Polycarp on biblical literalism

Great Debates
1

Polycarp:

Regarding my questions in this thread:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2986284#post2986284

You wrote:

Assuming you won’t object, I’ll start a new thread, trying to set forth my thinking clearly, rather than responding specifically to you point-by-point, as my taking offense at what I saw as trolling and was apparently just you flagging what you saw as inconsistency and “cherry-picking” and objecting to them (but doing so in a tone that triggered hostility in me), has turned this one into a trainwreck. I will of course keep in mind what you’ve flagged and try to respond adequately to your points. I sincerely hope you’ll participate in it, and perhaps we can resolve the questions you raise. I may be a few hours dealing with IRL needs and getting my thoughts together before I start it, though.

Are you still planning to follow through with your above statements?

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I didn’t think he was a strong Bible literalist in the first place. What do you want him to address?

3

Yes, and I apologize. But I’m only interested in Biblical literalism in order to combat it, or more precisely to combat its negative effects on others – literalists are free to think what they like, but may not force it on others, IMHO.

I haven’t been able to compose a statement of my belief system adequately structured and justified to be able to defend it against the challenges you raised in that other thread. But in view of your re-raising the question, I’ll give it a go, right here. Post(s) setting forth a rough cut will follow.

4

I believe in God. Start with that statement, and let me make clear that the term “believe” is not to be construed as “intellectual acceptance of the existence of” but as “put one’s trust in.”

I do not comprehend God – whatever and whoever He is, He’s significantly more than anything I can wrap my mind around. I know Him in the sense that I know a person – as an individual I can trust, who has made His goodwill known to me.

I understand Him as expressed in the traditional terms of Christianity, that being the medium through which I came to know of Him. I accept Him as who He purports to be through having had a number of experiences in my life that were, effectively, theophanies – experiences of his real Presence accessible to me.

As a putatively omnipotent being, I am forced to accept the idea that He can if He wishes supersede the everyday generalizations of how things behave that we have codified as laws of science. I do not, however, believe that He does this as a general rule, if at all. It’s my belief that He works through the Universe that He created and the laws that He instituted to govern its workings to achieve His ends.

Given that, I put a great deal of store in the workings of human scholarship and its abilities to tell us how the Universe works and what motivates human beings. Hence, I accept the Big Bang as the most probable cosmology, Darwinian evolution as amended through the work of DeVries, Gould and Eldridge, and others as the probable explanation of the diversity of life and its history, intelligent historiological research as giving the likely structure of what happened in the human past, and so on.

As a result of my theophanic experiences, though, I have come to know and love the Bible, and it was on this particular topic that badchad’s questions seemed to revolve. In order to explain where I’m coming from here, I need to put forth a couple of quick anecdotes by way of analogy.

In The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill tells of returning from being appointed Prime Minister to find the Dutch ministers waiting to meet with him, having escaped from the onslaught of the Nazi invasion that day. In The Last Lion: Alone, William Manchester points out the impossibility of this, the actual meeting with the Dutch ministers having been the next day – and notes that that particular point in time was a climactic one when many critical things happened simultaneously, and that Churchill had been juggling eggs with the fate of the world at stake for six years between that event and the time he wrote The Gathering Storm. Quite simply, although he was writing the history of events in which he played a leading part, his memory of precise details failed him at that point.

Continuing with the Churchill story, we find him arguing with the American Chiefs of Staff and Roosevelt later, and defending himself against an allegation that he was opposed to the Normandy Invasion. According to him, his position never changed, and it was that such a step should be taken when there was a reasonable chance of success, and put off until enough troops, landing craft, etc., could be put together to give it that reasonable chance of success. This attitude is an underlying theme in discussions of potential invasions of occupied France through his entire six-book history of WWII. In short, he is telling what appears to be an accurate account of the war, but it is subtly slanted to make the point of his stance on Normandy never having changed. When, for example, he discusses “Sledgehammer,” the 1942 proposal to invade Brittany in order to draw Nazi troops off from the Russian campaign, he makes clear that he was willing to do it if it would have a useful effect on the Nazi-Soviet front but not if it would waste troops and materiel to no good end.

