BadChad, GodzillaTemple…come 'ere youze…group hug!!! 
I think Godzilla’s argument is about as water-tight as any you’ll see in these here parts. It’s apparent to me that Poly admires Jesus’s teachings for the most part, and carefully – methodically disregards those teachings that don’t work in his world.
Seems to me “circle jerk” would be more appropriate than “group hug.” But whatever gives you the warm fuzzies.
It’s very obvious andros that they get their warm fuzzies from themselves. Are people like that usually jerks? Yes.
It’s no reflection on Poly (or anyone like him) whatsoever.
Gee, and here I was trying so hard to be polite in my discussions…
godz, if you’re not pissing someone off, you’re not having a truly honest exchange of views. 
Glad to see that this thread managed to steer clear of the insults long enough to allow for the reading of the very clear, compelling and yes, polite arguments presented by godzillatemple.
Well done indeed.
badchad, I do believe your logic is just as sound and possibly even easier to follow, but perhaps you should work just a tad on the delivery in order to avoid getting bogged down by the (scathing) style itself.
Just a thought.
Siege:
Not that different from me.
I wouldn’t call myself an advocate of any sort of Christianity, however if one spouts off about how they follow the teachings of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, then your stuck with following them and to be logically consistent you have to bite the bullet and accept some them teachings in which the morality of “this world” considers pretty stupid.
But is that not exactly what you are doing when you believe in all/some of those miracle stories? Is casting off logic also what you do when you accept that an all loving all powerful god created a world which you and I both agree is pretty messed up? Isn’t it illogical that god would punish people forever for things they are powerless to change? My attack on liberal Christianity is not due to the fact that I think fundamentalists are anything special in the reasoning department but rather a backlash against liberal Christians who smugly think themselves so smart while holding onto positions every bit as unreasonable as the fundamentalists, while at the same time being less internally consistent in their beliefs.
I have experience with both fundamentalists and liberals. My mother is fundamentalist and yet a very very nice person, (people often wonder if I’m adopted.;). She still thinks gays go to hell unless they repent and would think your Wiccan friends darn close to evil incarnate, at least until she got to know them. However it’s not because she gave it thought, or is a bad person rather it’s what you get out of a lifetime brainwashing. I do my best to deconvert her, but as they said in the Matrix, “We never free a mind after it has reached a certain age, it has trouble letting go.”
None of that requires that they be correct in what they preach. I think you might get the same from a meeting of secular humanists, minus the irrational baggage.
Atheism offers a lot if you ask me. No guilt, not having to figure out what part of gods plan it was that you lost your car keys, sex, drugs, rock and roll, etc. Well personally I avoid the drugs.
I didn’t call exercise a cure only stating that research indicates that it helps. Exercise is good for a lot of other things and unlike religion, it’s not a scam.
I still think weight lifting is a good addition as the improvements one makes are rapid and objective. The best website I know of for good information on the subject for women (which is pretty much the same as for men) is: http://www.stumptuous.com/weights.html
Also add Andrew Tobias “The only investment guide you’ll ever need” to my recommended reading list.
Since you ask I’m telling you atheist. Biblical-literalist Christians have a plethora of contradictions of their own.
I think I’m familiar with all the models of Christianity of which you speak and from where I’m sitting they are all irrational. I don’t know much about Buddhism but I have heard good things about it from people I respect, in that it does not necessarily require the belief in the supernatural, yet fulfills the needs of those unsatisfied by life. But still I’d go with that Russell book I cited earlier. Be adventurous Siege.
Andros:
Edlyn:
You know, potshots without substance only further emphasize the weakness of your side’s argument. However, I suppose by now you figure it can’t get any worse, so by all means continue.
RedFury:
He’s good. No doubts there. I appreciated his politeness as well since it demonstrated that the answers, which weren’t forthcoming, were not a matter of mere personality.
I appreciate the compliment and constructive criticism. I’ll try to make an effort on the latter but can’t guarantee anything.:).
I’d much rather get my warm fuzzies from something that actually EXISTS, but please…carry on with your delusion.
Are people like that usually jerks? No. YOU are, you big poopy head! You are! A BIG. JERKY. POOPY HEAD. With no leg to stand on in this thread. You are defeated.
OP and friends are invited to celebrate their victory here.
xenophon41:
HA! See that everybody, I do have friends.
