I’m kinda curious if Curtis will interpret this thread even slightly literally and absorb some of the responses, or will his next thread about atheists contain the same misconceptions?
God is not a moderate.
OTOH, this problem is very old. St. Augustine said Christians shouldn’t defend crazy stuff in the Bible we know to be false by citing the Bible as an authority because it made Christianity look bad to non-Christians and thus hurt the cause of conversion. You’d think an intellectual would be bothered by that bit of cognitive dissonance while arguing that Jesus died for our sins and you can read all about it in this crazy book which he just said is full of demonstrably wrong facts which should be ignored because it makes us look dumb.
Not all atheists, but there are certainly many of them. Read the thread.
Curtis, there are several factors at play here -
[ul][li]Often the atheists in question are reacting against fundamentalists. [/li][li]Hyper-literalism is often a form of straw man argumentation. Your example of “the sun rose” is a good one.[/li][li]Very often, the atheists who do this are not reacting to what was said at the time. They are reacting to some significant figure in their past, with the comeback that they wish they could have said at the time. Often it happened to them when they were young, or at least immature, and children are often literalists.[/ul]You can’t force someone to understand something if they don’t want to. And the Bible is a book written for adults. [/li]
Regards,
Shodan
For once I agree with Curtis! 
(sort of.)
An intellectually honest debator should choose the smartest spokesman for the opposite side to argue with, not the stupidest strawman.
I am not a Believer, but sometimes want to discuss something in the Bible. But the other atheist can’t get past some falsehood (at least in a “hyper-literal” sense) to see something which may have much moral or historical interest.
The debate has to begin somewhere. The easiest place to begin is with what is literally written.
How is the atheist supposed to read your mind to determine what you think is literal or metaphorical? Why should we accept your interpretation of a given passage?
These are rhetorical questions, obviously, meant to illustrate why atheists attack a literal bible.
I quasi-agree with this. One should always be intellectually charitable in a debate.
That said, it’s often difficult to determine what a person believes. Now, a discussion is one thing. You can suss out what a person believes and go from there. A debate is often very different. The point of a debate is to win, not to convince the other person. Often the person with the most unanswered ‘points’ is considered the winner - which leads to shotgun style debates. So an atheist would spit out 100 ‘contradictions’ while the believer only has time to clear up, say, 10 of those contradictions. Creationists do this to scientists all the time in debates, I should note. In fact, I first got acquainted with this approach after hearing of the ‘Gish Gallop’, named after the departed Duane Gish. William Lane Craig has a similar approach in his debates on God. He will lay out many points and it’s often hard, given the time, to address two or three of the points.
That’s one of the reasons I prefer discussions to debates.
This whole mindset puzzles me. I am not an atheist because the bible is self contradictory. Frankly, the literalism or nonliteralism of the bible is irrelevant. If I were to “debate” my atheism it would be on a much simpler and fundamental level that has nothing to do with a passage here or there in the Torah.
I can in a very honest way… by considering the time & place & also the distinction between the Covenant of Moses & that of Jesus…
If you are a citizen under the Covenant of Moses, in a society with functioning miracle-working accurate prophets, and anyone, no matter how close, tries to lure you to serve other gods, then they are committing a crime of treason, of rebellion, & of sheer stupidity. You came out of a plague-decimated Egypt, you walked thru a split-open Red Sea, you see what shit comes down on those who defy The Throne. Someone who lures you to serve other gods has rightfully earned themselves a Darwin-Award big-time. (Back then, they were called Korah-Awards.)
That society existed off & on from the time of Moses (1400 or 1200 B.C.) up to A.D. 70, when the Priestly-Sacrificial system of his Covenant fell under that penalty after a generation of persecuting miracle-working accurate prophets- Jesus and His Apostles. Since then, religious offenders are not subject to physical penalties but to the penalty of being denied the Sacraments & expelled from the Congregation until they repent.
…or a Vulcan?
I think that a lot of vocal atheists (not all of them, but a lot) have a lot better grounding in science than they do in classical literature, philosophy and religion, etc. (Admittedly, the same is true of many Christians—and often without the grounding in science.) Either they’re blind to the fact that the Bible is an anthology of different works in different genres, or they at least lack the background to tell how the original audience would have understood the various parts (what was intended as history, as parable, as poetry, etc.), and the critical faculties they bring to the text are those they’d bring to a work of science, or modern historical narrative, or something like that.
If it’s my mindset that puzzles you, it’s because my communication failed. I don’t debate religion at all; my interest in the Bible is mainly historical; I was commenting that it’s frustrating discussing the Bible’s historical interest with some people. (But if I did debate it, I’d be with you, certainly not making a mockery via hyper-literalism.)
Got it- sorry if it seemed I was picking on you! The funny thing is that I’m Jewish and based on genes alone love debating the meaning of the bible. My equally ahtheistic son wrote a marvelous piece for his Bar Mitzvah discussing the meaning and interpretation of the bible- nothing literal about it. To me it’s like discussing any influential piece of literature and trying to get meaning out it that can influence our lives.
