Another revelation in the tragic Montanaplane crash endorsed by anti-choice freaks: one of the women on the plane was five months pregnant. If their deity is responsible for these deaths, not only is their god an abortionist, he’s one of those hacks who butchers the mother in the process…but apparently, Gingi Edmonds is alright with that.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Carlie– go back and find the post in which I claimed that you were ignoring the extra-biblical evidence. You won’t find it. I wrote that you don’t know what it is and that I stand by. I have no intention of trying to reproduce it here. The shortest book on the subject I know– and meant for a popular, not a scholarly audience, is 218 pages long.
If you go back even earlier, you will find that I stated plainly, at the outset, that the evidence resides in the 26 historical documents that comprise the New Testament. I said that their nearness to the events they describe and the thousands of partial ((5000+))and a handful of full manucripts produced in virtually every part of the Greco-Roman world allows us to establish the reliability of the text. These are things that would make scholars of other ancient periods die of joy, if they had the like.
Now, unless you all can come up with something new and to the point, I will flounce off. Again.
Your god doesn’t exist, and your bible is fiction. Prove me otherwise by citing legitimate sources. Your continued evasions tell us something about how you view the truth, and it isn’t very pretty.
Maggie is a flouncer, so Jesus the historical figure could do real magic tricks that were really really for real magic that wasn’t even a trick, that real people actually wrote about real people writing about them, gosh, oh, decades later, so that makes it real history too, I bet!
What other kind of evidence could anybody possibly need! Hurray! I’m going to go to heaven, where Jesus will fix me so I’ll no longer have to feel any compassion for the atheists frying in hell. Maybe I’ll be allowed to zap a few in a Cosmic Milgram Experiment.
Maggie,
While they may be based on a historical person and some historical events, the gospels are not eyewitness accounts–they are religious propaganda tailored for various audiences. Their main purpose is to promote a “spiritual” truth, not a historical one.
And, as I commented earlier:
I wrote that you don’t know what it is and that I stand by. I have no intention of trying to reproduce it here. The shortest book on the subject I know– and meant for a popular, not a scholarly audience, is 218 pages long.
You don’t have to reproduce it, just cite it. Tell us what sources you’re using. If you really know your stuff, it is a trivial matter to tell us which books/articles/authors/authorities you have gotten your information from. If, as you say, we don’t know what it is, how are we supposed to find it and read it ourselves if such knowledgeable people such as yourself don’t tell us? Without it, we can justifiably assume that you’re making it up. You may not realize it, but you’re engaging in a time-honored technique of claiming there’s evidence but then refusing to show it.
And you can’t use the Bible itself. That’s circular. It’s saying “I’m right because I say so”. Doesn’t wash. Extra-biblical references, please. You’ve claimed there are so many it’s impossible to doubt the historical truth of the Bible, now pony up.
Maggie, believe what you will. The only way to change our minds is with the physical evidence you run away from showing. Your testament is worthless without the proper citations, and that is all you provide.
Maggie, the bible claims the impossible. There are multiple actions attributed to Jesus that simply cannot happen. And for this we have 2nd hand eyewitness accounts made decades after the event? There are plenty of other holy men who have had the same claims made of them, yet all claims are nothing more than anecdotal. There may have been a historical Jesus, there may be a figure the legend is based on. But a historical Jesus is not a biblical Jesus. If all you have is 2nd hand eyewitness accounts decades after the fact, you do not have a historical document.
Was Matthew an eyewitness account when it talked of Jesus’ birth? Was Luke? How come they reference events surrounding Jesus’ birth 10 years apart? Why is that even the greatest historical critic of King Herod made no mention of the massacre of the innocents? Even if the gospels were based on Jesus, there’s no way that most of these facts could be known by the writers. As a historical document, the bible fails. Hell, the town Nazareth where Jesus was supposed to have been born didn’t exist until the 3rd century CE.
The bible fails the historical test and it fails hard!
Believe it or not, there are many of us who have access to books. I have closed stack privileges at two college libraries and I know there are others with similar connections. So give us the name and author of this 218 page book, along with any others you feel appropriate.
What is the matter with you, Carlie? Is this deliberate lying about what I said or are you really so prejudiced that you can’t hear me? The exact word I used, talking about sources other than the New Testament was “paucity”. Is that the problem? you don’t know what the word means?
And you can’t use the Bible itself. That’s circular. It’s saying “I’m right because I say so”. Doesn’t wash. Extra-biblical references, please. You’ve claimed there are so many it’s impossible to doubt the historical truth of the Bible, now pony up.
The Bible is not one book. It is a compilation of many documents written in many different places by different authors at different times. There is no real historian on the planet who would dismiss them as primary historical documents. The only issue is how much credence one can give to them and that does not depend on your prejudices or the state of your digestion. It depends on applying the usual techniques historians bring to the study of ancient documents.
Here is the bibliography you asked for.(It is only the tip of the iceberg and it only contains English sources.) I won’t bother to list more because the likelihood of any of you reading or even looking at any of these is non-existant. Nevertheless, these are among the most prominent and best scholars writing in English. Most are still writing. Books are distillations of scholarship aimed at a non-specialist audience. Heavy duty scholarship takes place in peer-reviewed and excruciatingly dull journals (as someone, an intellectually honest atheist (!) I admire, put it). If you know what an index is and have access to one, you can see what they have published in the peer-reviewed literature.
Brown, Raymond. An introduction to the New Testament. New York, Doubleday, 1997.
Bruce, F. F. Are the New Testament documents reliable? 4th ed. Eerdmans, 1954. (It is still in print and it is available online)
— Jesus and Christian origins outside the New Testament. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1974.
–The real Jesus : who is he? London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.
— The canon of scripture. Inter-Varsity Press, c1988.
— Biblical exegesis in the Qumran texts. Eerdmans, 1959.
–Men and movements in the primitive church : studies in early non-Pauline Christianity. Paternoster Press, 1979.
–The canon of scripture. Inter-Varsity Press, c1988.
Blomberg, Craig. The historical reliability of John’s gospel:issues & commentary. InterVarsity Press, c2002.
—-Making sense of the New Testament. Baker Academic, c2004.
–The historical reliability of the Gospels. 2nd ed. Apollos, IVP Academic, c2007
–Jesus and the Gospels: an introduction and survey. Broadman & Holman, c1997.
Witherington, Ben. Jesus, Paul, and the end of the world: a comparative study in New Testament eschatology. InterVarsity Press, c1992.
–The many faces of the Christ: the Christologies of the New Testament and beyond. Crossroad Pub., c1998.
–The Jesus quest: the third search for the Jew of Nazareth. 2nd ed. InterVarsity Press, c1997.
N.T. Wright—He is so popular a scholar, theologian and bishop (Piskie variety) that a great many of his essays, sermons et al. are available at an unofficial website (http://www.ntwrightpage.com/)
While he has written a number of popular works, most of his stuff is written for scholars or, at least, people educated in theology and Christianity.
–The original Jesus: the life and vision of a revolutionary. Eerdmans,1996.
–The challenge of Jesus: rediscovering who Jesus was and is. InterVarsity Press, c1999.
–The contemporary quest for Jesus. Fortress Press, 2002.
Apostolic history and the Gospel: Biblical and historical essays presented to F. F. Bruce on his 60th birthday. Edited by W. Ward Gasque and Ralph P. Martin. Eerdmans c1970.
New Testament textual criticism: its significance for exegesis: essays in honour of Bruce M. Metzger edited by Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee. Oxford, Clarendon Press. New York, Oxford University Press, 1981.
If you admire intellectual honesty, then why don’t you strive for it yourself?
The same thought occurred to me.
The word does not mean “non-existent” which is the phrase that accurately describes the non-biblical sources for Jesus.
I’ve read Blomberg’s book on the historicity of John’s gospel and I was not particularly impressed. Like many apologetic books by theologians, he assumes his conclusion and sets out to prove it, ignoring or belittling any contradictory data. I’ll look at a couple of the other books that you recommend.
Maggie,
The exact word I used, talking about sources other than the New Testament was “paucity”.
Liar. You said at #382 that “You can fume as much as you like but I have the majority of historians on my side (about the historicity of the New Testament).” The only way to know that you have “the majority of historians on [your] side” is to have documentation from them. A lot of documentation. You can’t say something, then say the opposite, and then claim to know what you’re talking about.
If you know what an index is and have access to one
Holy fuck, your condescension emanates from you like a day-old skunk carcass on the side of the road. You might be surprised to find out, but there are other educated people here. ‘Tis Himself had you pegged – you’re a bit smarter than everyone else at your church, and probably loud-mouthed enough that you always popped up with the right answer first at school, so you think you’re superior to everyone else on the planet. You may have been a big fish in your little pond, but you’ve just jumped into the ocean of the internet.
I’m mildly impressed that you did provide a list; I’ll check out whether they’re any good later this evening after the rest of my activities for the day. In the meantime I hope others who already know them will weigh in.
Heavy duty scholarship takes place in peer-reviewed and excruciatingly dull journals
Is that your own opinion of journals, or what you assume my opinion is? Having published many times in such peer-reviewed journals, I find them to be not excruciatingly dull at all. I would much prefer references to peer-reviewed research than pop-culture books.
The Bible is not one book. It is a compilation of many documents written in many different places by different authors at different times.
And they contradict each other in dozens of places, or haven’t you noticed? Also, you are claiming veracity of each of them independently, in which case no you cannot use them to verify themselves.
Yawn, Maggie, why not 10 posts ago, like a real truther. Now we need to to check that the references don’t just come back to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Josephus. We would be very disappointed in you Maggie if that was the case. At that point we would consider you a liar and bullshitter for not checking your references properly, which brings you whole scholarship into question, including your testament for god existing. If only one citation is bad, all are bad until proven otherwise. Care to remove any citations under that criteria?
Nerd #516
Josephus isn’t a good source. The passage in Antiquities of the Jews that mentions Jesus was likely a forgery written by a Christian apologist to provide historical evidence of Jesus’ existence. Parallel sections of Josephus’ Jewish War do not mention Jesus. Christian writers as late as the Third Century, who quoted from Antiquities of the Jews, did not mention the passage.
Maggie wrote:
Pssst, Maggie – you forgot they’re also written different genres! That’s the real key to
picking and choosing the bits you like and getting to ignore the bits you don’t likereading it critically, remember?Gosh, I should open my own cafeteria.
I know ‘Tis, which is why I included him on the list. In other words, if all Maggies listed citations ultimately reference the same inaccurate sources, she is proven to be untruthful. Science is about making sure you don’t tell lies, so all references are followed back to the original source and verified. Maggie, again, care to remove any of your citations?
Maggie from the first post she made here showed a complete unwillingness to even try to understand where others are coming from. Just look at the way she dismissed arguments about the nature of God because of the old testament stories – no-one was saying they literally happened, yet she dismissed all arguments under that assumption. Then two posts later admits she believes in original sin that is born out of the old testament, claiming there is truth in all the stories. If she were intellectually honest, she would see that we were claiming the nature of God the same way she claims original sin. But no, she’s just another self-righteous twit who deals in insults then claims the moral (and intellectual)high ground.
Just another pathetic excuse for a human being…
Maggie still hasn’t addressed my questions of what the Christian God she believes in knew, and when he knew it; how much power God had/has over what he allegedly created and what we know about him and his existence; and who bears the ultimate responsibility of mankind’s not living up to God’s expectations.
Frankly, while I can’t say I have no interest at all in the question of whether Jesus actually existed, that won’t resolve the central issue of my intellectual problem with the Abrahamic religions, and that is the central claim that God is omniscient and omnipotent and benevolent.
I fail to see how God could be all three.
Based on the evidence, the Abrahamic God is either incompetent, not-all-that-bright, a sadistic, bullying, egotistical monster, or, perhaps, all of those.
What kind of all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God knowingly creates flawed humans, refuses to give humans anything more than cryptic and often-conflicting information about himself and what he expects from them, constantly tests the humans on their knowledge of him and his laws, then punishes them when they fail his tests–as he knows they will do–because of the flaws he knew about before he began to create?
So, whether or not Jesus actual lived is irrelevant to me. The issue for me is the whole Christian concept of God.
At #473, Maggie asked:
Do you suppose that anything will be said or proved after more than 3,500 years of failure to debunk the Hinduism?
I won’t bother to list more because the likelihood of any of you reading or even looking at any of these is non-existant.
Crikey but you’re an arrogant git.
Brown, Raymond. An introduction to the New Testament. New York, Doubleday, 1997.
I own it. An excellent reference.
Witherington, Ben
Should have known. He’s an apologist whose books are useless for serious study of the NT. His laughably bad defense of the traditional attributions of the gospels is what you consider serious scholarship? I think I see the disconnect now.
N.T. Wright
–The original Jesus: the life and vision of a revolutionary. Eerdmans,1996.
–The contemporary quest for Jesus. Fortress Press, 2002.
I’ve read both of these. Wright is somewhat superior to Witherington, but I found myself reading these and other similarly uncritical books “against themselves” and doing that you can clearly see where the anxieties are. He helped convince me further that the gospels are mythical, not historical, in inspiration, though, of course that’s the antithesis of his view.
For those who might be interested, here’s a far superior list, in terms of both insight and scholarly rigor:
John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus and The Birth of Christianity. These are long and difficult books, but they’re absolutely essential reading for serious study of the origins of Christianity with emphasis on historical and anthropological context. We ultimately come down on opposite sides of the historicity question, but these books are tours de force.