Sorry for abandoning this thread, I’ve been away working, without Internet access to speak of, for two weeks. I had no clue that the horse still has vital signs.
Love is not a feeling; it’s an act of the will.
And however banal you may find that Christian song (personally, I think it’s well done, and one of the few examples of"contemporary Christian music) I care to listen to), the underlying point that true love is not merly an emotion but an underlying commitment to act in a loving way is, I think, valid. All else leaves you at the mercy of glandular secretions and fatigue poisons.
And, FWIW, in making comments of the sort “God is love,” nearly everyone using the phrase does not imply identity but rather something on the order of “There exists a spiritual entity of immeasurable power and wisdom, and a prime characteristic of this entity is love.” (The fun, of course, comes in defining what one might mean by “a spiritual entity.”)
As Xenophon noted, it has not been my intention in any religious witnessing to proclaim my possession of Absolute Truth to which everyoine else should adhere, but to report, for the benefit of others and in keeping with myLord’s commandment, what I believe to be true on the basis of my own experiences. My point in bringing up Gaudere is that a rational person with a different set of evaluative criteria and a different set of experiences can come to a quite contrary opinion to mine. I do not intend to sound supercilious or insistent that my system is inherently a rigorously logical one – it flows from my own evaluation of my own grasp of critical discipline combined with my own experiences and the sense that there is Something beyond myself causing those experiences.
Barry did, as is probably obvious to most people, hit on a weakness in my reasoning – but IMHO it’s one that is resoluble. If I understand his argument correctly, he is saying that I am founding my theological beliefs and ethics predominantly on what I find in the Bible, and then critiquing the Bible based on those theological beliefs and ethics, which would certainly be circular reasoning.
However, he misses a couple of elements in arriving at this conclusion. First is that (as I hope is obvious) I do not regard the Bible as the inerrant Word of God trundled down from heaven by a bevy of archangels, but as a collection of ancient literature dealing largely with the religious beliefs of a particular people and then the writings of an offshoot group to which I and about a billion other people belong.
Now, allow for the sake of argument here that we accept the validity of my evaluation that evidence does strongly suggest the existence of the God of Whom that book purports to speak. (This is a highly debatable presumption, as numerous other threads have discussed – but for the sake of defending the internal consistency of my system, I’m asking that it be presumed in analyzing that consistency, only, that a person such as myself might put together personal experience, the weight of authority, and reason to sensibly arrive at that conclusion. Whether it’s a valid conclusion is grist for a separate series of posts.) Take note that we are not presuming any characteristics here, just the bare fact of existence.
Now, given that presumption, it becomes possible to work with the data at hand to analyze the relative validity of the evidence in light of what can be posited about the entity it purports to describe. First, one employs pyschology rationally to evaluate personal experience. As noted, I grant that there does exist a Jamesian will to believe and that I do have a touch of it. (If I were to produce a music video, I’d have a singer performing “A Reason to Believe” to (apparently) someone sitting in an easy chair whose back is to the camera, and at the end of the song have the camera pan to show a Bible propped up in the chair. :))
Second, one can use the techniqaues of textual criticism of paleographic documents on the Bible quite as well as on any other collection of ancient documents. Studying Herodotus, one can accept his description of the existence, acts, and character of a Spartan king (subject to support or refutation from other ancient material) without swallowing whole hog his straightfaced reportage about the Hyperboreans or the Blennyes. The same sort of analytical techniques suggests the historicity of the court reportage of David’s monarchy without requiring Noah’s Flood or Jonah’s making his home in a fish’s abdomen.
As noted previously, such an analysis is possible with regard to the acts and syaings of Jesus as well. We have at our disposal four reports, dated from 35 to 65 years after His ministry, each of them showing clear evidence of a particular olemic slant. The sources themselves concur in showing him as regularly teaching in parables, prone to the use of metaphor, and tending to hyperbole. Therefore, it’s only rasonable to read material that appears to be parabolic or hyperbolic, or to use symbolic language, as being exactly that. As I commented four years ago on this board, that Jesus referred to Adam does not establish the latter’s historicity any more than David B. saying what he did at sunset means that he believes in a geocentric, flat earth.
Using this methodology, one can arrive at a reasonably sound, if empirically derived and subject to refinement, identification of what Jesus actually said and what import to place on each utterance. This then becomes a guide to the nature of the God previously postulated.
