Your first sentence is a very Paulist thought. I don’t personally subscribe to it, though. At least not in those words.
The Bible is a book. Written by men. Fallible. People who believe in God (that one in particular), believe it to be inspired by God, not dictated. The authors try to bring to the masses their particular experience of God (in their varying degrees of closeness to it).
That doesn’t mean it is just another work of literature. It is a compilation of the best (at the time) works on God and His people. The books were chosen to give a “concise” but comprehensive view of the Christian church and teachings with deference to tradition at the time of the compilation.
So it is not the verbatim word of God. It is the educated and informed thought of the Church (at that time).
You ask me to pin down my definition of believe. I would say that it’s anyone else’s definition. But therein lies my problem.
I would like to believe a lot of the bible. It’s got a lot of messages in there that I really agree with. But the simple fact that it’s got so many things in it that I strongly disagree with is what’s causing me the problem.
I can bring myself to believe that god exists. I know that there’s “something” out there that’s greater than myself and everything else. But I just don’t see this being doing a lot of the things that were stated as direct acts or directions of god in the bible. I do not believe someone who would create us and love us unconditionally would do such things. And from my personal expierence, these far outnumber the good things done.
Let me explain a little further. Lets say I have a dictionary and I look up the word basketbal and find the following.
basketball - verb - the act of hitting someone with a fish.
Now I know this is incorrect. So I look up several more words. Most are wrong, but a few are what they’re supposed to be. Why would I keep this book around if it’s full of all these things that are incorrect? And don’t say that the bible doesn’t have incorrect things in it, most posters have already pointed out things that are wrong with it.
What it boils down to is this. I want to believe in god. I want to beieve that there’s an everlasting life waiting for me on the other side where I will get to see my grandparents and father again. I want to believe that someone somewhere really gives a crap about me and my wellbeing. What I don’t want to believe is that this person also will send unbabtized babies to purgatory, gays to hell (I have several gay friends whom I would take a bullet for), and send people who have never heard of him and therefor cannot take him as lord and savior and toss them into a lake of fire for all eternity. I absolutely refuse to believe such things. But where do I draw the line? I just cannot force myself to let all of the evil and just plain sick things slide by and accept all the loving and caring parts without fail.
Again, only my personal opinion. I have nothing against anyone who can and does only beileve parts of the bible, or none of it. Hell, I envy you, I would have a greater peace of mind if I could just do one of the other. But I just can’t seem to get there for myself. More thought and input will be greatly appreciated.
Ok, now this is just getting really creepy. The ads at the bottom of posts my trigger off of words within the thread, or I’m fixing to freak the hell out. The ad now reads for the “Second Coming” and “Hell Does Not Exist: and you can prove it. get the facts for yourself. - The big Hell lie.”
Seriously, I’m starting to wig out a bit. Someone tell me the ads are triggered, please.
I have not made the argument you claim I am. You seem unable to be bothered to actually argue with what I have said. That’s too bad. I enjoy discussing things in good faith with people, but it doesn’t seem that you are capable of it.
This statement is so bizarrely out of touch with reality, the history of the Bible, the history of the Jewish people, that I scarcely even know what to say.
You’ll have to make that argument then. There are countless passages in which God either destroys thousands of people, men women and children, or orders his servants to do so. No one until very recently in human history has tried to argue that these were not actual events and commands and actions carried out by God. If you interpret them that way, I don’t have any direct quarrel with that. But the question is: why bother? Why start from a story about God telling his servants to dash the infants torn from the pregnant bellies of his enemies upon the rocks and spend time trying to massage that into a message of love and peaceful non-violent change? Why not simply have that message to begin with and discard the baby dashing altogether?
The other problem you face is that the people who DO insist upon reading those passages and believing them and defending them more directly don’t seem like irrational crazy people. Their readings of the text are, in fact, far far more plausible than yours. So where do you get off insisting that YOUR interpretation is the “rational people” version of things?
Your version must be missing Leviticus then. And the letters of Paul. And most of the prophets. And parts of the Gospels. What exactly IS in your Bible?
