Careful, more talk like this, especially after your interlocutors have informed you that their own personal beliefs aren’t up for discussion, and it’ll be hard to tell you apart from all those literalist fundamentalists who go around asking whether one has accepted Jesus as their personal Savior.
I understand you don’t care for their views, but you seem to have nothing against their methods.
I believe I have established that the concept of Biblical inerrency is a recent phenomenon[1] and endorse the fine sentiments of Left Hand of Dorkness a couple of posts back.
I think there is a non-miniscule probability that Jesus survived the Roman execution for a short while. More likely though, not.[2] But I’m more Buddhist than Christian, so I can’t really tell why this matters. [3]
I think that’s above my pay grade. If pressed, I’m pretty sure I can establish Jesus’ memetic survival.
Give me the exact cite from the Gospels and I’ll pull out my copy of the Jesus Seminar and give you their take.
[1] Dating from the beginning of the fundamentalist movement, say.
[2] IIRC, internet infidels has an article on this topic.
[3] …though my stance is mostly agnostic.
ETA: Kimmy: So have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?
d&r
So basically you’ll do just about anything not to answer the question. I just wanted to be sure. My guess is you figure if you don’t personally admit to a ridiculous belief, then you won’t be criticized for it. Like the Bible teaches, “hide it under a bushel.”
You didn’t.
That’s not exactly clear, so you think most likely Jesus died and didn’t rise? It’s OK, you won’t go to hell if you answer clearly and honestly.
I believe it is a fascinating a question to ponder and that it is too magnificent an inquiry to short-circuit by coming to any answer prematurely. It is a lot more interesting to be thinking about God and any purpose God might have for human beings than it is to get your dogma straight and settled. I’m not worried that there might be some incomprehensible things out there; I relish the possibility that there are.
You really should drop the ‘liberal’ vs. ‘conservative’ terminology. conservative =/= literalist. Although literalists are conservative, most conservatives are not literalists. Example, the Catholic Church is a conservative one, but it is not literalist in the slightest.
I suggest you substitute ‘mainstream’ where you’ve been using ‘liberal’. That will exclude the literalist fundies, and pretty much no one else. You realize, I hope that the fundies are only about 20 to 30 percent of Christians. They are a minority, despite their claims.
Precisely. It’s a modern fundamentalist perversion. That’s why their theology is so screwy compared to the mainstream sects.
That almost sounds agnostic but somehow I don’t buy it.
But I guess you’re going to have to since you asked a question about my own personal beliefs, and consequently, you’ve got no other basis to assert what I do or do not believe. Perhaps you can start to understand why I found your question to be a sterile avenue of inquiry.
I didn’t make up the term. For what I have noticed, liberal Christians tend to vote liberal/democrat. Maybe that’s why they survive better on this left leaning message board.
Sounds like something a liberal Christian would want to be called, so as to more marginalize their embarrassing, but more faithful, brothers.
I think a larger minority that you suggest. I’d say ~40-45%.
No he’s not wrong. Those polls are flawed. Allow me to explain.
As I said, fundies are 20 to 30 percent of all Christians. However, there are a lot of mainstream Christians who just aren’t very damn devout. They didn’t pay much attention in Sunday School, because they don’t much give a shit about any but the most basic of doctrines. They are the equivalent of the ‘12th century peasants in the pews’. And their pastors don’t preach about the origin of the world, at all, because it isn’t an issue. Therefore, they haven’t had any of the non-creationist doctrines of their sects reinforced at all since the Sunday School they didn’t pay attention to in the first place.
Now, given that the fundies are the loudest of Christians, and they don’t say "our sect teaches that the world is 6000 years old, instead, they say “Christianity teaches that the world is 6000 years old”, some of those ‘peasants’ kinda absorb it into the back of their brains. Along comes the pollsters, asking them about creationism. What happens? They think “well, I’m a Christian, so Yes, I guess.” The problem is that the pollsters don’t have any good way to filter out the ‘I don’t give much of a shit, and I’m too much of a dumbass to remember my Sunday School lessons, so I’m just going to spit out what I think I’m supposed to say.’ They don’t really have any good way to get those 15 or so percent categorized as ‘too dumb to have a valid opinion’.
Yes he is.
Well sure. If you take a bunch of fundamentalists and not count them, then you can say to yourself that there are very few of them. Just don’t think you are fooling anyone but yourself and apparently a lot of other liberals since it’s another pretty common liberal Christian meme. I guess it’s another one of those things that makes you feel better.
Not on this board.
I think they say the Bible teaches the world is ~6000 years old, because it does.
That’s wonderful conjecture. Do you have a cite?
More faithful? :dubious: I know far more Catholics that are faithful to all their doctrine than I do fundies. The fundies are a rather hypocritical lot, in my experience. They talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk.
