Somehow I had a feeling Polycarp would chime in here…
An interesting position, Poly, in the apparent assumption that only parts of the Bible are true.
Dropping, for the moment, your obvious and ingrained assumption that your belief system is the “right” one, where’s the footnote that says, for example, the story of Genesis is merely a story that simply tries to Illustrate That Which Cannot Be Described, and thus should not be taken for, er, gospel, but further states that, say, the story of the Ressurection is the Literal Truth?
You see the story of Jesus on the cross asking God directly “Why has thou forsaken me?”, and I see the same story as of a delusional individual who firmly believes he will be saved from this torture before he dies, and when, naturally, nothing happens, he does not, in the depths of his delusion, question the existence or nonexistence of he who will “save” him, he simply asks why he’s been left to die.
Much, I’m sure, that a condemned man may wonder at the very last moment, why the Governor didn’t call just before the switch is thrown. He doesn’t doubt the existence of the Governor (of course, in this example he has no reason to, but work with me here) he simply wonders why, since he’s “innocent”, that the Governor would leave him to die.
In other words, yes, I’ll accept it’s possible that a “Jesus” did live in approximately that time period, and may have interacted with those individuals, but considering that the first of the stories about him were not committed to papyrus until something like forty years later (and just how many different versions of, say, the Kennedy Assassination do we have today, even with the mnemonic aids of movie film and thousands of photographs?) how can one be sure those stories were not, shall we say, embellished?
I’m sorry, oral traditions are just that- they are subject to coloring by the preceptions of both speaker and listener, subject to the vagaries of each holder’s memory and widely morphable even to the politics of the listeners.
Much like your example of the documentary of vs. a story set in WW2… Can it really be called a “documentary” if one uses only data based on the memories of those who say they were there, using no films, no photographs? And what if you only interviewed those who were in the first wave of casualties? They might not even know how the battle came out. What if you only interviewed the one partial detachment of Canadian soldiers, out of two divisions of mixed American and British? What if you only interviewed the company clerks? Or the mess cooks? Or only interviewed the Soviets who survived Stalingrad? Or only the Germans who got out, injured or otherwise, as the Nazi front was pushing up TO Stalingrad?
Oh, and a “four sided triangle” would be a 3-D shape formed from four identical 2-D triangles. What’s so unknowable about that?
“Truth” is a concept that becomes quite slippery. I have read several items of fiction that were “truer” than some works of history – the points they were written to make and the context in which they were set, were much more effective at evoking the desired response and the sense of what it was like at that time and place than the poorly written but profusely documented bald narrative of events.
Do I have criteria for suggesting what portions of the Bible are literal and which metaphorical or pious-fiction overlay? Yes:
If a miracle is described, employ extreme skepticism. It might well have happened – an omnipotent God is in the mix and could have caused it. But it’s well known that people do tend to react to the inexplicable by explaining it – and that explanation tends to grow with time. My classic example here is the feeding of the 5,000 – because, although the story is retold in all four Gospels, the actual Gospel narrative does not anywhere say that Jesus turned five loaves and two fishes miraculously into food for 5,000 men and an indeterminate number of women and children. I can envision his charismatic personality and teachings of love and generosity being such as to move the people assembled to share what they had with them, in a “Stone Soup” scenario – and the Scripture would be equally supportive of this understanding.
Give due credence to the “Jacob Brown effect.” Jacob Brown was, of course, the General who won the War of 1812. At least, that’s what you learned if, like me, you grew up within ten miles of his birthplace. In other words, whatever a historian might have thought of Israel vis-a-vis the much larger and more powerful kingdoms of Assyria and Egypt, the Books of Kings focus in on what went on in Israel, and distort the objective historical figure through this narrow emphasis. The most obvious example of this is Abraham and his 318 followers (or was it Eliezer of Damascus, whose name is the Hebrew characters that, taken as numbers, produce 318?) joining in the Battle of the Nine Kings. Their effect was probably negligible, if they did actually join in the battle and not just raid the retreating armies (an alternate reading to place on the Genesis text) – but it’s a big deal for the Genesis writer.
Remember that most of the Bible books were written for specific reasons. This is especially true with regard to Paul’s letters – he had no intention of leaving instructions for what a person attending First Baptist Church ought to be doing as regards garb and hairstyle; he was addressing himself to the small Christian community in the large port city of Corinth, and their particular needs.