Burton Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament?, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, The Lost Gospel: The Book Q and Christian Origins, and The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy
If you’re arguing the gospels aren’t myth, and you haven’t read Mack, you’re not arguing honestly.
Randle McCraw Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels, and Gospel Fictions
That last is quite short, and dense with examples of how the NT was constructed out of OT passages interpreted as prophesy, not from history. Have a Bible handy.
John Shelby Spong, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes
Just an awesome thesis: that the synoptics were written for the Jewish liturgical year, to serve as a proto-Christian liturgy for communities that had split from diaspora synagogue communities. He makes a great case for it too.
Yawn.
Shorter Maggie: a couple of thousand years ago, religious nuts wrote stupidities and magic-man claims. Having been written long ago, these documents are historical, and the claims therein are factual.
Carlie:
Having published many times in such peer-reviewed journals, I find them to be not excruciatingly dull at all. I would much prefer references to peer-reviewed research than pop-culture books.
I am sure you would. However, you can log into Proquest, Ebscohost, Academic Search Premiere or any one of a dozen more and do the work yourself. It took me long enough to pull the books I own from my shelf and transcribe the necessary details. I’ve done my bit. The rest is up to you.
CJO— most of what you cite is too far out of the mainstream to be useful to someone needing an introduction to New Testament studies. Some of it is dishonest crap (everything produced by the “Jesus Seminar”). Crossan is a Jesus Seminar leftover who isn’t worth reading, except as an example of what passes for scholarship on the fringes of New Testament studies. Randle McCraw Helms is pretty good but, again, is of no use to someone who wants to know where scholarly consensus resides. Burton Mack is also not worth reading, if one wants an introduction to solid, broadly accepted scholarship. He is worth reading if one wants a highly imaginative, very interesting but completely unsupported (by actual evidence) thesis about Jesus and the scriptures.
There are a lot of different scholarly approaches to New Testament studies. There is also a distinct consensus position– or, perhaps I should say, cluster of positions. Your guys are not in the mainstream, although now that I know whom you read, I understand your opinions much better.
Spong is a heretic who needs to debunk Christianity, since he is an atheist who didn’t have the minimal integrity required to get out of the church and stop pontificating on its dime, once he decided it was all bunk.
Your dismissal of Wright alone, tells me plenty. You should have consulted the Arts & Humanities citation index first. Wright has been cited 140 times and not in English language journals alone. Funny thing that. He has an international reputation.
Your dismissal of Witherington is even worse. His work has been cited 141 times in the last 15 years and he is still a relatively young man. How often has yours been cited? Also has an international reputation.
Let’s see. Bruce has been cited 185 times since 1997. And much of his work is now 50+ years old!
I think I won’t bother to multiply examples.
Bastion Your questions, if honest, are excellent but cannot be answered on the fly (even if I weren’t exhausted, I doubt I would attempt to answer them). If you really want to know and are willing to follow up, I can point you to articles and books that I have found helpful.
Ah Maggie, still no evidence for your imaginary deity, without which the whole Jebus argument falls into a heap of failure. I must say, I am very disappointed in you response. This is Pharyngula, where atheism is the default, and theism and Jebus must be proven though hard evidence. No god shown, so everything beyond god, like the bible and jebus, are still false. No need to look at your alleged evidence. It is false until the deity is evidenced. We are waiting for your burning bush or equivalent.
It took me long enough to pull the books I own from my shelf and transcribe the necessary details. I’ve done my bit. The rest is up to you.
*plays tiny violin for all Maggie’s hard work of pulling things off of bookshelves and typing in the names*
I have. Do you honestly think that nobody ever bothers to research anything they talk about? When I was in the process of realizing Christianity was a pile of dust I did look long and hard in the primary literature for good evidence for the validity of the events found in the Bible, and found nothing that convinced me. You claim that you have such evidence, but you’re telling me I have to go find it myself. Okay, then. That stunning argument, however, has failed to convince me that I missed something and that I ought to take the time to go do it all again.
Maggie, still missing from your Jebus citations is the contemporary citation to Jebuses life. Something from 4 BC to say 30 AD. Recent citations don’t count. Welcome to science.
I shouldn’t even bother to respond to this but what the heck:
Kel, you are seriously lacking in reading skill and understanding. This is just preposterous:
Maggie from the first post she made here showed a complete unwillingness to even try to understand where others are coming from. Just look at the way she dismissed arguments about the nature of God because of the old testament stories – no-one was saying they literally happened, yet she dismissed all arguments under that assumption.
Oh, please. Come back to earth. The issue was the types of literature in the OT and the need to understand that it cannot be read cluelessly. Think here of the Skeptics Annotated Bible. That is clueless reading.
No particular arguments were made since the idiotic “genre defence” nonsense pushed things in a different direction.
Then two posts later admits she believes in original sin that is born out of the old testament, claiming there is truth in all the stories. If she were intellectually honest, she would see that we were claiming the nature of God the same way she claims original sin.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense. I stated plainly many messages ago, that the Old Testament is, first of all, the Jews national story. It reflects their understanding of themselves, their history and their understanding of God– all composed over approximately 800 years. Because we think that all scripture is inspired, we accept that it has lessons to teach us. Important ones. But we believe that because Jesus said so– and he is God. If there were no New Testament, there would be no reason for us to think that the Old Testament was divinely inspired. That is what I mean when I say that we read the OT in the light of Christ.
But no, she’s just another self-righteous twit who deals in insults then claims the moral (and intellectual)high ground.
This is, soberly speaking, hilarious. Take out a mirror and have a look. Then take a look at Nerd’s treatment of Invigilator, to name just one particularly nasty example. However, I do see that I hurt your feelings and for that I am sorry.
Maggie, you still haven’t aswered my questions. Why are you avoiding the proper answers?
Oh yeah, that was when you said the OT wasn’t to be taken literally, except for those parts that were.
I think I was wrong when I said you didn’t understand the “genre defense.” Now I believe you do understand it but don’t want to answer the questions it raises because you don’t actually have a good answer. So instead you pretend it’s idiotic.
Maggie, for some reason you think that we’re a bunch of stoopid, unedjumacted idjects. I can assure you, Madam, that this assessment is incorrect.
She put mack on her list to support her argument. She’s a tool, you all should stop. He doesn’t come close to supporting her case and in fact states the plenty to the opposite.
Then this:
Yeah, all those scholars are sitting around being dishonest. Not a one wants to know the truth. Don’t tell Robert Price. Your a tool.
NT Wright I like, his stuff is good although obviously I don’t think he gets everything correct(who does). There is no Erhman on the list and he is more accomplished a historian than NT.
BTW, having an international reputation is an argument from authority and frankly not worth much. It simply doesn’t matter in truth claims.
Witherington is to much apologist and not enough actual researcher. As a previous poster mentions it’s kind of hard to take seriously someone who presupposes his conclusion first. Except for tools that is.
OK, I am guess I am going to have to toss Nerd a bone, even though it pains me to have to shame him this way:
This is Pharyngula, where atheism is the default, and theism and Jebus must be proven though hard evidence. No god shown, so everything beyond god, like the bible and jebus, are still false. No need to look at your alleged evidence. It is false until the deity is evidenced. We are waiting for your burning bush or equivalent.
This is painfully ignorant. Really ignorant. What empirical evidence do you think there could be for God? The very demand is preposterous. Science is limited to explaining matters that are natural and repeatable. So your demand for empirical evidence or “scientific proof” is one that can never be met.
This does not demonstrate that there is no God. It demonstrates that science has a very limited domain. It is your a priori unbelief in the supernatural which lacks rational justification.
Science can’t demonstrate or even comment on whether or not there are things outside of the physical realm. These are metaphysical claims and science is limited to the physical. The belief that we should only believe things which can be proven scientifically is called scientism and it is really bad philosophy. It is also self-refuting, since it cannot be proven scientifically.
Frankly, belief in God, far from being irrational is actually very rational–more rational than naturalism, imho. Naturalism explains nothing but just assumes that everything is the way it is just because. Why? Just because. It would be nice to hear a convincing scientific argument that addresses why the universe behaves as if it were governed by laws, why we can apprehend those laws and express them in the language of mathematics and, even, why there is something rather than nothing.
There are some things that science can never know, even on an empirical level. Such limits are the basis of quantum theory and chaos theory, unless I am much mistaken. What happened during the Planck era of the Big Bang is a limit on empirical knowledge, since the known laws of physics break down at that moment at the beginning of the universe.
So, you cannot get very far with me claiming for science some exalted position in the scheme of things. It is just too limited and cannot explain the things that I most want to know.
Masochist Maggie wrote:
Ah, there’s the rub. How do you know he’s a god? Because he said so?
If, as you say, the validity of the NT depends on him being a god, you therefore need an objective means of showing that he is, in fact, a god. Note: the existence of a human Jesus that matches the bible’s fanciful narrative is not enough, even if you managed that surprisingly (for someone who did as much as he allegedly did) difficult task.
Gee, I bet all those adherent of Judaism are in for a rude shock! One of their holy books is only a collection of ludicrous fairy tales and baffling poorly-fact-checked history (amongst other things) unless Jesus was actually Yahweh Jr.
I’m guessing this means the cafeteria doesn’t have a kosher menu?
How can one “know” God if there is no interaction on the natural realm?
Nothing ignorant about it. You keep saying Jesus is God and God is worthy of being worshiped. Nerd in particular but others as well as saying (and here I show my age): “Where’s the beef?”
Let’s start with a basic premise. Atheists do not believe there is a god. Yes, I’m using the definition of atheism as my first point. I do this not because I think you don’t know what the word means, but because I’m fairly certain you’ve not yet realized the concept.
To put this in more universal terms, you’re attempting to sell a concept for which there is no proof other than the beliefs of people who have spread the word before it. Whether you like it or not; whether you accept it or not, the fact remains: You’re attempting to convince us that something we cannot see, feel, hear, or otherwise partake of any empirical evidence of its existence, exists. Regardless of how much you believe in the story and how much it has affected your life and the lives of those around you, we do not.
Next point to consider: Atheists do not need to believe in a god. We assert that the foundation for our actions and ideas lie in proven methods related to science and the establishment of undeniable fact. In this, we believe that we have everything we need to live a healthy, rewarding life.
It’s hard to convince a man with two working legs that he needs to buy a third, or worse, get rid of his and try the ones you have on. And when he looks for your version and cannot see, feel, touch or otherwise prove that they actually exist, he’s going to insist on really good evidence that what you’re trying to sell is worth considering.
Would it really make Christians happier if it turned out that a human cult leader named Jesus actually existed and got shredded going up against the Roman machine? No, I don’t think so. All the Christians who care about this issue want is a modicum of proof that their beliefs have some basis in reality so they can blow off some of the heavy doubt constantly wafting about outside their churches.
To their horror, Christians found they must go to extreme lengths to even extract a hint that a person named Jesus existed around the time the Bible espouses, and what’s worse is that doomsday preaching messianic Jews are plentiful in the same time period. Then there is the fact that, if it wasn’t clear enough to everybody else, the New Testament pieces specifically dealing with Jesus are fraught with historical quackery. The whole search for the historical Jesus turns out to be a Rorschach test in disguise.
So what do we get from this historical search for Jesus? We get Christians like maggie who climb the mountain of evidence built against the trueness of their religious texts and declare that the air may be thin at the top, but their point of view is quite unobstructed. In the end, it doesn’t matter at all if a cultish person named Jesus is shown with significant probability to have existed because Christians on the whole are blinkered.
You should have consulted the Arts & Humanities citation index first.
Riiight. Every time I even consider criticizing the claims made by a member of a club, I’ll be sure and check how many hearty backslaps he got from all the other members; too many, and I wouldn’t dare. He’s sure to be right.
(Did you check Mack and Crossan before you blithered this patent appeal to authority?)
I’m about done with this waste of glucose. It should be apparent to anyone who wants to read this thread that serious arguments are on the table about the historicity question and the mythical nature of Paul’s Jesus and the characterization of the synoptics as prophesy historicized. Maggie has responded to none of them with valid arguments of her own, content to feign lack of interest and lean on the very authorities the arguments are calling into question. If it’s “been dealt with,” then it should be as trivial as compiling a list of citations to also compile a list of these supposedly authoritative refutations.
Heh.
I’m reminded of various SF stories I’ve read, where the plot device is time travel back to Jesus’ time.
Here’s a particularly good one: Let’s go to Golgotha.
Maggie writes:
On this we are in total agreement, but, obviously, we continue to completely different conclusions based on this assessment.
For me, if something isn’t empirical, or accessible to our senses or technology or understanding, it is as good as nonexistent. Even if it did exist, I have no reliable, objective means to verify it, and neither does anyone else.
Your god fits in to this category by your own admission; it existed, you believe, in a time before time, in a place outside space. The very concept of existence breaks down given those conditions. How does anything happen without time? Where are you when there’s literally no place to be?
The most prudent and parsimonious tack to take, in my opinion, is to say that we don’t know what preceded Planck Time, and we may never know or fully understand. Positing an unknowable and immaterial god as some kind of explanation is nonsensical.
John Morales,
I read the description of Let’s go to Golgotha – that’s brilliant!
???? Where on earth did I put Mack on my list? Dear, foolish atheist, Mack is on CJO’s list.
Am I still a tool?