To change to another anecdotal analogy, in the Symposium and other dialogues, Plato puts words into the mouth of Socrates that the latter may or may not have ever said, but by wisely composing speeches for him, brings to life the philosophy which Socrates taught in a way that a dry account in finest Kantian language would never have done.

It is in this respect that I can read the Bible “seriously but not literally” (as Marcus Borg phrases it). Its contents speak to me in vivid detail of the nature of God’s personality, of human nature, of what Jesus did and taught. That the Bible has a lot of mythopoeia in it is not a reason not to be interested in it, it’s merely a token that those passages are to be read with an eye to what the author was trying to get across in saying what he did, not as some sort of literal, objective historical narrative.

Like Plato, the four Evangelists wrote according to the Classic custom of composing speeches for famous people that conveyed their ideas and teachings, and the nature of who they were, vividly and meaningfully. Like Churchill, they wrote polemically. Precisely what happened on the Sea of Galilee one stormy day, or on the hillside where the crowd of 5,000 men had gathered, I don’t know. That doesn’t matter – it’s the meaning that the Evangelists invest those stories with that is the key point for me. Luke’s portrait of Jesus is one of a compassionate minister to the outcasts of society who condemned the “religion politicians” of the time (to use Libertarian’s evocative term); John’s portrait is, in context, a mystic who speaks in figurative language in which simple words like “light, bread,” and even “word” are invested with special meanings. But the character of the man Jesus comes through in both accounts. Luke and John were not writing objective biography; they had no intent to. What they were doing was an effort to educate people who had heard of Jesus and His teachings, and become interested, in what sort of Man He was and what He said and did. And they succeeded in that – He is better known to most people in the modern world than any contemporary or virtually any other man before or since. But they did not write objective fact and one is not obliged to read it as such. This, however, in no way obviates one’s ability to get accurate meaning out of what they wrote. One must merely read with an eye to what their style was.

With regard to the miracle accounts, I have another anecdote for you: a real one, from my own life. And then a question.

One day in 1990, I was ending a vacation week from work, my wife having returned to work and due to go to our church for choir practice and then to pick up groceries before coming home. That afternoon, I had a massive heart attack. Our young friend and later ward Jay felt a strong urge to come visit me, though he had no idea that I’d be home, and followed the urge. He found me gray of complexion, sweating profusely, and in acute pain, ran and phoned the church to contact my wife, who drove home and rushed me to the hospital, where I was treated and eventually underwent bypass surgery. Had Jay not shown up, I would have been dead by the time my wife got home. In later months, he attributed that urge to God telling him to go see me.

From one perspective, my life was saved by the knowledge of the cardiologist at the hospital and his prompt treatment with a clot-dissolver and other stuff later. But how I came to get there in time is another question. Did God miraculously save my life? Or not? Or does it depend on how you interpret the facts I’ve just reported?

In his gospel, John never once uses the word “miracle” – he always uses [symbol]musthrion[/symbol] (musterion, with the meaning “sign”) for the events we term “miracles.” And they are supposed to be seen as signs that Jesus was who He claimed to be, or who John claimed Him to be. It’s in that context that I read the miracle stories that seem to give everybody problems – it would be possible to tell the story of my heart attack and survival as a “miracle story,” or as the triumph of modern medicine and the kindness of a teenaged boy to a couple who’d shown kindness to him.

Likewise, the attribution of the genocide of the Canaanites and Amelekites and the killing of 42 boys who sassed Elisha by two bears to the command of God is, for me, a case of “passing the buck upstairs,” little different from President Bush thinking that it’s his Christian duty to lead us into an invasion of Iraq. Over on the Pizza Parlor, a very insightful poster named JoyC noted that it is quite easy to see the growth of the Torah not as God having dictated all those laws to Moses but as the gradual implantation of laws devised to handle situations gradually over hundreds of years into a document supposed to have been given by God as the Israelites’ Source of All Law and written by Moses, the man whom He used as Lawgiver. In much the same way, the Congress claims that the Constitution authorizes the Defense of Marriage Act – even though the question of whether gay people can enter into a legal marriage is one that would have left Madison, Washington, and Hamilton going “wubba, wubba, wubba” – they found a clause in it that they could interpret to say that that law was authorized by it.