Look at the pictures drawn of people, and particularly of Jesus, by the authors’ words. While Luke, Mark, John, and Matthew had their own private axes to grind, they seem to be giving a coherent view of a winsome, charismatic individual that people would follow to their deaths. Though John makes him Rabbi Socrates, and Matthew is so bound up in showing him as the fulfiller of prophecy that he disregards almost everything else, there are some common points to be made.
Net conclusion for me is that Jesus was a means by which God made himself manifest in teaching what he wanted men to do as regards himself and each other, and that something happened on that first Easter morning that made a major change in the lives of his followers. Beyond that “something” and the descriptions of His appearances thereafter I don’t want to go – but I think it’s clear that some occurrence changed them from the guys who had slunk away while he was being taken to trial into people who were unafraid to proclaim what they knew to be the truth.
You do not need to tell me you are serious. To answer your question, I care about what “any of you” believe simply because I wish to have a basic understanding of what people believe, and why they believe it. To tell you the truth, I am still a student and I have a fairly limited knowledge about this field. I think that learning about the many different beliefs of people will help me to understand them. As the saying goes, “Knowledge is an investment that always pays good interest” (or however it goes).
You know, this is probably more insulting than not insulting. Consider for a moment, if you will, how a polytheist would feel about your denigrating any or even all of his Gods with such a casual dismissal merely because you have a belief in monotheism.
Yet another question for you: How do you make such a distinction in languages (such as Hebrew, Arabic, Sign, Korean, Japanese, Chinese…) which don’t have lower & upper case symbols?
I was under that impression for a while, but a fellow pseudo-intellectual friend informed me that most (people like us) would say that an agnostic is someone who believes in some higher power, but is not sure what form the higher power is, and that an athiest either doubts that there is anything, says there is no evidence and leaves it at that, or denies existence of a god.
That is when I went from calling myself an agnostic to an athiest. He says that our definition is not universal, but is pretty much accepted in philosophical circles, as some really infamous athiest lady (i’m sure many of you will know the name) from Texas who was killed by the government presented the above (my) definition.
I agree. While I believe it is easier to believe in God than not, I also made the conscious choice to not believe in god. And since that point, I have faced many eternal questions and crisises without that crutch.
I had consciously decided to be an agnostic for many years. Then I spent a few years not thinking about it. Then, a couple of years ago, partly because of the prevalence of related topics here on the SDMB, I gave it some more serious thought, and I decided I was, after all, an atheist.
I have absolutely no fear of being wrong (the old Pascal’s wager thing). And in looking at the world, I’m pretty sure I’ve formulated a perspective through which things make a lot more sense – to me. I make no promises that the perspective will appeal to anybody else; that’s the whole point.
I generally keep this perspective to myself, because I don’t like getting into arguments. I’m not nonconfrontational (I had a rather forceful discussion with somebody at a party over their idiotic interpretation of a movie a few days ago, for example), but when it’s as fundamental as this, I think it doesn’t serve anybody’s ends to try to convert anybody. I’ve managed to avoid being dragged into any serious debates in the last few years on the subject of faith, so I’m not sure what I’ll do when the inevitable religious type starts trying to hammer on my philosophy. I hope I’m gracious enough to sidestep it without hurting anybody’s feelings.
As far as whether or not believing in a higher power is ingrained into human nature, I would say, sort of. We’re not necessarily wired to believe in God (or gods, or animistic spirits, or whatever), but there are specific aspects to our intelligence, I think, that lead us in that direction.
First of all, we are pattern seekers. It’s one of the things that’s made us so successful as a species. We see a lot of disconnected data, and our brain doesn’t rest until we’ve managed to assemble it into some sort of framework, a meta-explanation that encompasses and explicates the data. In other words, we constantly ask “why?” Sometimes the scale is small, as in, why doesn’t so-and-so return my calls? And sometimes it’s large, as in, why is poverty so hard to eradicate? Why? why? why?
We get annoyed and frustrated, I believe (based on observation), when we can’t come up with a “why.” We look at the mess in the Mideast, for example, and we go back and forth over the history, the politics, and everything else, until we finally decide it’s so ridiculously complicated as to defy explanation, at which time we either settle for a simplified model (see any of the numerous “why don’t we do this about it?” threads that have popped up lately), or we give up, deciding with anger and/or sadness that the problem is beyond us. That doesn’t mean that truly smart and informed people can’t make a valiant attempt at it (see the responses to the aforementioned threads), but I haven’t seen any single explanation that I find totally comprehensive and convincing.