Carlie: You are tiresome. Extremely tiresome. I suggest you look at 397 and 409. Don’t bother to apologize. I don’t care enough about your opinion for it to matter.
Tis— I am going to explain this once more and that is it. If you can’t get it, you can’t get it.
“genre defence” was the ignorant name given here to what literate people call intelligent reading. That is, reading with regard to the type of literature one is dealing with. In other words, being literate enough to know that there are differences among types of literature and one needs to know what they are, even if only intuitively– historical accounts, poems, satires, legends, the New York Times editorial page, etc. If you read a NYT editorial as though it were fiction you … wait! Bad example. If you read a NYT editorial page as though it were a poem, you would not be reading very intelligently. If you tried to claim it was written in dactylic hexameter, you would risk some painful derision from those with better reading skills.
How does one read the New Testament intelligently? By understanding that the writers are making truth claims about events that took place at a specific time and in a specific place. In 4 cases in the form of a narrative; in the rest in the form of letters to congregations filled with real people. We will exclude Revelation because it is vision literature and even John says he doesn’t know if he was dreaming or whether it was real. He isn’t making truth claims about specific people at specific historical times in specific places.
Now, understand this. What Paul and the gospel writers tell us about Christ’s ministry, death, burial and resurrection are truth claims. That means that if they are not true they are false. No ifs, ands, or buts. If shown to be false they cannot be salvaged by claims that they are “metaphorical” or “allegorical” or “mythological”. They are not. Everything, absolutely everything stands or falls on the literal truth of what the writers claim. There is no other possibility and the notion that any reasonably sane person would try to evade that hard truth by recasting the NT as something that it clearly is not is remote.
Can I make my position any clearer than this?
And he didn’t even say so. Nowhere does Jesus claim to be God. He implies that he is “the Son of Man”; he speaks of God as “Father”, but nowhere does he insist that he and God are the exact same thing.
And the synoptic Gospels have some verses which imply homoiousia, and some that imply homoousia, and more than a few that downright proclaim heteroousia. And the matter was not settled until several hundred years years later and the conflicts between the various factions were ended by the faction that proclaimed homoousia achieved political and social victory — not by reason, and not by evidence, but simply by having their guy on the throne, who made laws that favored them and punished the others.
Riiight. I suppose Christians have no problems answering these, then: Why does God exist? Why is he good? Why did he create the physical universe?
Why does the term offend you so much? You’re practically frothing at the mouth.
It’s the simple combination of two terms to reflect an observation – your ‘defence’ of your selective interpretation of the old testament by claiming that the ‘genre’ the aspects of it you cast aside are written in allows you to do so.
That you dislike the fact that your so-called ‘intelligent reading’ can be summed up so succinctly (and far more accurately) doesn’t change that.
Is contradiction an acceptable way to tell if they are false? Such Jesus having been born both 4BCE and 6CE, for example?
Wow.
A cry for help, from the imprisoned person in Maggie’s persona?
If so, then to that true self I say: Cheer up, this is Pharyngula.
What I don’t seem to be able to get through to Maggie is that, until fairly recently (relatively speaking), this is how the vast majority of Christians felt* about the whole bible, and many other aspects of their religion – hence my satirical comments upthread about the Catholic hierarchy in 1517 and creationists in 1859 – to illustrate that things change.
For someone who seems to know so much about one aspect of the history of her religion she’s surprisingly ignorant of many of the other important factors – specifically, the social context.
*And how many, not insignificantly, still feel; the very existence of fundamentalists illustrates that Maggie’s opinions are not shared by all Christians – why is that?
You really are a condescending twit. You may feel superior to me but you haven’t shown any reason for me to accept your superiority. If you don’t want to answer questions or continue discussions, then don’t. But don’t be supercilious about it. I’ve been polite to you until now, but if you keep playing la grande dame then I’ll tell you what you can stick up your rosy red rectum.
I’m literate, I’ve got a graduate degree, and I’m reasonably well read, but I’ve never heard of the expression “intelligent reading.” So as far as I’m concerned, “intelligent reading” is just as ignorant as “genre defense.” Incidentally, in American English “defense” is spelled with an “s” and throughout the English speaking world the first letter of the first word in a sentence is capitalized. At least that’s how literate people do it.
Uh huh. <yawn>
I was discussing the Old Testament, not the New. If you can’t keep up, take notes. But okay, we’ve got four gospels, a bunch of epistles, and John’s acid trip. There’s also the Acts of the Apostles, but who cares about it? Paul was such a minor character in the early church.
That’s what literate people call a “dichotomy”.
I’ll teach you a word in Yiddish: Nu? It translates loosely as “so?” only with overtones of “okay, and now what?”
No, I’m sure you probably can’t. You’ve stretched your little brain just as far as it can go. However, you didn’t answer Wowbagger’s description of “genre defense” or my questions about the Old Testament. But you’ve done as well as we can expect, i.e., not particularly well.
At #525, Maggie wrote:
Of course my questions were honest! I’d be very interested in reading your answers–if you have any.
While I realize that I asked a lot of questions, and I’m sure answering them isn’t easy, it seems to me that the questions I asked are things that most introspective Christians would have already thought a lot about and at least have some basic answers for–especially for someone who is as learned in theology and Christian philosophy as you are.
I thought about these things when I was a Christian, and I still think about these things as an atheist. Never have found answers that satisfy me intellectually.
So sure, point me to articles and books, but spare me the ones that conclude: “It’s a paradox,” or “God and his ways are a mystery which we can’t understand.”
I need something that makes rational sense.
‘Tis Himself wrote:
I’m Australian. My term, my spelling :)
As long as we are talking about books I’d recommend “Who Wrote the Bible?”. It gives a nice account of the document hypothesis and how the Torah came to be formed. No surprise, it’s a hodgepodge of the fairy tales of goat herders, ancient regal propaganda, and was written mostly by priests looking out after their own self-interest. The apparent “mysterious” nature of God is really an artifact created by bad editing.
At #551, Wowbagger, OM wrote:
Tsk. If ‘Merican was good enough for Jesus (and the pre-Babel Jews!), it should be good enough for the Aussies too!
And not just their own self-interest, but seeking a complete monopoly on all religious services. It wasn’t just about getting rid of all other gods besides Yahweh, it was about getting rid of all other forms of worship — even worship of Yahweh — except at the temple in Jerusalem. And of course, making worship at the temple mandatory. Follow the money… and the (sacrificial) meat.
I have some more complex ideas about how religion and politics and psychology all interacted to go from Judaism to Christianity, but it’s rather speculative and involved.
Owlmirror wrote:
C’mon, spill. You know you want to.
Owlmirror, I’d be very interested in hearing more about this.
Come on now, do that thing you do, so well
Owlmirror,
Please don’t tease.
On this we agree. Now what is the historical evidence of Jesus’ resurrection? Never mind all the claims of things any other human could do — where is the independent verification of the claim that he was divine? The claim that you said was “proved”, in contradistinction to the claims of other religions?
Can we assume that Owlmirror’s lack of response indicates that he’s away working on his magnum opus?
It – the spawning of Christianity from Judaism – is a topic worth examining. I recall hearing that it might have had something to do with the ideas and concepts filtering in from the east, i.e Buddhism.
And, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a far more satisfying explanation for the change in direction (freeing the Israelites in a metaphorical sense, rather than through a violent uprising) than the appearance of a magic man-god with a penchant for lepers, prostitutes, poorly catered weddings and bad performance art is.
Jesus-as-God ‘introducing’ the concepts he did devalues the achievements of humanity. We earned the knowledge that we should be better to each other; we didn’t have it handed to us on a fucking platter.
Credit, as they say, where credit is due.
What empirical evidence do you think there could be for God? The very demand is preposterous.
Yeah, that’s what Jesus said. That’s why he didn’t turn water into wine for people, or heal a leper and tell him to go tell everybody about it, or heal a demon-possessed man and tell him to go tell everyone about it… oh, wait. Well, that’s why God didn’t give in to Moses’ demand for a physical sign for the Israelites, or to Joshua’s request for clarification, or.. oh, wait. Yeah, God thinks empirical evidence is preposterous and never does it.
Don’t bother to apologize.
Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it, especially since the two posts you cited there just contain you blathering, and none of those primary literature references you keep saying you have in your Hello Kitty diary but you won’t show anyone.
By understanding that the writers are making truth claims about events that took place at a specific time and in a specific place.
If they’re truth claims, and true, they should agree with each other, right? Then why are there so many contradictions among them on the details of what actually happened? That’s the kind of thing that’s more characteristic to, say, stories.
Easy, look at all supernatural events listed in the bible. If they really happened, and are not just drug induced hallucinogenic vision, there should be evidence available. Say an eternally burning bush (Moses).
Maggie, for an atheist, who only disbelieves in one more god than you do (I presume you disbelieve in the Greek/Roman/Norse/Indian pantheons), I require something other than testimonial statements of belief for god to exist. Until the evidence is demonstrated, god doesn’t exist. Same with Richard Dawkins.
You are using a form of a presupposition argument. You presume god exists, and we must demonstrate otherwise. But given the nebulous nature of god we can’t. YAWN. Guess how many times we have seen this inane and intellectually bankrupt argument.
I’m sure you will be back with more meandering intellectual vacuous discourse. You have nothing else to offer to the discussion.
I’ve got no problem with Brits, Canucks, Kiwis and suchlike riff-raff misspelling “defense.” But folks from Oz should know better.
If instead of wasting his political capital on WorkChoices, John Howard had implemented American spelling in Australia, an overjoyed electorate would have easily returned him to office (or at least his own seat) in 2007.
We apparently have the blood of christ, relics of the cross, Christ’s foreskin (all seven of them), among many other artefacts that could still carry the DNA of Jesus. If Jesus was as believers say, then we should be able to test the DNA and see it missing a male lineage. If we could examine the blood and show that Jesus was really the son of God as opposed to the son of man, then I’d believe. Though I’m guessing that even if a single artefact is a genuine relic of Jesus – any empirical testing would show Jesus is a man.
At #564, Kel wrote:
Even if the DNA of Jesus showed the existence of a father, I’d be surprised if that would settle the matter of Jesus’ divinity for most believers.
They’d simply create new beliefs as explanations. Examples:
– Since humans are made in God’s image, God the Father is literally “the father,” and that male DNA is his DNA; or
– God put male DNA into Jesus to test the faith of believers; or
– The devil put the male DNA into the sample that was tested to shake those of faith; or
– God can do anything. If he wanted to put male DNA into Jesus, he could. After all, he put DNA into Adam and Eve didn’t he?; or
– The story of the virgin birth is allegorical, a way for the writers of the NT to explain to unsophisticated people that Jesus was both man and God. But Jesus is still God; that part of the story is true.
Maggie
So let me get this clear, despite the lack of evidence, Jesus existed? Your desire does not make it so.
_____________<;,><_____________
While The Skeptics Annotated Bible is a light hearted and irreverent look at the bible, it does raise some interesting questions which certainly question the validity of the bible as an historical source. (Can you name all 13 of the 12 tribes of Israel for example). Clueless, or just inconvenient.
And let’s look at some of those inconvenient questions.
As mentioned above, when was Jesus born? Before 4 BCE (Matthew) or 6/7 AD (Luke). Or are they both later additions to a growing mythos?
Where exactly in the scriptures is the prophesy of the virgin birth?
When Jesus starts preaching, his mother thinks he is mad. Why, has she forgotten about the angels of the lord, the wise men bearing gifts, the murder of the innocents and the flight to Egypt?
When Jesus upset the money exchangers, why did they not do anything? What about the temple authorities. And the Romans were always on the alert during passover for trouble, yet they did nothing. The first thing they would have normally done is nailed the troublemaker to a cross for the insurrection. Perhaps they did, and the myths developed from then on to attempt to explain just exactly why the alleged messiah was crucified.
At the trial of Jesus, was it a jewish custom to let a prisoner go, or a roman one? Why is this custom not mentioned anywhere else? And do you know what the main problem with Pontius Pilate releasing a man condemned for crucifixion is?
Despite your assertions, we can only surmise that Jesus probably existed, he was a wisdom teacher from Galilee, and that he was crucified.
The bible tells us more about the early christian church than the life and teachings of Jesus, who remains shrouded in the mists of time.
Owlmirror
Ah, there’s the rub. How do you know he’s a god? Because he said so?
And he didn’t even say so. Nowhere does Jesus claim to be God He implies that he is “the Son of Man”; he speaks of God as “Father”, but nowhere does he insist that he and God are the exact same thing.
You are mistaken. Jesus did clearly state that he is God. His hearers certainly understood that; they even tried to stone him for blasphemy. John 10:29-31. (See also Mark 2:7 among others) He proved his claim by rising from the dead. So his followers say, and so we believe.
And the synoptic Gospels have some verses which imply homoiousia, and some that imply homoousia, and more than a few that downright proclaim heteroousia. And the matter was not settled until several hundred years years later and the conflicts between the various factions were ended by the faction that proclaimed homoousia achieved political and social victory — not by reason, and not by evidence, but simply by having their guy on the throne, who made laws that favored them and punished the others.