No. Your claims run counter to what virtually everyone who has read the Bible has read in it. If you want to make the case that the only or the “whole point” is what you claim, then do so. Little effortless “I am rubber, you are glue” comebacks aren’t going to cut it.
Wait, so now you are admitting that that content does, in fact, exist again? Which is it?
Why do “rational” human beings require the exercise of having to re-interpret things that clearly state things they don’t believe? What is the point? Either slavery is 100% wrong or it is justified sometimes. If you think it is wrong, then what is the purpose of reading godly justifications of it and then spinning around and saying it is wrong?
If you use your own judgment regardless, what’s the point of insisting on this particular text, returning to it again and again? Why not read the works of Marquis de Sade and reinterpret them so that their “whole point” is just all about loving each other?
The BIBLE attributes them to God. Like when God writes the Ten Commandments? Or flies around with the Israelites? You seem to have missed my point, which is that this is simply what the text says. Of COURSE it is possible to read it in a non-literal fashion and as the work of men and not God.
But men are still around, writing and working. Why keep coming back to the Bible, a book that makes claims and stories that you say we need to work to NOT read as they are written? If you have a better interpretation of what the Bible is trying to get across, why not simply write a new book containing those interpretations and put that in the Pews?
And what: did this process somehow end when the Bible was put together? It seems to me that most of the greatest developments and thoughts about God came long after the Bible. For instance, I’ve found things Polycarp or Liberal have said about God and love and so forth to be far more profound and (and this is important) clear and definitive than the Bible itself. Why aren’t those views bound and sitting in the pews and studied in the breakout sessions instead of the Bible?
Well, if you want to get specific, then cite an idea, and we can discuss it. It’s not a matter of opinion unless you want to simply avoid being definitive about exactly what it is you want to get out of the Bible.
However, let’s get real here. Nowhere in the Bible will you find a clear and simple statement like this: “Do not be cruel to anyone, enslave anyone, force someone to have sex with you against their will, try to force them to accept our religion or threaten them with death or punishment if they will not.”
I think virtually EVERY progressive Christian would agree to that statement. They might even claim that it really IS the true message of the Bible. Wouldn’t then, the Bible be vastly improved if this statement was added to it? Wouldn’t that be a definitive and powerful and lasting statement of the importance of those ideas and that interpretation?
So why not? What’s the problem?
Take it another way: Wouldn’t you agree if it said that statement CLEARLY and definitively anywhere in the Bible, that the history of Christianity and indeed the world have likely been vastly changed for the better? All the violence done in Christ’s name, violence that progressive Christians are nearly unanimous in declaring is a vile distortion of Christianity, would be fatally undercut right there in the text. Instead of having, really, a pretty fair argument that he was doing the right thing, the High Inquisitor would have had no plausible argument at all.
Look, as I said, I’m not really trying to argue away people’s interest in the Bible, but I think there’s more to it than you are making it out to be. From my perspective, everything you are saying could be true enough, but it still doesn’t really seem like an adequate enough explanation for things as they are. Some people really really like, say, Proust. Others like Hemingway. Some people choose to spend their entire careers studying one of these guys. But that really isn’t an explanation that really seems to “get” the whole of why the Bible and no other text is what’s sitting in the Pews every Sunday, what people swear on, what they carry around with them in a tiny version, read a passage from every morning for inspiration, and so forth.
Now come on: was that really an honest response to my analogy? Did you REALLY think that the point of it was to say that the Bible is a science text? If you didn’t, then why claim that this was part of my point?
And the Bible clearly is not JUST a work of literature: it is treated as a place to look to for insight and truth. It doesn’t strike you as odd that this source then contains things that are diametrically opposed to what people all agree is the truth?
Lots of things are interesting historical/cultural artifacts. Old science texts are fascinating! I have one that actually contains lecture notes where a medical expert on women discusses a major cause of female problems that he entitles “overexertion of the brain and the over-development of the nervous system.”
