Not only have I read it several times, but I have studied it under Northrup Frye. It is a historical work – one of many among other cultures and religions. It can give insights into our own culture, but as far as it establishing that there is a god – it fails. Just because something is written does not make it true.
To put it more directly, what is the proof of your god being the one true god, as opposed to another person’s god being the one true god, as opposed to another person’s god being a chemically or magnetically induced brain fart? Simply falling back on something someone else wrote, or on your own personal perceptions, does not cut the mustard. Such arguments just leave us with “My god is right,” “No, my god is right,” “No, my god is right,” and all the trouble that follows thereof.
Several times?
Cover to cover?
Yes (Mostly King James, but also couple of times through the New American). A bit most evenings throughout highschool, before getting into serious study of it in university. Several friends and I also attended each other’s churches to see how different denominations were different).
Several times, huh?
What would be your take on Liberal’s cite of John 10:34 in post #104 above? I started on a reply, but noticed your post before I hit reply.
Your thoughts?
This … I am not sure if I know how to respond. Let’s give it a shot.
Look at this: “Just because something is written does not make it true”. I know that. Your math book in school, that was written. It was true. You learned this through study, and you came to an understanding. So some things that are written are true. The Bible even says in Proverbs that it is foolish to put faith in every word, and the wise ones consider their steps. Think of that, the Bible itself says you shouldn’t put blind faith in it, that you should study it to make sure!
The Bible is written, just like that math book. It is true. **I ** know this because I have come to an understanding over time. Reading it thru does little for anyone…it’s 66 separate books. Don’t forget that. 2Tim 3:15 says that all scripture is inspired of God, but it still took a few thousand years to write, so naturally different literary styles will jump in there.
Obviously, since it took assistance from teachers for you to come to an understanding of mathematics, and you had more than one teacher, just reading a math book with 1 study guide wouldn’t cut it. Just like reading the Bible with ONE study guide won’t cut it. You’ll never get it all…it’ll never make sense.
The important thing to remember here is that each individual has the ability to make up his own mind. Really, each individual has the **obligation ** to do so. So if you were to study with one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and if after a year or so you still completely disagreed with them, you would have the right to make up your mind and say “No thanks, I don’t buy it”. Everyone fears that studying with a Witness would somehow corrupt their brain…it won’t, I promise. Until you make up your own mind, you’ll still have the same beliefs, the same old habits. Try studying with your Priest, or Pastor. They won’t give you the personal help that you’ll get from a Witness. I promise.
Think of it this way, maybe then you’ll get where I’m coming from. If you were in a land where a large portion of the money flowing around was counterfeit, what would benefit you most? Studying all the different types of counterfeit money so that you knew what it all looked like? Or studying the true money very hard so that you knew what to compare the fakes to?
The Bible says that there is one true God, and that his way is perfect, and that we as humans have an obligation to keep his commandments. So this is what I will study, and hold all others up to it. I’ve not seen any reason to change that SOP.
???
Okay - when I said any other, did you think I meant any other god explanation or any other physical explanation? I meant the latter. While a god explanation was used to explain physical things, like a rainbow, don’t you think explanations of where we go when we die, why is there pain and death, and why good things happen to bad people (and vice versa) fall into the same sort of categories?
God of the gaps is not necessarily a negative concept. 3,000 years ago a deistic explanation of the Sun introduced far fewer entities than fusion, given their level of knowledge of the world.
I don’t know of more sophisticated notions of god from 4,000 years ago, say. Perhaps they had a prehistoric Augustine, but we need to not read in too much of our theological evolution into their beliefs.
Well ya gotta gimme more than that…
What don’t you get, specifically? Did I not understand what you were trying to say or vice versa?
Sorry for all the continuous posting, but this is the only time I get to actually read this board.
Where in the sam hill’s blue blazin’ tarnation is the OP?
A conventional reading of this passage is that Jesus is defending his own divinity with the following argument: (1) the scripture is not blasphemous, (2) the scripture says that those who are divinely commissioned can be called divine, (3) Jesus says he was divinely commissioned, therefore (4) Jesus is not being blasphemous when he asserts that he is divine.