There is a strong whiff of Sherman and Peabody’s Improbably History in your retelling. Here is the accurate version– the church from its earliest days was clear on the nature of Christ. The controversy arose only in the Eastern church, Alexandria to be specific, in the 4th century, provoked by one rather colorful and interesting character by the name of Arius. He eventually brought the majority of bishops in the eastern churches to his side, although one, Athanasius, vigorously opposed him. The Emperor Constantine who didn’t care one way or the other but wanted peace restored, convened the Council of Nicea to deal with the matter. It was attended by 300 or slightly more bishops, all but 2 from the east. We know of only two western bishops and two Roman priests, who represented the pope, in attendance. The Council lasted approximately 2 months and when the vote was finally taken, the traditional view prevailed– only 2 bishops held out for Arianism.
I am not exactly certain why you brought this up. If you are trying to say that there was lots of controversy, as Christianity spread to different places and among people further and further removed in time and place from the original church, that is certainly true. Beyond that, I don’t know where you wanted to go with it.
Maggie is gonna to debate Owlmirror on the Bible?
***grabs popcorn***
This should be fun.
He proved his claim by rising from the dead.
Maggie, please detail exactly what happened after he rose from the dead. Given that it’s the most important, crucial piece of your entire religion, that’s the one “truth claim” that ought to be fairly accurate. Who did he appear to first? What did he say? How did they react? What happened next? That will give you something to do until Owlmirror gets back.
Can I have some of that popcorn?
Dear Maggie,
If Jesus was God, He couldn’t die, because God is, by definition, immortal. He couldn’t be both human and God, because one can’t be perfect and imperfect, all-powerful and limited, omniscient and ignorant at the same time.
The death and resurrection you promote as the foundation of your faith is contradictory, self-refuting, and impossible.
Thus, according to Paul, your religion is worthless.
You believe it because his followers say it? Mohammed’s followers say a winged horse flew him to heaven — do you believe them as well? Joseph Smith’s followers say that he translated golden plates — do you believe them as well? Theosophists believe that the lost continent of Lemuria was occupied by the “Third Root Race” of seven foot tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying, mentally undeveloped but spiritually pure reptiles — do you believe them as well?
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. The claim that a person rose from the dead is pretty extraordinary. If your “evidence” is merely a few accounts written decades later by people who weren’t even eyewitnesses, well, that hardly counts as “evidence”, much less “extraordinary evidence”.
Since I consider John Dominic Crossan one of the most scrupulous Christian scholars investigating the historical problems of earliest Christianity, both in terms of transparency of method and in his willingness to examine his own and others’ presuppositions, I cannot let stand maggie’s blithe ad hominem dismissal of his work as the product of a dishonest man:
I’ll let him defend himself. Ask yourself, maggie, if this sounds like a dishonest approach to scholarship:
And, going one better, I would submit that Witherington’s apologetic approach, for one, is summed up very precisely as “manufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one’s own story.”
And maggie, all your smoke-blowing about “scholarly consensus” in your uniformly ad hominem dismissals of the scholars I cite is just too rich not to linger on for a moment.
Here’s some “scholarly consensus” for you: The author of Luke-Acts was not –could not possibly have been– a companion of Paul. (In fact, none of the traditional attributions of the canonical gospels passes scholarly criticism, which puts Witherington much further out on “the fringe” of critical scholarship: you know, that’s about applying the very same methods to the NT texts that we would apply to any other anonymous ancient texts. Your sources don’t do that; mine do.)
CJO– your quote from Crossan makes my point. He may be a fine scholar but he is on the radical fringe and his emergence from the Jesus Seminar does him no favors.
Let me be very blunt so that you will quit (I hope) trotting out the crazies.
The Jesus Seminar was the dishonest, agenda-driven brain child of Robert Funk. His misson, as he publicly stated, was to undermine orthodox Christianity. Since you are in a quoting mood, let’s look at a small number of his choicer theses:
We should give Jesus a demotion. It is no longer credible to think of Jesus as divine. Jesus’ divinity goes together with the old theistic way of thinking about God.
The plot early Christians invented for a divine redeemer figure is as archaic as the mythology in which it is framed. A Jesus who drops down out of heaven, performs some magical act that frees human beings from the power of sin, rises from the dead, and returns to heaven is simply no longer credible. The notion that he will return at the end of time and sit in cosmic judgment is equally incredible. We must find a new plot for a more credible Jesus.
The resurrection of Jesus did not involve the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus did not rise from the dead, except perhaps in some metaphorical sense. The meaning of the resurrection is that a few of his followers—probably no more than two or three—finally came to understand what he was all about. When the significance of his words and deeds dawned on them, they knew of no other terms in which to express their amazement than to claim that they had seen him alive. (http://www.jesusseminar.org/Periodicals/4R_Articles/funk_theses.html)
Funk hand-picked the members of the Seminar in pursuit of his agenda. Frankly, it was an embarrasment for and to the academic community, which mostly distanced itself from the Seminar, from beginning to end. The media swallowed it uncritically, of course.
For those who don’t know how they set about “debunking Jesus”, they had an amazingly sophisticated and scholarly way of doing it. The members sat around, listened to a Gospel passage and then, with little or no discussion, secretly voted on whether or not Jesus had really said what was attributed to him by dropping colored beads into boxes. Red=Jesus absolutely said it; pink=probably said it; gray=maybe; black=nope. The beads were given numeric weights and the result was calculated according to some formula.
Normally, scholars state their opinions openly and submit them for criticism and discussion. Not the Seminar! If it weren’t so incredibly embarrassing, the idea of scholars voting in secret would be hilarious. Needless-to-say, this is not scholarship; this is partisanship.
Oh, yeah. How do I know all this? Why, they described it in the introduction to their “seminal” work, “The Five Gospels”. Anyone who wishes can read a lengthy excerpt from it at their website: (www.westarinstitute.org/Polebridge/Excerpts/voting5g.html)
Color me orange– not impressed.
Maggie, color us orange, not impressed by your analysis.
Of course, they don’t call it faith because it’s based on evidence – even though most people who claim on faith really believe based on the evidence of the bible… which really isn’t evidence for anything.
Deal with the arguments, not the people, maggie. I didn’t cite word one of the Seminar’s output. The only thing that Crossan quote puts him on the fringe of is the community of Christian apologists. It puts him firmly in the mainstream of broadly secular critical analysts of the NT texts. Your reaction to it shows clearly to which camp you belong. Have you read either of Crossan’s books I am citing, or are you content to take a fallacious guilt by association stance? I don’t play the “I don’t need to read that because I know it’s wrong” game. I have read Witherington and Wright, I have explained why I find their approach problematic, and I will deal with specific arguments if any should see the light of day. Since the bulk of your output seems to emanate from a region where the sun don’t shine, as it were, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Is it just me or does Maggie’s analysis of the Jesus Seminar pretty much describe, accurately, the entire history of the ID movement?
If religious belief really was a matter of faith, you wouldn’t see religious apologetics. And you certainly wouldn’t see the likes of Maggagie trying to argue tooth and nail of the accuracy of the new testament. Her version of truth? That the particular mythology of the culture she’s born into has an accurate account of their man-god while all other cultures and their respective myths do not.
Josh wrote:
Josh, you can’t say that – ID means a literal reading of the old testament. And that’s just not a sophisticated or a nuanced or an ‘intelligent reading’ of the text.
Maggie and her kind leave that to the dirty fundamentalists.
What I don’t understand about Maggie’s position is that, if such a view of Christianity is the correct and necessary one, how come it’s only a recent development? Surely the Church hierarchy, with their thousands of scholars should have cottoned onto it some time in the past 2,000 odd years and stopped attempting to teach OT literalism.
And why does this sudden urge to dismiss certain aspects seem to parallel discoveries in science and moral/ethical developments in Western society? Is that just a coincidence?
You have gotten to the crux of the matter, CJO.
The only thing that Crossan quote puts him on the fringe of is the community of Christian apologists. It puts him firmly in the mainstream of broadly secular critical analysts of the NT texts.
He represents a strand of scholarship that I reject and, frankly, have little respect for. He is not “firmly in the mainstream of broadly critical…) What a lot of adjectives and adverbs! He is a well-known representative of a particular approach to biblical scholarship that I and many others reject. However, that doesn’t mean that I reject every word he has written.
But in the end he and the strand he represents do not persuade me, or a large number of scholars and theologians who have worked and are working in this field.
I am afraid we have taken this as far as it can be taken. I now understand clearly where you are coming from and I have made it clear where I am coming from. What more is there to say? At a certain point, it is useless to trot out dueling scholars– you are not going to change my mind, any more than I am going to change yours.
Then prove it my not saying anything more.
Duh! That was clear from your first post here.
What a lot of adjectives and adverbs!
First time I’ve been criticized for using, you know, words to make an argument.
Maggie wrong! Christianity stupid!
That better?
I am so reminded of Emo Phillips’ story:
But Maggie, in a post upthread you wrote this:
How, if there’s ‘no real historian on the planet who would dismiss them as primary historical documents’ how can there be a group to be a ‘representative’ of?
Oh for fuck’s sake. Though it has been fairly clear for many posts now, how can you honestly say that what you’ve been doing on here is having a conversation if you reject the possibility of your mind being changed? This, right here, is what’s dangerous about belief.
Maybe that’s the next stage they’re working on as a followup to the genre defence – the ‘lexical category defence’. That way, anything that’s written with too many (or too) few verbs/nouns/adjectives/adverbs etc. can be dismissed as non-literal.
At #577, CJO wrote:
That’s strikes me as a very odd reaction.
Isn’t the usual reflexive response to this type of output exactly to the contrary–to hold one’s breath.
You do?
At #586, Wowbagger, OM wrote:
Do you think it’s because this group isn’t composed of “true” historians? Clearly, they’re just colored marble-voters.
You should consider only what true historians say.
[And this time, I’m going to try to be more careful to hit “preview”, not “post” than I did for #589. Not that that eliminates all my errors, but it does help.]
Wowie: I am beginning to fear that you are unteachable; you haven’t understood a word I have said. One of the things I have said is that “my view” is not a recent development. How many citations from ancient writers will convince you? Moreover, you don’t actually know what my position is, exactly. I have only bothered to discuss the necessity of understanding, language, metaphors, etc. Some of this is what Augustine (below) refers to as tropes. What is a trope? Wiki to the rescue! “A literary trope is a common pattern, theme, motif in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning.”
What I don’t understand about Maggie’s position is that, if such a view of Christianity is the correct and necessary one, how come it’s only a recent development? Surely the Church hierarchy, with their thousands of scholars should have cottoned onto it some time in the past 2,000 odd years and stopped attempting to teach OT literalism.
Church hierarchy? Catholic Church? Well, OK. let’s see what they have to say about the OT:
Para. 121-122
The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked.
Indeed, “the economy of the Old Testament was deliberately so oriented that it should prepare for and declare in prophecy the coming of Christ, redeemer of all men.” “Even though they contain matters imperfect and provisional, “the books of the Old Testament bear witness to the whole divine pedagogy of God’s saving love: these writings “are a storehouse of sublime teaching on God and of sound wisdom on human life, as well as a wonderful treasury of prayers; in them, too, the mystery of our salvation is present in a hidden way.”
(http://www.usccb.org/catechism/text/pt1sect1chpt2.shtml#120)
Let’s see, what did Augustine have to say about reading scripture intelligently?
But in addition to the foregoing rule, which guards us against taking a metaphorical form of speech as if it were literal, we must also pay heed to that which tells us not to take a literal form of speech as if it were figurative. In the first place, then, we must show the way to find out whether a phrase is literal or figurative. (which he goes on to do) …
The chief thing to be inquired into, therefore, in regard to any expression that we are trying to understand is, whether it is literal or figurative. …
Moreover, I would have learned men to know that the authors of our Scriptures use all those forms of expression which grammarians call by the Greek name tropes, and use them more freely and in greater variety than people who are unacquainted with the Scriptures, and have learnt these figures of speech from other writings, can imagine or believe. Nevertheless those who know these tropes recognize them in Scripture, and are very much assisted by their knowledge of them in understanding Scripture.
(From On Christian Doctrine http://www.catholictreasury.info/books/christian_doctrine/index.php)
Does this help?
Yes, that is indeed one of the verses implying homoousia; obviously, John was edited by the explicit homoousian faction or a member thereof. But I note that he backs off from there in verse 36; from being “one” with God, to being “just” the Son of God again.
John 10:34 is actually pretty amusing, given your grandiose claims of “intelligent reading” of the OT. Jesus cites from Psalm 82 (‘I said, you are gods’) as his defense. Is Psalm 82 literally claiming that humans are gods? Well… no. The very next verse in the psalm says “Nevertheless you will die like men / And fall like any one of the princes.” I don’t know about you, but my intelligent reading is that the psalm-writer; the human saying “you are gods”, was being deeply sarcastic about those he was speaking of (or to), in context.
Looks like Jesus didn’t know how to “intelligently” read the Old Testament! Heh.
Except that he is was only interpreted to have made the claim in the first place by the very late authors of John. The synoptics have no such claim; the “son” is not the “father” in them.
Yet the “rising from the dead” is itself an interpretation of a non-directly-witnessed event which has much more probable naturalistic explanations, such as being made up as a story, or as something non-supernatural that was misunderstood, such as awakening from a coma, or as outright fraud; a carefully-orchestrated sleight-of-hand.
The only basis that Christians had for believing it without evidence was to abandon reason. And you’re in the same boat.
—————-
Garbage. Utter nonsense. The church did not exist as anything even vaguely unified until all disagreeing factions were purged or assimilated They certainly were not clear on the nature of Christ; that was why they had all of those councils. And the reason they were unclear was because the various factions interpreted different parts of the bible in different ways, because the bible itself is hideously unclear.
