For whatever it’s worth, PRR’s claim has validity, in that Valteron is the one who said the quote in question back in post #176. It would probably behoove you next time to just point it out right away, PRR.
PRR, for what it’s worth. I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading up on the historicity of Jesus and the evolution of the book we now know as the Bible. Most of this happened after I became an atheist and thus was, for me, a matter of history (one of my favorite hobbies) rather than religion. I have noticed no errors, embellishments or “cheats” in the accounts which tomndeb and Polycarp have given you. Just sayin’.
Hmmm…non-religious people lack motivation to be evil and/or stupid? :dubious:
Hogwash. Taking the marginal and generalizing with it is very a disingenuous method for debating, even for an “opinion”. I noticed you dropped the second half of my quoted paragraph to skirt around the issue that a non-religious person can follow a book and cause many evil acts as well. Your opinion on the matter is VERY skewed.
Give credit where it is due, and criticism where it is due…it is you that has the double standard where virtually everything else has it’s plusses and minuses except religion, where in your opinion, everything about it is evil. That’s as close-minded as it gets, sir.
Actually, this is the very first time that you have actually called attention to the specific fact that I attributed a quote by Valteron to you. In no pregvious post have you actually indicated what words I was supposed to have been falsely attributing to you.
I do apologize for getting the attribution incorrect.
Of course, had you actually noted the material that you were whining about in your first complaint, I could have resolved that issue some time ago as soon as you brought it up. Unfortunately, since you have made a habit of making false charges against me for the past four months while refusing to ever provide a citation and since I knew that I had not posted any invented or modified quotes, your failure to be specific until this post caused me to dismiss your accusations as simply one more in your long list. (Boy who cried “Wolf!” and all that.)
I noticed it last nigght but I just thought I would see how long you two would yell at each other before somebody noticed that you in fact DID attribute something I said to pseudotriton. 
Jesus was allegedly the Son of God. He allegedly became flesh and dwelt among us and died to redeem all humanity. His message would logically be the most important message that was ever communicated in the whole history of the human race.
Jesus was allegedly the Son of an omniscient and omnipotent God. But he chose to communicate the most important message ever communicated and that ever will be communicated through four Gospels that even contradict one another and through a bunch of quotes asnd parables that are so open to interpretation that Torquemada and the Inquisition boys, the Prots and Caths in Northern Ireland, our own queer-basing K’bird, our wonderfully liberal Polycarp, Francisco Franco, Martin Luther, the Pope, John Calvin (who burned heretics didja know) were all devout Christians who got completely different and opposing messages out of the gospels.
Does such an astounding inability to communicate a message of this importance clearly not make you doubt that perhaps it is NOT a message directed to humanity by an omnipotent God?
Does it not seem more consistent with what you would expect from a bunch of followers of a rabbi who was crucified by the Romans, who formed a cult around his memory, and initially did not write a lot down because after all, he clearly said that he was returning in the lifetime of those present when he was alive.
Then, about 65 years after his death, by Tomndeb’s own admission, they began writing down stuff about him. Given the lifespan of most people back then, and given that you would have had to have been about 15 or 20 to be a disciple of Jesus when he was alive, it is unlikelty that anyone who had actually witnessed the events described in the Gospels was alive 65 years after Jesus’ death.
We even find fragments of gospels like the ones discovered in Egypt in the 1800s which are only feragments, but in which there are nonetheless differences, extra words and phrases, etc.
What is more likely, that Jesus actually was the Son of God with miracles or resurraction or that he was a rabbi whose followers started a cult and built him up to be divine? To my mind, the latter solution is by far the most likely.
One point that keeps coming up in this thread and many others, whenever anyone points out all the evil that has been wrought on humanity by religion, is that science is somehow also “evil”. There is usually a mention of nuclear bombs or eugenics thrown in for good measure.
This comparison and this argument are specious at best.
Science and religion are entirely different.
Science seeks to discover truths about the nature of reality. Not only can its conclusions be challenged, but they must in fact be falsifiable in order to be valid.
Compare this to religion. When God grants what you prayed for it proves that prayer works. And when God does not grant what you pray for it proves that God does not want you to have what you prayed for. So it is not fasifiable.
Science cannot be evil or good, because it is nothing more than a method for discovering the realities of our world and constantly improving our understanding with challenge and experimentation, with proof and falsification.