It raises the issues of whether Jesus is claiming deity, and if so, to what degree, and of how Jesus is attempting to use existing biblical law to argue against those who oppose him.
On a broader reading, it raises the issue of what cultures of that region considered necessary for godhood. For example, compare it with the long existing requisites of knowledge and eternal life.
For the purposes of our discussion it is meaningless, for Jesus’ argument is based on three premises: (1) that there is a god, (2) that the scriptures are true directions from that god, and (3) that that god commissioned Jesus as a divinity. This comes back to my earlier point about something not necessarily being true simply because it was written.
Another way of puting it is that the passage was an attempt to validate the divinity of Jesus under existing religious beliefs. That does nothing for our current thread that is trying to establish whether there is a god or not – it just pushes the inquiry back to an earlier god.
(Which in turn raises the interesting possibility that one of the things that makes us human (as opposed to cats or bananas or car alarms or proto-humans or GWB) is our capacity to conceive of god – even if that conception has no ground in reality.)
Funny you should mention that. That was throughout grade 11.
Hoo boy - we know about the quotes from scientists. It is called quote mining, and the scientists so quoted are often quite pissed off about it. Often, if you read the next paragraph of the quoted work, you can see how dishonest the quote mining was. Quote mining Darwin is an old and vernerable tradition among creationists.
One can read Hemingway, or Shakespeare, many ways. You can look for his conscious intentions. You can look for his unconcious intentions. You can interpret it in ways he never could have meant. One can certainly read the Bible in the same way, asking what the political and moral intentions of the writers were. You can also read it to see what their social environment was. For instance, when they wrote the sacking of cities was quite the thing to do, so Joshua’s actions were not ones to inspire an moral qualms. As Borges might have said, if someone wrote the Bible today, using the same words, it would mean something quite different.
But that’s the literary interpretation. The issue is whether it is a true reflection of historical reality. We can produce three models - a literary model, where it is all made up (possibly inspired by true events, like historical fiction,) a model in which it is all true, absent obvious fables and parables, and the model that most Christians use, in which stuff that does not contribute to what they consider the true message of god was written by people and can be discarded. My study tells me that model 1 makes the most sense.
A better analogy is unlearning something. When I was in junior high, I learned the theory of mountain building before continental drift. By always remaining in doubt, even of stuff taught to me, I could accept the better answer. But I’m afraid that even if someone tells me to watch Plan 9 From Outer Space as if it were a classic of the cinema, I still see it as junk.
Simple: there weren’t a lot of humans around, they didn’t live in a place where fossilization happened very frequently, and fossilization is rare in the first place. We’ve only been looking for 150 years, and a lot of the fossils are in relatively inconvenient places.
We do have million year old bones of our ancestors. Yeah there are more dinosaur bones, but they were around 80 times longer than we have, they covered the entire earth, and there were lots and lots of species. We’re still finding new species of dinosaur bones. You’d need to compare the number of mammal bones with this, not human bones.
Anyhow, do you agree that we have found 100 million year old dinosaur bones? Do you have a problem only with human evolution, or all evolution?
Of course there are explanations for those things. But how do we know they are the correct explanations? We can’t prove it one way or another, but if you check out the stuff you can verify, and it’s all wrong, you may reasonably doubt the stuff you can’t. That’s why stuff like evolution is important. I’m certainly not claiming that other religions have done a better job explaining the natural world. None of them have a clue.
BTW, I’m Jewish, and never had a priest. When I went to Hebrew school we learned the stories (actually our history book started with Abram and never claimed that the creation was historical) but no one ever tried to claim science was incorrect.
True, but well spoken and intelligent creationists are very rare here. Most, I’m sorry to say, start at the “if we’re descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys” level. So, even if I think you’re wrong, and even if I give you a hard time, I do appreciate your elevated level of discourse.
My main problem is with the misrepresentation of the Bible. Like I said in another post, I prefer to study what I believe to be true and then hold all others up to it. Like all those crazt denominations of Christianity that have little to do with Jesus or his teachings…
What’s really most important in life is not that we perfectly understand everything. It’s that we live together in a way that is mutually beneficial, and consistent.