This need for explanation is, I believe, why we fear the unknown. From our earliest days, if we didn’t understand something, it potentially had the capacity to injure or kill us, and thus was to be feared, simply as a survival response. This, taken with our need to understand, served (and serves) us extremely well. We fear what we don’t know, simply because we don’t know it, until somebody in our tribe starts to figure it out. Once that beginning of understanding is achieved, we all collectively focus on it, until it’s been explained isn’t feared any more. How many people are afraid to put their nose to the window of a microwave, simply because they don’t have any idea how it works?
Now combine this ceaseless curiosity with the hardwiring of status relationships. We all habitually rank everything and everyone. We always have somebody in charge, and we ask one another (go look at IMHO and Cafe Society), who’s the best tennis player? what’s your favorite movie? what’s the worst song ever written? who’s the bravest person ever? and on and on and on. Whenever you meet somebody, you automatically and unconsciously jockey for status. This is magnified when you meet somebody famous; either you don’t question the status relationship, in which case you defer automatically, or you reject the value of celebrity and struggle for dominance.
This is deeply ingrained, and affects how we think about almost everything. The Elizabethans invented the Great Chain of Being, ranking everything in the world, from sand to jellyfish to birds to horses to peasants to nobles, according to some mythical notion of value. Plato imagined a “perfect” example of each category. Scientists have only recently moved away from thinking of the evolutionary ladder to the evolutionary web or bush, but they find themselves facing a brick wall trying to get the general public to give up the notion of “higher” and “lower” beings, of an animal being “more evolved” than another. It just isn’t the way our brains work. We can consciously decide to think in other ways, as evidenced by the aforementioned evolutionary web, but it isn’t the default, and if we aren’t cognizant of this, our patterns of thinking will manifest themselves again and again without our knowing it.
Take those two basic facts of our intelligence – our need to find patterns and explain things, and our assumption of ranking and status – and religion, as a human construct, makes a lot more sense.
Death has been mentioned above, specifically the fear of it, and that’s an excellent example. We are simply unable to conceive of the universe except through our own perception. We take for granted our own consciousness as an aspect of the world. It is very nearly impossible to imagine the world without some point of view, and death, as far as we know, removes our point of view. It is persistent, however, in our thoughts, and thus we cannot see how death could be final and permanent. This is the great unknown, the biggest unknowability in our experience, and thus we fear it.
There is much else that we, as early tribal peoples, wouldn’t have been able to explain. What is the sun? We know now it’s a gravity-powered fusion furnace, but what did the wandering Caananites think? How could they have arrived at anything resembling a modern conclusion? And what about lightning? earthquakes? the Aurora Borealis? Why does it get hot for a few months, then cold for a few months, then hot again? Why does the flooding of the Nile seem to coincide with the appearance of the star Sirius? Why? why? why?
At a certain point, our intelligence had progressed to the point that all of these unknowns were scaring the bejeezus out of us, so we invented an explanation. Every single culture on the face of the earth has a creation myth, without exception. Whether the world as we know it was willed into being in six days, complete with the first man, or grown from a reed in the First World by a golden-haired child of the sun, or sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, every single people on this planet has formulated an explanation for how everything got here and who runs it.
These stories run the gamut from monotheism to pantheism, but they all share two important characteristics: They provide a framework for comprehending the unknowable, and they all posit a world beyond the power and understanding of humans.
This is turning out to be longer than I expected, so I’ll get to the point. Religion serves a fundamental need in the human psyche. We need to know that things operate in a coherent, comprehensible manner, and that somebody or something is in charge. We are not comfortable thinking that the world simply is what it is, and that we’re all pretty much on our own.
Some of us recognize this about human nature, and have decided to exempt ourselves from these patterns. And yet, we continue trying to formulate a framework for the world, because we literally can’t help it. (Grand Unification Theory, anyone?) After carefully observing how humans will happily invent superficial rationalizations in order to have buckets and pigeonholes to place otherwise nagging uncertainties, we have decided that religion, relying as it does on an impossible confidence about comprehending the absolutely and utterly unknowable, is not a helpful framework. Instead, we turn to science, or art, or some other means of finding meaning and order.