But while fascinating, this is not the view I would sit down to read to gain wisdom about ultimate truths of feminine hygiene. Please don’t misinterpret me again: do you see what I’m getting at? The point is that the natural thing to do, not just in science but in general in human endeavor, is to improve upon things we can all agree are unclear or troubling or in error as written. At the very least we’ll seek to clarify something with a sidebar or note to the reader!
Maybe, but this sounds a little shifty to me, because there are plenty of things in the Bible that God says and does that I don’t think you or a progressive Christian have ANY problem with agreeing is definitively wrong. That’s what makes it so odd that this lack of clarity is, as you argue later, to be celebrated.
Why? While certainly some stories are ambiguous and interesting, others are clearly not. Why would progressive Christians remain wedded to a 4th century judgment of what texts should be read to understand God and what should not?
I guess this hints more at what I’m getting at: it isn’t JUST that the book is somehow coincidentally what everyone decides is really interesting and neat above and beyond every other work of literature. It seems like most people really DO believe that there is some, almost magical, power to reading and interpreting THESE particular words and no others. Because if what you were really saying were true, it still wouldn’t answer the question of “why the Bible in particular.” If the point of the exercise is REALLY just to let personal conscience and a personal relation to God, then why the Bible, always, again and again, alpha and omega? Why not Dostoevsky? People are just as capable of making up their own minds based on that.
I think most progressive Christians would agree that, for instance, the Noah’s Ark story never happened. It’s mythical. But they would, however, say that it’s instructive to think about and reinterpret what it means. I don’t disagree with that!
But isn’t it a little odd that it’s THAT myth and no other myth that gets this treatment? The greek myths, for instance, are just as much people trying to grapple with deep ideas. The saga of Orpheus is a powerful myth too from which a reader can draw all sorts of deep reinterpretations. Why does Noah, then, get top billing, in fact, EXCLUSIVE billing over that myth? Why Noah, and not something else?
Or take a mythical story from Islam, or the Hindu tradition, or Chinese mythical literature. There are powerful stories here, and not only powerful, they are stories from which progressive people of other religions have drawn and still TODAY draw powerful interpretative lessons and ideas from about man’s relation to God. Why aren’t any of THOSE stories there in the pews?
Fundamentalists have an easy time answering that question, but I think it’s a very very different and more difficult question for progressives. Is it because those stories really are, in some way, inferior? If not, if it’s all about interpretative reading and learning, then it really IS something of a mystery, isn’t it?
No, you’re mistaking me again. I’m simply referencing the part IN THE BIBLE itself where God is described as writing the Ten Commandments: something so doggone important in the context of the Bible that it is the ONLY time god EVER personally seems to write anything down.
And yes, people reinterpret all of that.
And yet it is a remarkable coincidence that no one seems to have tried it, isn’t it? That there isn’t a single major denomination: not even ones like the Mormons or Muslims that explicitly base their entire traditions on rejecting some of the clear statements of the Bible despite still incorporating it as a whole into their traditions, that update or alter the Bible to reflect their claimed superior modern understandings of God’s words. Not even a disclaimer somewhere within the text!
I was going to let you know that they are trggerred by keywords – and since SDMB discussions can get far-ranging, and we don’t know what specific keywords will trigger them, they often provide a bizarre counterpoint to the arguments being presented.
Then I looked, to comment on what it was giving me for Google ads:
[ul][li]The Gift that Gives Back[/li][li]Save a Life Today[/ul][/li]
:eek: :eek: :eek:
Um, what? What does this have to do with what I said? I am the one who is arguing that the moral precepts of the Bible are clearly vague and incomplete taken as a whole. In the particular part you were arguing about, however, I was responding to the claim that the Bible says nothing definitive about all sorts of moral questions and does in fact, give all SORTS of commands and instructions, sometimes in very exacting and almost obsessive detail. The two are not contradictions.
No way using the Bible, of course, because there is no agreement on how the Bible is used. But are you really not willing to say that someone has it wrong when they suggest that stoning gay people to death is just plain wrong: that this is NOT in fact, right?
