> This is because the entire body of Christian thought and teaching ultimately
> uses Scripture as its litmus. Wander too far from that, and you can call yourself
> whatever you want–that won’t make it Christian.
You may believe that, and there’s no problem with your declaring that you believe it, but that doesn’t mean that you can claim that other people must believe it. Many people who call themselves Christians, indeed probably most people who call themselves Christians, have no problem with taking parts of the Bible in a non-literal fashion. You can argue that they are wrong and even incoherent in their beliefs, but you can’t define them out of existence. You don’t get to define what a Christian is.
> Since the Christian God is omnipotent, omnisicient and prescient, and
> communicates fundamentally through the Holy Scripture, the only reasonable
> assumption is that such a God would present a clear, unequivocal and
> straightforward account for everything Christians are supposed to believe.
Again, this “reasonable assumption” is only your claim. Lots of other people, indeed perhaps most other people, would say that God does no such thing, and there is no reason to assume that he does such a thing. You may be right or wrong in your philosophical assumptions, but you can’t claim that everyone obviously believes in them already, so other people are stupid or are deliberately lying when they say that they don’t accept your assumptions.
OK…you sucked me back in for a moment, anyway.
The metaphor in question is the Genesis creation story, which was always (within reason) taken literally until fairly recent times; not the idea of metaphors in general.
And I do agree that I don’t get to decide who calls themselves a Christian and what they get to believe. Go right ahead and call yourself a Christian while still embracing the idea (for instance) that the Hindu story about Lord Krishna trying to con Gopi girls into parading past him naked refers to Jehovah. Once a Christian decides the Bible isn’t the fundamental arbiter of what to believe, there’s no anchor to a core set of beliefs. And once that anchor is lost, the definition of a Christian gets more than a bit fuzzy. So fuzzy that it gets silly pretty fast. Next thing you know you’re believing Joe Smith found some gold tablets that updates everything.
So yeah; if you toss out the Bible, Christians can go right ahead and believe in evolution as well as the Pink Unicorn. The Council of Nicaea would be pretty disappointed with who-all gets to self-style themselves in modern times as adherents to the religion they invented.
Y’know, for someone who apparently thinks of himself as the torch-bearer for early Christianity, you seem remarkably ignorant of the fact that they did not in any way, shape, or form, interpret or use the Bible like you apparently do. Not at all. The idea that the Bible is sole arbiter of Christianity is an extremely modern and almost entirely Protestant idea, and has absolutely zip to do with either the vast majority of Christians today or over time.
> The metaphor in question is the Genesis creation story, which was always
> (within reason) taken literally until fairly recent times; not the idea of metaphors
> in general.
No, you’re wrong. Augustine believed that the creation story should not be taken literally and he wrote in the fifth century. Look at the section “Natural knowledge and biblical interpretation”:
It was very common in the Middle Ages to interpret the Bible in metaphorical ways. Literalism is actually quite recent. It sounds to me like you listened to some preacher at some fundamentalist church who claimed that (a) anything other than a literal interpretation of the Bible is simply abandoning Christianity and (b) no one until about the late nineteenth century ever advocated a non-literal interpretation of the Bible. Both claims are wrong. If you want to talk about biblical interpretation in such a broad way, you’re going to actually have to study biblical interpretation.
Look, you may or may not be correct in your philosophical beliefs. You may or may not be correct in your assertions that a non-literal interpretation of the Bible is useless. But you can’t just wish away Christians who don’t interpret all of the Bible literally. Nearly all Christians at nearly all times didn’t take large parts of the Bible literally.
Thank you. And as for Dio, I’m not arguing history with him yet, but theology. And he doesn’t know Christian theology for shit. In fact, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know the difference. Either that or the SMDB secret rules have required him to stake out ground he can’t prove. Christians have considered Jesus through the Davidic line since Paul at least. And that is virtually all Western Christians. Dio only thinks he knows better what other people believe.
Priest: If men don’t trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.
Commoner: Right. The world’s a kind of hell.
Priest: No! I don’t want to believe that!
Commoner: No one will hear you, no matter how loud you shout. Just think. Which one of these stories do you believe?
Woodcutter: None makes any sense.
Commoner: Don’t worry about it. It isn’t as if men were reasonable.[right]-- Rashomon[/right]
“Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Personally, I don’t think that there is a bit of logic or any falsifiable evidence in favor of the Christian (or Hebrew, or Muslim) God, and therefore no amount of hard scientific evidence or elimination of the necessity of introducing a supernatural entity in order to explain phenomena of the natural world will ever suffice to “disprove” the existence of said deity. Of course, I think the same is true for Invisible Pink Unicorns, the Goddess Eris, and The Great Cthulhu (“Why vote for the lesser of two evils?”), all of which have about the same level of substantiation and internal logic as the Hebrew/Christian Bible provides to Elohim, and the study of such material to divine some ultimate messages rises to about the same level as Tolkien and Star Wars fanism.
