ll listen to what they have to say.
Again, I’m not trying to attack anyone’s faith. I’m not looking to convince anyone that their faith is invalid. My only focus for this line of argument is to counter Biblical literalism and Biblical justification. The inconsistencies I am attacking are not in the Bible, but in those who claim to follow it, and who use it as a basis for their arguments for certain policies and/or beliefs.
And again, my primary purpose is defense. People drag the Bible into public debate about issues of major public policy. To me, that makes it fair game for analysis and counter-argument.
Person A : “I live my life by the Bible, and it says X”
Me : "I see. So I take it you don’t eat pork or shellfish and you give all your money to the poor then?
I’d rather talk about what is right or wrong in real terms and leave religion out of it. But I’m ready if they bring religion into it.
Ok, I didn’t realize your beliefs dictate adherence to one of the supplied ‘rules’ and not another. I don’t mean to say I don’t get that you are not a fundamentalist-literalist- just that I hadn’t guessed that in your personal belief system you opted that one of those (willingness to lend) applied to you but another didn’t (willingness to give rather than amass wealth), specifically. I mean, you couldn’t expect me to guess these specific personal decisions, could you?
But then another rather obvious question arises, in terms of logistics- how do you figure out what goes in the “literally true” box and the “not literally true” box? I ask this in all seriousness. Add your snark if necessary, it’s fine with me if you have that need. But if you’re going to respond, I would really appreciate an answer to this question.
Here’s that snarkiness I meant up there. Whatever, man. I’m just asking honest questions.
I do apologize. I confused you with the OP, who did post only to play games with a non-existent population of Dopers. (The number of Fundamentalist Christians who post on the SDMB are miniscule. The Number of Fundamentalist Christians who adhere to the most literal reading of Christian Scripture who also post in Great Debates is exactly 1. (We have another who might be counted, except that that poster has a whole roster of beliefs that are simply of their own with no connection to the belief of any other Christian.))
One thing to understand about most Christian belief is that Scripture proceeds from belief, not the other way around. Even Luther, with his “Only Faith; Only Scripture” dictum realized that point at some level, as demonstrated by his efforts to reshape scripture to match his beliefs. For the most part, Christians see the bible as the work(s) of 50+ authors, each presenting one (or more) views of God. Taken together and viewed in toto, they provide a basis for each generation to pass down their beliefs to the next. Grabbing individual sentences, or even pericopes, out of context as though each is the direct word of God, has never been part of Christian belief, (or Jewish belief before the former heresy took root). That whole notion is something that was pretty much invented in the last 200 years. Christian and Jewish scholars have argued over the contradictions for years, but always in the context that there was a message behind each portion of the contradiction that was resolved by a greater truth. So, while playing “gotcha” with contradictions between various statements and either other statements or the actions of the believers can be fun, it has no bearing on reality.
Now, it may lead one to the judicious conclusion that one should reject any work(s) containing such contradictions or impossible demands, and that is fine for the person who makes that choice, but trying to impose that sort of rigor in logic will simply miss the point for any believer.
Indeed, I have asked a Christian friend of mine to explain the contradictions in the gospels and his point (if I understand it) was that the gospels are like police witness statements to some event, taken years after that event: no two witnessess ever really see or remember exactly the same thing, human memory and perception being what it is - that doesn’t mean that the event in question “didn’t happen”, only that, in order to get at the real, objective truth, you have to closely and critically examine the witnesses against each other.
The real difference between a believer and a non-believer is that the former fundamentally believes that the “events” both happened and were supernatural. I myself am of the opinion that the events of the gospels probably “happened” in that there was a dissident preacher who led a millenial movement of disaffected Jews, but that the supernatural gloss on this event is pure mythology. But neither position rules out a critical evaluation of the texts.
You seem to be embarking on a fallacy of the excluded middle: Either the literalists are right or the book provides nothing useful.
A different perspective–the one actually embraced by a majority of Christians–would be to note that the bible provides the perspective of, at minimum, fifty people who had an experience of God, whose words have resonated with millions of people over the last 2,500 years, (1,900 if you limit it to Christians).