Which contradicts your own thesis that there was “the” church, which demonstrates its unsustainability and inconsistency.
So they voted… kind of like tossing pretty coloured beads in a box!
Color me deeply unimpressed. Ha.
“Traditional view”, meaning “majority view which then became the tradition”. In other words, the dissenters were mostly assimilated, and the John-advocates won. Not by reason, and not by evidence, but by a popularity contest.
Of course. Because stories with no evidence to support them change in the transmission. God, for some strange reason, never offers direct clarification, probably because God isn’t real.
Dear Josh. Chill, dude.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Though it has been fairly clear for many posts now, how can you honestly say that what you’ve been doing on here is having a conversation if you reject the possibility of your mind being changed? This, right here, is what’s dangerous about belief.
A more careful reading of what I have said would, I believe, demonstrate that I am not convinced by the arguments made by the scholars CJO has named. If they can argue more persuasively or turn up good evidence to support their positions, of course I would change my mind.
Weighing evidence for positions I did not formerly hold is how I, at the age of 25, ended up converting from atheism to Christianity. Funny thing, that. Thinking often does take one to unexpected places.
Right Maggie, we feel the same way about your and your ignorance. God doesn’t exist, your bible and Jebus are myths. What part of the TRUTH are you having trouble with?
I, at the age of 25, ended up converting from atheism to Christianity.
Pray tell, what kind of atheism did you hold before? Was it a thoughtful, considered, researched atheism, or do you mean “My parents never took me to church”?
Mmm-hmmm. Very funny.
Yes, evidence. What do you have beyond your book of mythology, and why should your book of mythology be put on a greater standing than every other book of mythology throughout history?
Oh, bother, Owl. Is that what I was led to believe would be a serious contrary position?
There is only one church. It started, roughly, in 33 A.D. While the gentile converts certainly could be cantakerous, as Paul’s letters demonstrate, every letter and every sermon that exists from the 1st century demonstrates clearly that the first and 2nd generation of apostles and bishops were in agreement on doctrinal matters. That is simply an easily verifiable fact.
Clearly, as time went on and the Gospel was brought to groups with different cultural and religious backgrounds, there would necessarily be questions; some new and some old arising, which did lead to controversy. So what? That is the nature of human nature. If the Corinthian church, established by Paul himself had to be smacked upside the head over doctrinal matters, how likely is it that others would escape fads, controversies and even heresies?
By the way, it is childish to try and liken the Council’s voting on the Arian question after 2 months of vigorous debate to the Glasperlenspiel the Jesus Seminar wasn’t embarassed to engage in. In fact, it is a rather amusing species of conceptual Anschluss and fails badly.
why should your book of mythology be put on a greater standing than every other book of mythology throughout history?
Easy – she has proof that her book was actually written at some point in the past. QED.
Maggie wrote:
On the contrary, I know exactly what you’re saying; I just reject it because I see it for what it is: sophistry. Yes, I’ve been willfully obtuse, but I make no apologies for that – it’s what I do.
The reason I keep pointing out what I point out is that, despite the fact that you hold this position, it is not one shared by all Christians and, until fairly recently, it was only a position held by a minority of Christians.
Ussher’s calculation of the age of the earth from Scripture was in 1648 – meaning that literal creationism was part of Christianity less than 400 years ago, meaning that, at that time, Christians believed in a literal OT view of creation that, obviously, wasn’t countered by ‘ancient writings’.
Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ was published in 1859, to great uproar amongst the religious community. If the Christians of only 150 years ago were such nuanced and sophisticated readers of the Old Testament, why did this happen?
Slavery was endorsed by Christians (though not all) who using biblical passages as support for the practice. The civil war was less than 150 years ago, and the equal rights amendment only happened in the lifetimes of many people who are still with us today.
The USA is rife with efforts by those who – despite your desperate attempts to distance yourselves from them – are Christians and who are trying to get literal Old Testament Creationism taught as fact in schools.
Your attitude toward the OT is, in a way, commendable, because it is archaic nonsense by today’s standards. But that does not change the fact that you are omitting things which do not meet contemporary moral, ethical and scientific standards and have come up with concepts such as ‘intelligent reading’ to justify that.
If your view of Christianity was universal (historically and contemporaneously) then I would have, as they say, no leg to stand on. But it’s a demonstrable fact that Christianity has changed, and changed much. Why? Because you and other Christians are as (or almost as) liberal and scientifically literate as the society they belong to.
So, you abandon the parts that don’t fit the current incarnation. However, you still want to believe and turn to the bible for inspiration and justification – hence your position and argument.
Maggie, still nothing but bullshit for your position. YAWN. Boring godbot troll.
Maggie opined,
You’re probably not impressed because you’ve deliberately misrepresented and lied about how the Jesus Seminar worked.
Given that you’ve lied, why should we accept anything you’ve said?
Typical theist – using lies in place of actual arguments.
What makes you think I’m not aware of that? That was quite clear, thank you.
Good. That’s how discussions work. Given what I’ve read so far, I’m rather skeptical that you’re not completely entrenched in your position (because you believe it). But I’m glad to at least read the words.
Pray tell, what kind of atheism did you hold before? Was it a thoughtful, considered, researched atheism, or do you mean “My parents never took me to church”?
There is no such thing as “researched atheism”, unless you are using a very strange circumlocution for “did you read Nietsche, Camus, Sartre et al.?” (Yes, to those 3 and many others. The current popular lot, Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett are mental midgets in comparison.) In fact, I was a right proper little existentialist for awhile.
Of course, it is possible to look at the world thoughtfully, research religions, and find them wanting. But research atheism? Is there a text book on the subject? A bibliography of canonical sources I should have read before claiming that exalted name?
So, to answer the rest– my parents never took me to church. I assumed, on the basis of my limited understanding of science and my childish belief that there could be no such thing as a miracle that Christianity was all bunk. In other words, I held many of the same views I see expressed here.
Once again, Maggie lies.
False. Even the Catholic Church admits that it is made of multiple churches. There is no single church because there is no single standard for the interpretation and understanding of the scriptures and the extra-scriptural traditions that the Catholics, for example, value so highly.
Again, a lie. Paul’s version of the truth – considerably at odds with Jame’s more Jewish-focused cult – came considerably later than 33.
Again, a lie – one demonstrated by the very letters and sermons (and sorry, you lied about the sermons. Be ashamed); most of which were Paul’s attempts to correct what he saw as doctrinal errors on the part of the separate churches and bishops.
You will note that you just contradicted yourself there.
Loser.
You’ve been Godwined. Again, fail.
Maggie, I’ve no objection to your religious nonsense – I don’t expect to change the mind of someone who so clearly is unversed in the topics she’s discussing. What I do find contemptible is the lack of reasoning, the outright obfuscation, and the deliberate mendacity of someone claiming to be a Christian.
You make Christians look childish, unthinking, and uneducated.
There is no such thing as “researched atheism”,
I apologize for using terms you couldn’t understand. What I mean is that everyone starts off as an atheist – nobody believes in a god unless they’re carefully coached in which one to believe in. However, that’s a default position, and isn’t based on any information. What I refer to is the position of having researched religions in general and found them all to be obviously lacking in anything resembling truth. It is often called “reasoned atheism”, which is the term I probably should have used. People like you, who never went to church and never really thought about it, aren’t that kind of atheist, and it’s disingenuous for them to act as though they had strongly held beliefs against religion that were then changed when in reality they went from not thinking about it to agreeing with whatever religion suddenly gave them the warm fuzzies.
Maggie, you have committed the crimes against Pharyngula of lying, godbotting, and proselytizing. How do you plead? Maybe you should just go before you get banned for your bad behavior. Your choice cricket.
I don’t think Christianity is ‘all’ bunk – just the parts about there being a god, a single person meeting the description of Jesus doing and saying all the things atttributed to him and the descriptions of the supernatural events surrounding his conception, birth, death and supposed resurrection. Oh, and the miracles, of course – but you yourself admit they couldn’t have happened.
Most of the bigger ideas espoused by Christianity are great – why would I dismiss the achievements of humanity via social evolution simply because my ancestors were under the misapphrension that the only way they could have reached such a point was to have a man-god teach them to be good to each other?
That was a shameful performance, R’s granddaughter. Ignorance married to arrogance produces utter nonsense. I am going to deal with just two:
Church=body of believers in Jesus Christ. It does not mean “denominations”. Don’t build an “argument” or an ugly diatribe on quicksand.
An enormous wealth of early church writings are available online in English. Avail yourself of it before making stupid comments that demonstrate only that you don’t have the faintest idea what you are talking about.
One last piece of advice that you should take to heart immediately. Don’t be too quick to call anyone a liar or a loser, until you are sure you have stepped away from the mirror.
Maggie wayyy back at #208
It makes no sense in a Godless world to claim that anything is wrong or evil
Then you go on to say that you were an “atheist” till you were 25.
Does that mean for 25 years you were killing people indiscriminately??
Somebody call the cops!
Which would be fine – if they all believed the same thing. As it is, the beliefs of Christians are so wildly disparate that, when place on a spectrum, Christian beliefs can be shown to have less in common with those of other Christians than they do with those of members of other religions.
This lack of universality seriously undermines its claims of ‘truth’.
Nerd: You have committed the unpardonable sin of being a bore and a boor. There is no defense for that.
Great argument. The only problem is I don’t understand what you’re all talking about. Best shut up, and learn what I can then.
The only reason Nerd seems boring to you is that Nerd has to keep asking you the same question over and over because you keep refusing to answer it.
Wowie, stop it. Just stop it. You go from one clueless, preposterous statement to another. Christians do share the same core beliefs. Honestly, where do you get this stuff? The various denominations differ on incidentals; sometimes widely. Where fundamentals are concerned, they are in agreement. One is no longer a Christian once one rejects the Resurrection, Judgement, and all the other stuff you can find in the Apostles’ creed.
And don’t dare trot out that idiotic atheist mantra “No true Scotsman”. Words have meaning. When they become so elastic that they do not describe something accurately, they are useless. Christianity describes a set of beliefs that one must subscribe to, in order to use that label meaningfully. It makes just as much sense to talk of God-fearing atheists as it does to talk of Christians who reject the resurrection, or any other essential.
Oh? And what question has Nerd asked me that I have not answered?
Maggie, why don’t you try addressing the points I raised in post #601? Chew on that for a while before trying to invalidate the ‘No True Scotsman’ argument.
Maggie, you committed sins against Pharyngula by lying to us. If you weren’t discussing in earnest, and willing to acknowledge you could be wrong, that is lying. You kept avoiding hard questions which would undermine your position, again lying. You keep trying to present god and Jebus, which is proselytizing and godbotting. You see Maggie, the only way to get yourself out of crimes is simply to fade into the bandwidth, or actually acknowledge you could be wrong. I suggest fading into the bandwidth.
And the question you have not answered is the physical evidence for your imaginary god. Which we both know doesn’t exist. Again, another lie from Maggie.
It’s not atheists who refuse to identify common criteria for Christians, you dumbass! We’d love if the Christians agreed upon some, but instead “sophisticated believers” like Spong get trotted out as a response to criticism of particular Christian beliefs.
To be honest, if a holy book was not written in the past it means it had to come from the future – and I would be far more inclined to believe a book that breaks space-time than one that was written back at a time when earthquakes were caused by egyptians having gay sex…
What makes the bible special, seriously? Sam Harris makes the point that there’s nothing in the bible that couldn’t have been written by a 1st century author – yet the greatest advances of understanding the universe in the last 500 years including the insights of Newton, Darwin and Einstein all are attributed to the work of man.
everyone, we have reason to believe maggie has been committing major crimes till she was 25 (see post 611). Beware! If she loses belief in her almighty doG she will go on a rampage!! For the the children’s sake – pleeease don’t try and argue against her!!!
I’m locking my doors just in case!
Maggie said:
I’ve met more than a few liberal Christians who think that hell is just an invention. Leigh Williams also believes that. How does that jibe with the portion of the Creed that states Jesus descended into hell?
AnthonyK @ #614 wrote:
IIRC, I think that at some point, the discussion was WRT whether it was OK for God to kill humans.
But the current discussion involves Maggie’s claims that while the OT is merely allegorical, the NT is true, Jesus really existed, and there’s proof that Jesus was God.
Maggie also says that no “real historians” question that Jesus really existed, and that Jesus’ divinity has been recognized since his resurrection (and the resurrection is supported by proof).
Certain posters have taken Maggie to task for her position and claims. Maggie says these posters don’t know what they’re talking about.
At least that’s my understanding. I hope I haven’t misstated the discussion to date or anyone’s position.
I guess a lot of those early Christian sects really were heretics!
At #620, windy wrote:
Well, Maggie isn’t a Spong fan. See #525 in which she wrote:
Funny thing, that.
I find this amazing. Would magaggie believe someone who claims to have seen bigfoot? Would she be more likely to believe it if a few different people claimed to have all seen bigfoot? Advertising has caught onto the fact that humans feed off eyewitness testimony, but the great thing about critical thinking is the transcendence from that to believing on empirical evidence.
Will maggie care to explain why her particular mythology is true while every other religion, holy book, handed-down myth and legend is not? What makes Christianity unique?
Maggie wisely quipped:
which is fully consistent with her initial post here:
Well, the comments here (those I have read) are as dumb as always. Pteryxx, thinks for example, that claiming something makes it so.