[Fixed symbol coding. – MEB]

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(If a moderator sees that string of accented vowels above that I do, and would be so kind as to convert it into the Greek musterion with the symbol font, I’d be appreciative.)

6

Thankyou badchad for giving us another window on Polycarp. His testimony, views, faith in God, compassion, and devotion to peacemaking, as well as his relentless advocacy for full acceptance for a clearly persecuted (in the name of God)segment of society, homosexuals, oh, and writing skills, leaves me in with supreme admiration. I am happy to be his friend.

7

Sorry, but I gotta say “me too”. Poly is my spiritual big brother, and I love him this much. […arms stretched really really wide…] :slight_smile:

8

For a bit more on my belief stance, let me cite the Baptismal Covenant of the Episcopal Church (and reflect to you that a straightforward naive interpretation of some of the statements in the part of it derived from the Apostles’ Creed is not required):

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By the way, Poly, I fixed your symbol coding, but the word musterion ([symbol]musthrion[/symbol]), “mystery” or “hidden thing” or “secret”, doesn’t actually appear in the Gospel of John. I think you’re thinking of semeion ([symbol]shmeion[/symbol]) or “sign”; although semeion does seem to be his favorite, John also uses ergon ([symbol]ergon[/symbol]) or “work” at least occasionally in miraculous contexts (John 7:3; John 7:21); and in one place (John 4:48) teras ([symbol]teraV[/symbol]) or “wonder”. (Teras could also be rendered “monster” or “monstrosity”; it’s apparently not used that way in the New Testament, though it is used in verses like 2 Thessalonians 2:9 to denote “miracles” performed by Satan, as is, incidentally, the word semeion).

Another word used for “miracle” in the other gospels, but not in John, is dunamis ([symbol]dunamiV[/symbol]), with various meanings relating to strength, power, or ability, but in some contexts rendered as either “mighty work” or “miracle”, depending on the translation.

Incidentally, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “John never once uses the word ‘miracle’”–miracle is not a Greek word, but a Latin one, from miraculum, “thing wondered at”, so anytime you see “miracle” in the New Testament, some Greek word has been translated. Did you mean that he doesn’t use dunamis anywhere?

10

Wow Polycarp, you summed up a lot quite nicely!

11

Buck, thanks for the fix, and also for the correction. You’re right, of course – I was doing that from memory, and confusing two things – the use of semeion (sign) in John with the other material I’d studied at about the same time on the distinction between Magick and musterion in sacramental theology. My sincere apologies to all for having given fraudulent information. I think you’re right about dunamis, which is (IIRC needs to be added here thanks to my last blunder!) the standard word for “miracle” in the Synoptics.

12

A very succinct and asthetically pleasing summation, Poly, I eagerly await badchad’s questions.

13

I am quite interested in hearing about your “theophanic experiences”. Is this the same as a “mystic experience”, when the origin of the experience is a transendental diety?

My dictionary lists “theophany” as “a visible manifestation of God or a god”.

14

Yeah, I probably should have used “mystical experience” – I did not experience a vision but an inward sense of Presence and a not-quite-verbalized communication with Him, more or less analogous to the way one’s thoughts race to an insight. It was a “theophany” for me – an experience of Him as real as reading your post – but I did not mean to suggest an objectively verifiable or falsifiable event.

15

With regard to badchad’s questions to me in our last exchange in that other thread, maybe I’d better get my stance clear here:

First, I read Scripture with an eye to the total message of the book, and with particular reference to what genre of writing is being used at the moment. The Book of Jonah, for example, is a fable with the message that God wants repentance from and extends salvation to all people, including your enemies – Jonah was sent to the Assyrians who were Judah’s biggest threat, and balked at going. The fish story is a part of his trying to run away from God’s will for him, and wherever he went finding God there. And when he finally did preach repentance to the Ninevites (who historically never repented and converted to worship of YHWH, by the way), he was pissed off that those sons of bitches got saved, even by his preaching. The gourd story that ends the book deals with God gently reminding him that He’s in charge, and He’s compassionate to all men. If one takes this as a literal account, one should be very cautious in visiting Disney World – there are people there pretending to be the real characters of your favorite fairy stories! (Personally, my favorite writer of fairy stories is Armistad Maupin… ;))

“Supernatural events” in the Bible are the writer’s naive perceptions of what went on. I do not know whether any given one of them is a literal account or not, but it does not matter – whether Jesus got up from the tomb on Easter Morning in a sort of Night of the Undead Messiah or not, some event occurred that convinced men who had known Jesus intimately for three years that although they’d seen Him dead, He was alive again. (David B. has an interesting “urban legend” explanation of this somewhere in the long-defunct threads here, which is not convincing to me but may help explain what went on to others who are similarly discomfited by the Resurrection stories.)

