Well, I’m enjoying your ignorance of the use of apostrophes. Consider my rant as questioning a belief in a God too incompetent to devise a clear message to the humans about his nature, intentions, or desires, and the corresponding belief by some humans to consider the error-ridden Bible as that perfect and divinely inspired message, their brain stems not withstanding. Can you reconcile a belief in the Bible’s divine inspiration with the errors contained therein?
If you’re one of these thoughtful cherry-picking Christians, who interprets the Bible to mean whatever he wants it to mean and feels comfortable rejecting those phrases, sentences and chapters that he finds inconvenient, well, you’re right, I don’t have much of a debate with you, at least not here. But is no one willing to defend the Bible other than by conceding at the outset “Oh, the Bible! Everyone knows that it’s a worthless error-riddled heap of mealy dung so why expect consistency or a literal reading to be meaningful”? Is this what belief in the Bible has come to mean, that’s it’s the basis of your beliefs but you don’t actually, you know, believe in it or anything?
Sure. Although inspired by God, it was written, interpreted, kept, and translated by humans. Personally, I don’t believe everything in it is the Word of God!, it is just one of the myriad of ways God works to connect with us.
You’ve created a strawman that makes it sound like to believe in God you have to accept everything in the Bible as absolutely true, without error, divine, and to be taken literally. As a majority of posters have pointed out that’s simply not true.
But enjoy yourself, because that’s what God would want.
And you make the distinction between “parts that I do believe are the word of God” and “parts that are just so much stupid hooey” how, exactly? Self-interest? Divine guidance? Flipping a coin?
I find what sections would piss you off the most and go with those. At least that’s what I’m starting to think of doing.
But since you’re (see, a proper apostrophe!) being so calm and open minded, I’ll tell you that the Bible is just one of the many things I use to try and develop my relationship with God. I don’t worry too much whether or not there was a pillar of fire or the sun stopped moving, I’m much more concerned about my relationship with God, and how I can use that relationship to better myself. If the Bible helps in that pursuit, great. If it doesn’t, fine. I’m not a Biblical literalist, so I don’t quote it as authoritative as God’s word. Personally, I find “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself” much more important than the entire book of Leviticus. I’ll leave it to you and fundamentalists to try and determine exactly what is the Word of God.
I’m with pseudotriton on this one. You guys ARE being nitpicky and obfuscatory. When you add in the term “Christian” to his OP so that it becomes “The Case Against the Christian God” then his target is specific enough and his argument holds true.
PRR is saying
Most Christians believe that god is all-knowing and all-powerful.
Most people believe that god either
a) directly inspired the people who wrote the Bible, creating a document whose every word must be literally true since it came directly from God
b) was more subtle in how he inspired the people who write the Bible – while not dictating it to them, God definitely “led them down the path of righteousness” as they wrote it in some shadowy, ill-defined way that gives the Bible’s words greater weight than those of uninspired by God writings.
Very, very few if any Christians would say that God had nothing to do with the Bible
Given that the Bible is full of errors of logic, errors of fact, grossly unethical behavior sanctioned by god and a lot of other obvious horseshit
God is either grossly incompetent or all those Christian beliefs are wrong.
This seems to me to be an eminently sound argument that makes the case against the Christian god very strongly. I haven’t read any posts that directly addresses it, except for exactly the kind of nitpicking and obfuscation that PRR has complained about. His complaints seem reasonable to me. Does anyone have an actual, logical response to what PRR is saying? (Someone did say that god did not write the Bible, implying that god had nothing to do with it, but did not explain that as being consistent with general Christian values.)
If prr had simply stated that his “case” was against a fundamentalist Christian God, then he would have a point and he could have waited until one of the hundreds of fundamentalist Christians on this board responded to it, which, by my guess, would be never.
He has an argument against those who believe in an inerrant Bible. I’ll let them answer him, because it certainly isn’t my belief.
If that’s what he meant, then that’s what he should have written. You don’t get to retitle your OP after 40 replies because your argument was shown to be weak.
Upon reading the OP, I was reminded of this old joke:
A guy is walking down the street one night when he sees another guy crawling around on his hands and knees underneath a street light.
“What’s the matter?” the first guy asks. “Did you lose something?”