In short: In my opinion, we aren’t hardwired to be religious, but we are hardwired to explain the unexplained, and religion has fulfilled that function better than any other device. It’s under siege right now, because so many of its teachings are falling before the inexorable juggernaut of scientific inquiry, and the safe and comfortable framework suddenly doesn’t seem so safe and comfortable any more. (Sample rhetorical question for someone considering atheism: If <insert supernatural creator> is all-wise and all-powerful, then why didn’t he/she/it tell us about quarks and the Copernican model and DNA right off the bat? Why make us work for it if the act of discovery will take us further from faith? Personally, I don’t buy the “it’s a test” answer, because that presumes a certain sadism inherent in the creator. And besides, it goes back to and relies on the unknowable. But I digress.)
I sometimes wonder if faith will become obsolete one day, as the sheer weight of scientific discovery makes belief in the supernatural simply untenable. But I usually conclude that it won’t, because a comprehensive understanding of the world requires such an investment of intellectual capital that it’s easier to fall back on one simplistic paradigm or another. How else to explain the “Apollo moon hoax” phenomenon, than by a desire to discredit what we cannot verify with our own eyes, and to undermine the sciences that want to lead us away from the possibility of believing in voodoo and John Edward and laundry balls and everything else that makes it possible to be a tiny singular being in a huge and unfeeling universe?
So, anyway, that’s why I, as an atheist, don’t see the need to posit a supernatural creator-slash-supervisor. I see the role it plays in human nature, but in recognizing that role, I realize I don’t need it for myself. Dunno if it’s what you were looking for, but that’s where I come from on the subject.
** Colinito67,** you really need to use the “preview.” Your last post makes it impossible to tell which words are quoted from my post and which were your answers. At first, I was all set to report you to the administrator for falsifying my quote. But then I realized that you unintentionally combined your words with mine. Using “preview” would prevent that kind of problem.
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If you are referring to Madalyn Murry O’Hair, she was an avowed atheist who said something to the effect that an agnostic was just a gutless atheist. That was her opinion. If it’s enough to cause you to show your “guts” by calling yourself an atheist instead of an agnostic, okay by me.
But you should be careful about accusing the government of her murder. She was once called the most hated woman in America, and there were many who would have killed her, given the opportunity. She wasn’t hated so much for being an atheist as she was for contesting school prayer all the way to the Supreme Court. Now, you are probably in no danger of being rubbed out (by fanatical religios or by the government) just for calling yourself an atheist. Just don’t be too anti-religion too publicly, and under your own name.
Madalyn Murry O’Hair was killed by David Waters, who embezzled money from O’Hair, was exposed, and plotted revenge. There’s a little editorializing in the timeline of events, but it lays it out pretty well.
I’ve been an atheist about 30 years, since age 12.
I’ve learned recently that several of my cousins (we were all raised Irish Catholic) are “quiet atheists”.
Religious folk, I believe, feel more free to challenge my beliefs (or lack) than they would someone of a different faith. Several christians have flat out told me I’m wrong, I’m NOT an atheist, I just imagine I am, and that faith will come to me when the time is right. Well, my mom died 8 years ago after a protracted illness, and my dad died a few months ago, and to be honest, praying for them never even once crossed my mind.
And having observed this to a christian coworker who had invited me to “pray with her”, I was subjected to a 10-minute harangue about how horrible a person I was.
Atheists, in comparison to other minority groups, are probably situationally closest to gays. IE, it is an “invisible” difference that may not be apparent to any except close friends. And there are “closet” atheists, who really do live a double (perhaps/probably hypocritical) life of “faith” for the sake of family tranquility. Then again, I know plenty of avowed atheists who put up Christmas trees, fer Chrissake!
Perhaps I’ve gone astray here (I’ve put in too many 12 hour days this month at work).
This is interesting. A friend told me recently that he had rediscovered his Catholic faith, and that when he spoke to his father about it, discovered that his old man has been a “quiet” (I used the term “closet”, but mostly to cheese him off) atheist since boyhood. I wonder if I’m not part of a silent majority. Nah, probably not.
As to why I “deny”, well as has been stated many times, I don’t deny, I just don’t believe. If someone wants to believe in a deity, that’s just ducky. Just don’t try to tell me that I’m wrong for not playing along.
