In other words, the ends justify the means.
However, the concept of means is incompatible with the concept of God being omnipotent. An omnipotent being has no need of means. An omnipotent being can just leap straight to the ends.
It doesn’t matter what story you tell: there is a conceptual problem with the idea that a perfect being could creat an imperfect world, where perfection is defined as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. It doesn’t matter what story you tell: you cannot square a circle without changing the semantics of the terms you’re using, that is, without equivocating.
Well, as a Methodist, this is fairly easy to answer: Wesleyan Quadrilateral–Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience. In practice, it’s complicated. 
Ultimately, everyone has to decide for themself.
Well, my denomination doesn’t really have any authority that’s not an outcome of a large consensus of members, so that question doesn’t really apply to me. I’d vote with my feet if I was unhappy with any pronouncements, because I don’t really accept any human between me and God.
The simplest answer is: there’s no reason to expect it be “all or nothing”. The Bible is not monolithic.
With more nuance: most Christians do believe all of it, but what they mean by “belief” varies a lot. The Biblical literalists try to force the idea that “belief” can only mean “belief in the literal truth”. But belief can mean something like “belief in the essential truth”.
For example, take the phrase “all men are created equal”. No one believes that statement is literally true–men are born with varying amounts of intelligence, charisma, privilege, etc. But the statement is true in the sense that political rights should not depend on the particulars of one’s heritage. And not just men, but women, as well. So many people, if asked “do you believe all men are created equal?”, would answer “yes”.
Belief in a statement must always be qualified by what the interpretation and context are.
As for “everyone gets to roll their own”, well, yes, we do. God gave us free will and judges us each as individuals. Everyone has to roll their own, because the “Pope said so” won’t get you a free pass on Judgement Day.
What you say is reasonable, but I’m not sure whether it’s true—it’s something I’ve thought about and agonized over. If an omnipotent God wanted you to have some quality like wisdom, or compassion, or patience, would there be any difference in the end whether you went through experiences that grew and developed these qualities in you, or whether God bopped you on the head with his magic wand and magically instilled these qualities in you? The latter doesn’t seem right somehow, in much the same way that Last Thursdayism doesn’t seem right.
But one Protestant sect accepting that another sect’s choice of hymns or something is very weak ecumenicalism. Considering Jews exposes the real rot in the concept, from the Christian point of view. The priest might tall the rabbi “Sure, we can get along” but under his breath he is saying “but you are going to hell.” Anything else destroys the very basis of Christianity, which is more than that Jesus said some cool things.
Even if Jews get a pass for believing in the same god, then we have Buddhists and Hindus. Ecumenicalism beyond the level of “we won’t kill or forcibly convert people any more” makes no sense for universal monotheistic religions.
Now Jews are happy to leave other people alone, since we have a tribal religion and don’t think anything bad happens to non-Jews because they are non-Jews. But if we refuse to accept Christ as the Messiah, how ecumenical can we be? All it boils down is “you are wrong, but we we’ll agree not to mention it too often.”
For existence, yes. Fir shared views of external reality, not so much. Subjective reporting is the best for relating so-called religious experiences, but not to see if religious experiences match reality. I assume the same goes for LSD trips though I’ve never touched the stuff.
That is true today. If the Exodus had happened, it is not true of Israel then, who had direct experience of God.
Much of what we know is from other humans, and we have developed ways of critically analyzing that evidence. I’ve never been to Venice, but I’ve read about it and seen pictures of it, so I can believe it exists. But if one account had it on a lagoon, another in the mountains, and another on an island far from sure, I’d begin to have my doubts. Like about the Simpsons’ Springfield.
You get the same message considering it as allegory. And where do you get the concept that evidence of God’s existence hurts faith? Revelations certainly doesn’t have that message. The concept of Jesus returning would seem to contradict this notion. If Jesus comes down, would the first thing you’d say to him be “go away, kid, you’re hurting my faith?” I suspect this whole thing about evidence hurting faith would go away as soon as evidence turns up.