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Don’t worry, I know exactly what you are talking about. :slight_smile:

Trying to explain mystical experiences to those who have not had them is, I have found, ultimately impossible. Like trying to explain colour in words. Also, the word itself has unfortunate connotations of charlitanism or cultishness - no wonder people avoid it, it conjours up images of scamming Yogis.

For those of us that have had them, there is simply no denying their life-changing power. I myself am of the opinion that such experiences ultimately underlie all religions.

Interestingly, although (as far as can be gathered) the experience itself is fundamentally similar for all, it gets expressed in different ways. I think it quite possible that there is a physical explaination for them - but I in no way think that such an explaination robs them of their insight or importance.

17

Polycarp:

I believe in God. Start with that statement, and let me make clear that the term “believe” is not to be construed as “intellectual acceptance of the existence of” but as “put one’s trust in.”

I am unclear as to what you are saying here. Are you saying that you trust in god though you are not 100 percent sure that he exists? I know you tend to get upset that I take your statements and reword them, but I am trying to get a clear handle on what your position is, so feel free to clarify for me. If your not 100 percent sure that god exists can you estimate what percent sure you are that some god exists and what percent chance you think that he is of the christian variety?

I do not comprehend God – whatever and whoever He is, He’s significantly more than anything I can wrap my mind around. I know Him in the sense that I know a person – as an individual I can trust, who has made His goodwill known to me.

I think this gets down to the crux. How can you know god as you would a person? Also how can you be sure he has made his goodwill known to you. You have posted that you have had some unfortunate things happen to you as well. Couldn’t you just as easily said that god has made his badwill known to you?

I understand Him as expressed in the traditional terms of Christianity, that being the medium through which I came to know of Him.

I don’t think you are making the claim that Jesus actually and literally came and spoke to you. Would it be accurate to rephrase this by saying you went through some very unlikely events, which would make anyone think there might be something there and because you live in the USA, christianity was the most proximal supernatural explanation?

As a putatively omnipotent being, I am forced to accept the idea that He can if He wishes supersede the everyday generalizations of how things behave that we have codified as laws of science. I do not, however, believe that He does this as a general rule, if at all. It’s my belief that He works through the Universe that He created and the laws that He instituted to govern its workings to achieve His ends.

I take it from this that you don’t put much credence in any of the miracle stories. In the last thread you seemed to be saying that you didn’t believe in hell either. If I got this wrong please clarify. Do you beleive in heaven or any other afterlife?

It is in this respect that I can read the Bible “seriously but not literally” (as Marcus Borg phrases it).

Well, as Voltaire phrases it “A proverb isn’t a reason.” Heck, I read the bible seriously, but not literally, as I did The Iliad and The Odyssey. All three talked of gods and had moral lessons a plenty if you looked for them. How can you (without cherry picking) say the bible is any different?

Its contents speak to me in vivid detail of the nature of God’s personality, of human nature, of what Jesus did and taught.

Plagues, floods, fire and brimstone, angel’s with swords, hell fire for unbeleivers. This speaks to me vivid detail of god’s personality (if he exists) and in our dog eat dog world, it actually fit’s better than the nice god that you see. Note that to see your loving god, you have to ignore or explain away a lot of jealous, vengeful, murderous stuff. How can you say that your view of god’s personality is right and the bad stuff is wrong? Back to the greek god’s, at least they didn’t make the claim of being all good and all powerful at the same time. In that sense I think you could make their existance a little more likely than your favorite god.

Precisely what happened on the Sea of Galilee one stormy day, or on the hillside where the crowd of 5,000 men had gathered, I don’t know. That doesn’t matter – it’s the meaning that the Evangelists invest those stories with that is the key point for me.