I, too, have had theists tell me that I’m not really an atheist, and that I will find faith when the time comes. I just smile and leave. I figure that it’s just not worth getting my knickers in a twist over someone else’s inability to realize that not everyone thinks like they do.
Damned if I can remember where, but I just read something wherein the head of the American Atheists (I think) said much this same thing.
Heh, there’s that term again.
I would be one of those. Of course, my wife’s Catholicism, and my daughter’s budding Catholicism give me an added excuse, but I’m not sure I wouldn’t do it anyway. I remember being happy when I see a Christmas tree.
Quite simply, she does and I don’t. It’s something that I have purposefully removed myself from. Besides, DST has begun and there’s bicycle riding to be done.
I will, however, be there when she takes her first communion this coming Saturday. If it’s important for her, it’s important for me.
Christmas trees don’t mean nuthin’. My family’s Jewish and my mother wanted us to assemble that damn plastic monstrosity every year. We called it a “New Year tree”, and we went shopping for presents after Dec 25th to take advantage of sales and such (which on reflection, is a pretty Jewish thing to do).
The tree itself doesn’t have any real Christian significance, anyway. It’s pagan, through-and-through.
In recent years, my sister has moved to Ontario and I didn’t care enough to maintain the tradition, plus the stupid thing used to stay in the corner until April or so when somebody finally got around to putting it away.
Fascinating. So, Polycarp, you’re telling me that, bascially, only the believable stuff in the Bible is true?
“If a miracle is described, employ extreme sketicism”… Well, I suppose I should be thankful you’re apparently not a Fundie.
Yet you say that something happened three days after Jesus’ death, something significant and to change the course of… well, literally the World.
The natural assumption here is that JC was, in fact, dead, and did, in fact, come back to life via presumably supernatural means. If that’s not in the same definiton of a “miracle”, I appear to be reading from the wrong thread.
Was this account not among those stated earlier as having been written forty years, plus or minus, after the ‘fact’? When one assumes, or agrees that other parts of the Bible are… embellished, to one extent or another, or even apocryphal, as you stated, false but in an attempt to better convey a feeling, a mood, rather than in an attempt to conceal or mislead… why is this a “miracle” and the story of the loaves and fishes something that can be dismissed as good storytelling?
I find it quite interesting that you profess such faith in a system and a book that you yourself agree is mostly either outright false or at best mere embellished novellae. Again, what makes that system the least bit different than a Scientologist believing in whatever it is that passes for L.Ron’s ‘bible’?
And in any case, while you present a somewhat more enlightened than usual viewpoint, again I ask, what makes your particular viewpoint the “right” one?
You may well agree with concepts of Evolution and Astronomy, and/or have a different concept of “God” than others, but I believe you can agree there are those who do not necessarily share that view. Good old Jack Chick, for example, would undoubtedly curse you as an unbelieveing heathen. Various ministers such as Graham and Swaggart may politely tell you “that’s an interesting point of view” but end that sentence with “now here’s why you’re wrong”.
And what, of course, makes you right and them wrong? Or are they right and you’re wrong?
And before you yell at me for using “right” and “wrong”, that is, quite literally, how religions see each other- The Baptists see the Catholics as practically insulting “their” God with the way they pray… The Catholics think the Protestants have it all wrong. The Muslims just know all the Christians will be dealt with savagely by Allah for their unbelief. The Jews are equally sure everyone else is pretty much already damned, and even then, the Orthodox Jews are worried for the eternal fates of the less-devout Jews…
If you feel you are “right” due to what you have observed about the mechanics of the World, why does that make me any less “right” due to my observations about the same world?
One of us is quite wrong, and though we both know who that is, our answers are not the same.
I’m spending WAY too much time on this, but hey, here goes:
-I see. Two things; First, you apparently agree that portions of the Bible are… shall we say, less than factual. Those… less enlightened than you take every word and comma as the Absolute truth. So again, both sides cannot necessarily be correct.
And second, again you imply your viewpoint is somehow the correct one, which further implies that the majority of Christianity is… if not wrong, than at least rather misguided. Upon what do you base that view?
-I’ll assume here, that you’re referring to a tachyon particle, a particle that can supposedly achieve infinite velocity and thus literally be “everywhere at once”. Last I heard, such a particle is still quite hypothetical. The particles we’re aware that actually exist, are, last I heard, still limited to relativistic speeds and below.
