So what? Some nut thinks Jesus was a lizard man from space. An infinitesimal splinter group means next to nothing when it comes to general Christianity.
And having *any *beliefs about God is silly because regardless of if it’s the Abrahamic God, the Hindu Gods, the Aztec Gods, or some silly new age nonsense about oneness, they’re all assertions based on no evidence.
Some orphans got it comin’. 
Eh, my wife finds my belief that the Three Stooges were comedic geniuses silly. And I realize that proving the existence or nonexistence of any type of god is an exercise in futility. I don’t try to convince anyone that my opinion is correct, and it has no effect on how I live my life. And wouldn’t the art in cathedrals have been cool if this idea of Jesus being a lizard man from outer space had caught on during the various councils of the early Christian Era?
That’s just playing word games. A self-professed Christian who accepts the Gospels but rejects the Revelation, “believes in only part of his [professed organized denominated] faith.”
I’m talking about the years right after the Origin was released. Mainline Protestants had no trouble with evolution after the evidence was in - Catholics also to be fair. But it was quite a shock at the time and not what anyone was expecting.
No one can deny that religions evolve. What is odd is that if they had the divine inspiration they claim, they wouldn’t have to.
Speaking as a comic books fan, that’s for sure! There are huge chunks of the published Marvel and D.C. “canon” that fans just laugh off. “Oh, don’t worry: that never happened.”
How does claimed divine inspiration imply that religions shouldn’t have to evolve?
Receiving divine inspiration implies that the gods are telling you what is true.
Changing divine inspiration implies that you are telling the gods what is true.
Good examples. I was not claiming that what is in a physics book was true necessarily, just that it is unambiguous. If two physics books contradict each other, either one is wrong or there is a serious hole in physics which must be fixed - which has happened.
Law on the other hand is created by people. Various laws contradict each other, and it is the job of a judge to come up with an answer in a particular case. Just like the Bible, in fact. The difference is that as you said there is no general theory of law and no one pretends that a Supreme Court ruling is the absolute truth for all of eternity.
Jesus is the son of God by a vote of 5 to 4.
And political science is just like fiction only not as believable.
If God told Brigham Young or whoever that blacks shouldn’t be church leaders, and then changes his mind a century or so later, does that seem to you that God is involved or people claiming to talk to god are involved? Is God still cool with slavery?
Religion evolving, if you believe God is involved, implies that god changed his mind or has to compromise.
What kind of God is it whose opinions evolve like the opinions of humans?
Changing divine inspiration could imply the gods are telling you a new truth.
Us telling the gods what is true does not negate that the inspiration is divine, whether or not its changed.
A God whose relationship with an individual or a society can change. An eternal God does not imply our religion cannot change.
You might think about whether your evolving sense of what god wants is driven by the culture, not something which happened by itself. If you lived 50 years ago your view might not have evolved. Ditto for some of the major churches.
Yup, you’re just making stuff up to suit your whims and then using that as the ultimate appeal to authority.
You could just make stuff up without the appeal to authority, wouldn’t that be simpler? Although it would mean not being able to use an appeal to authority.
Here’s what I remember a former Sunday school teacher telling us.
Paraphrasing: the Bible is the story of the Hebrew people’s search for God in a particular time period. He also said that when people asked him who/what was his ultimate authority, his reply would be “my mind”. While not a majority opinion in Christianity, concepts of God that depart significantly from the Abrahamic God are not that uncommon. Such ideas would probably not be out of place in any mainline divinity school. A supreme being who dictates what’s right and what’s wrong? There are plenty of Theists, and Christians, who don’t believe in that either. I realize Atheists don’t believe in gods of any form or fashion, but if you’re going to call someone’s beliefs silly at least know what the belief is. Is it possible to disagree with someone without condescension? After all, we’re talking about something that can’t be proven or disproven. That said, I don’t have much use for theistic proofs either. As long as it doesn’t push you to harm anyone, or isn’t pushed on anyone, I have no problem with any kind of disbelief or belief. Hell, I can even live with the designated hitter rule.
“I ignore Deep Space Nine in my personal Trek canon. Roddenberry’s original Star Trek was positive and utopian and campy; Deep Space Nine doesn’t fit with any of Roddenberry’s original intent, so I don’t include it in my fanfiction.”