But non-Euclidean geometry was derived from changing the basic postulates - but it was derived using the same logical and mathematical laws as Euclidean geometry was. That the universe is not fundamentally Euclidean didn’t affect the validity of any of this. Physical checks cover the validity of the postulates, not that of the reasoning.
It is clearly not provable, but not purely subjective either. We’d have to be able to conceive of a universe where they are not true. We can conceive of universe where conservation laws don’t hold, where causality doesn’t hold at the macro level, and lots of other stuff, but one where A && ~A is true? Kind of hard.
Given the internal contradictions in the Bible saying it is not monolithic is very reasonable. But the question is: what filter do you use to distinguish the true parts from the false parts, the actual stuff from the allegorical stuff. For instance, I can say that Jesus did not actually rise from the dead, but that is an indication of how he would be remembered after his death.
My contention is that all morality is actually atheist morality. By that I mean you choose a moral path without reference to God, and then you pick and choose pieces of your religious sources to justify that path. That is why some Christians use the Bible to justify support for homosexual relationships and some use the Bible to condemn them. If God actually existed, and cared, it might be a good idea for him to come down and explain what he actually meant.
Well, I disagree. I don’t think arguing about the interpretations of specific scripture is productive for this thread.
I picked it up somewhere during my lifetime, probably in church, but who knows.
Again, you’re interpreting scripture in a way that I don’t.
As for “evidence hurting faith would go away”, I’m not sure where you’re getting that. What do you mean by “faith”? I use it to mean “belief not supported by objective evidence”. So once there’s objective evidence of something, what was faith becomes another type of belief.
Not quite. If a hypothesis is physically confirmed, then the postulates and reasoning are confirmed. But if a hypothesis fails, then the postulates and/or reasoning fails. Typically, we assume it’s the postulates that have failed. And that assumption is justified because the reasoning has never failed (ignoring cases where the reasoning is faulty).
The bottom line is that we use logic and reasoning because they work, not because they were handed down by the Goddess Science.
Argument from ignorance is a fallacy.
I suppose one could argue that because it’s impossible for any human to conceive of a universe where logic does not apply, it is objective in the sense that it’s a repeatable observation. But that’s really stretches “objective” past the limit, in my opinion.
See above: Scripture is interpreted through the lenses of Tradition, Reason and Experience. People have minds; they can use them. (If they it even matters to them whether a particular story is literal or allegorical.)
That’s a defensible position, but hard to prove without knowing the minds of the people involved. That is, just because a moral is derivable without reference to God does not imply that a particular person derived that moral without reference to God.
As for using that position to support (or not) the existence of God, you already know what I think about proofs about God.
That feels a bit like a dodge but I’ll rephrase: Is there any event related in the Bible that you consider pivotal to your faith? If so, how do you defend against the possibility that it was simply allegory? If not, in what sense do you “believe” in Christian scripture?
With respect, this borders on incoherence; you can’t say a group “believes” some thing and allow the meaning of the word “believe” and the thing itself to vary across that group.
Saying that, “All men are created equal”, is an assertion about the way in which we should treat people. Insofar as people agree with the conclusion that we should offer equal rights to all, they “believe” it. But saying, “Jesus died for our sins”, is an assertion about a specific thing that happened combined with a pile of unverifiable assumptions that could choke a donkey. People who “believe” this ostensibly accept that it happened the way the book says and that all of the assumptions it implies about life, the universe, and existence in general are true.
That’s cool I guess, but we’d better hope God doesn’t really care about the details because, if He does, the vagueness inherent in His teachings has certainly put most of the faithful (unwittingly and through no fault of their own) on His bad side and they can’t even know it.
I wouldn’t say anything is “pivotal”. My favorite verses are Matthew chapters 4-7 (the Sermon on Mount), Luke 10:25-37 (the Parable of the Good Samaritan) and John 1:1-18 (Jesus is the Word). The first is the story of Jesus giving a sermon. Does it matter to me if Jesus really said it? No, the message itself is what matters. The latter two stories are so clearly allegorical to me that I’m baffled by anyone interpreting them literally.
And, yes, I believe those stories, but I do not interpret them literally.