Nice to see that you’ve stepped away from the mirror there maggie.
I’m still not clear on what “proof” there is of the resurrection. Without some kind of proof, why should we take that claim more seriously than the myths of Hinduism or the religion of the Mayas?
Again, just to be clear, Maggie has pretty much backed up to defending the mere existence of a Jewish preacher named Jesus. She’s offered nothing in support of his divinity except the claims that non-eyewitnesses have made at least decades after he died. Somehow we’re to take the consensus of the “Church” to be evidence, even though by that standard the 13th tribe of Israel came to America and Xenu trapped alien souls in volcanos.
I know, I wasn’t accusing Maggie of resorting to the Spong defense, but her claim that atheists deny that Christians tend to share certain core beliefs is completely bonkers.
Of course she would, Kel. Her parents never took her on weekly Bigfoot hunting excursions.
But I’m biased. I thought maggie was a smug, condescending asshole the moment of her arrival:
Apparently, that’s what being a True Christian is all about ;)
At #628, Kel wrote:
Maggie already answered this (I think) @ #365 where she wrote:
Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m convinced by that argument. Wonder why no one else has thought of it before.
Ah I see, it’s abstruse points of early church history, brougnt up to suggest that modern Christianity, of Maggie’s exact stripe, is what God really meant all along.
And people here question that?
Un-fucking-believable.
Still I shall certainly be using the “Spong Defence” from now on; whatever it is, it sounds cool. Who says early Xtian theology is a waste of time?
By that account aliens must have visited us given the number of “witnessed” events there have been in the last 100 years. Maybe Jesus didn’t resurrect, his body was abducted by aliens ;)
Ah, the Spong Defense.
Considering the rocky terrain, I think it appropriate.
Oh, don’t do that. She went absolutely off tap when I started mentioning ‘genre defence’; anything else along similar lines might just make her head explode.
Fuck off atheists, and leave my defence alone!
You can imagine the listeners thinking: “Oh, we are gods. We are gods. We are as gods!”
I’m trying to think of all the incredulous nonsense that has come up in the last 100 years as supported by eyewitness accounts:
And so on… each day we deal with claims of the extraordinary – and these perpetuate through anecdotal evidence. People pass on what they saw to others and very shortly it becomes a widely-accepted belief. The satanic cults molesting children in the 1980s should serve as a warning to the problems associated with anything to do with memory. Yet what makes Christianity’s reliance on the anecdotal any more solid that the many who can testify in this modern age to either witnessing a UFO or being personally abducted; especially when multiple accounts cooborate the same tale?
At #628, Kel wrote:
As anyone involved with legal matters will tell you, eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and the accuracy of the recall of events fades quickly with the passage of time.
It isn’t unheard of for eyewitness testimony which was documented almost immediately after an event to be contradicted by physical evidence such as DNA, photos, or video recordings.
What our mind tells us happened–especially when there’s a time gap between an event and when we recall that event–and what truly did happen, often aren’t in accord.
Have you ever had the experience of finding out, based on physical evidence, that an event you clearly and quite vividly remember, could not possibly have happened the way you remember it happening? I have, and it kinda shook me to realize that something that, for most of my life, I “knew” had happened, was merely something my brain had invented.
The ways out brains process, store, and recall memories are, IMO, fascinating. And frequently more than a bit buggy.
Can we still use the Chewbacca defense?
I have to admit that when I first heard the name ‘Spong’ I thought it was made up. Finding out it’s actually a real name was a bit of a shock. Then again, I have a stunningly boring surname (by English-speaking standards) so almost anything else seems interesting to me.
Maggie seems to be taking a long time to respond – perhaps she dashed off to the cafeteria.
Here’s an excellent article on how crappy “eyewitness memory” is.
Wowie– I am going to write as simply as I can, what I believe about the Old Testament. You boast of deliberate obtuseness, so you will understand why I say this is the last time I will answer any question from you.
1. The Old Testament is, first of all, the Jews national literature and reflects their understanding of their history, their understanding of God and God’s dealings with them.
2. The Old Testament is sacred, divinely inspired Scripture.
3. It contains stories and only a fool would read them literally. It contains laws. One would be a fool not to read them literally. It contains history. To be read literally. It contains poetry. Not to be read literally.
The quotes from St. Augustine would convince a normal human being that from early on, educated people realized that scripture is full of poetic figures (poetic devices). Augustine said that it is a mistake to take what is meant literally as metaphor. He also said that it is just as big a mistake to take what is meant figuratively as literal. He got it. This just doesn’t seem complicated to me.
The reason I keep pointing out what I point out is that, despite the fact that you hold this position, it is not one shared by all Christians and, until fairly recently, it was only a position held by a minority of Christians.
Where did I ever claim that all Christians shared this? I said quite clearly that reasonably well educated people hold the same positions. Just like St. Augustine said that educated people were better equipped to understand scripture than uneducated ones. Big duh!
Ussher’s calculation of the age of the earth from Scripture was in 1648 – meaning that literal creationism was part of Christianity less than 400 years ago, meaning that, at that time, Christians believed in a literal OT view of creation that, obviously, wasn’t countered by ‘ancient writings’.
No kidding? Virtually everyone believed in a literal OT view of creation then. Of course, most people were Christians, at least nominally. I also believe, literally, that God created the world. The issue is not that fact. The issue is our understanding of how. Science answers some of the how and when questions and has certainly dropped positions it once held (like an eternally existing universe) and adopted others. Is it your position that everything science has ever believed and dropped in the light of fuller, better information invalidates its current understanding?
Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ was published in 1859, to great uproar amongst the religious community. If the Christians of only 150 years ago were such nuanced and sophisticated readers of the Old Testament, why did this happen?
This is almost pure myth. Darwin’s work was a best seller (as all his works were) and he was lionized from the beginning. The religious moderates and liberals were as enthusiastic as the general public. So well regarded was he that he got a state funeral which was nearly unheard of at the time for commoners.
This is the summation of its description of the scientific theory of evolution in the Catholic Encyclopedia:
This is the gist of the theory of evolution as a scientific hypothesis. It is in perfect agreement with the Christian conception of the universe; for Scripture does not tell us in what form the present species of plants and of animals were originally created by God. As early as 1877 Knabenbauer stated “that there is no objection, so far as faith is concerned, to assuming the descent of all plant and animal species from a few types” (Stimmen aus Maria Laach, XIII, p. 72).
At the end of the article, the author states:
To what extent is the theory of evolution applicable to man? That God should have made use of natural, evolutionary, original causes in the production of man’s body, is per se not improbable, and was propounded by St. Augustine (see AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, SAINT, under V. Augustinism in History). The actual proofs of the descent of man’s body from animals is, however, inadequate, especially in respect to paleontology. And the human soul could not have been derived through natural evolution from that of the brute, since it is of a spiritual nature; for which reason we must refer its origin to a creative act on the part of God.
This, I should say, comes from the 1913 ed. of the Catholic Encyclopedia (www.newadvent.org/cathen/05654a.htm)
Slavery was endorsed by Christians (though not all) who using biblical passages as support for the practice. The civil war was less than 150 years ago, and the equal rights amendment only happened in the lifetimes of many people who are still with us today.
Yet again, this does not reflect an informed view of reality. Slavery was the norm in the ancient world and it is still the norm in many parts of the world. Start with the situation in Sudan (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6455365.stm) Just as always, it is Christians who are at the forefront of battling it. While it took far too long for the the entire church to do the job of abolishing it wherever it had the influence to do so, it is Christianity that provided the moral argument for abolishing it: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. (Gal. 3:28). The southern slave owners certainly understood the implications of this– that is why many refused to let their slaves become Christians or be instructed in Christianity and it is why the Baptists split into Southern and Northern Baptists. (they don’t call themselves “Northern Baptists” anymore.)
The USA is rife with efforts by those who – despite your desperate attempts to distance yourselves from them – are Christians and who are trying to get literal Old Testament Creationism taught as fact in schools.
When did I ever deny this? When? Who by the way, is responsible for defeating these efforts? Not atheists. There are too few of you to pull it off. Think of the most recent, famous case and take a look at who the main players were.
Your attitude toward the OT is, in a way, commendable, because it is archaic nonsense by today’s standards. But that does not change the fact that you are omitting things which do not meet contemporary moral, ethical and scientific standards and have come up with concepts such as ‘intelligent reading’ to justify that.
Intelligent reading is not a concept. It is an ordinary noun modified by an adjective. Other examples might be, oh, I don’t know… how about “red dress”, “bad movie,” “cold brussel sprouts” or “overgrown garden”? I mean, quite literally by “intelligent reading” reading with your brain turned on.
If your view of Christianity was universal (historically and contemporaneously) then I would have, as they say, no leg to stand on. But it’s a demonstrable fact that Christianity has changed, and changed much.
Do you think we read Homer the same way the Greeks did? Or the English Romantics? The texts don’t change but our understanding grows richer and fuller over time as the necessary outcome of engaging with them.
So, you abandon the parts that don’t fit the current incarnation.
This is meaningless. Incarnation means “In flesh” what does that mean here? You are throwing around big words you don’t understand just as you have tossed out assertions about matters that you understand very poorly.
I have abandoned no part of the Bible. Not one. You may continue to believe whatever you want.
Here is an excellent article on oral transmission of stories, events,etc.
http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_tradition_bailey.html
So when you came on here and we talked about the old testament in terms of God (not historical events) why did you dismiss us as taking it literally when we were doing the exact same thing as you say you are?:The Old Testament is sacred, divinely inspired Scripture.
How is that view any different from the ones who criticised the nature of God in the old testament?
So, Maggie, if Jesus was God, and God is, by definition, immortal, then how could he die?
Heh. I called your bluff.
maggie, meet Papias:
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.vii.ii.v.html
See? Papias, following Paul in 1 Corinthians, holds that the Son is subordinate to the Father, not identical.
Just as one example.
Of course. Because Christianity is the product of human nature, and nothing more.
Oooh, “Glasperlenspiel”; obscure German reference FTW.
But it is infantile to suggest that there is any difference between any two different attempts to vote on whether “revealed” truth is true. What did Nicaea debate about? Whether the proof texts of John beat the proof texts of the three synoptics? Bah. It is all vanity and chasing after the wind. God is imaginary.
Perhaps this:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tAeFipOVx4MC
maggie @#610:
You might easily be accused of lying, there…
There are fourteen different definitions of “Church” on dictionary.com; “all Christendom” is 3rd, and “denomination” is 4th. On m-w.com, it’s 3a and “denomination” is 3b. The OED has about twenty-six definitions, with 4a as “Church Universal, and 5a as “distinct branch”.
I could go on…
Did someone die and make you queen of the English language? Or are you just utterly incompetent at using it?
maggie @#616 (one of the numbers of the beast FTW!)
I note that the Apostle’s creed, being older than the 1st Council of Nicaea, does not include the unity of Jesus and God. Heh.
Indeed. Indeed.
So is the word “Church” useless, or not? Twenty-six definitions seems pretty elastic to me…
Oh, and speaking of “elastic definitions” and “useless”, could you, as queen of the English language, please define “God”? Thanks ever so much.
How about “death”? Could you define “death” for us, please?
Looks like someone died and made you Papessa as well.
I’ll get to the rest of your post later on, Maggie – I have to be away from the PC a while – but I’ll deal with this particularly ignorant (and yet somehow representative) commment before I depart:
A Google search for the definition of ‘incarnation’ as per this url:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+incarnation&meta=
Run it for yourselves. The first line of the page it generates:
embodiment: a new personification of a familiar idea; “the embodiment of hope”; “the incarnation of evil”; “the very avatar of cunning”
‘Big words I don’t understand’, huh?
Our understanding of Homer is richer and fuller than the ancient Greeks’? Eh…
Apologies, folks – this is going to be a long ‘un. I’ll break it up in to a few posts.
Part 1
Maggie,
How you keep mistaking rejection for misunderstanding I’ve got no idea, especially considering how often you keep touting your skills as a critical reader and interpreter of nuance. Let me spell it out for you: I know what you believe; I simply reject it as a valid answer to the questions put to you.
This is not a view shared by all Christians today, nor was it the case during the greater proportion of the history of Christianity. If the early church fathers felt this way, why were all Christians not made aware of it? Why did the majority of Christians remain uninformed of this for nearly 2,000 years?
Fundamentalist Christians reject your interpretation. Why, exactly, do you get to be right and they wrong? What evidence do you have to support your claims that they don’t?
Why would the ‘divine inspirer’ provide incorrect scientific information? Why would he give us the tools to understand the universe but which would show the bible to be so very wrong about so many things?
Why, exactly, does putting something in verse form render it invalid? Is there a law or rule of literature which confirms this?
Take The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde. Verse VI:
In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.
‘In Reading gaol by Reading town’ – we can interpret that to mean the Reading gaol is near Reading town – but that’s a literal fact, isn’t it? Reading gaol is near Reading town. Even though it’s in verse.
However, in the same verse, he also describes ‘a wretched man, eaten by teeth of flame’ – poetic device. Flames have not teeth; we can dismiss it.
Where are we now? We have fact and device in the same verse – whatever are we to do? We can’t deny that Reading gaol exists, nor can we argue that flames have literal teeth. Does that mean that some of the verse is fact and some of it is device? How on earth do we determine which to take seriously and which to enjoy?