False Analogy. One is history, the other theology. Ask someone in GQ to explain the difference.
It’s religion, it’s about belief. If it’s about what you can prove as historical fact, well there is very little in the Bible you can offer has historically confirmed fact. Most historians don’t believe that you can even prove Jesus lived, and the Josephus reference is generally regarded as an interlineation.
Many Christians regard the Bible as divinely inspired and many regard it as inerrant. IS THE BIBLE INERRANT? I am not among those, but at least I have the decency not to call people liars on their religious beliefs, and I keep my mouth shut in church on the subject ('cept for Bible study, we Presbyterians will mix it up there.)
Whether this inerrency is itself an error isn’t really a matter of factual historical debate, the Bible appears to contradict itself in any number of places, and theologians have explanations for each one, including the one you are currently fixated on. And on grounds of argumentation, they might be weak, but it is accepted doctrine theologically, and this particular matter has been accepted doctrine since the time of Paul.
Ah, the insistence that religion be logical. Most of Christian religion is not logical. That doesn’t mean it isn’t doctrine. You do understand that Paul in Romans 1:3 flatly stated the Davidic line through Mary, and that it is tradition? You do understand that strict scriptualism isn’t shared by all Christians, and in fact far from a majority?
I understand that people have expressed skepticism of the claim of the Davidic line. However, it is still standard doctrine and people have believed and still believe it despite the skepticism.
I’m not offended, it’s a rather minor point in Christianity. And best wishes on getting the doctrine changed. It’s hardly the same as someone misrepresenting the Trinity as divided and impliedly polytheistic, which is a rather major point of doctrine. And of course it has a logical hole in it. It isn’t logical. Most of the scriptures are unprovable. There are countless such logical problems. And I’m sure theologians have patched them all. The claim of the Davidic line is historically unprovable except on the basis of tradition.
I’m a Presbyterian. I’ve been taught that Catholics maintain that Mary remained a virgin her whole life and Jesus had no siblings. We disagree. The bible pretty clearly says Jesus had James as a brother. But I hardly get in the face of Catholics over that. Catholics rely on not just scripture, but also on tradition.
I’ve found that it’s often illuminating to compare and contrast claims in re Jewish culture and Christianity with some other contemporaneous culture without the religious ‘baggage’ that skews our understanding. E.g., did Jesus exist? Not necessarily as precisely who Matthew, Luke, and John portray him as, but simply as a historical figure who taught ethical conduct and such, a la Gautama, Confucius, Mahavira, etc. Well, in that context, Jesus ~ Socrates. That is, the historical figure insofar as we can isolate him is confirmed by writers with polemic purposes, whose use of him in their writings obtrude to prevent any ‘objective’ picture, but do confirm bare historicity, in both cases. (Jesus:Gospel writers::Socrates:Plato and Xenophon)
By this token, though, if we make the assumptions this thread does (ancient accounts must be taken as literal objective reportage and not story, legend, fable, etc.; metaphysical conclusions can be drawn logically from this presumption), it’s possible to prove the objective reality of Zeus and Hera. Like this: Leonidas King of Sparta, who fell at Thermopylae, is unquestionably a historical figure. Quite a bit of human history turns on his actions. But he is also, according to Greek history, a lineal descendant of Heracles, who in turn was fathered by Zeus and hated by Hera as a result. Application of the parallel assumptions t6o those governing this thread demonstrate that the historicity of Leonidas entails the historicity of Heracles … and hence, logically, the reality of Zeus the Thunderer and his wife Hera.
I trust the illogic is evident – in both my conclusion and the one it analogizes?
The “within reason” wiggle room weasel was my shorthand to avoid just this sort of nitpicking. In general the prevailing view of Christian apologists (and more recently, the Christian polloi as the Scripture has been translated and the polloi have become literate) has been to accept the Bible as literal except where it is obviously wrong, disagrees with personal opinion of the reader or is internally inconsistent. In those areas, what is obviously plain text gets a by and is considered metaphorical or allegorical. Genesis, for instance–full of inconsistencies and (now, at least) obviously wrong–gets its plain text spun by whoever is interested in retaining other Scripture bits. But in general–within reason–all core beliefs have pled Scripture as the final authority. Where an individual (a Pope, say) was the human figurehead, the plea was still that his authority was grounded in his ability to most accurately understand and interpret Scripture.
St Augustine, by the way, (while condensing the six days to none) did accept the literalness of the Genesis stories and their timelines in general, along with Adam and Eve as historical figures. :
"Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. For some hold the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, that they have always been… They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.
– Augustine, Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World’s Past, The City of God, Book 12: Chapt. 10 [AD 419]. your own cite, above, under Creation
Let me use your own cite, then, as a great example of literal interpretation in the past now seen as metaphor because Christians don’t want to throw out the bathwater of nutty or inaccurate passages with the Baby of the core beliefs they choose from the remainder of Scripture.