Not sure about that. Last time I heard they pretty much all use birth control.
Well of course all Christians are hypocritical (except maybe the Amish), but the fundamentalists seem more ready to admit they are sinners when they don’t follow the Bible.
It’s no skin off my nose. Perhaps you missed this post of mine from the other thread:
IRL they sure as shit are.
I’m really wondering why I would bother. You seem to be a literalist fundamentalist, in that you have bought into their formula {must be 100% literally true, or 100% literally false}. You’re taking the opposite side, but you’re just as fanatical and closed minded about the formula itself. I’m done with someone who’s not really interested in learning, just pretending he’s infallible.
This came up in my Confirmation Catechesis: my group consisted of people who had some sort of Very Specific Question about Church doctrine which our “Jesus loves you” lessons had never addressed; it was the VSQ of one of my classmates.
Specifically, the miracle she brought up as “no fuckin’ way” was not a Biblical one, it was the Miracle of Calanda. A double-amputee beggar, long known to everybody in Saragossa as he’d owned the sweet spot at the Basilica’s main entrance for decades, went missing. Months later, he came back with both legs. The subject was investigated, but with the techniques of the 17th century and with no torture (which was the basic investigative technique, subtlety was something they left for universities). People swore up and down that guy was the beggar, the surgeons who’d amputated the beggar testified as to having amputated the beggar, ok, miracle.
The money of any of my classmates is on “dude must’a been the beggar’s cousin or something, close enough in looks to deceive people and knowing the beggar well enough to fake”. DNA techniques, National IDs and a national registry of fingerprints were still a few centuries in the future.
Now: did the events took place? Yes.
If one believes the two men to be the same one, is the regrowth of two legs “beyond the ken of the medical science of the time”? (This happens to be the objective criteria for medical miracles - note that something can be a miracle under a certain level of medical knowledge and not one under a higher level) Of that time and of ours, the difference is that for some reason people in that particular time and location were more ken in believing divine regrowth than in believing this guy wasn’t who he claimed to be.
Did people see that act as divine intervention? Yep.
Does that mean God regrew the dude’s legs? I don’t for a minute believe it.
A different, more recent one (20th century):
A blacksmith’s arm had been badly hurt in a work accident. He was told he’d never be able to use his arm again, the damage was too severe. He made a promise that if he recovered the use of the arm, he’d go on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of a local saint. The blacksmith recovered the use of the arm and his pilgrimage is being repeated annually 70-some years later.
The recovery of the use of the arm is “beyond the ken of the medical science of the time”, but not beyond the ken of ours; nowadays he would have had microsurgery, physiotherapy and whatnot in order to improve his probability of recovering the use of the arm from “tiny” to “almost sure”.
Some miracles in the Bible are perfectly understandable to modern medical science if you do things such as ignore the numbers given for ages (Sarah was neither the first nor the last woman to get pregnant after her menses were gone); others seem to have been distorted in the telling (Jonas eaten by the whale); some stories are invented from whole cloth (the book of Job). In the end what matters is how does the person hearing the story interpret it - life happens everywhere and dawn every day, yet I’ve heard both called “miracles” by people who meant it. After all, a “miracle” is simply “something which produces a feeling of wonder”; something which makes people look at the world with the eyes of a child.
From what I can gather there are 2, maybe 4 that post.
I imagine if you didn’t have a cite, you wouldn’t bother. You could be honest though and just admit it.
I’ve claimed neither, nor do I believe either. I just think it very very rational to put 100% of the miracle/supernatural episodes in the Bible in the 100% literally false category. How about you?
What’s fanatical and closed minded about the formula that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?
You really don’t have to get all huffy about it, all you had to do was admit that your claims were conjecture and you didn’t have a cite.
You are aware that it’s readily apparent in the percentages broken down by denomination, just a few posts below the ones where you posted your links? A little bit of thought and math makes it obvious. Where do you think the literalist Catholics come from, anyway, if the catechism itself denies literalism, as was posted already in this thread by someone else? Do you really need the most trivial thing cited to a source you will just nitpick and deny, anyway? You are starting to develop a pattern here and in the other threads, you know.
If I called the book bullshit just a couple of posts ago, what the hell do you think?
These aren’t arguments. They aren’t even table pounding. It appears that the OP has run out of things to say regarding the topic of this thread and is basically changing the subject.
It’s ok. Lots of fundamentalists get bent out of shape when the argument doesn’t go their way. In fact it’s refreshing (and rare) for the theists to have the edge in a GD thread: nice job Kable!
Oh no, we are not attacking Reef Shark for his fundamentalist beliefs. We are ridiculing him for his deliberate ignorance of science. Two different (although probably causally related) thinks.