We can answer this because 1897 isn’t so long ago, and Reading (and, presumably, its gaol) still exists. We know that ‘teeth of flame’ is a poetic device because it’s in English, the language we speak, and we are aware such devices are used by poets.
Someone who found only a scrap of paper with this verse on it and who doesn’t know English geography might assume Reading is made-up. They might assume that it is meant to be a fantastic description of some horrific, magical event where flames have developed teeth. It’s actually quite chilling if you read it in that context – and is the perfect illustration for how meaning is conveyed.
Your ‘interpretation’ of the bible is coloured by your preference for it not to have been considered fact, Maggie – because the culture and the society in which you live deem it unpalatable. Not because of any intrinsic value of the material itself. They wrote what they thought was real and what they thought was God – and they were wrong.
That was more than 2,000 years ago. What’s your excuse?
Part 2
On the growth of liberal Christian interpretation
You didn’t. But that all Christians don’t share it is important, because it means that reading the bible the way you believe in the bible isn’t a necessary condition of Christianity – it’s just your opinion.
And we’ve got no more reason to accept that it’s a more valid interpretation of Christianity than fundamentalism is, do we? You have to do a little bit more to convince us that you’re right and they’re wrong – and you’ve not done a very good job of convincing them, and they already believe in Jesus!
On Ussher’s dating the universe from Scripture and it being accepted as fact
We’re talking 1648CE – do the maths; I’m sure you’ll realise that there had been 1648 minus approximately 33 – that leaves 1615 – years of Christianity in which learned and scholarly Christians had access to the same scripture that you have today. If this ‘intelligent reading’ of yours was integral to Christianity from the start the Church should have had no problems with people pointing out the scientific inaccuracies of the OT.
But that wasn’t the case, was it? Just ask Galileo. Why was he treated the way he was? Surely the learned scholars of the day would have seen this as a perfect illustration of how the old testament was not meant to be taken literally. By your logic Galileo should have been hailed a hero, praised and feted for helping the church further their understanding of the universe and God’s plan.
But he wasn’t, was he? How long did it take for the Church to admit its mistake?
On the self-correcting nature of science
Obviously not. But scientists admit their mistakes and move on; they don’t concoct inane defences for it. I don’t recall anyone pointing out to Nobel laureate Barry Marshall that the medical community were justified in being wrong about gastric ulcers because all the research done on it in the past was written in verse form.
It contains laws. One would be a fool not to read them literally.
So rabbits, literally, chew cud.
And grasshoppers have four legs, literally. Got it.
Part 3
On slavery
Forgive my ignorance – how long had Christians had access to Galatians? Was it lost until recent times? Was that chapter only discovered and published in the mid-to-late 1800s? Were those dirty fundamentalists keeping it a secret from the educated sophisticates?
If not, and it had been part of the bible all along, why did it take Christians 1,800 years – including times during which they ruled most of the world – after they had known of Christ’s disciple’s supposedly specific and unequivocal opinion on the matter to actually do something about it?
Three words, Maggie: Prevailing. Moral. Zeitgeist.
On Charles Darwin and the rise of evolutionary science
Again I refer you to the age of your religion – over 2,000 years – and again I ask you why did it take so long? Surely if Christian scientists had not had entrenched beliefs in literal creationism they’d have worked it out a little sooner than they did – it’s very hard to find something because think you’ve already got the untrumpable answer (Goddidit, as we like to say).
And why did Darwin, a Christian (at least at the beginning), wrestle with his conscience over what he had found? Why did he not trumpet his findings as a way to celebrate the ‘intelligent reading’ of the bible? Could it be that such a thing didn’t exist in his time – despite the fact you claim it’s inherent in the scripture?
Reality trumps opinion – again.
Great Wowbagger, elegant and interesting!
Re: grasshoppers/insects with four legs in the OT. Here’s a hilarious explantion from AiG:
So now you know. The bible is indeed inerrant, entomologically speaking.
Part 4 (this is it, I swear)
Newsflash, Maggie – if it didn’t exist before, you made it a concept when you applied it to a situation. How do you think expressions enter the lexicon? I’m rather to keen to have people pick up and use ‘genre defence’ – it’s certainly appropriate and, judging by your loathing of it, extremely effective at hitting the mark.
This is the part that puzzles me the most about this bastardization of Christianity.
Literacy has only been a given in the recent past. The printing press, too. The bible, for many years, wasn’t translated into local languages. So, for the greatest proportion of Christianity’s existence, its proponents have been unable to experience this ‘richer and fuller understanding’ that those contemporary Christians (who choose it – remember, it’s not a condition of Christianity to believe this) experience as the ‘necessary outcome of engaging with them’.
They didn’t have it, couldn’t get it and – even if they did – they couldn’t fucking read it. They had to have it read to them by a priest who chose what they did and didn’t hear – not exactly the best situation for allowing thorough analysis.
Why did Jesus let that happen? Why would the church, his legacy, condemn so many millions (if not billions) of his faithful flock in complete ignorance of the ‘true beauty’ of their saviour’s words, thoughts and deeds? Why were they not given the gift that you have – and which you, evidently, take for granted?
and
Only educated people can truly understand what it is to be a Christian? Is that what you’re saying? You pompous, ignorant, arrogant swine. Do you know so little of history outside the tiny, sheltered box of your theology classes? Think about what you’re saying – that the greater proportion of all the Christians since the religion began have experienced nothing compared to what you, Maggie, take for granted as the ‘only way’ to be a ‘real’ Christian.
Sickening.
You have abandoned a lot more than the bible. You’ve abandoned everything that is actually good and worthwhile about Christianity in the quest for self-righteous, self-indulgent rationalisation – and your naked contempt for all your ‘uneducated’ co-religionists (past and present) dwarfs that of any atheist I’ve ever met.
I’d take a fundamentalist over your type of Christian any day. They’re far more honest.
I see Maggie was back with one of her self-serving bits of screed that said nothing intelligent, in spite of her frequent use of the word. Clue for Maggie: your bible is a work of fiction. If you dealt with it from that angle, you could actually mount an intelligent analysis.
What I do is point out the consequences of your preferred policies (women die) and the fact that you are content with these consequences (so you are a misogynist). You regard this as fundamentally unfair. I regard taking you at face value, without considering the consequences, as fundamentally dishonest.
As I’m certain we all made clear, we’re talking about late term abortions here. Your support for one does not mitigate the damage of your opposition to the other.
Please tell me exactly what I said to give you the impression I’m functionally illiterate. My arguments are for the proposition that abortion, at any stage of the pregnancy, is an absolute and unqualified right.
So you know that the 8.5 month abortion for fun is an anti-choice talking point, and you use it anyway. That’s a funny way of being pro-choice.
I know you’re not calling for additional legislation. As a libertarian, you should have an allergic reaction to unnecessary laws remaining on the books. Your support for the current law shows your presumption of its necessity; in your mind there must be slutty sluts aborting viable fetuses for fun (a misogynistic premise). Otherwise you’d support repealing the restrictions.
Point of order: as the million year old links show, while you have gone from identifying as pro-life to calling yourself pro-choice, the substance of your views has not changed since June at the latest. I would love it if you’d actually change your mind.
Apologies, PZ – I guess I’m feeding the troll, but I had to get that out of me.
Wowbagger, that was incredible. It will be totally lost on Maggie, of course, but the rest of us find that to be fabulous.
What I find abhorred about Maggie is that she was so quite to condemn anyone who didn’t take the bible the way she did, even when we were doing the exact same thing as her. Did she apologise for her oversight? No. She just kept on insulting people here.
What you wrote reminds me of a sermon I once heard. The pastor was talking about salvation, and specifically said that it was “easy to misinterpret the scriptures” with regard to how to be saved. Wait, WHAT??? The most important thing of all life, the very reason the son of God came down to earth and suffered agony and died, and it’s EASY TO MISINTERPRET based on the scriptures that GOD HIMSELF GAVE US??? Way to screw that one up, God. You might think he would make that part kind of easy to understand without an advanced degree, wouldn’t you? Unless God is an elitist or something. Or just a bastard.
Wowbagger, you shouldn’t apologize for that series of comments. It was a terrific read. And I think valuable.
Wowbagger, your series was no longer than one of Owlmirror’s or David Marjanović’s well reasoned rebuttals covering many points.
Thanks all. Maggie’s attitude bugged me – as you can probably tell.
I think that’s a contributing factor to my awkwardness about it. Those are some huge shoes to try and fill, and it’s not as if I’ve got any esoteric knowledge of the bible to draw on and use.
You know she’s just not going to listen to you anyway, but good post there Wowbagger. It was a good takedown of one of the most arrogant people to have come on here – which would be okay if she was willing to learn. But no, even when she’s caught out she won’t admit error.
Re: Oscar Wilde.
One of the quotes attributed to him, so possibly untrue, is that when he was on the platform of Reading Station, in the rain, and shackled, he is said to have remarked:
“If this is how Queen Victoria treats her convicts, she doesn’t deserve to have any.”
strange gods before me @#660:
I do not follow your argument. You seem to be asserting that:
(1) There are very few late term abortions, and most of those which do take place are necessary to save the woman’s life.
(2) Accordingly, restrictions on late term abortions are unnecessary.
(3) Restrictions on late term abortions kill a lot of women.
(4) Accordingly, restrictions on late term abortions are a way of causing unnecessary deaths of women.
But don’t (1) and (3) contradict one another? If late term abortions, for reasons other than saving the woman’s life, are extremely rare, then the number of women potentially affected by restrictions on such abortions must surely be small? You can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim that late term abortions almost never happen, and at the same time claim that restrictions on such abortions kill lots of women. If – as you assert – no woman would want to have a late-term abortion for a capricious reason, then a law preventing her from doing so will not harm anyone.
Premise (1) is clearly true; late term abortions are very rare, and almost all of those which do occur are necessary to save the woman’s life or health, as I have acknowledged in virtually every single post on this thread. I am not using it as a “talking point”. I am not claiming that there is an epidemic of these abortions. It is you who is claiming that these restrictions on late-term abortions cause large numbers of women to die; I don’t see how you can support this conclusion while simultaneously arguing that very few such abortions ever occur.
That is more applicable to modern day christians of the Pauline faith.
Again, this is more applicable to modern christianity. But in the centuries after the death of Jesus, there were many different thoughts on Jesus, such as his divinity, or whether he was the messiah, how to worship, etcetera.
The Pauline letters are an example of this, differing from the jewish practices of the both the brother of Jesus, and the disciples of Jesus on things such as cleanliness, diet and circumcision.
The main early jewish christian faith was destroyed in the sack of Jerusalem, leaving the Pauline doctrine as the winner of this war of conversion by default. What you have is the testimony of the winning side in the fight for converts to early christianity. Any other heretical (non-Pauline) writings were destroyed in the ensuing centuries.
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You mean like Daniel?
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It is not an atheist mantra, it is a logical fallacy that is applicable to non-religious themes too. Why do you not want us to trot it out, because you know you are guilty of it?
Wowbagger
Owlmirror and David Marjanović do indeed have a large amount of knowledge, but it is your persistent and clear arguments which earned you your Molly.
I too enjoyed your read.
Wowie—you shouldn’t have bothered. That was the dumbest dissertation yet. All the applause of the denizens here cannot make it smart. It is also evil. It is full of outright lies and deliberate twisting of what I have said, so that you can score points. It has nothing to do with honest discussion. If you actually believe this stuff then you are beyond reach of anything but supernatural help. I feel like I need another shower after having read this crap.
Re the Old Testament. My “interpretation” (Your word and it is an incorrect usage of it) is the consistent “interpretation” of the entire Christian community from AD 33 on. It is simply ignorant to claim otherwise. You cannot find any Christian body anywhere that has ever rejected the Old Testament as sacred scripture. Don’t bother to trot out small sects or heretics, even if you can find them.
Why would the ‘divine inspirer’ provide incorrect scientific information? Why would he give us the tools to understand the universe but which would show the bible to be so very wrong about so many things? Another really stupid question. The Bible wasn’t dictated by God. It was written by men with the knowledge available to them at the time.
I really had to state this?
Your Reading gaol interpretation misses the point entirely.
But that all Christians don’t share it is important, because it means that reading the bible the way you believe in the bible isn’t a necessary condition of Christianity – it’s just your opinion.
Who the hell said it was a necessary condition of Christianity to read the Bible the way I do?
But that wasn’t the case, was it? Just ask Galileo. Why was he treated the way he was?
More asinine fatuity. Galileo wasn’t condemned for his scientific work but for drawing theological conclusions from it and pontificating on them.
Then there is this nonsense:
Carlie
It contains laws. One would be a fool not to read them literally.
So rabbits, literally, chew cud.
And grasshoppers have four legs, literally. Got it.
You got nothing, as usual. This is a cultic taxonomy and classifies animals for the purposes of identifying them as ritually clean or not.
It also misses the point that this is a statement of fact to be read literally. Whether it is wrong or not is a completely different question. This is a revelation to you?
More nonsense from Wowie:
If not, and it had been part of the bible all along, why did it take Christians 1,800 years – including times during which they ruled most of the world – after they had known of Christ’s disciple’s supposedly specific and unequivocal opinion on the matter to actually do something about it?
Three words, Maggie: Prevailing. Moral. Zeitgeist.
One word, Wowie. Sin
Again I refer you to the age of your religion – over 2,000 years – and again I ask you why did it take so long? Surely if Christian scientists had not had entrenched beliefs in literal creationism they’d have worked it out a little sooner than they did – it’s very hard to find something because think you’ve already got the untrumpable answer (Goddidit, as we like to say).