“I ignore quantum physics in my personal physics worldview. Newton’s original laws or motion were clean and neat and made sense to me; Quantum Physics doesn’t fit with Newton’s universe, so I don’t include it in my textbooks.”
One of these things is not like the other…
Well then you need a new New Testament. If you guys are still working off of the New Testament, that would be like me trying to fix my 2010 Ford by using the Ford Model T 1909 specs manual.
I agree with the point made earlier about attacking reliigous faith on grounds that it’s not consistent to be selective about it (c’mon, an all-knowing, all-powerful all-wise GOD said it, who are you to “interpret”?) It only makes the believers angry and defensive.
Besides, you are overlooking an important central fact about large, successful religions: since they comprise most of a given nation/area’s population, most of their adherents are of average intelligence or lesser. In short … they’re dumb. They often cannot recognize or follow logical arguments. Plus, they don’t give a crap about intellectual consistency. They just know that if they do what the man in the pulpit (or whatever) says, they will be adjudged “good” and will live forever in very happy circumstances after they die, and what’s not to like about that, eh?
I think women are in general more attracted to religion because historically it has given them some respite from the more brutal aspects of the patriarchal culture in which they live(d), even if it did reinforce other aspects of those patriarchal cultures. If you were a “good” woman you need only fear being beaten by your husband, for all others it was hands off except for the local noblemen and their bully boys, if you happened to be a peasant woman, as most were.
Average guys however, don’t really get a lot out of religion. They have to dress up nice on their day off and go sit in an uncomfy place and listen to some pansy in a fancy hat go on and on about how you shouldn’t do fun stuff like getting drunk, beating up your wife and children, fucking whores (or any woman you could think up a reason to call a whore, such as, she was pretty) gambling, and so on. Plus he wants ten percent of your money for all that shit.
What I’m saying is, most male adherents to religion (and many female adherents in the West, where the brutality has been toned down a bit) are practically agnostics. They cling to religion because they’ve been taught to, and because they’ve been taught to fear not doing so. The way to attract them away from religion isn’t a rational attack on religious precepts, but to point out to them that they don’t NEED to go to church on Sunday, they can sleep in late, not have to listen to the pansy and keep their money, and still have a very nice life.
So?
There used to be a Christian bookstore in my town that has hundreds of thousands of Christian books, many of them officially published by my former denomination. Did I have to “accept” all of them as well?
That might sound like a false comparison, but until Martin Luther came along, there was no sense in which the Bible was seen as the basis for Christianity. The essential content of Christianity was the teaching and practice of the Church, which had originated with Jesus, who taught it to his disciples, who passed it on to the first bishops of the Church, who passed it on to their successors and so on. The Bible was a supplement, historically later (in the case of the New Testament), and intended only for those who understood the official, essential teaching well enough that they both needed and could be trusted with it. Being a Christian had nothing to do with reading or following the Bible; it meant participating in the rituals and following the rules of the Church as spelled out by the Church’s hierarchy. God himself, in the person of the Holy Spirit, was believed to guarantee the accuracy and validity of those rituals and rules. The Bible was also believed inspired by the Holy Spirit, but it primarily gave the historical context for the origin of the Church and validated the Church’s authority. It wasn’t, however, the source of the Church’s authority, nor of its teaching (though it contained many of the Church’s teachings).
Martin Luther didn’t like some of what the Church was doing, so he latched onto the Bible as an independent source of authority superior to the Church, despite the fact that nothing in the Bible itself supports this understanding, and that the New Testament was only ever considered authoritative because the Church said it was. (The Old Testament as well, in a Christian context, was only authoritative because the hierarchy of the Church, after some debate, declared that it was–again, because they claimed that as the successors of the apostles, they knew what Jesus had taught, and they said he had taught that the OT was authoritative. Other Christian leaders disputed this. The New Testament, with its stories of Jesus reading from the Hebrew scriptures, didn’t exist yet, and in fact was almost certainly composed in part to address this very issue.)
Luther himself, though, said that the Bible was only authoritative insofar as it teaches the reader about Jesus. He deprecated several books of the Bible that he claimed did not do so, and expressed doubts about the validity of Revelation. To repeat, the person who invented the idea of Biblical authority as separate from the Church doubted the authority of Revelation. He could do this because he didn’t propose that the Bible was somehow magically self-authorizing (as many do today) but proposed that it was the best available repository of the authentic teachings of Jesus.