Sure, you can toss out or ignore Scripture, define yourself as a Christian, and feel comfy about it. It just becomes ridiculously inconsistent with what the original inventors believed, and the term Christian becomes meaningless.
Oh…in terms of my formal education: about 17 years of exposure in formal Christian schools (KG through college, and a boatload of formal college-level courses in Christianity). Not sure what that has to do with it, except it does make it harder to BS me.
You had 17 years of literalist education, and want to assert that’s the only valid view, despite the fact that Biblical literalism is a terrible idea when applied to the Old Testament in particular.
Despite the fact that Genesis was never ascribed divine authorship, being instead, traditionally, the oral history as recorded by Moses centuries later.
Despite the fact that you yourself are claiming that the Scriptures should contain everything that God requires good Christians to think and believe- which doesn’t mean God has any particular opinion about what Christians think about the origin of the universe. Or, “it doesn’t mean there’s not extra that was added in, too!”
Hell, Chronicles and Kings were the original court records, purportedly. Not books of religious instruction. They’re included for relevance, much like Genesis. From a Christian perspective, all that’s needed in terms of instruction is in the New Testament, particularly the Gospels. For a Jew, all that’s needed for instruction is in the Pentateuch- and in terms of instruction, it’s only three of the five books (Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus)!
He’s quite aware of what is believed. The problem is, descent through Mary wouldn’t qualify him as the Messiah, since only the father counts, and Joseph qualifying wouldn’t count either, since Joseph was not the father. Christians of course consider Jesus to be descended through the Davidic line, but he can’t be the son of God and actually descended both. It’s hardly the only place where Christian theology and reality conflict, after all.
The wages of sin being death makes perfect sense in Jewish theology, since you don’t ask for eternal life, but ask to be written in the book of life for the next year. Those who are sinful, I suppose, die, not get damned.
Of course it doesn’t work out that way, but I was too young and too religious back then to ask the hard questions.
I promise you I know the difference between history and theology, and I would venture a guess that I know Christian theology at least well, or probably better than you do. I have some formal study in this area. I’m not just talking out of my ass.
I don’t “think I know better.” I wasn’t saying that anything you said wasn’t doctrine, I was just pointing out (and I’m far from the first), that the doctrine is logically flawed. Repeating over and over again that it’s a “belief” does not remove the logical flaws.
I never said that Christians don’t believe Jesus is a Davidic descendant. Of course they do. There’s still a logical contradiction in saying that Jesus can be both “of the seed of David” (a phrase which specifies patrilineal bloodlines only) and saying he was born of a virgin. That logical contradiction exists as a matter of stark fact, regardless of doctrine. I’m not saying the doctrine doesn’t exist, I’m just saying it’s illogical.
Now that was probably off-topic for this thread, but at least be accurate about what I said.
You can’t disprove creation. You can’t even devise a theoretical way to falsify it. Creationism is unfalsifiable. All you can do is what most of the scientists are currently doing, which is to say “I don’t see much (any) evidence of creationism, so why seriously consider the option?”
Creationism isn’t useful to science. You can’t test it or disprove it, or use it to make models that help us understand how stuff works, or anything else even remotely helpful.
Theologically, “creationism” is the belief that God was behind creation.
Literalists take the “out of whole cloth” view.
The OP was trying to “disprove,” I suppose by context, Christianity, by pointing to evolution.
Creationism as a belief is not a priori opposed to evolution. It’s a theological, metaphysical belief about the purpose of creation, not the how. This board is about fighting ignorance, after all.
As it pertains to arguments about evolution, the word “creationism” is usually assumed to refer to special creation, i.e the origin of all living species simultaneouly and individually as opposed to arising by common descent. It is possible to falsify special creation as a biological hypothesis.
I’d say that only the Adam and Eve story needs to be literally true. I don’t see how the first verses make any difference to the truth or falsity of Christianity. However, original sin must have originated from human choice, since God infecting us with sin makes him cruel. I believe most Christians believe that for some reason sin can only be forgiven through Jesus (something I have never, never understood.) If God created sin, this can’t be true.
If I understand correctly, even the most righteous human cannot be sin free since he or she inherited sin in some way from Adam and Eve.
I don’t see the two random people being chosen to be the first sinners position either. Adam and Eve, having been created without knowledge, occupy a unique position. The only alternative would be for some set of people to suddenly get a perfect moral sense, and then sin against it. Seems very unlikely to me.
I don’t know if this will do much to clarify things (I’ll say upfront it’s riddled with holes), but the original concept behind it seems to have been that Jesus was seen as the ultimate Pascal sacrifice. The perfect, unblemished “lamb” who would redeem all sins once and for all. The crucifixion happened at Passover, after all. John even has Jesus’ death occur at the moment the pascal lambs were being killed at the temple. Jesus’ body is then symbolically consumed as a parallel to how the lamb was eaten when the Temple was still there.
Not that it wouln’t be easy to pick apart, but the whole Christian crucifixion/eucharist soteriological scenario is rooted in Pesach motifs.