Take nuclear bombs for example . Science discvovered that material objects are made of atoms and that the splitting of an atom can produce a chain reaction of atoms that gives off immense energy and also dangerous radiation. This is a simple truth or fact about our universe. It is neither good nor evil.
NO SCIENTIST ever discovered a scientific truth that said that the United States should build two bombs using the principle of nuclear fission and use it to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians through heat, explosion and radiation.
The decision to drop the bombs was made by politicians, not by scientists.
Religion begins with the idea that it is right, that it is a true revelation from an omniscient God, and humans suffering from this delusion have been killing one another for centuries, and committing all kinds of evil in the name of God.
Put it this way. The first human who discovered fire was a scientist. Among the things he or she discovered was that it hurts like hell when fire is applioed to the body. But the decision to fry heretics alive on the Spanish Chair during the Inquisition was not a decision of science, but of religion.
I agree with you that science is not evil and that it seeks to discover truths about the nature of reality. But I disagree with you that it differs from religion on those two issues. Religion also seeks truth and the nature of reality. And they don’t have to contradict each other.
The “evil” lies within the people who use science and religion for harmful purposes – which is probably pretty much all of us at one time or another. There may be quirky cults along the way that teach evil intentionally, but these are generally short-lived. I’ve read that most of the world’s great religions teach peacefulness and love as basic guiding principles. If that is true, that message certainly gets lost somewhere along the road to patriotism, sect loyalty and revenge.
I think statements like this are what lead to confusion. To the extent that religion seeks factual truths about reality, it does not in fact seek, but instead pre-assumes. Religion is not an epistemology of factual seeking about this physical reality. It might well be a method to plumb some other reality, but it is not set up to explore this one, on a factual basis. Any claim that it does most certainly DOES conflict with science and often contradicts it, historically with religion coming out the loser.
To the extent that religion seeks to explore what I suspect you mean when you say “truth and the nature of reality” what is really being said is that religion shapes and influences particular judgments and feelings about things that happen in this reality, exploring subjective attitudes towards events in ones life, and so forth. To THIS extent, religion does not in any way conflict with science.
Do you have a citation for this?
A much more frequent “comparison” would seem to be a claim that science will “replace” religion or that science is “better” than religion.
I’d hate to see all this wonderful straw go to waste.
Now these are statements that the vast majority of theists posting to the SDMB would agree to.
I think you may have a definite point there.
My impression is that religion generally, presupposing the existence of a supernatural power or dynamic (adding the latter to incorporate Buddhism, various Neopagan non-theistic views, etc.), asks the question, “How can I best live my life in proper conformance to (God’s will / the behavior expected of one who has placed himself as al-muslam* to Allah/the dynamic of karma / atman / the forces of Nature)?” The answers found in the various faith traditions and the variants within them constitute the basic practice of religion.
Note that this is quite distinct from the abstract metaphysical question of “Is there a God or gods? If so, is It/They in any way concerned with me/us?” This is, I think, the error common to most atheists and agnostics attempting to discuss matters regarding religion with believers generally: They equate “belief in God” (i.e., commitment to His will, in a personal relationship) with "belief in the tooth fairy/Bigfoot/UFOs/the survival of dinosaurs/astrology/etc. (i.e., the giving of semi-intellectual assent, however motivated emotionally, to a proposition regarding the actual quiddity of some hypothecated entity or process).
Where religion becomes a force for good or bad, of course, is in a skewed variant on the same question regarding science – and the parallels and disconnects are both worth taking into account. Insofar as there is an “ethics of science,” it holds that the gaining of knowledge is good in and of itself. That such knowledge may be used for nuclear weaponry, brainwashing, terrorism, etc., is an unfortunate evil consequence of the good-in-itself knowledge regarding these things.
Now, consider a variant on the deity Kanicbird has defined. (I fully realize that I’m setting up a straw man here, and will gratefully welcome her corrections on the actual belief system. My interest is in defining the Christian conservative (CC) conception of the nature of God in simplest terms; hence, I am willfully simplifying and misconstruing some rather arcane points of doctrine in the interests of simplicity.) At rock bottom, say the CCs, man was created good but with the potential for good or evil, and placed in a paradiasical situation but with the ability to choose evil. As a result of man’s doing so, in the form of Adam (=Hebrew for man), an inherent taint entered the world and marked every human with that indelible taint. So, while theoretically possible to choose righteousness, no man is able to eliminate that taint from himself. If you live and work on a civet farm, you end up smelling of civet, no matter how fastidious you try to be. God is merciful but also righteous. It is within his power to condemn all human beings to Hell, and (say the CCs) this would be only just – because we’re all, automatically and incurably, tainted by sin. And his wrath is over those who continue to indulge in sin. But he is also merciful. So instead of judging and condemning us as (they believe) we deserve, he instead accepted the self-sacrifice of his Son, who being God could pay that price and being man stood surety for all his fellow men, and forgives those sins if the person repents of them, places his life under Jesus’s authority, and endeavors to live according to God’s will.