Luther was very influential among subsequent Protestants, but of course had no direct influence on Catholic or Orthodox teaching. Catholic teaching today places more emphasis on the Bible, but still considers it subordinate to the authority of the Church.
Many Protestants, however, combined Luther’s concept of sola scriptura with Luther’s other idea of the priesthood of all believers–the concept that each Christian has a personal relationship with Jesus that guides their understanding of Scripture by means of the Holy Spirit. Haven’t you ever heard a conservative Christian say that “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship”? That’s what they’re (poorly) trying to express. It’s the imaginary-friend element that makes someone a Christian.
This idea became extremely important in Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the history of Protestant theology can really be told as the struggle for authority between the Church bigwigs, the individual believers’ imaginary friend, and an old book, with people and groups appealing to whichever one gave their ideas the most support. Every denomination today has some official doctrine or guideline attempting to clarify the relationship between those sources of authority, and almost all of them contain something about the supremacy of the Bible, often implicitly contradicted by something else about the authority of the Holy Spirit speaking to the believer’s heart. Still, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that anyone seriously proposed that the Bible is a truly independent, self-authorizing authority that is “fundamental” to Christianity and that neither individual conscience nor Church authority can supers cede it in any way.
Nevertheless, the idea was easy to grasp and was useful for denigrating the other guy’s ideas, as long as you could find some supposedly obvious interpretation of the Bible that agreed with you. Among Protestants, the denominational hierarchy almost never have any independent moral, spiritual, or theological authority, so they can say what they want about the Bible being supreme, but there is nothing internal to the faith to compel the member of the denomination to agree with it, any more than American citizens have to agree with Congress or the Supreme Court to be “real patriotic Americans.”
When I was a Christian, I read the Bible, including Revelation. I also prayed regularly and participated in the rituals of the Church and tried to follow the moral principles and rules of the Church. I believed that Revelation and the Gospels were both written by faithful Christians who had been inspired by God, and they in turn had inspired subsequent generations of Christians, including the ones who inspired me by running homeless shelters, opening hospitals in Haiti, and fighting for gay rights. So I took what I read in the Bible seriously, I subjected my beliefs to the denominationally official fourfold test for truth of Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience, listened to what I foolishly thought was the voice of the Holy Spirit, and came to the conclusion that “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and most of the other teachings of Jesus found in the Gospels were valuable and morally true, and that the idea of Jesus releasing four angels on horseback to slaughter people until the entire earth was literally covered in blood was silly and evil and probably the result of someone taking the idea that God would provide justice for the oppressed and applying their own primitive, naive, and even evil concepts to it.
Trinopus and any others who think non-fundamentalist Christianity is inconsistent, please explain how, exactly, I was only partly Christian or believed only part of my faith.
Yes, my beliefs were wrong. (FTR, I no longer believe that Jesus’ teachings, in the aggregate and compared to other moral teachings of the time, have any particular insight or authority.) Yes, they were based on insufficient evidence and were, at heart, silly. But I fail to see how they would have been any more complete, consistent or rigorous if I had simple swallowed the Bible whole, despite nothing in the Bible itself or in pre-1900 Christianity suggesting that doing so was the only way to be a “real” Christian.
Fascinating history, and I’d love to read more about it. So…cite?
That said, to me it’s not just about the Bible–it’s also about 2000 years of history. A “moderate” Christian who believes only in “love thy neighbor as thyself” has to deal with a hundred generations of Christians who did not share that belief. Did you believe God spoke to them and told them to persecute gays and Jews, then recently changed his mind? Or did you believe that you were so select and special that you had a true revelation not shared with other Christians for millennia?
Fundamentalist belief–even if not grounded in Biblical literalism–is at least internally consistent in that it believes that God spoke to Christian leaders and more-or-less told them the truth over all that time, though that belief of course fails in the face of science and history. But Moderate beliefs can only avoid the counterfactual and amoral worldview of their forebears at the cost of inconsistency–they believe in Jesus based on the teachings of the group whose very teachings they reject.
This liberal Christian believes that if something is wrong, it not because “God said it’s wrong.” It’s because it does harm to someone. Quakers believe in the “inner light”, which some may equate with conscience. The idea of God, the ground of being, saying anything doesn’t work for me. I’m probably a humanist first, a Christian second. But it’s the teachings of Jesus, as I interpret them, that made me a humanist. Others become humanist other ways; nothing wrong with that.