How can you say that doesn’t matter? If the claim is that Jesus is god, and he demonstrates this by doing miracles, how can it not be important that these miracles didn’t really happen? Isn’t that the evidence. Otherwise all he has is sayings that you aren’t sure are really his, as his biographers are obviously unreliable.

But the character of the man Jesus comes through in both accounts.

A stuck up compulsive griper who is never pleased with anything anyone else does, who might actually be able to have a good time if he would look at the bright side of things?:slight_smile:

From one perspective, my life was saved by the knowledge of the cardiologist at the hospital and his prompt treatment with a clot-dissolver and other stuff later. But how I came to get there in time is another question. Did God miraculously save my life? Or not? Or does it depend on how you interpret the facts I’ve just reported?

Yes, it does depend on how you interpret the facts. It also depends on what are the facts. Regarding your friends visit, I have to go back to David Hume. Is it more likely that your friend showed up by coincidence and then came up with the story about his “strong urge” coming from god? It’s unclear from your story whether he thinks it came from god or not but that is the implication I am recieving. Or was his urge no stronger than required for anyone to do anything?

Besides the question of the above fact. Look at how you spin your heart attack as a good thing as evidence for the existance of god. I got news for you. A heart attack is a bad thing! So instead of asking why did god help you, why not ask why he chose to screw you over like that? A fundamentalist could say that it was for your liberal interpretation of the bible sending people to hell.

Still aside from your bias in the story I would tend to explain it as such. Lots of people have heart attacks. Many survive. In a land where most people believe in god, most of them pray. Those that live tell of their miracle or whatever you want to call it. Those that die tell no tales. Of course I could ask the obvious like: Why did god save you and not stop plane crashes, huricanes, wars, yadda yadda.

Likewise, the attribution of the genocide of the Canaanites and Amelekites and the killing of 42 boys who sassed Elisha by two bears to the command of God is, for me, a case of “passing the buck upstairs,” little different from President Bush thinking that it’s his Christian duty to lead us into an invasion of Iraq.

While I agree, your still cherry picking (your term that fits well) what you want to believe over what you have good reason to believe.

First, I read Scripture with an eye to the total message of the book, and with particular reference to what genre of writing is being used at the moment. The Book of Jonah, for example, is a fable with the message that God wants repentance from and extends salvation to all people, including your enemies – Jonah was sent to the Assyrians who were Judah’s biggest threat, and balked at going. The fish story is a part of his trying to run away from God’s will for him, and wherever he went finding God there. And when he finally did preach repentance to the Ninevites (who historically never repented and converted to worship of YHWH, by the way), he was pissed off that those sons of bitches got saved, even by his preaching. The gourd story that ends the book deals with God gently reminding him that He’s in charge, and He’s compassionate to all men.

Again your biasing what you believe. The bible is full (really full) of accounts of god not being compassionate to all men. Besides even if the details of the above account aren’t to be taken seriously, I don’t think the lesson is any good either. A better lesson could be that nobody is in charge, nature is a cruel place, so you better watch yourself because there are no fairy godmothers to look after you.

“Supernatural events” in the Bible are the writer’s naive perceptions of what went on. I do not know whether any given one of them is a literal account or not, but it does not matter – whether Jesus got up from the tomb on Easter Morning in a sort of Night of the Undead Messiah or not, some event occurred that convinced men who had known Jesus intimately for three years that although they’d seen Him dead, He was alive again.

Again, if Jesus did not really do miracles, what makes him different that a lot of other so called wise thinkers who attracted a following, that you chose not to worship?

18

Kudos to BADCHAD!!

Reference your rebuttal of Polycarp’s argument: incisive, succint, pointed, and devastatingly discerning. Congratulatlions!!!

19

No – my point in saying what I did is that I was not making an objective, metaphysical assertion about a putative entity to be termed God, but that I operate on a faith-based concept of trust in Something that I have come to know as God, in a relational setting. Obviously one cannot have a relationship with that which does not exist, in some way, shape, or form – and for the same of argument I’ll allow children’s “imaginary friends” in the door here, and concede that my percept of God might conceivably be all in my own imagination (I have grounds to take the contrary position, which we can discuss later in this thread) – but my position is not merely one of asserting that God objectively exists (on which I have no reproducible proof capable of satisfying the skepticism of another, merely interior, subjective proof sufficient for me) – but that the key to knowing and understanding Him, so far as a human can, is in that relationality, that acceptance of a personal relationship with Him.