Now, one may still take the position that such people are delusional or otherwise wrong, but you need to address the manner in which they actually use the bible rather than the cardboard cutout that applies only to a limited, (if very visible and outspoken), number of people, almost all of whom reside in the U.S., and are heavily clustered in the Southeast, even there).
Ah, no. I don’t know that I’d said it in this thread or not, but I’m a big fan of the words of Jesus. I think that Jesus and his followers probably launched true humanism into the world. It took teachings like those attributed to Jesus in order to take hospitality-virtue (be nice to travelers) and neighbour-virtue (don’t cause trouble, be nice to your neighbour) and synthesize this into a truly humanist perspective, which said that all people are your brothers and sisters, regardless of whether or not they are strangers, from another tribe, an “enemy”, or even if they look entirely different than you.
This is an idea so huge that we’re still working out the implications. We still have trouble being true to our humanist ideals when it comes to what happens far away, to people who are very different than us, for reasons we don’t really even know enough to understand.
The challenge still remains.
So I think there’s a lot of worth in the Gospels, at least. The Old Testament’s worth is the record of the myths it contains. The rest of it, well, I suppose a record of what cranky old Jewish patriarchs think is a good idea is worth something. Make fun of my bald head? Get eaten by bears! So there!
But largely, the Old Testament shows what lead to the kind of thinking that the teachings of Jesus transcended. The steps up to the mount, so to speak.
The Epistles, well, they don’t even claim to be much more than advice.
So no, I don’t think the Bible is worthless. I think it’s worthless to bring up in an argument or discussion with people of mixed faiths. I specifically would like the Bible kept out of public debate. It’s meaningless to bring it up. I’m not a Christian, so saying “it says so in the Bible!” is meaningless to me and no useful exchange of ideas can follow.
However, merely saying “I’m not a Christian” never seems to stop these people. They cannot seem to think outside their given channels.
The counterarguments I provide are meant to derail Biblical debate and force discussion of issues in secular terms. Admittedly, they are a kind of shock therapy, and might well blow up in your face if what you seek is a peaceful exchange of ideas. But you weren’t getting that anyhow.
Ideally, if all those faced with Biblical literalists and Biblical justifications in public debate about public issues were well armed with these sorts of counterarguments, then those bringing up these things in public debate would at least be forced to read their bible all the way through and come up with some kind of coherent counterargument of their own.
Or they could just stop bringing up the Bible to justify whatever it is they believe, and we can talk about things in secular terms of right and wrong without bringing in ancient texts and an omnipotent creator-father-being whose existence is not exactly universally accepted.
You need to read more Isaiah, Amos, as well as Jeremiah, perhaps a bit of Malachi and some Joel.
However, as I have noted on more than one occasion, you are unlikely to find (m)any such persons on this message board. You’re preaching to the choir, for the most part.
I am handing out rhetorical ammunition to like-minded people.
I recognize that I’m a lot more likely to find atheists than fundamentalists around these parts. That’s probably at least part of why the debate around here tend to be of a pretty high quality.
But these are the exact people who are most likely to find themselves locking horns with the Bible-thumping types against whom this line of thinking is fairly devastating. They want to argue the Bible, let’s argue the Bible.
Were they more wise, they’d realize that us smartass agnostic liberal-ish book-learnin’ types are just way better at any form of legalistic wrangling than they’ll ever be, whether it’s arguing over what kind of armor an Ogre can wear or about what it really says in the Bible.
I regret posting my old essay in its original form. I should have rewritten it first to take out the snotty sarcastic tone. It’s entirely inappropriate. I wrote that article for either www.thisisby.us or www.newsvine.com under the somewhat naive, perhaps even retarded, idea that I was going to really stir up controversy and get my readership up.
Historically, this has never worked for me. Yet I keep trying…
Anyhow. For now, just consider the points in my OP and ignore the tone, and the next time you are engaging in debate with a Bible Belter, ask them if they eat pork, and if they ask for things back when they lend them. It’s fun!
I wrote a story once, alas long since lost to a HD crash, in which a bigoted, right-wing televangelist dies and goes to heaven and discovers, to his horror, that absolutely everyone gets in. Jews, homosexuals, even Hitler is there.
Make fun of my bald head? Get eaten by bears! So there!