-No, I don’t. I find it as worthless an argument as “you just have to have faith” or “well, God believes in you” and similar platitudes.
The question remains, however, unanswerable or not. “God” is described in all manner of ways, as having a definite sentience, an intelligence. And further, if one believes, as you apparently do to one extent or another, in the “Big Bang” theory, and agrees that there was nothing and less than nothing before that event, then “God’s” intelligence, his being- in whatever form- had to have come from somewhere.
-As before, presumably as did “God’s” matter and energy. If one assumes or agrees that planets and suns can form from clouds of ephremal stellar gasses, then one can further assume God’s essence must have coalesced from that same material- but then again, where did the intelligence come from? Why does “he” have these powers beyond what we can even observe? What makes him so special?
-And what corroborating evidence do we have that all these events are indeed “historical events”? I understand that the Romans and others have some writings that, depending on your interpretation, and at times conveniently forgetting trifles like nonlinear timeframes, seem to agree with certain parts.
And yes, I quite agree that dead people don’t typically sit up and start wandering around several days after they’ve died. But as the linchpin in one’s argument it’s tenuous at best. As I’ve said before, the first writings of the event were not put to paper- or even stone- for upwards of forty years later. And have, in any case, been rewritten, retranslated and edited countless times in the intervening millennia.
Early “copies” of the books that eventually became the Bible were handwritten, one at a time, often by barely literate monks. And were continually hand-written for some… what, fifteen hundred years, until the development of movable type?
Who’s to say that in those years, no monk or clerk took it upon himself to change a word here, or add a sentence there, to make it more “clear”, or to change a train of thought to something more in agreement with the politics or the popular thought of the day?
And even assuming that the text was wholly unchanged for nearly two thousand years, and that the reports themselves were factual and truthful, there have been cases where people have been assumed to be dead and either nearly or actually interred before discovery. Is it not possible that the loss of blood and dehydration could have put the lunatic that called himself “The Son Of God” into a form of coma? A condition from which he somehow recovered a few days later, or at least recovered well enough that others realized he was actually alive?
For some reason, that concept is, for me, a little easier to swallow than assuming he was touched by an omnipotent being who restored his health and healed his wounds.
-Again the implication ‘they’ are wrong and you, for whatever reason, are right.
-Keep going one step further and we’re back to the unfortunately common circular logic. Here you assume the Bible is a factual documentary, and by implication, anything that disagrees is a falsification, a “mere story”. Again, we are told, in effect, the Bible is right. See, it says so right here in the Bible.
-And believing the Bible as The Absolute Truth and without question, is not “mindless following”? If more actually questioned, and listened to thouse outside the Church, perhaps they’d be a little less “mindless” in my opinion, but unfortunately, I see far too many younger friends who, when presented with a religious conundrum or contradiction, trot right over to their Trusted Minister to ask an answer.
And what answer are they given? Naturally, “You must have Faith, my son”, or simply “God works in mysterious ways.”
That’s not an answer, that’s little more than a step above brainwashing, just without the eyelid clamps.
Worse, few are given the chance to compare and analyze connections between the Biblical world and that reported by legitimate science- a large portion of nearly all denominations and sects dismisses outright anything that even vaguely contradicts Biblical rote. Witness the “official” designation that Pi equals an even ‘three’ by the infamous school board.
-I’m afraid you and I both are outnumbered by those who believe this “garbage” as the absolute literal truth. Again, it’s nice to see a little skepticism, but I still wonder how you can be so sure you’re right and “they” aren’t.
-Hold the phone. Theory? Data? On just what data do you surmise the existance of a supreme being, save for the self-citational Bible? What facts did you use to presume divine being? The fact you were born? That little green apples grow on trees? That the sun rises in the morning?
And if so, why is this a study in the evidence of divine creation and not mere exercises in evolution, botany and stellar mechanics?
I simply cannot accept that, had you not been exposed to the Bible or religious influences early in your life, that you would have come to similar nonintuitive conclusions. How on Earth, minus those influences, would you come to assume “Gee, some all-powerful, all-seeing, and possibly transdimensional intelligent being must have made those mountains, since I can’t for the life of me think of how they could have occurred naturally.”
-Athiests, nontheists, antitheists and even those of different denominations are frequently threatened with hellfire and damnation. How else would the Church- any church- be able to recruit more members, other than upon threat of imminent eternal pain?