I believe that the theory of evolution is certainly plausible, and that’s why it’s so entrenched into our schools as “the only truth possible”. I’m just not willing to believe that the particular scenario of evolution endorsed by self appointed experts is true. In other words, possible? Maybe. Likely? No. True? Nope.
My main problem with evolution is: Emotion, and Art, among other things. Evolution will never explain these beyond the standard “Oh it’s just chemical reactions that we don’t fully understand yet, so really, your wife’s not *mad * at you, she’s just experiencing high levels of a particular chemical. No we don’t know why it’s there…sure doesn’t seem beneficial for survival to be arguing with our mates.” 
There aren’t various gods, but there are various people. Another way to put that is that there is only one hub, but there are many spokes. As spokes, our perceptions are necessarily subjective. You cannot experience my consciousness and I cannot experience yours. We all are tied in to the hub, but not to one another. The hub is therefore objective, and is privy to all the spokes.
I say that in order to lay the groundwork for understanding the following (so that it isn’t confused with solipsism): the universe is not real. It is a probability distribution. The universe that you perceive exists solely for your benefit, so that you can make moral decisions. If there were no Bin Ladens and no Indian Hater Jacksons, we would have no moral decisions to make. You despise these tyrants just as I do, and so what we value has at least that much in common.
What is real and significant about you is your essence, or spirit. It is eternal, essential, and necessary. All you are observing when you look at Bin Laden is electromagnetic energy suspended in a field of gravity. It is the same thing you observe when you look at a flower. Or a starving child. Or the Mona Lisa. These are quantum fluctuations that are nothing more than probabilities collapsing. This is the essence of the universe.
Does it seem real? Certainly. It would hardly be an effective mis-en-scene for our moral play if it didn’t. Does it matter since it isn’t real? Yes, of course it matters because we draw our moral conclusions from it. Since it isn’t real, can’t we just opt out and ignore it? Maybe, but it would be really really — and I mean really — hard. Things like pain, sadness, joy, lust, hunger — these are all a part of our universe, and they slap the face of our consciousness when we try to ignore them.
So, am I saying that the people on the WTC plane were not real? Yes I am, BUT… only from your perspective. (Remember how the notion of subjectivity was drawn. The spokes and all that.) They have their own perspectives in which you are not real. You do not know and cannot know what experiences they might have had. Maybe in their world, where you never existed, none of what you saw ever happened.
This is why Jesus teaches us to avoid moral judgment of others altogether: it is because we cannot live someone else’s life, and have no idea what their perceptions of the universe have brought to bear upon their life experience. But what of people who did know the victims? Those whose lives did intersect with theirs? It’s hard to keep track of (for us anyway), but all these realities are going on simultaneously. Yours will always confirm your own experience, but never someone else’s.
No essences died in those planes on that day. Their real selves, their spirits, experienced an altogether different reality from what you did. Now, you will ask me, “But didn’t you see it too? Didn’t you share the same reality I did?” And of course, it’s pointless to answer because from your perspective I am answering with what your experience tells you I’m saying. Therefore, whether I say yes or whether I say no, you will take from the answer what you are prepared to take and nothing more. It will be filtered through your aesthetic.
This is why one man can cry out in anger over what happened there while another man cries out with joy. This is why one man calls our soldiers heroes for volunteering to fight, while another calls them cowards for fighting with bombs and missiles without even seeing the faces of those they kill. This is why one man is disgusted by what another man desires.
If you’re still reading, then consider this: what were you to the Indian child who starved in the snow in Tennessee? Nothing. Nonexistent. You therefore cannot know what he actually experienced in his own reality. Maybe he is reading about your untimely demise, his essence existing in an entirely arbitrary place and time relative to your perspective.
So if that’s the case, if nothing in the universe is even real, if no harm can come to anything out there, if only spirit is real and lives forever, then why should we care about anything at all? Well, that’s exactly the decision you’re making. What do you care about? What do you treasure? What do you value?
You and I, our essences, are equally real but completely detached. I have my world, and you have yours. I have my moral journey, and you have yours. My judgments about yours are worthless, and your judgments about mine are the same. You need concern yourself only with your own, and I with mine.