I am 99.99999% sure of His existence – allowing for the remote possibility that I may be constructing a monumental post hoc fallacy on my own hallucinations, but not for a second truly believing that to be the case. “Of the Christian variety”? I want to deal with that in answering your next paragraph, if you don’t mind.

Because He is, among other things, a person – or at least has the attributes associated with personhood. Since (except for alien abductees if they are to be believed and the owners of genius cats if they are) no human being has ever dealt with another sentient mortal not a human being, there’s a distinction between your and my personhood and His – but it’s one of his being an element of His nature; He’s more than another person, not less and not skewed from the concept of personhood.

I’m not prepared to promulgate some sort of great conceptualization of the solution of the Problem of Evil – but allow me to say this much on the goodwill/badwill question. He created a world in which it is possible for evil and hatred to exist and people to choose to do things which injure themselves or others, physically or spiritually. (And “spiritually” does not necessary mean “in a religious sense” – contemplate the spiritual damage done to a gay youth by the ostracism of his peers and the condemnation of the fundamentalists, as dealt with in a different thread.) In living in this world and dealing with it, we find we grow emotionally and spiritually; I suspect that has a great deal to do with the reason He chose to produce it in the way He did. While He could plausibly have intervened to physically stop me from entering into situations where harm resulted, that would be contrary to his apparent “write a ‘clean’ operating program for the Universe and let it run” mode of operations. Instead, what He does is to work through his “operating system” by causing coincidence to happen and people of good will to intervene at the right times.

No, I didn’t have a vision of a bearded Palestinian standing by my bedside and talking to me (though a now-deceased and quite rational aunt of mine did). Your rephrase is quite accurate save for the fact that I did have the mystical experience (I originally said “theophany”) of a very strong sense of His Presence in which He gave me to understand some things.

I believe that the Trinitarian Christian formulation of how He is to be conceived is incomplete as an accurate description of Him but is IMHO the best of a wide range of such incomplete formulations. I affirm with the earliest Church that “in Jesus we see God” and don’t demand anyone buy a particular metaphysical concept of how that may be true. I suspect this needs much more work to be a clear statement, but if I may I’ll wait on your questions in order to know where to clarify it.

I “believe in” God. I see my task as to deal with the world in accordance with the two Great Commandments (love God, love your neighbor), and to trust Him for what may happen at my death. I don’t rule out total annihilation of my consciousness, reincarnation, or any of a dozen other potential fates – but I believe He has the situation under control, and I don’t need to worry about it.

I confess to being totally at sea about the miracle stories. A lot of Scripture suffers from what I personally have termed the “Jacob Brown Effect” – Gen. Jacob Brown having single-handedly effectively won the War of 1812 – at least if you go to school about five miles from where he lived, as I did. Imprecision due to exaggeration, repetition of stories with consequent distortion à la the kids’ game “Telephone,” misinterpretation of what did happen, either by the observers or by others misconstruing their reports – all these may have contributed to the phenomena reported. It’s quite possible, of course, that they may be the literal truth – that Jesus was able to cure a paralysis and tell the man to take up his bedroll and walk. But far more likely is that they were told by the early Christians, whether as made-up stories to illustrate a point that came to be regarded as true, misconstruances of what happened, or whatever, in an effort to stress to the rest of the world what a remarkable person this Jesus was.

Whether they are objectively true accounts, “sermon illustrations” that came to have an independent life, people repeating “urban legends” in the belief they were true, misunderstandings of actual events, or flat out lies, I don’t know – I suspect strongly a mixture of the first four in some proportions.

Because the Bible talks more directly about the God I know as a person. (So does the Koran, but IMHO the Koran is about 2% Allah and 98% Mohammed so far as inspiration goes.) I am personally not inspired or instructed by tales of Greek and Roman deities and their love lives and strange sense of justice, with the exception of the Prometheus story. (This is not true for the Norse stories, for which I have a great deal of fondness and from which I’ve gained a bit of insight.) I find few moral lessons in the Iliad and Odyssey, though in the works of Sophocles and Euripides I do see a great deal of insight into the human character and how man deals with his fellow man and with the world around him, sometimes tragically.