And there you go using the word “evidence”- Please understand the evidence I’m sure you refer to as some sort of proof of an omnipotent intelligence, is seen by others as proof- and often more quantifiable- of natural progression, Darwinian evolution, or even plate tectonics.
-I agree that freeing people from “superstition” is a good thing. And, from my point of view, superstition is by definition an irrational belief in illogical actions, magic or chance. Meaning that religion as a whole falls squarely under those auspices.
You, my friend, by definition and by your own admission, are chained by superstition.
-Non sequitur. No science I’m aware of even hints at the possibility of divine or intelligent interference. It appears you understand the function of science, but will not allow any evidence to alter your predisposed religious viewpoint. IE, you’ll be happy to agree with it if it’s nonthreatening or unrelated- or easily explained by reinterpreting your view through the prism of your religion, but will deny, not accept, or twist and reinterpret anything hinting otherwise.
Damn. You guys already made all the good points. Oh, well - at the risk of being redundant:
Although I’m sure that there are people who hate God, there are probably far fewer than you think. As has already been pointed out, a statement like “How could God do xyz?”, is a reaction to the logically contradictory concept of God AS PRESENTED BY THE THEIST. For example, you might say that God is all-powerful and all-loving, to which I would respond “then why would He allow suffering?” It’s a rhetorical question, the point of which is to show the contradiction inherent in your description of God. We tend to question the validity of things that do not make logical sense. But it doesn’t mean I’m walking down the street by myself thinking “Boy, that God sure steams me!” Perhaps if we took an example of something that YOU do not believe in, it would become more clear. Let’s say you and I are watching a Superman movie, and you say, “I don’t think Superman is real - how would he be able to fly?”. Does that mean you hate Superman?
On my study, reference to authority, and experiences. On what do you base your view of the world?
Correct, allowing for photons and probably neutrinos and gravitons being required to travel at c in a vacuum, neither above nor below it. It was my intention to respond to your “everywhere” with an example that conforms to physics, albeit theoretical, of something that would be everywhere at once.
Debates on causality usually collapse into philosophical conundrums, but let me take this far enough to ask how you posit this assertion. Does the principle of equivalence have to “come from somewhere”? As I understand this branch of philosophical theology, the idea is that God, however defined, is that which exists in eternity, without time constraints and without being the object of causality – and that this God in some way has attributes which enable It to be perceived personally as well as in abstract conceptual terms or as an (impersonal) force.
Hurray. Your world is composed of nothing but matter and energy, so God must be a part of it. Since the First Amendment, not the words written down on paper but the concept behind it, is neither matter nor energy, I presume you have no rights under it in your own estimation. If this is false, then you are allowing an abstract concept to have existence – albeit as a human construct. Whatever God is in his nature, is, in Christian estimation, something “beyond,” though co-present with, the physical universe. (The term “beyond” must be understood in a metaphorical sense here, not as implying “over the edge of the universe” or other inanity – which just goes to point out the difficulty of speaking of such matters in language adapted to dealing with the physical.)
None. With the sporadic exceptions you note that may well have been pious frauds, there are no known contemporary writings by non-Christians supporting these premises. However, that does not ipso facto prove the Gospel accounts false, simply leaves them in a position of unsupportedness. Outside Plato and Xenophon, we have no factual evidence for the existence of Socrates either (as far as I know). And Plato at least was clearly writing about him in order to push a particular agenda. Yet very few people are moved to claim that Socrates was a lunatic or a fictitious character.
You might consider learning the rudiments of Biblical criticism before you advance an argument such as this. There are clear refutations of virtually every one of your statements in scholarly writings easily available to anyone with an interest. The final paragraph of that quote refers to a well-known fact which is taken into account and allowed for in every modern translation.
A theory which has been advanced many times before. As an aside, Jesus himself never referred to himself as the Son of God, except in statements regarding what “the Son of God” will do in eschatological events which are taken by most people to be self-references but which do not actually so assert “me/Jesus=Son of Man” in any way.
Boggle quotient set at high? Good. Because the claim of traditional Christianity is not that “some omnipotent being…restored his health and healed his wounds” – it’s that he himself, human being, was also a facet of that omnipotent being and did it himself. I know that one is even more bizarre than the other assertions, but it’s what Christianity teaches.
Well, let me ask you if you think they’re right. If not, it would seem that we’re in agreement here.