I can so say that. Christians are not monolithic. We can disagree about anything, including what “Christian” means.
You are making unwarranted assumptions about the beliefs of Christians. “Jesus died for our sins” can be interpreted many ways and on multiple levels. There is not one fixed meaning to it, nor does saying one believes it require one to necessarily accept any other belief.
I think you’ve been confused by some Christians who use that phrase as a code word for their particular belief sets.
Thus the need for faith.
And, actually one of my favorite stories (read the Good Samaritan) addresses that issue–it is the Samaritan (someone with heterodox beliefs) that is the exemplar, not the “righteous” people.
This isn’t what I said at all. There is no means and there is no ends and there’s nothing to justify because there’s nothing going wrong.
Consider, you’re watching a movie, it’s a good film, and you enjoyed it. Do you look at the first 100 minutes as just set up for the last 20? No, there’s purpose to every part of the movie and you have to take it all together as one cohesive work.
Imagine a film where all of the characters at the beginning have nothing to learn, no conflicts to resolve, are perfectly happy. What story will you tell? If they’re already perfect, anything that happens is tragedy because they’re taken farther away from perfection. Or look at another medium like music. If all you have is a small set, possibly only one, of timbres, notes, and rhythms, what sort of songs can you really create? Or fine art, you only get perfect colors, and lines.
What makes that music or fine art interesting is those “imperfect” sounds or lines. If all you hear is that one “perfect” sound, it seems bad, but when you hear it in the context of a song that builds off of it, it becomes part of the perfection of that song. Similarly, if all you see is an uneven line or a blah color, it looks bad, but they may be part of a greater context of a beautiful image and they fit perfectly.
There’s also this concept of “going right to the end”. When you watch a film do you only watch the last scene? When you read a book, do you only read the last page? When you listen to music, do you only listen to the last couple of seconds? When you look at a painting, do you only look at the farthest edge of the work? We perceive time differently, as though the past is gone, the future doesn’t exist, and now is all there is, but I subscribe to the B-Theory of time. And in comparing that total 4D structure as a work of art, we don’t just look at it as slices perpendicular to time, we see the whole work as one, and the perfection isn’t some last state, but the whole piece together.
We see these differences over time as “changes” but that’s only because we can’t exist in moment A and moment B at the same time. But, when you consider, you can’t be at point A and point B at the same time either, and in both cases one has to travel between all moments or points on a path between A and B. Again, consider a painting. On left side a line is thin, and as we follow it more to the right, it gets thicker. If we compare the left-to-right to time, we could say the thin part is the start and the thick part is the end and it “changed” over that time. But when we are actually able to view the dimension in its entirety, there is no change, it simply is. Yes, we lack this ability, but many theists would say that God has the ablity to perceive time in such a way (ie, he’s outside of time). To argue that because God is omnipotent and thus wouldn’t have things change over time would be like to argue that such an artist wouldn’t have that line change in thickness from left to right. There is no “change” when any given moment and point is time and space simply is.
So, again, pain and suffering seem like bad things in no context because they’re unpleasant, but just like the imperfect line or imperfect note, they serve as part of a greater context. That context is learning, growth, experience, existence.
The standard response I keep hearing is that we’re all born sinners and evil and guilty because of Adam and Eve (well, mostly Eve), so it’s all our fault.
I can’t see any purpose or learning curve in situations like what befell Sylvia Likens:
Not sure what Christina science is.
But to me and to quote scriptures of Lord Jesus, ’ God is the God of the Living’ to me everything is alive including the entity we sometimes call ‘mother earth’. We are her fetal child, all life in her is her (single) child. Just like a human mother can do things that intentionally or unintentionally harm her in-utero child, so can mother earth.
Yeah probably. I think I’m just going to file you as one of the exceedingly reasonable/inoffensive Christians I so rarely encounter out in the world and call it a week. I don’t have to “get it”, but thanks for trying to explain anyway.
Neither is faith.
Why should God fix the world when we’re perfectly capable of fixing it ourselves?
Tell that to people who suffer from incurable illnesses.
Or people who were harmed or who lost houses or family members due to natural disasters.