So far, so good. It’s pretty arcane already, but something that one can grasp as logical within its own framework of assumptions. Believers get saved from Hell, by their own free choice to repent of sin and follow Jesus – a personal decision.
But now comes the trick part. Remember that God is wrathful, and in the CC view he takes it out on humanity on a regular basis: Flood, Tower of Babel, Egyptian captivity, Babylonian Exile, natural disasters ad libitum, and most especially the eschatological conceptions of the disasters and Great Tribulation to come in the Last Days. (Cf. Hal Lindsey, the Left Behind series, and many another bit of writing.) Hence, the CCs feel, if humanity in general continues to sin, God’s bound to notice, and “you won’t like Me when I get angry” 
To prevent all that, it’s incumbent (so the CCs think) on them to make every effort to make sin illegal and use the power of law to stomp it out in that way. God will, in fact has, forgiven the good Christian who backslides and commits a sin or two here and there, like getting a divorce to marry someone who’s stirred up his libido more than his aging wife, having an affair on the side, maybe getting drunk in a tough situation – those are all things we can grasp why God might understand and forgive, since we can understand why people do them. But those evil unrepentant sinners who do things like accept gay people (obviously choosing to sin!) as perfectly normal, allow abortions, advocating gay marriage, etc. – He’s bound to get wrathful about them if we don’t stop them, and we’re apt to get burned when He throws a natural disaster at them. So it’s incumbent on us to make sure that they don’t piss Him off, by stopping them fom sinning first!
For anyone not a Christian conservative, of course, that “stopping them from sinning” is arrogant bigotry and attempting to force their beliefs on others by law.
Now, the perspective of liberal Christians is quite other than what’s presented here, but it seems pointless to present it again.
- Someone correct me on my usage here, please: the meaning intended is “self-assured, self-controlled commitment to honorable servitude”
No this is not a blanket condemnation. I’m not really sure what you stand for. I’ve only seen your criticism of others. Is that what you stand for?
I’ve seen you throw childish hissy fits when you feel you’ve been slighted rather just admit you’ve made a mistake like a grown up might. Is that what you stand for?
More specifically, you were wrong and continue to be wrong about the historical facts. You come to board that you know requires some citations for posts that are more than opinions and refuse to be bothered to give cites as you misrepresent the facts. For example;
{bolding mine}
Care to name any of these historians you speak of? I admit my ignorance on the subject. I’m glad to be educated. Tell me a historian or two that lived in Christ’s lifetime and did some historic writing about Judea.
This is of course a side issue since your implication about Toms intent is obviously incorrect as well.
When Tom corrects you and calls you on* facts* you misrepresent his actions to imply his objection is not about the* facts* but he just objects to having his beliefs challenged on a message board. That is obviously untrue to even the casual readers. If that’s a debate technique it is most unimpressive.
I’m familiar with it.
How were you using it then? Do you believe that most gay and women are born with that sexual preference?
I agree. My point is and still IMHO, the physical act of sex cannot be a sin. If the condition of the heart is a sincere expression of love then it cannot be a sin.
I’ll help out PRR, Cosmosdan, on this one. There is one and one only writer who attempted history and who was active in the Holy Land at approximately the time of Christ (actually a couple of decades later). That is Flavius Josephus, author of the Antiquities and Jewish War. And, though focused largely on the political intrigues of the time, he does in fact mention Jesus, in positive terms and ones that suggest that the “more than human” meme was already present. Of course, there are some scholarly reasons to believe that some or all of the Jesus comment was an editorial insert made later; Diogenes or Tom may have some comments on that problem.
People writing history were scarce in the ancient world. There were no contracts or royalties, no way to assure your works would be read and preserved. You did it in your spare time out of personal dedication, or supported by a patron.