I am quite well aware of what circular logic is. My assumption is that narratives in the Bible which do not affront logic are, by Occam’s Razor and with due reference to the idea that they may be slanted or otherwise misrepresent the truth (as in, King X won the war not because he was a good general with a good army, but because God caused it to happen), probably somewhat accurate accounts of what they purport to tell about. But I don’t use that to prove the Bible in any way – I’m merely trying, working from external principles, to place some truth value on a part of its contents.
Yeah, but between the extremes of “It’s The Absolute Truth” not subject to question and “It’s all a bunch of hogwash” lie a number of in-between positions. Are you seriously advocating that one’s sole choice is between “mindless following” and totius porcus rejection of everything Christianity suggests?
Total, arrant falsehood, as you would realize if you read at all on the subject. Most major denominations – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox – except the SBC take a totally different view from this, involving the use of legitimate science.
I think you’re wrong on the outnumbering – counting up the unchurched and those for whom it’s a non-issue, and adding in the “sane” Christians for whom belief in a Triune God does not require rejecting most of the findings of natural science, as compared to those who believe that the Bible is the absolute source of all truth and that which disagrees with it must be fraud or misunderstanding, I think you’d find the former far outnumber the latter. Thank God!
As for how I can be so sure, allow me to construct two scenarios for you: (1) There is no active God. Therefore, the “laws of nature” discovered by science constitute the closest we can get to noumenal Truth. (2) There is an active God who loved the world so much that He gave His only-begotten Son… you know the quote. The latter said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Is this all-loving God going to plant evidence or allow the Devil to do so in order to mislead all but the minority of people who see through all this because obviously the first chapter of Genesis has to be the literal factual narrative (one interpretation, since there are clearly parts of the Bible that are not literal factual narrative) and everything that disagrees with it falsehood? Or is it more likely that the theory of fallible humans that that chapter is literal factual narrative is in error, and the discoveries of science and the mythical interpretation of that chapter is the truth?
Very nice. As it happens, I was exposed to the Bible, Sunday school, and all the rest of it early in life. And rejected them, more or less, in my teens – effective apathy and “they’re nothing that matters to my life” rather than a seriously-thought-through rejection, but you get the idea.
However, you’re making the assumption that every person who believes in God does so exclusively because he’s been brainwashed, more or less, into believing in the Bible stories on penalty of Hell. For me, it was an actual experience of God making Himself manifest in my life. For others, it’s been a sense of His Presence and Grace that corresponds with their understanding of how the world operates. For yet others, it’s been a satori experience. Some few have accepted belief on the basis of logical argument, so I hear, though that leaves me with questions. Finally, some have been convinced of the historical accuracy of all or some of the Bible and related traditions. I had thought you were aware of my personal experience from other threads. And I fully concede that this is a subjective experience not reproducible at will and without anything to support it as factual to other people other than my putative veracity in describing the incident and its consequences.
On the assumption that you have a significant other, I presume that the sole reason for your involvement was the threat of making your life unbearable otherwise? I detest the “threat of Hellfire” school of evangelism, and so do most Christians I am acquainted with.
Evidence is that which enables one to formulate a theorem or opinion, the supporting material justifying the conclusion one draws. Because you don’t happen to find it adequate or satisfactory for your needs does not mean that it is therefore not evidence, at least for others. In any court dispute, both sides produce evidence. One side loses. Their evidence was not sufficient. But it is not true that it therefore was not evidence.
Cool. Zen Buddhists are well known for irrational belief in illogical actions, magic and chance. But you apparently define any religious belief as falling into those categories and therefore ipso facto superstitious. What was that you were saying about circular reasoning again?
No. I would drop my belief in God in a heartbeat if it could be unassailably proved to me that everything that causes me to believe were in fact error on my part. I’ve subjected my own personal religious experiences to a reasonable degree of skepticism, simply because they did not fit into the logical system I had for how the universe works. And I am not interested in clinging to a standpoint that is to me unsupportable – which is why I reject stuff like Biblical literalism and young earth creationism that is in fact unsupportable. But I know God better than I know Gaudere (and have never made any erroneous remarks about His brother!;)) and I am not prepared on the basis of someone’s misinterpretation of my stance as “mindless superstition” or “circular reasoning” to reject the clear awareness of His existence and love for me that I have perceived and do perceive.