I’m no believer in the Judeo-Christian God - but if you think David is depicted as all good in the OT, you are simply wrong. David does plenty of rotten things in the OT, rotten even by the Iron-Age standards of the time it was written in. Remember Bathsheeba’s old hubby, Uriah the Hittite?
David was depicted as a man, warrior and king as a complex character - good and bad. In this, his depiction differed from that of other contemporary ME chronicles of rulers, which tended to be more in the way of uncritical pangyrics. That’s part of the reason why people find the David mythology interesting, and have for centuries.
To the extent that the premise is true, I’d say there are two reasons.
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The people who say they believe some parts of the bible in some ways, but interpret everything to be pretty much in accord with modern secular values are not of much concern to atheist activists. Sure, their beliefs are irrational and even technically less internally consistent than rabid literalists. But they aren’t generally dangerous, and are often allies to atheists and minority religions in the fight for religious liberty and separation of church and state. So there’s not much motivation to argue them out of their beliefs.
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To the extent that one might want to argue with one of these middling Christians about their beliefs, it is exceedingly difficult because the goalposts move. I think most of these folks go about their lives thinking vaguely about God as a magical friend who helps them out, loves them no matter what, and will take them to heaven when they die. They pray to this god to get good parking spaces or to spare them a bad diagnosis when they have a scary lab test. But when you try to pin them down on the theology of these actions, they react to the barrage of logic by defining God as less and less interventionist and anthropomorphic, until he’s an ineffable Deist type god who just makes us feel warm and fuzzy when we pray. Then after the debate they go back to worrying about whether He’s watching them masturbate, and praying to Him for a raise. It’s a lot simpler to argue against the black and white words of the bible!
Yes, I do. Cause it can be such fun!
But it is often read with childish mindsets.
Well, CL, I wonder just how much of the introductory material of the site, and how well. If you did at all.
Here’s the last section of their FAQ:
Originally posted by SAB:
"Frequently Asked Questions…
**Why should I believe what you say about the Bible? **
You shouldn’t. Read it yourself and decide for yourself what you think about the Bible. That is the whole point of the SAB.
**Why do you highlight the nitpicky stuff? The Bible has plenty of serious problems to point out. By including the marginal verses you make it easy for believers to discredit the site. **
Yes, this is a problem. No one doubts, for example, that 1 Samuel 15:2-3, Ezekiel 23:20, and Leviticus 19:18 are cruel, filthy, and good, respectively. But many other passages are not nearly so clear. Some think they are important and should be included; others think they are trivial and should be left out.
Although I would like make the site as comprehensive as possible, I can’t include everything. So I try to apply the O’Connor test when deciding what to include or leave out. How would an “objective observer” view the passage? Would she view it as cruel, absurd, intolerant, or good? If so, then I mark it accordingly. If not, I leave it out. (And when in doubt, I leave it out.)
**Do you allow believers to present opposing views at the SAB? **
Yes, whenever possible I provide links to responses from apologists, and two Christian apologists are currently responding to the SAB notes. Links, when available, can be found at the bottom of chapter and contradiction pages. The same opportunity will be provided for the Quran and the Book of Mormon.
There is also a discussion board where both believers and skeptics can discuss the Bible and suggest changes to the SAB."
Oh, and I don’t imagine you as having a problem with SAB taking the same literalistic-default approach to the Koran or Book of Mormon. They are “bad” books, so it’s quite all right to tear them apart with what they actually say. :rolleyes:
- Jack
One example is not enough.
I abandoned the God concept many years ago but have no need to “debate” anybody on their religious belief or lack of same. It’s a free country. Besides, I was raised Catholic–we learned to take the Bible with a grain of salt.
The Biblical Inerrancy crew does provide some tempting targets for derision. For one thing–why do they take parts of the Bible 100% seriously & ignore other parts?
But their campaign to foist their beliefs on the rest of us is really irritating. I was raised among the Texas Southern Baptists & found them a bit intolerant about religion. But they weren’t political about it–back before the Texas Republican Party & the Southern Baptists consummated their unholy union.
Rather than debate, I just contribute to the Texas Freedom Network.
On the other hand, Bart Ehrman points out that when you’re telling someone a story that involves talking animals, that’s a flashing-light notice to all that it’s not meant to be taken literally, and even primitive people knew that.
On the third hand, modern America seems to have a really large number of people who say they believe every word as literally true. My impression is that these are the people who haven’t read much of the Bible, except for the disembodied verses that they see in church.
As surprising as it sounds, that’s what we’re doing.
Someone who believes the Bible is the word of God might be an idiot, but at least he’s consistent. Given his initial mistake, taking it as a moral guide actually makes sense.
Having understood that the Bible contains flaws, the pick-and-choose Christian has no such excuse for believing the other bits, or acting like it’s the word of God (i.e. of any worth as a moral guide whatsoever).
Could be. Too bad any asshole can wave one around.