I find the unwillingness to accept that different times and places may have had different customs and viewpoints, to be one of the greater problems involved in threads like this. One finds it hard to transport oneself out of suburban San Jose, or academia, or greater Montreal or London, into an environment where people thought differently, imposed different criteria on what they expected a good non-fiction text to do, had a different worldview (cf. my comments on ancient perspectives on postmortem survival on page one of this thread).
It’s truly scandalous that Pliny didn’t do radiocarbon dating or chemical analyses before writing his natural history, or that Plato or Matthew or Luke put words in the mouths of people whose actions they were reporting. Because everybody knows that the way we do things is self-evidently the proper way for anyone to have done them at any time and place. Right?
I believe they refer to Josephus, a chronicler of events during and following the time ascribed to Jesus. There is a much-contested area of his writings that are said to refer to Jesus Christ. Some say these writings were added by christian copyist in later centuries. You can read more here
Sorry Polycarp, simalpost!
Of course they are. My point before was completely and purposely illogical. It is similar in it’s blatant lack of logic to the arguments and assertions you continue to make and cannot defend.
<snip>
Do you think the scientists who built the first successful atomic bomb knew how it would be used, and knowing this continued anyway? Not the politicians or the generals but the scientists.
Yes it has happened. Evil greedy men use all manner of justification for their acts. To claim that this is predominantly what religion is about is just your own biased opinion. I would say nationalism has been the justification for far more evil acts than religion. Perhaps we should abolish governments because they are evil.
Who invented the creative torture devices? The never ending quest to make better and more deadly weapons? At the very least scientists have been willingly complicit in man’s inhumanity to man.
As I said before, you completely ignore all of the good done by religion over the centuries to give voice to your own bias. Neither you nor **Der Trihs ** or any other atheist can make any legitimate claim that religion is predominantly evil. It’s obviously something you feel strongly about but your emotional venting is not evidence. It doesn’t add substance to you biased claims.
That wasn’t what I meant. I wasn’t talking about feelings and subjective attitudes or about events. But when I try to explain, I do come across as condescending and that is absolutely the opposite of what I would be trying to describe.
I jdon’t think that science and religion are TOTALLY at cross purposes. I just don’t see any signs of their intersecting at some final point. I think some religious groups anticipate that the will eventually – the Baha’is, for example.
Thanks Poly. I’m familiar with this and have read what Josephus allegedly wrote about Jesus.** PRR** was claiming there were historians of Jesus time who should have written about Jesus but didn’t, as if that omission said something significant about JC. I was just asking him to be specific about which historians he was talking about. I doubt I’ll get a serious factual answer, and that omission will say something significant.
Look, either religion is a good means for finding out factual questions or it isn’t. It sure doesn’t seem to be. But for many people, it does seem really important to exploring how to understand things in their lives: that sort of “truth.” That’s all I’m saying.
I’m not sure I follow you.
Polycarp Your first and second paragraph to me starting with:
.
that could be a (slightly inaccurate and misleading) interpretation of my belief, it is not how I would put it, but see where one could derive that from.
The third paragraph does not represent my view and I believe it to be inaccurate scripturally in places.
The tribulation period can be divided into 3 or 4 parts:
The 7 seals, which I take to refer to Satan’s ‘attack’
The 7 trumpets which I take to be God’s angels counterattacking
(The 7 thunders, which may be a 2nd wave of the trumpets, which may be canceled.)
Then God steps in with the
7 bowls of the wrath of God
So for the most part God it hands off in the vengeance dept for a while. But God did seem to dish out vengeance in the past.
btw Jesus allows divorce, but not for the reason you state.
Bold mine. It is not that that God might understand and forgive, it’s that God promised to forgive, no matter how bad the sin (with one exception), if you accept Him and Lord.
One reason for wanting some laws passed prohibiting certain things (such as murder) is a belief that the instructions that God gave man in how to run things will produce a better society.
As for the issue brought up by you, the sin of homosexuality. I accept the person as a fellow sinner, no better or worse then any other sinner, no worse then myself - and we are all sinners. My reaction to them is to pray for them, not cast stones at them.
Yes I assumed so, It was more for the benefit of others here.
I was using it in the choice of SS marriage.
I believe that I don’t know, I also believe that no one really knows why, they make guesses and speculate. I think it’s very possible to have gender misidentification where you have a someone biologically one gender and mentally the other but this is not how most people would define ‘gay’.
I’m not sure about this statement, which I know you already made. People can love God in that condition, I am making the assumption that people can also love a false god, which is a sin.