This is in no way circular except insofar as some of the material on which one bases the initial presumption is derived from the book analyzed – but that is part and parcel of the process of coming to the conclusion s presumed The Biblical data, though somewhat suspect, is capable of being analyzed and its relative validity established – and that analysis functions to guide and support the attempt to understand the deity behind the data.
Sorry for abandoning this thread, I’ve been away working, without Internet access to speak of, for two weeks. I had no clue that the horse still has vital signs.
Love is not a feeling; it’s an act of the will.
And however banal you may find that Christian song (personally, I think it’s well done, and one of the few examples of"contemporary Christian music) I care to listen to), the underlying point that true love is not merly an emotion but an underlying commitment to act in a loving way is, I think, valid. All else leaves you at the mercy of glandular secretions and fatigue poisons.
And, FWIW, in making comments of the sort “God is love,” nearly everyone using the phrase does not imply identity but rather something on the order of “There exists a spiritual entity of immeasurable power and wisdom, and a prime characteristic of this entity is love.” (The fun, of course, comes in defining what one might mean by “a spiritual entity.”)
As Xenophon noted, it has not been my intention in any religious witnessing to proclaim my possession of Absolute Truth to which everyoine else should adhere, but to report, for the benefit of others and in keeping with myLord’s commandment, what I believe to be true on the basis of my own experiences. My point in bringing up Gaudere is that a rational person with a different set of evaluative criteria and a different set of experiences can come to a quite contrary opinion to mine. I do not intend to sound supercilious or insistent that my system is inherently a rigorously logical one – it flows from my own evaluation of my own grasp of critical discipline combined with my own experiences and the sense that there is Something beyond myself causing those experiences.
Barry did, as is probably obvious to most people, hit on a weakness in my reasoning – but IMHO it’s one that is resoluble. If I understand his argument correctly, he is saying that I am founding my theological beliefs and ethics predominantly on what I find in the Bible, and then critiquing the Bible based on those theological beliefs and ethics, which would certainly be circular reasoning.
However, he misses a couple of elements in arriving at this conclusion. First is that (as I hope is obvious) I do not regard the Bible as the inerrant Word of God trundled down from heaven by a bevy of archangels, but as a collection of ancient literature dealing largely with the religious beliefs of a particular people and then the writings of an offshoot group to which I and about a billion other people belong.
Now, allow for the sake of argument here that we accept the validity of my evaluation that evidence does strongly suggest the existence of the God of Whom that book purports to speak. (This is a highly debatable presumption, as numerous other threads have discussed – but for the sake of defending the internal consistency of my system, I’m asking that it be presumed in analyzing that consistency, only, that a person such as myself might put together personal experience, the weight of authority, and reason to sensibly arrive at that conclusion. Whether it’s a valid conclusion is grist for a separate series of posts.) Take note that we are not presuming any characteristics here, just the bare fact of existence.
Now, given that presumption, it becomes possible to work with the data at hand to analyze the relative validity of the evidence in light of what can be posited about the entity it purports to describe. First, one employs pyschology rationally to evaluate personal experience. As noted, I grant that there does exist a Jamesian will to believe and that I do have a touch of it. (If I were to produce a music video, I’d have a singer performing “A Reason to Believe” to (apparently) someone sitting in an easy chair whose back is to the camera, and at the end of the song have the camera pan to show a Bible propped up in the chair. :))
Second, one can use the techniqaues of textual criticism of paleographic documents on the Bible quite as well as on any other collection of ancient documents. Studying Herodotus, one can accept his description of the existence, acts, and character of a Spartan king (subject to support or refutation from other ancient material) without swallowing whole hog his straightfaced reportage about the Hyperboreans or the Blennyes. The same sort of analytical techniques suggests the historicity of the court reportage of David’s monarchy without requiring Noah’s Flood or Jonah’s making his home in a fish’s abdomen.
As noted previously, such an analysis is possible with regard to the acts and syaings of Jesus as well. We have at our disposal four reports, dated from 35 to 65 years after His ministry, each of them showing clear evidence of a particular olemic slant. The sources themselves concur in showing him as regularly teaching in parables, prone to the use of metaphor, and tending to hyperbole. Therefore, it’s only rasonable to read material that appears to be parabolic or hyperbolic, or to use symbolic language, as being exactly that. As I commented four years ago on this board, that Jesus referred to Adam does not establish the latter’s historicity any more than David B. saying what he did at sunset means that he believes in a geocentric, flat earth.
