Hush! Some preacher in Alabama will hear you!
We now are touching on something, we liberal christians *and other liberal religists) don’t normally say something has to be black and white or right and wrong, we see and possibly it is a fault that the world of morals and laws are shades of grey.
It say thou shall not kill and we all say “yeah that’s pretty cool” but if someone is going to harm my child I would be prepare to kill them, so lets not get all black and white but acknowledge we are non perfect humans who enjoy the greay.
It doesn’t really, there are people on both sides that behave beautifully and those that behave horribly. A belief or non belief does not make one a good person, that is a personal choice based on genetics, upbringing and society.
So you don’t respect moderate religious folks because they’re not fundamentalists.
And who are you to say what is completely against the Bible? The Bible itself is inconsistent and full of contradictions most obvious example being the Old and New Testament. It’s up for interpretation which is why there is so many different branches of Christianity.
My position is it is true or it is not. That is what I was taught in Religious high school. ANd I carried that part with me to adulthood. Since we can easily know that it isn’t all truth one should feel a need to reject it totally.
Most main-line denominations not only don’t take that position, they believe in evolution and other things that give Evangelicals and Creationists the screaming meemees.
Hell, I was actually taught evolution by a Jesuit priest! Not just at a Jesuit school, but by an ordained Jesuit priest with a degree in biology. I suspect had you asked him about Biblical literalism in terms of creationism vs. evolution, he’d have told you that was just plain stupid, and to shut up and quit being a knucklehead.
Actually, it says “do not murder.” I am not sure why the sixteenth century English translators and their early seventeenth century disciples seized on the word “kill,” but that is not the correct translation.
thank you.
I can probably be described as a religious moderate although religious belief is not politics and can’t be described in the language of politics accurately. I have identical reactions to fanatic atheists and fanatic Christians: run away fast!
Robert163, you know what moderates do that you and fanatic Christians don’t do? They doubt they are perfectly right. They also doubt that anyone is perfectly right. That is a large part of what makes them moderate.
No.
Robert163, what you fail to realize is that man was originally created with an additional cognitive faculty. In addition to knowing what we see is real and understanding that an object we feel actually exists, God endowed us all with the important ability to know and immediately recognize His true word so that we may better serve Him. This cognitive ability was destroyed as a result of original sin. Humans lost this ability and relationship with God as a punishment for original sin. However, by praying and accepting the Lord, the Holy Ghost is able to miraculously repair this ability in individuals who receive Him into their heart. The closer their relationship with God, the greater their ability to immediately recognize the written word of God and distinguish it from that of man. The truly saved who have had their cognitive faculties repaired by the Holy Ghost can read the bible from cover to cover and distinguish the parts that are straight from God, distorted by man, or made-up entirely. You can’t tell the word of God from that of man because you lack the full cognitive function of your mind. As a blind man cannot tell the difference between blue and green, you cannot tell the difference between a man’s word and God’s. Perhaps if you read the bible after some honest prayer, the Holy Ghost can help you see the truth and the light.
Funny how this always ends up in exact agreement with the specific dogmas of the theologian doing the interpretation. Funny how this results in different interpretations of the same texts by different people, whose cognitive faculties are inspired to exactly the same degree by the Holy Ghost. Funny how often the means by which these differences were resolved involved torture, burnings at the stake, or open warfare.
You mean that wasn’t a joke post?
You get to ask someone what the reasoning is behind their political opinions also.
We’d roll our eyes at someone whose set of political opinions consisted of stuff that just sounded right, or were compiled by throwing darts at political platforms.
To rephrase the OP, which I can do since I’ve asked the same question many times, understanding that moderates are not literalists, even in the slightest bit, how do they come to the set of beliefs that they do hold? How do they decide to reject some parts of the Bible and accept others? How do they handle logical dependencies in the Bible, especially when they reject an event and accept its consequent.
Example: If a moderate Christian believes that the importance of Christ is to absolve believers of inherent sin, and that sin was due to a choice and not built-in by God, when was the choice made? A few hundred years ago the answer was easy - in the Garden. Since the moderate rejects the actual existence of Adam and Eve, where did original sin come from?
However from this thread it appears that the act of asking for a description of your reasoning in this area is either an accusation of fundamentalism or an example of mean old fanatical atheists oppressing believers with unreasonable questions.
We got one answer - it seems right, which is at least an answer.
Poe’s Law strikes again?
Cavemen turned their backs on God. They were violent, backwards, and worshipped false nature spirits. Just don’t ask whether it was anatomically modern humans or australopithecus, that’s too tricky.
A: The Adam and Eve story is a parable for humanity’s emerging consciousness and ability to tell right from wrong, something animals lack the ability to do. (Though horse whisperers may qualify that last claim.) In Christian parlance, that’s known as the “Fall upwards” interpretation.
Again, you’re getting tripped up in Biblical literalism. Freaking St Augustine maintained that a day in Genesis was like 1000 years for God. This word for word legalistic framework is a recent American fundamentalist one.
Scripture follows faith, not the other way around. Somehow that has been turned around in the opinions of many people.
A clear example is the origin of Christianity. The first letters that were later adopted into the New Testament canon were written in the 50s–at least fifteen years after the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The last text that was eventually part of the canon was completed as much as 90 years after the life of Jesus. The oldest compilation of texts into what we now call the canon was from around 170–nearly 140 years after the life of Jesus. Despite that decades-long lack of a New Testament canon, Christianity developed as a faith throughout that period. Scripture encapsulates the faith of a people. It is not a constitution written and set forth for a people to accept of reject. Rather, scripture is written, (or compiled), by people who already believe in order to provide a Story that acts as an anchor and a foundation to hold the faith in place. Later generations will use scripture as the encapsulated faith, but it proceeded from the faith, not the other way around. This was a salient break in the thoughts of the Catholic Church and Martin Luther when he formulated his sola fide dictum. The existing church saw scripture as supporting the faith while Luther presumed that the faith was based on the scripture.
American mythology includes the Story of a rag-tag bunch of farmers/volunteers fighting the most powerful military force in the world to a standstill, breaking the rules, relying on individual ingenuity and a desire for individual rights. That Myth has served to support or underscore all sorts of attitudes and movements in the nation’s history: rugged individualism, isolationism, libertarianism, gun ownership, a reluctance to embrace trade unions*, and a host of other phenomena. It no longer matters that most of the Myth can be shown to have few actual historical precedents; the Myth has been established. It even generates subsidiary Myth that furthers the the Story. The American fascination with and constant appeal to the Story of the cowboy has been based on the older tales of knights errant, with the lone cowboy fighting for Truth and Justice against all odds. Never mind that the actual cowboys of the “Wild West” were the clearest example of feudal society that this country has produced. That is true of all Mythology–the telling of Story that binds together a people and describes the Truths to which they hold. Regardless of the historical accuracy of the Story, it has shaped and continues to shape the consciousness of the people.
Looking for (or debunking) the historical event on which Myth is predicated is a pointless exercise. Since the people look to the Myth to bind them and to give them direction, mere historical events are pretty much irrelevant to the situation.
- (Every major effort at unionization has occurred among immigrant groups who had not yet internalized the American Myth and has weakened as those groups have become assimilated.)
Jerome translated it non occides too. Perhaps he had a good reason?
And in so many words, being a Jesuit.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit and a palaeontologist who studied Homo erectus pekinensis. It’s usually the Jesuits who are on the cutting edge of Science, not just Roman Catholic Science, though Fr Mendel, the heredity guy, was an Augustinian.
Accuracy?
It’s certainly a good example.