badchad, if your only purpose, here, is to follow Polycarp around and harrass him, you are going to have a short, unhappy experience.
If you want to rant on about religion, you’ve got lots of company. If you keep making it personal, you are out of here.
[ /Moderating ]
Tomndebb, I have broken no forum rules that I can think of. If you or someone else wants to be the voice of liberal Christianity, so be it, and will be more than happy to reply to you. If Siege wants to give bombastic and irrational answers, I’ll reply to her as well, but for the most part it is Polycarp who continues to play that role.
I am criticizing a specific message; that Jesus is some loving being of infinite wisdom, and that liberal Christians have any more reasonable base for their faith than fundamentalists. If one guy wants to single himself out as being that messenger, it is not my fault.
As politely as possible: bullshit.
It is quite possible to wrangle over those issues for months on end without making it a personal matter, yet you have immediately begun the practice in which you were engaged when you were last here of making it a direct personal confrontation.
There is a general rule about refraining from being a jerk and if you insist on making your challenges personal, you will be breaking that rule. The last time you played your game, you pretty much confined yourself to the BBQ Pit where personal attacks are permitted. You will not be permitted to harry a poster in Great Debates.
I’ll leave the moderating, of course, to tomndeb. Just chiming in to say that, though I’m an atheist (or strong agnostic, depending on how one defines terms), I always find Polycarp’s posts illuminating and interesting. For example, his elucidation of the Trinity in a thread a few weeks ago was by far the best I’ve ever seen. I, for one, thank him for the time he spends addressing these issues.
I’m glad you say that Tom. Looking through my last post the most inflammatory comment I can think of, is my closing line questioning Polycarp’s honesty when he says he lets Jesus do the cherry picking for him. Thus you give precedence to the idea that it’s ok to questions someone’s honesty without breaking any forum rules. Notice, however, that I did it without profanity and that I did it after citing specific examples. You’re just “sniping.”
That’s not exactly true. When arguing about liberal Christianity, each liberal Christian’s beliefs are different and as such each argument is best made, IMO, if customized to a particular person. While I think Polycarp makes himself out to be the biggest target for my style of argument, if you check my history, I had no compunctions about arguing similar issues with Siege, Mangetout, yourself, and others. As I have posted before, my free time is short and as such I can’t spend my time arguing with absolutely everyone and as such I try to do so only with who I think are the best representatives of my opposing view point. I think you would be a great representative of such, but I know you like to keep your personal beliefs more private, and I can’t say I blame you.
That’s a pretty subjective rule. I think it is being jerky, in deed, to go around professing ones love to a deity who explicitly stated he intends to punish me and most of humanity forever and ever. Or if we are to soften Jesus’ statements down to accept Diogenes the Cynics’ interpretation of hell, merely intends to murder my soul, and the soul of billions, and toss our corpses into a flaming garbage dump. That’s not nice, and as much as one might give lip service to “love” being a jerk doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Again that is incorrect. I spent a good deal of time in Great Debates, because that is the stated place to discuss religion. I am discussing religion. Later I did go to the Pit, and in spite of that being the stated place to give personal attacks, Polycarp again got special treatment, my threads were shut and I was told opening new ones was off limits.
Tom, I know you share many of the same beliefs of Polycarp, which I think are equally as irrational. If you would like to start a new thread defending liberal Christianity, so as to stop the hijack of this one (a hijack I did not start), I would be more than willing to join. However, if I recall our past conversations I think it will be made clear that you hold your beliefs primarily because you were raised in them, and in spite of your intelligence and erudition, you yourself were unable to cast off the belief system learned at your mother’s knee.
chad, I’m more than willing to continue discussions if you will grant me the courtesy of accepting that I think I’m being rational and honest in presenting my views. My irritation with you was not because you disagree with me; many of my closest friends here on the Dope disagree with me on a lot of different issues. It was because you seemed to be bringing an agenda that you yourself did not agree with to the argument in what appeared to be an effort to accuse me of dishonesty, picking up on every infelicitous phrase or failure to clarify in a way that felt like stalking. That behavior is commonly considered trolling, and I am far from alone in disliking it.