I mean, I don’t have any doubt that most progressive Christians would be willing to lay down their lives to end slavery or to protect gay people from a death sentence in Nigeria, wherever these convictions ultimately come from (their interpretative reading of the Bible, or their own consciences overriding what’s written in the Bible). But doesn’t it seem kind of strange that while someone would actually DIE for a particular principle, they aren’t willing to simply explicitly write out that principle clearly in the one book they sit down to read from every Sunday (whether it be some completely different book, or a Bible with some extra chapters included, or whatever)?
And what is your point? That was then. This is now. I thought you were all in a lather about what’s going on today. America was happily keeping slaves according to law then, too. You acknowledge that your country has moved on and improved, right?
You are blaming the Bible for the idiots who misinterpret it. Illogical. Completely so.
They instruct people to PUT TO DEATH those who, for instance, make “graven images.” That’s not treating people well by any definition I can think of.
There’s also not “exactly” ten commandments: first of all there’s a completely different ten commandments elsewhere (and, in fact, the only ones that are actually CALLED the ten commandments in the text), and second of all, the very same part of the story where the ten are revealed goes on to list commandments and holy laws at great lengths. How can you possibly claim to have read the Bible and yet deny this?
Where is the point you are arguing? Because I’m discussing the contention that the Bible commands 21st century people to behave barbarously, which is what you are claiming as the basis for rejecting the Bible.
Again, why? Jesus said that was then, this is now. He told you to love others in so many words. What is so hard to comprehend?
Because the rational person does not destroy. Humans who don’t cooperate perish. To behave otherwise is competely against any logic.
Leviticus is the ‘Old Law’ that Jesus replaced. It was useful for its time but that time is gone.
If you actually try to read through the thread, and particularly this line of discussion, your response here is completely incoherent. It’s as if you simply forgot entirely what was being discussed and responded to this statement out of the blue.
I don’t see how it’s illogical, since you have no way to prove that anyone has “misinterpreted” the Bible, especially when you yourself seem to think anyone who reads it literally (i.e. anyone who does NOT misinterpret the plain text!) is an idiot.
The Bible is not, in fact, very clear about a lot of things, and in certain parts when it is clear, it seems very plain that, say, putting to death people that try to deconvert from Christianity is precisely what it calls for in no uncertain terms. You can argue that these passages were written by flawed human beings, and I’ll agree with you. But arguing that they are being “misinterpreted” and those who interpret it that way are idiots for doing so is simply ridiculous.
You’re not even going to quote mine a complete sentence? You have to resort to just a phrase? No wonder you seem to be clueless as to what I’m arguing if you simply scattershot pick out words at random, invent new implications for them, and then run with it.
I’m not arguing that people “reject” the Bible: you seem obsessed with straw men.
The Bible, however, is the same document today that it was in the 10th century, and in the 4th. What it commanded then it commands now. If you want to reinterpret how we treat the Bible in light of 21st century enlightenment morality, that is certainly a different matter. But trying to claim that it doesn’t command such things in the first place is simply nonsense.
Because a) Jesus does NOT explicitly say that, and b) it makes no sense anyway if that’s how you read it. Morality is not a “that was then, this is now” sort of proposition. If it is an absolutely the case that you must love and not slaughter man women and even unborn children of your enemies, then it is not something that was okay to do previously. It CERTAINLY isn’t something we should continue to celebrate or hold out as the word of God if we believe it is 180 degrees from what God wants or tells us is right.
If it is wrong to kill someone just because they try to encourage you to worship a different God, then it’s wrong period.
But if you disagree, then when exactly did this transition happen, anyway? What do you have to say to the person who was legitimately murdered, under this decree, just an hour before Jesus put it into effect? Oops? Suck it up?
That’s your opinion, and while I agree with it, it again is just a dodge in this topic. We’re talking about what the Bible actually says, not what you think it should say.
Would you agree that the the Bible, as written, commands and celebrates irrational things, by your own logic? Or not?
So you believe, sure. But that theology is not so clear in the Gospels. Matthew 5:18 states that “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” Jesus never explicitly says anything about getting rid of the old law, and his followers, in fact, continue to fight over this issue for decades afterwards. So clearly, it AIN’T so obvious or certain.