Using this methodology, one can arrive at a reasonably sound, if empirically derived and subject to refinement, identification of what Jesus actually said and what import to place on each utterance. This then becomes a guide to the nature of the God previously postulated.
This is in no way circular except insofar as some of the material on which one bases the initial presumption is derived from the book analyzed – but that is part and parcel of the process of coming to the conclusion s presumed The Biblical data, though somewhat suspect, is capable of being analyzed and its relative validity established – and that analysis functions to guide and support the attempt to understand the deity behind the data.
What and ignore all that stuff about :
Jesus burning people in a lake of fire.
People being damned for unbelief.
Saving for retirement.
Following the law.
How you determine which parts of Jesus’ speech is hyperbole.
What you think hell is like.
Why you criticize fundamentalists for judging people with the exact same motives you do.
How you define “predominantly” as in; scripture predominantly describes god as loving and forgiving.
The probability of your personal miracle.
How reliable the gospel writers were.
Christian’s problem with evil.
How we can grow in heaven without pain yet why pain is necessary on earth for growth.
Why you let Paul who you described as an idjit trump the teachings of Jesus while previously stating that you think Jesus should trump the rest of the bible…
So did I call it or what:
“I think this is the part where you explain that while Jesus did command against the above things he really didn’t mean it.”
Anyway I’ll play along. First if the above is what Jesus’ teaching really meant he should have and probably would have said so, omnisciently knowing it would save future people a lot of guilt, grief and suffering. Otherwise unless you have something from Jesus backing up that what he said regarding divorce is not what he meant please cite it, otherwise I think it would be slightly more honest to admit a lot less certainty in your ability to read between the lines of the gospel writers, considerably more honest if you just admit you made the whole thing up or copied someone who did.
The above should stand on it’s own but doesn’t need to. See you forgot (or on purposely neglected) to mention the part where Jesus talks about marrying a divorced woman being adultery also.
Luke 16:18
Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
Now if Jesus’ sole concern was with the welfare of the “put away” woman he would have encouraged other men to marry her after she was dumped, would he not?
Yes he would.
If his concern was for her to be supported he would not have admonished the act of marrying her by calling it adultery right?
No he wouldn’t.
I trust your responses to my other points will be stronger. You do have responses to them right?
Poly: Thank you for the well written (albeit late) response. We’ve wasted a lot of bandwidth arguing in another thread about this, but without your participation it all seemed rather moot to me.
As I’ve mentioned before, I do not claim any expertise in the “textual criticism of paleographic documents” of which you spoke, and I therefore cannot debate whether or not (a) such techniques are valid in general and/or (b) whether you have applied them accurately. Xenophon kept trying to make a comparison between analyzing the Bible and analyzing the writing of Ghandi, which I felt was clearly an invalid analogy (especially since we know for a fact that Ghandi lived and was the author of what is ascribed to his name, whereas we have little empircal evidence that Jesus even existed as a historical person, let alone whether he actually said or did anything he is alleged to have said and done). I remain skeptical that “textual criticism of paleographic documents” can be effective when there is a good possibility the text in question is entirely a work of fiction in the first place, but again, this is not a field in which I claim any expertise whatseover.
Having said that, I just have one question for you, and then I’m done. You’ve stated that you have a set of beliefs regarding God, Jesus, and the teachings contained in the Bible. These beliefs include such things (if I remember correctly) as the fact that God is love, that Jesus would never condemn sinners to an eternity of suffering, that it really is all right to marry a divorced woman under certain circumstances, etc.
My question to you is whether you held these beliefs before engaging in the scholarly analysis you decribed above, or whether your analysis led to your beliefs. In other words, did your analysis form the basis of your beliefs or merely confirm them? In particular, did you find any surprises during your analysis that forced you to change something you previously believed, or did your analysis support everything you believed? And were there any passages that could legitimately (according to your analysis) have been interpreted more than one way, but which you chose to interpret in a way that matched your existing beliefs, or did your analysis only admit to one interpretation in all cases?
Regards,
Barry
While we wait for Poly’s reply to the questions concerning him specifically, let me respond (yet again) to the objections that were directed to a detail in the other thread (which was not about Poly specifically).