First item: of course the Bible is subject to all sorts of skeptical criticism. Czarcasm, Diogenes and others will gladly give reasons for doubting any particular passage has the truth value of the New York Times, the Encyclopedia Britannica, or even the Origin of Species. In that regard, I’m more than willing to conceded that the Gospels are at least 30 years later than the events they describe (and that’s the extremely-early conservative-Christian dating; Diogenes would put the dates a minimum of 10-15 years later, running John up to about 100 AD. Beyond which, each is somewhat polemic, painting a picture of Jesus as something the author wanted to bring across to the audience: the Jewish Messiah, the wonder-working Son of God, the Compassionate Healer and Advocate of the Poor, and the Eternal Word Made Flesh. But it would be my strong position that within that, one can in fact grasp the figure of whom these varying portraits are painted, and what He had to say about God, human life, ethics, one’s duty towards God and man, etc.
Given that, all three Synoptics show Him as defining a certain behavior set as what He expects of His followers. Key to that are the Two Great Commandments, the primacy of spirit over letter in understanding God’s will and commandments, the call to non-judgmentalism and compassionate outreach, etc. It’s that that I identify as the “cherry picking that Jesus did” – Three Gospel writers paint three different stories of Him defining those two commandments as the key to all else. In my mind, you’re free to reject Him altogether, or doubt any part of the stories about Him. But if you accept Him as what He portrayed Himself to be, then you are obliged to take something on which He evidently laid as much stress as those issues.
Now, like anyone else, Jesus engaged in hyperbole, metaphor, and so on. He characteristically taught in parables. He used a classic Aramaism of antithesis: not “hold X as more important than Y” but “love X and hate Y.” “If your eye offends you, pluck it out.” It takes someone determined to argue a particular point against Christianity not to recognize such figures of speech as being tropes intended not to be taken literally.
Now, I grant that on the basis of the fundamentalist assumptions, this has to be seen as the rankest sort of cherry-picking. But the fundamentalist assumptions hold the Bible up as something sacrosanct given by God totius porcus, all parts of which are to be taken as His Word without cavil. And the history of how it came to be, the disagreements about the content of the canon, the very internal evidence of the book itself, disprove those assumptions.
I do not believe in a God who hands down judicial sentences of eternal torment. I believe in a God who loves all people, and who respects their freedom of choice enough to keep the door open for them to return to a relationship with Him as long as possible, but allows them to choose something they will always regret if they insist on doing so. Getting into this whole issue of Hell and why a loving God would let people go there can be quite complex, but can I suggest the metaphor: a loving parent stops a small child from doing something risky, attempts to dissuade his/her adolescent or adult child from doing it, but ultimately has to accept the adult child’s decision to live his/her own life. The jokes about “I’m so going to hell in a handbasket for that” and so on to one side, human nature is such that we can make choices that preclude future choices for ourselves. What I’m saying is that God attempts to stop people from choosing to “burn themselves out” destroying what is good and joyful in their lives, but must ultimately accede to some people’s choice to do so. Hell is where you are when you’ve irrevocably destroyed all your possibilities and all you have left is regrets.
I have no idea what you mean about “giving precedence.” It is permissible in this forum to question another poster’s honesty when there has been a specific exchange of purported facts and one side or the other believes that they have discovered a deliberate misrepresentation of actual verifiable facts. Beliefs are not verifiable facts. You are asserting that another poster is dishonest because you choose to hold different beliefs. That is a personal attack.
Given that your only participation on the board had been to make those sort of personal attacks against a poster (however you wish to dress up your claims), you were asked to quit that behavior before and you chose to withdraw. Your only participation since your return has been to resume the exact same behavior. That is not me sniping; that is an observation of your jerk behavior. If you find the definition not to your liking, you are free to resume your behavior on a board where the rules better suit you.
As long as you can engage Polycarp (or any poster) at the level of discussion without making your attacks personal, you are welcome to participate. If you decide to make it a personal vendetta, you are not.
[ /Moderating ]
Dear moderator Tomndeb:
If you will look at the OP I posted to begin this thread, you will se that it has gone on for page after page and has gotten completely off topic. Please, I beg you, put it out of its misery. Close it down or whatever. Give it a death with dignity and end its torment!
Besides, it really does no good to people like Polycarp and the others to carry on their debate under the title of my original thread. They are making interesting points, but how likely are people interested in their arguments to click on a thread whose title talks about outing gay priests? By the same token, anyone interested in the topic I brought up who looks at the latest postings will wonder what any of this has to de with the title of this thread.
Fiar enough. Rambling hijacks are par for the course, (particularly after many days), but I can see where you would prefer that the two or three most recent discussions not be connected to your OP.
Closed, it is.
[ /Moderating ]