Well, I think the same of Jesus of course, but that is irrelevant. Can’t you stay on topic? We’re talking about what is actually said in the Bible. If you interpret things differently, that’s great, but that’s not what we’re talking about. If you think Paul was wrong, then why not correct his misunderstandings for us?
Ok, a lazy, somewhat off-topic response, but if so, then why not discard it?
Well, for starters, eternal damnation? All the things Jesus has to say about those who are getting tossed in the flames to wither away?
This simply isn’t an adequate response to what I argued. It certainly isn’t something Jesus ever declares is Old Law or ever suggests is wrong, and Paul even reiterates that slaves should serve their masters, and in fact if their masters are Christians, serve them all the better. The idea that slavery is bad is found nowhere in the Bible, which is one of the reasons Christian abolitionists never got very far in theological arguments against slaveholding Christians.
Good grief. Read Exodus! This penalty is carried out in Exodus 32:27 like, pretty much right after God is finished telling Moses about it and sends him to hang out with him for forty days and nights, not long after God tells Moses that if, while beating your slaves, you knock one of their teeth out, you should let them go free. Also see Exodus 22:20 for discussions of worshiping other gods, and 31:15-16 about the death penalty for violating the sabbath, which God interestingly calls an EVERLASTING covenant (nothing about anyone coming along and tossing it away).
Good flippin’ grief. Have you ever read the Torah? There are pages and pages of specific directions and commands about dietary habits, keeping the sabbath, making sacrifices, the size of the altar, what clothes to wear, what to do about slavery and adultery and laying with animals and a million other things. And there are books and books of commentaries on how these rules get applied - since the writers of the Talmud knew they weren’t obvious, and had to be interpreted.
Perhaps you should put down the children’s illustrated Bible and read the real thing? I can’t understand in the slightest how you can make such a claim. That you think these rules don’t apply to you, that I do understand. But they are there.
Right, which is what this thread is about: people who read the Bible in a non-literal fashion, and decide on their own how much of it they want to adopt into their personal world view.
Well, mostly because I don’t own a church, I guess. Also, people might be interested in looking at the source of my interpretation, so they can make up their own minds about wether my interpretation is on the money or on crack. Plus, I’m not actually all that interested in dictating to other people what they should believe in the first place. It’s interesting to discuss, but for it to be a discussion, we need a common frame of reference. “Here’s the Bible. I think it means X,” is a pretty good debate. Just saying, “X!” tends to be a little dull. YMMV.
Well, all those ideas about God that you find so superior to those found in the Bible, were inspired by ideas found in the Bible. If all these really smart guys found these really good ideas in the Bible, it strikes me that the Bible itself might be worth studying. That’s why we have churches. If you want to study all the ideas that descended from the Bible, we’ve got book stores and universities for that.
You want me to cite an idea? I guess I didn’t understand your original point, because I thought you were claiming that the ideas in the Bible are better articulated in other sources. As such, it seems like it would make more sense for you to present an idea in the Bible, and the same idea more clearly stated in some other book.
Because you would be damaging the Bible’s use as a historical artifact and insight into the evolution of morality and the concept of God. Also, doing that would be a bit like forcing people to accept your religion, which is one of the ideas you think liberal Christians should edit into the Bible. Not as violent as you framed it, of course, but removing the parts you don’t like from the Bible and adding in your own comments deprives someone else from reading the text itself and forming their own opinions about it. Better, I would think, to leave the Bible as it is, and publish your ideas about what it means as a seperate volume, so that people who might be interested in your ideas can make their own evaluation of them against your source material.
No, I very much doubt that would have changed anything at all. It would be easy enough for the High Inquisitor to simply add or delete whatever he needs to justify his actions, especially in the ages before literacy was widespread. You look at most of the great religious atrocities in history, and there was almost always a substantial economic/political motive behind them, as well. I think that history tends to bend religion towards its will, and not the other way around. The Spanish Inquisition would have found a way to burn its marranos, one way or the other, regardless of what their holy book said.