The point, gzt, of the “Mahatmism” construct, is [ol][li]to explore the demands consistency dictates when applying contextual analysis to the collection of texts forming the philosophical or theological basis of any belief system, []to illustrate that inconsistencies are inherent to such an extensive textual base (which is what made the comprehensive writings and histories of Gandhi attractive to me as a comparative example),[]to show that such inconsistencies are neither caused nor exacerbated by contextualism, but insteadto show that these inevitable inconsistencies can only be resolved by the believer through a process of testing textual information against what is known about the particular text, and ultimately against the core tenets of the system.[/ol]I hoped to make it clear that objections to the results of such an approach to understanding cannot with any validity be criticized on the basis of the core beliefs of the analyst (specifically, on a Christian belief that Christ is God or a Mahatmist belief in Gandhi-as-avatar), but only on the basis of the accuracy of the actual tests conducted.[/li]
Your objection to the analogy on the basis of the certainty of Gandhi’s existence versus Christ’s is itself invalid, for two reasons.
First, one must also accept on faith that the Gandhi known and portrayed by historians and represented by the writings which bear his name as author is a correct and true reflection of the actual person. Sure, you can reasonably place a higher probability on the non-fictionality of Gandhi than on the non-fictionality of Christ (or of Charlemagne, or Saladin, or any other historical icon), but no logical certainty can be supported.
Second, the starting point of textual criticism is acceptance of the importance of the text(s) being criticized, not on the subject of the texts. One could postulate Christ as a fictional rabbi invented by Paul as the nucleus for a religion and promoted psuedonymously by his confederates and yet have the same starting points for analysis as a believing Christian.
Now, from the picayune to the supercilious… badchad’s sticking point, I believe, is the insistence that a belief in the divinity of Christ somehow requires a corresponding belief that none of the reported teachings of Christ the rabbi could possibly require consideration on the part of future Christians due to the communicative perfection of Christ the Lord. This assertion is frankly stunning in the scope of its underlying assumptions regarding free will, human perfectability and even liguistic universalities. I can’t wait to be enlightened as to how bc can support a belief that such inerrant messages could be conveyed indirectly to modern readers through the recording techniques of past millenia, while simultaneously deriding as foolish the belief that a simpler message might be conveyed directly to anyone willing to receive it. Such mental agility is impressive, to say the least.
Xenophon: You’ll pardon me, I hope, if I refuse to play your games any more. Your attitude, whether here in the Pit or over in GD where you started your other thread, is not conducive to a rational discussion (I can’t BELIEVE you had the temerity to refer to me as “snide”). Let’s just leave it at the fact that I happen to find your arguments wholly unconvincing and completely unrelated to the issue actually being discussed in this thread, and really have no desire to deal with you on the topic any further.
I have asked Poly a question that I feel is crucial to the issue being discussed. Hopefully, he will choose to respond in an honest manner. However, since this entire thread is addressed to Poly in the first place, I don’t think he needs you to “answer” for him.
Barry
That’s a fair and well-phrased question, Barry, which calls for an honest and clear-cut answer.
Unfortunately, I don’t have one.
I was raised a Methodist, in a moderate northern church that was neither hellfire-and-brimstone nor gung-ho-for-social-justice. Liturgically, there was quite a bit of focus on Jesus’s Summary of the Law (AKA the Two Royal Commandments/what Hillel said on one leg). At the same time, there was a lot of preaching done from a legalistic standpoint.
Being something of a precisionist, I tended to get very strongly into the “dem’s Da Roolz” point of view.
In college, I had two religion courses that influenced me, one from Fr. James Kavanaugh and one on Protestantism that introduced me to Fletcher’s Situation Ethics, then recently published and highly controversial.
The net result was a slowly dawning realization that the Christian ethics I’d been taught, and considered proper to practice, suffered from an unresolved dichotomy
It’s only been in the last ten years that I realized that the essential thing was to employ Jesus’s definition of what was most important to do and let that lead me where it would, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, and took my present stance.
Most of the study in scholarship preceded this – but it was the impact of meeting my son that caused me to realize that I needed to resolve the dichotomy for myself and take a stand, come what may.
That’s not a yes-or-no answer to your question – but it’s the only honest answer I can give.
The basis you’ve claimed for avoiding further discussion with me seems unsubstantiated by evidence (and belied by the rational participation of others in that thread). But it is certainly an unanswerable assertion.
Thank you for the request, but regretfully your summary judgement against my arguments will have to stand without my indulgence. We’ll both recover I’m sure.