“Yeah, I lost a contact lens.”
“I’ll help you look.” So he starts looking around too. After a few minutes, when neither of them has found anything, he says, “Say, are you sure it was around here that you lost your contact lens?”
“Actually, no, I lost it about a block away down the street.”
“Well why are you looking for it here then?”
“The light is better here.”
The OP included a claim that “believers often fill their days and nights with attempts to persuade us non-believers of His existence” (which I don’t see happening all that much here on the SDMB), and a plea to “allow us to get on with our fucking lives without another syllable about conversion, God, the Bible, or other related matters” (which, on the Dope, could easily be accomplished by skipping any thread devoted to such topics). It also presents a “case against God” based on a view of God and the Bible that I don’t see all that many Dopers propounding. I suspect that the people prr really has a beef with are elsewhere, and he’s only posting here because the light is better here.
If you really want me to address the argument that Evil Captor restated on its merits…
First of all, very few Christians believe that the Bible was literally dictated by God. It’s my understanding that this is what Moslems believe about the Koran: that it was authored by Allah, and Mohammed essentially acted as secretary. But I personally can’t think of any Christian, especially on the SDMB, who takes this view.
There are a substantial number of Christians who identify themselves as “Biblical inerrantists.” This does not imply that they think God dictated the Bible word for word, nor that every word is meant to be taken literally. It means (as I understand it) that God somehow managed to see to it that there were no mistakes in the text (which may or may not extend to its transmission and translation, depending on whom you ask). Such people would not grant your premise that the Bible is full of errors. They would say that all “errors” you claim to find can be explained away, or just need to be interpreted correctly, or aren’t really errors just because you happen to disagree with them. They would caution you that the Bible is not to be read like a textbook, and contains different genres. You shouldn’t necessarily insist on logical precision from a poem, photographic realism from a painting, or historical accuracy from a parable.
I honestly do not know how many (if any) Biblical inerrantists we have on the SDMB, nor how defensible their position is.
Other Christians occupy various other positions in the substantial middle ground between “God dictated the Bible” and “God had nothing to do with the Bible.” Few of them would go so far as to say that the Bible is “full of … obvious horseshit.” They would grant that there may be errors or imperfections in the Bible, but that this is no more a disproof of God than is the fact that there are imperfections in the world or in people. It’s only a fatal flaw on God’s part if you assume (as I said earlier) that it was God’s intention to spell everything out for humanity in a direct, inerrant, unambiguous way.
First, I think the OP was adequately refuted by Posts #2 and #3. The premise is faulty. You don’t need to believe in divine inspiration of the New Testament to be a Chistian. I, for one, was a Christian for decades and always took as my starting point that the NT was a man-made record. It just reads that way.
As for who keeps putting the issue in play on the SMDB, my casual observation is that it’s mostly skeptics, and usually newbies at that (this being an exception). I see almost no prosetylizing or witnessing (which, as a skeptic, I appreciate). Instead I see explanations and/or defenses from the theists, most of which are pretty cogent. Yeah, I disagree with 'em, but on the whole they strike me as a thoughtful bunch.
Perhaps one thing going for Christianity is the nature of empirical evidence. This is not often rationally deduced or based through observation. Thus facts are not always assisted by our rational knowledge but seen through empirical data.
Nevertheless I sincerely doubt the Universe, which we know to be a billion years old, became fully comprehensible to a shepherd 3,000 years ago who at the time was married to his 100 year old half sister. Even more amazing, this ‘meaning of life’ changed when a cosmopolitan Jew, on the road to persecute Christians, saw Jesus so vividly in a revelation that he was able to introduce the idea of resurrection to the masses, thus changing the world’s eschatological beliefs. All of this from a man who never met Jesus nor saw his ministry, he wrote the New Testament’s earliest work and was the composer of 16 of its 27 books. Saint Paul universalized the story of a peasant Jew who died a tragic death and whose God forgot to instill a new world order. Indeed, his failed apocalyptic visions were absurd and he told all of his disciples they would live to see the end of existence. Such a vision is nowadays rejected as it wasn’t empirically based; it did not happen yet sheep like masses believe in his story through ignorance. I do not understand how God forgot to save his son when Jesus preached to all of his followers that they would see the end.