Well, for one thing, it’s not the only book people use for that purpose. Lots of churches do have other, non-Biblical books in their pews. And, of course, lots of houses of worship don’t have a Bible in them at all. The New Testament, the Torah, the Koran, the Vedas, the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, and a thousand other texts are used by people everyday in the manner you describe, so there’s nothing at all special about the Bible in that regard. As to why Christians like that book so much more than those other books, I suspect it has something to do with the New Testament being about Christ.
I didn’t claim it was part of your point, I raised it as a reason why your point was invalid. A science text is supposed to present you with reproducible facts. If those facts are reproducible, the science text isn’t fulfilling its function. A religious text is supposed to be a source of philosophy on how to live your life. There isn’t anything about it that’s reproducible or falsifiable, so you can’t just say that it’s not working and scrap it.
That’s how I treat all literature. All art, really, not just literature. So I can’t say as you’ve drawn a meaningful distinction for me, there.
No. It strikes me as very human.
I do see what you’re getting at, but again, philosophy is not medical science. Generally speaking, it’s not falsifiable. Your antique medical texts have been disproven. We have evidence and experiements we can look at that show, objectively, that what was written in those books is wrong. You simply cannot say the same thing about a religious text. Excepting, of course, those portions of a religious text that attempt to answer scientific questions, such as how old the Earth is, and so forth.
Of course, you do know that you can buy annotated Bibles, right? They’ve got all the sidebars and footnotes you want. Or you could just attend church and listen to the sermon, and get the sidebars and footnotes first hand.
Okay, fine. We cut that part out. All of the people who already agree with us, already agree with us. And all the people who don’t agree with us, still have their unexpurgated Bibles to wave around and use to denounce whatever they feel is denouncable. What, precisely, have we gained by making these changes?
Because there is as much value in studying that which with you disagree as there is in study that with which you agree.
Well, a big part of that would be that Dostoevsky didn’t write a whole lot about the life of Jesus Christ, who tends to be rather an important figure to Christians. And, of course, anything that he did write about Jesus would have been derived from his own readings of the Bible and of other commentators on the Bible, which leads us back to the idea of looking at the source material first hand and drawing your own conclusions.
It would be odd, if that’s what actually happened. Since the study of Greek myth has been a staple of the university system pretty much since the very first one was ever founded, and continues to be actively studied in the halls of academia to this day, I have to say I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about here. It just doesn’t get studied much in churches, because churches are specialized in the study of Christian (and, to a lesser degree, Jewish) beliefs, not pagan Greek beliefs.
Because the purpose of a church is to specifically study those stories directly attached to the Christ myth. That’s like asking why you don’t study medieval literature during algebra class: it’s because algebra class is where you go to learn algebra, not medieval literature. Church is where you go to study Christian thought, not Hindu thought. If you want to study Hindu thought, go to a Hindu temple and hang out there. They got that stuff covered.
No, as it turned out, it was pretty easy.
Yeees… but if we’re specifically discussing those Christians who do not take the entire Bible to be the literal word of God, there’s no particular reason for them to take the Bible at face value at the one point where it actually claims to have been written by God, is there? If I’m looking at the Bible, and I’m taking the position that the Bible was written by man, when I get to the part in the Bible that says, “God wrote this part!” I’m still working under the assumption that it was a human who claimed that part was written by God, and not actually God himself who stepped in for that one bit of scripture.
Right. And?
No, not really all that remarkable. Or factual, for that matter. You’re really trying to claim that no one, ever, in the history of religious writings, has ever edited the Bible for their own ends?
I find that on these threads, long lines of parsed out discussion can tend to confuse exactly what’s being talked about. In this case, your response here to the actual thread of discussion is almost entirely nonsensical: it SORT of makes sense if what it was responding to was taken entirely in isolation, but in the context of the points we were talking about, it basically goes nowhere.
I think this discussion is pretty interesting, but before I continue it, I’d really like to get some sense that you are actually interested in it as well. If I type up another long response, and get a bunch of disjointed non-sequiturs back, then I’ve wasted your time and you’ve wasted yours as well.