I’m glad you are enraged by the Indian Hater and Bin Laden. We share this in common. But we also differ on quite much. In fact, I get the feeling almost everytime I encounter you that you utterly hate me. Not in a drama queen way, but in a visceral, deep, and abiding way. You are perceiving something about me that I do not perceive the same way. And such is the nature of subjective being.
You know, I do fail to see the relevance of the thread-title question. I’m fully aware that random individual X will refuse to acknowledge the existence of something for which he does not see adequate evidence or proof, whether it be Bigfoot, astrology, the Loch Ness monster, flying saucers, unicorns (whether visible and white or the other kind), or God.
But, although the love-and-marriage metaphor is getting very threadbare, the fact of the matter is that the nature of the interaction between believer and God is one of a relationship, an interpersonal interaction. I suspect that there is not a person here who has run a scientific battery of tests to determine if falling in love is the logical thing to do. Rather, it’s founded in a sense of love, confidence, and trust in the beloved, a certitude that is **non-**rational (but ideally not irrational) that this is the right thing to do.
Further, “scientific evidence” comes in a variety of different flavors. One does not assess the behavior of an individual or of a group or culture using a methodology appropriate to physics or chemistry, but rather one appropriate to psychology, sociology, or anthropology respectively. One evaluates a novel or poem using literary, aesthetic criteria. What is the appropriate methodology for determining the existence, nature, and character of a deity? An “answers prayers or not” test reduces God to a mechanistic respondent-to-inputs, a computer program or white mouse. And if God is in fact anything, He is someone possessed of greater knowledge and wisdom than we – that goes with the definition. Ergo, the “answers prayers” test is merely a form of Magick – which presumably does not work if regarded as a means of verbally manipulating the exterior world. (I forebear from any pagan-baiting here; I simply hold up that the recitation of a spell, even with proper preparation and ritual, does not automatically and consistently effectuate a given physical change. And that is precisely what a “scientific test of the efficacy of prayer” is expecting prayer to do. If God does answer prayer, He does it in accord with His wisdom. And while that sounds very close to the “mysterious ways” issue, honesty about any such test forces us to recognize that those faiths who do believe in a Monotheos who listens to prayer and reacts to it, do not claim automatic fulfillment of any petition made, but rather that He will answer prayers made in accordance with His Will. (“In My/His Name” found throughout Scriptural references to prayer means precisely that – your prayers are answered according to agency in the legal sense: what His intent is, determines whether a petition is a valid request for fulfillment, just as an agent is not free to do as he chooses but must act in accord with the wishes of the principal when acting as an agent. He acts in the name of the principal only when his actions are in accord with the principal’s wishes as expressed in his instructions. Any other purported act of agency is an invalid one.)
Yeah, I’m not saying that there’s anything negative about it. I’m just saying that it needs to be identified if it is indeed what is meant, so that it will not seem to place the same attribute on a metaphysical God Whose only existential attribute is necessity.
With respect to the god notions of antiquity, we obviously can never know. I could just as well argue that God as the provider of goodness is a simple concept, easily understood by even the simplest mind. Jesus Himself taught that children understand His concepts readily, while erudite men often struggle with understanding. And as I pointed out already, there are primitive cultures even today, who may reasonably be seen as analogous to early man, who are substance monotheists, believing that all metaphysical gods are merely different forms of the same underlying essence. And I agree with them.
I think it is a fallacy to presume that the further we go back, the dumber people were. If anything, it might well be the opposite. Early man had to be amazingly intelligent and resourceful even to survive. The earliest languages that we know of were exceedingly complex in their grammar. And in many early non-Western cultures, God was always viewed as spirit and not anthropomorphically.
Echo6160, there are a great many religions and sects within those religions. A great many of them insist that their way is the only true way. A person could spend one’s entire life investigating different sects, and still not cover them all. At some point, one comes to the conclusion that sects of Christianity, Islam and Judaism are simply variations upon a theme. If your particular brand of religion works for you, then good for you. If another person’s different brand of religion works for that person, then good for that person. If a person’s not believing in god works for that person, then good for that person.