Abso-fucking-lutely true. However, I have two points to make here. First is that it is IMHO not a dog-eat-dog world. The fact that I’m typing this on my home computer is, for those who have been members here over a few months, living proof of that – it was a gift from two people whom I’ve butted heads with here in GD. I could go on at length on that. Second, Fred Phelps claims to be talking about the same God as I am – but I totally reject his lunatic Hellfire-and-damnation scenario of who God is. The god who would create you, me, and Gobear and damn him for being what he created him as, is not one I believe in. Rather, what I see clearly in the O.T. (read in the order of writing, rather than the goofball order it’s been assembled in) is an evolving understanding of God from the anthropomorphic Thunderer of Sinai who drops by Abraham’s tent for lunch en route to destroy Sodom to the loving and compassionate but strictly tutelary deity of all the known world, from Persia to Tartessos, of Micah and the later chapters of Isaiah. The Gospels and First John culminate this process, and Paul’s work is an attempt to mediate the freedom from judgmental legalism to live as joyful and ethical free men who are God’s children by adoption and grace, to a world in which the concept of God as lawgiver and judge was no less prevalent than it is in most of Christianity today – and in doing so, he ended up giving guidance to individuals and churches that in turn got cast into “God’s word” and hence binding on everybody everywhere – a concept I reject.

The miracles are signs. What He did and how He did them are secondary to what they convey. I said in the other thread that it is no less a miracle to transform a bunch of selfish people into generous ones willing to share their lunch around with strangers than to transform five loaves and two fishes into enough food for 5,000 (actually more; that was the count of adult men, and there were women and children present).

And his biographers are, within bounds, reliable. In his dedication to Theophilus in 1:1-4, Luke makes it very clear that he was employing the best standards of First Century historiography and sorting out the wheat from the chaff in reporting what Jesus actually said and did. In any contradiction of detail between the stories, I trust Luke, for precisely this reason. Matthew and John had agendas to push, but report a person of much the same character as Luke – to reject Matthew’s grasping at “this fulfills the prophecy of Zechariah” when the Zechariah passage is no such thing is not to say that he told mistruths – he merely sees a fulfillment of prophecy in them that IMHO isn’t really there.

You must have Jesus confused with Jerry Falwell!! :wink:

Okay, I’m cherry picking. But I’ve seen enough people try to pass the buck, and some of them to blame God, that I see it as the likely explanation for why he’s represented in Scripture as commanding things that are contrary to the ethics he taught later. “God told me to get pissed off with you over in the other thread” is a good alibi – it gets me off the hook of not treating you decently, and is totally non-falsifiable. It puts the blame on Him for my uncharitable actions. (Doesn’t happen to be true, either.) If I can come up with that as an easy out, instead of being a man and apologizing for being hostile to you – as I do, here and now – it seems to me likely that it would be a convenient way for Hebrew leaders to pass the buck. (Notice that even in the Adam and Eve story, Adam blames Eve and then God – “the woman, whom You created, tempted me” and she blames the serpent. The J writer had shrewd insight into human nature!)

Answered the first part of this already. Second part, YMMV. It’s not how I see the world, and I think I have reason to prefer my view of it over yours.

Those other wise thinkers (well, except Baha’ullah) did not presume to identify themselves as the access to the Godhead. I worship Jesus because he was a human aspect of the God in whom I believe, an avatar if you will.

And, if you gave me concrete and convincing proof that Jesus was not indeed who and what He is claimed to be, I’d still live out my life according to His teachings – because I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and I like life, I like other people, and I like me better for living according to what He said.

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Now that’s the way to debate, badchad. You’ve raised some valid and challenging questions while tempering the snideness of tone that was present in some of your earlier exchanges. You’ve touched on some of the points that I would have touched on, although I think you’ve got a couple of swings and misses, too, but I won’t say what they are. I’m interested in how Poly will respond. I’m enjoying watching this from the sidelines for the moment and I don’t want to help either side. I think this could shape up to be a very good debate, with two very able opponents.