For myself, I attended church seven days a week starting in grade five, with classroom religious instruction also starting at that time. I attended religious camps in the summer, and religious retreats throughout the year. By the time high school came around, my friends and I participated in each other’s churches (RLDS, United, Anglican, Catholic, Pentacostal, and even a Jewish synagogue), held bible readings several times each week (including a year of JW), brought in guest speakers to our school, organized religious youth groups, and generally investigated religion to the degree that we were able.
Come university, I read English, with minors in classical studies and cinema – thus resulting in formal inquiry into Greek, Roman, and Christian religions, including studying under Frye (one of western civilizations greatest critical thinkers). As my capacity for critical thought developed, it finally dawned on me that I should not necessarily accept my upbringing as a Christian as gospel, and instead should look at the roots of my beliefs. I more and more found myself realizing that people pretty much follow whatever religion they are born into, or are exposed to in a preferential light (e.g. missionaries). I came to realize that my involvement in Christianity was simply a result of my being born into a Christian community. Given the opportunity to compare religions, and most importantly to look at the foundations of religions, I came to the conclusion that there is no god, but there is something in most people that makes them want to believe in god, and to cause many people to have visions of the god of their particular culture. For me, god is no more than a construct of individuals’ minds, as determined by how the neuron-transmitters of their brains function with respect to the culture in which they are raised. Some people will say that this type of brain activity (visions of god, etc.) is a result of god, but that argument does not wash for me. Persinger’s work on how the brain works is particularly telling.
Of the closest friends with whom I explored religion during high school, I later became an atheist; one became an RLDS pastor and social worker with a normal middle-class life and family; one married a nice Jewish girl of his same religion that his parents picked out for him (the poor bastard had been sent on embarrassing dates to a neighboring city throughout high school); one developed a southern American preacher accent (despite never having left Ontario, Canada), grew his hair long and grew a beard, finished every paragraph by saying “Praise the Lord”, and became a carpenter and itinerant preacher; one went from being extremely religious with visions of god and speaking in tongues to being a frat house whore; and one went insane with visions of god and the devil, was institutionalized, and killed himself. This leads me to wonder not whether there is a god or not (there is no god in my opinion, but I am open to proof), but rather to wonder why people believe in god, and to what degree a person’s sanity is either assisted or impinged by that person’s belief in god. I believe the answer is to be found by learning more about how the brain functions.
Ah, but what do you mean by use the Bible in a bible-based discussion?
I rarely involve myself in NT discussions, because I’ve read it exactly once, never studied it in school, and find it particularly uninteresting - having been brought up in a culture where Jesus means nothing. I’ve read much of the rest of the Bible more, and have been through it in Hebrew school. However, if you mean a discussion where only the Bible is used, I must bow out. Except in very limited situations, such as examining self-contradictions, and pointing out evidence that god ain’t so nice, I think the Bible must be examined like any other ancient work, in context and with full understanding that the notion of truth and accuracy was not the same 2700 years ago as it is today (except for political pamphleteers.)
echo6160 invited me to examine the Bible without doubt. That’s not the way I work. I am always in review mode. Not just books opposing my position, but for books supporting it. Smith’s book on atheism annoys me terribly since I found many of the arguments weak and easy to refute.
If you believe experts are self-appointed, you must never gone through a graduate program or peer review! Experts become experts through peer recognition. However, you are quite correct in rejecting the notion that evolution (the theory, not the observed process) is true. It is the best explanation we have for a lot of stuff, and our confidence in it is very high, but no one should believe in it as an absolute truth. That isn’t how science works. Don’t your co-religionists have a problem with your provisional acceptance - and provisionally is exactly how you should accept anything in science.
You might think differently if you ever experience the change in behavior when a high level of certain chemicals is reduced. Evolution is all about variability - nothing in it says that all members of a species will be alike in all ways. Far from it. As for emotions, isn’t it advantageous for social animals know what others are thinking, and don’t emotions help? I’m sure art is a side effect of the growth of our brain - not everything we like is directly advantageous. But I’m sure there is no sure answer to this yet.