God did do it. What a silly thing to say. Your thinking is so muddled here that I can’t untangle it. This just isn’t that hard. It took as long as it did because it took as long as it did. Good grief. You needed it explained to you?
Darwin struggeled because he was going against much of the scholarly and religious consensus of his time which he was part of. You are mixing so many apples, oranges, kiwis and bananas that you’ve got a mess on your hands, not a salad.
Who has denied that the Bible was taken as a reliable account of the world for centuries? No one who has actually read what has been written about it from the 1st century down until today would agree that it was read as though every word were literally true. I have already demonstrated that and you simply gloss over it. This is typical atheist intellectual honesty. It stinks.
Newsflash, Maggie – if it didn’t exist before, you made it a concept when you applied it to a situation. How do you think expressions enter the lexicon? I’m rather to keen to have people pick up and use ‘genre defence’ – it’s certainly appropriate and, judging by your loathing of it, extremely effective at hitting the mark. NEWSFLASH—
This is, without exception, the dumbest thing I have read here and that is saying something. I do not loathe your idiotic “genre defence” I hold it in contempt. It is so easily dismissed that I can hardly believe that you take it seriously. Try using it in an ordinary college level literature course. (I’d pay money to see that.)
Only educated people can truly understand what it is to be a Christian? Is that what you’re saying?
I won’t call you a pompous, ignorant, arrogant swine because I no longer think you are mentally competent. If this is deliberate– if you have lied, cast aspersions, jumped to completely unwarranted conclusions deliberately, then you have your reward– the applause of an ignorant, unpleasant mob. Congratulations.
I’d take a fundamentalist over your type of Christian any day. They’re far more honest.
They won’t have you. They prefer to deal with the sane, as do I.
Maggie argued:
“And please don’t trot out the Old Testament. I have no patience with fundamentalists.”
“I have abandoned no part of the Bible. Not one.”
“Of course, I believe in original sin. That is the point of the story of Adam and Eve. Stories have always conveyed truth”
“The Old Testament is sacred, divinely inspired Scripture”
Are you going to admit you were wrong to jump on people for something they didn’t do Maggie? Or is intellectual honesty only expected of those who won’t have their sin redeemed?
Close, Walton.
(1) There are very few late term abortions, and most of those which do take place are necessary or reasonably likely to be necessary — remember, it’s the doctor’s best guess beforehand which matters — to save the woman’s life or health.
(2) Accordingly, restrictions on late term abortions are unnecessary.
(3) Restrictions on late term abortions kill
a lota nonzero number of women.(4) Accordingly, restrictions on late term abortions are a way of causing unnecessary deaths of women.
Take note. The left-winger tries to account for the interests of every individual. The right-winger believes that some individuals are expendable.
I asked you to point out what exactly made you think I’m functionally illiterate. Here’s what makes me think that of you:
I keep repeating this because you’ve never addressed it:
I keep repeating it because every individual matters. Even one person killed or maimed is too many.
Yes Maggie, you are describing your posts ignoring your being caught out in lies. We are very honest people, unlike you, and we don’t like people who say they didn’t say something when we can quote them from their posts showing otherwise. Your veracity is now in the dumpster, so you need to do something about that. Either apologize or go away.
Agreed.
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But your interpretation is that the story in Genesis is an allegory whereas the early christian church thought of it as fact. Many still do.
And your take on the flood as a memory of a non global flood and not as fact. Matthew 24:37 disagrees.
Better start to get with the christian program.
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Fixed it for you.
Ooooooh, careful, now she’s really mad!
So your elegant takedown was evil – or should that be Evil? How dare you suggest stoning to death for adulterers, disrespectful children, or those who fail to keep the Sabbath holy…oh, no, that was the Bible; you merely suggested that her interpretation of Christianity was a-historical, biased (to say the least) and just flat out wrong.
Isn’t it strange that however people interpret religion, the correct reading is the one that justifies their views completely, and inerrantly?
So now she’s cross! What’s she gonna do, call Jesus back as a witness – and tell me, Maggie will know this, is he actually dead or not? I’m confused – and if he came to save us from sin – why is there still sin?
I guess I’ll never understand what it is to be a Christian the way Maggie is…
Not anymore! That clears everything right up; thanks.
Pure speculation here, but do we reckon Maggie’s been taking “advanced” courses in Christian History (her sect branch), presuppositional apologetics, and general theology?
She’s certainly parroting this shit as if it’s somehow fresh in her mind, and without a thought that there are valid objections to it – not least historical, factual ones.
Heh. I’m glad she’s angry though.
Welcome to our world, Mags babe, we too are angry; angry at the pathetic level of theological argument – mind you, we’re lucky here, because we have science to compare it with – and angry at the way Christ’s message, such as it is, has been consistently distorted by Christians to support their petty, amoral, judgemental worldview.
Maggie, however many big words you use, you are still no better than the average creationist or apologist fuckwit who posts here. In fact you’re much worse – God gave you an education, and you use it to spread lies, and make Christianity a laughing stock.
The actions of Christians are the greatest weapon that we atheists have – well that and being right.
Thanks Mags – we win again.
I agree that every individual matters. But as far as I’m concerned, an 8.5-month foetus is a human being, and therefore is an individual who matters. At that stage, the foetus is viable and can survive outside the womb; it has a brain stem; it has most of the physiological components of a newborn baby. If the 8.5-month foetus is not a human being, then a newborn baby is not human. I simply can’t see any ethically significant point of distinction between the two.
I can appreciate the validity of the argument that the woman has a right to bodily integrity, – which is, in a biological sense, absolutely true – and that, just as we do not force people to donate organs even where it would save lives to do so, so too we must not force a woman to support a foetus. And this is why I am fully in support of abortion up until the point of viability. (Which means that, in virtually every country, including my own, I would be considered a pro-choicer.) But after this point in the pregnancy, I would say that the question is more complex.
Let’s imagine that X, a woman, is carrying foetus Y. She is eight and a half months into the pregnancy. Foetus Y is normal and healthy. But there are sudden complications, and the doctors tell X that there is roughly a fifty-fifty chance that she will die in childbirth. She demands an abortion. Of course, if the abortion is successful, Y will certainly die – whereas if X carries Y to term, then there is a fifty percent chance that both X and Y will survive. What, in your opinion, should happen in those circumstances? Is it better to take the risk and try to save both lives, or to perform the abortion and save X’s life at the expense of Y’s?
Apologies for the error: ” – which is, in a biological sense, absolutely true – ” belongs in a different sentence, not in this one, as you can see from the errors in punctuation. Just a copy-paste mistake.
Well, the stalls get mucked out one more time and then that is the end of it.
Cosmic Teapot, you are off-topic. The subject of the message you are quoting was the place of the Old Testament in Christianity. I will repeat: The Old Testament has been considered inspired scripture and a part of Christianity since AD 33.
Sven: He got the answer his question deserved. In a sea of fatuity, it stood out as an example in a class of its own. Riddle me this: If the Old Testament’s creation story impeded science, what retarded science in the non-Christian world?
Anthony– what a seriously muddled bunch of crap. The teachings of my sect, aka Roman Catholicism, are widely available. Your ignorance can be enlightened quite easily.
What a cesspool of ignorance and arrogance this place is.
Projecting your attitudes again Maggie? Begone foul odor.
Cosmic Teapot, you are off-topic. The subject of the message you are quoting was the place of the Old Testament in Christianity. I will repeat: The Old Testament has been considered inspired scripture and a part of Christianity since AD 33.
then why did the Pope just have a gigantic meet and greet to discuss “evolution” and how the church views it, if all of this stuff has been “resolved” since AD 33?
funny, but I also think there were some issues of geocentrism that hadn’t been resolved at AD 33 either.
In fact, your church harassed and burned people over the issue well into the 1600’s.
The teachings of my sect, aka Roman Catholicism, are widely available.
then odd you would assume none of us have read them.
What, in your opinion, should happen in those circumstances?
The best possible outcome that the woman and her doctor can accomplish. Whatever that outcome happens to be is nobody else’s business but theirs. Butt out, Walton.
….says the newly-flushed turd.
Why thank you, Mags, we aim to please!
Yes, the teachings of your sect are indeed widely available – and a 72-year-old ex-Nazi virgin is currently their leading proponent.
You constantly talk as though our problem is that we are ignorant of doctrine. Not so, many here know more the church and its history than you do – see above – but the actual problem is that we reject it totally – its premises, its interpretation of (no)God’s word, and above all its practices.
It was evil for the church to promote, hide, and deny child abuse. It was evil for the church to consider the “rights” of foetuses over their living relatives (excommunicating the doctors and parents of the nine-year-old raped by her stepfather, where the child might have died if she had given birth and it is evil to teach that normal human sexuality is sinful, whereas letting people die from AIDS because contraception is “wrong” is just fine.
You are an apologist for all this evil, and more.
And, once again, you make a mockery of Christ’s message to humanity.
On your knees and pray, woman! You have a great deal to pray for. What a shame that it will no good, or save one life, or make any difference to the church-sponsored misery that is so many people’s experience of life.
I will repeat, maggie has no idea how works are verified in the field of history.
Maggie, you are not that smart. Also, you are the foul smell in the stalls. You are as inane as any literal fundie troll that has left droppings here.
Cosmic TeapotIchthyic, you are off-topic. The subject of the message you are quoting was the place of the Old Testament in Christianity. I will repeat: The Old Testament has been considered inspired scripture and part of the Christian scriptures since AD 33.then why did the Pope just have a gigantic meet and greet to discuss “evolution” and how the church views it, if all of this stuff has been “resolved” since AD 33?
Also off-topic. The Pope did not just have a gigantic meet and greet to determine whether the Old Testament is part of sacred scripture. That is the topic here.
funny, but I also think there were some issues of geocentrism that hadn’t been resolved at AD 33 either.
Also off topic.
In fact, your church harassed and burned people over the issue well into the 1600’s.
Oh? When, where, who, why? But also off-topic, though potentially interesting.
then odd you would assume none of us have read [the teachings of the Catholic Church].
You all claim to have read my messages. But you haven’t understood them and they were dumbed down for you. Why would I suppose that you understand scholarly writing any better?
Well, that was easy. Next!
I knew it! You believe in Hell and that is where you are going for your lies–for your sins, maggie. By the way, we love bacon here so calling us swine is a compliment. And I applaud Wowbagger for the courage to give you, insufferable maggie, the benefit of the doubt earlier and then roundly spank you for your spiteful arrogance later.
Maggie, still not saying anything, still no evidence your bible isn’t fiction, and still no physical evidence your imaginary god exists. That makes your whole discussion irrelevant. Sigh, we need better trolls.
Oh? When, where, who, why?
even more ignorant than I suspected.
ever heard of Giordano Bruno?
I suppose you must have missed that in all your “studies”.
phhht.
Also off-topic.
just because you say it, doesn’t make it so. If you can’t see how “sacred” and “accurate” are related, I think you have more thinking to do.
Dumb is certainly correct.
We don’t misunderstand your message – my church is right because it is, and I’m right because I say so – we just totally reject it.
Why the fuck are you here, arguing so badly with the atheists, and getting yourself all hot and bothered because we think you are fractally wrong?
Why don’t you a) go and pray – it will stop you from trashing your religion any further here or, better, b) get out and help some of the poor unfortunates in life to whom your church is so indifferent (unless there’s Jesus-beans in it for them of course)?
What part of your religion-addled mind thinks that coming here to serve as an easy target is any part of a good idea?
It’s like Maggie is commenting in an entirely different universe, the degree to which she doesn’t get it.
It also misses the point that this is a statement of fact to be read literally. Whether it is wrong or not is a completely different question. This is a revelation to you?
So you’re saying that you agree that there are statements of fact in the Bible that are wrong? Now we’re getting somewhere.
The Old Testament has been considered inspired scripture and a part of Christianity since AD 33.
Awferchrissake. “The Old Testament” didn’t exist in the 1st Century. Christianity was a Jewish sect in the 1st Century, and Pharisees, Saduccees, Essenes and various other groups no doubt, all had a different ideas about what schould be considered capital-S Scripture. As far as the Roman church, what about the deutero-canonical books, maggie? Why the “deutero-“? why are they secondary?
Because they were confirmed as sacred scripture HUNDREDS OF YEARS LATER than always-undisputed OT works.
And, of course, Protestant Bibles DON’T contain the deutero-cannical works, posing a little problem for your inclusive “Christianity” there. I think you meant “Catholicism,” which, last time I checked, was a subset of Christianity.
Nerd— Don’t you have test tubes or something to wash?
CJO— Your belligerent stylings are as silly as they are beside the point. Interestingly, they also prove my point that you don’t know how to read intelligently– in this case with regard to how language is used.
Can you possibly suppose that I am talking about a single volume bound in leather and published by Simon ben Shuster, when I talk about the Old Testament scriptures in the first century? Likewise, if you took 33 AD literally!, well what can I say?
I am having a hard time refraining from laughter at your “questions” and your shouting. I am nearly deaf, now!
Why the “deutero-“? why are they secondary? Because they were confirmed as sacred scripture HUNDREDS OF YEARS LATER than always-undisputed OT works.
This is so beside the point. Consult wiki or any one of a hundred different reference sources to inform yourself on the subject. (Hint: the issue was 1. those few books are not found in both the Hebrew and in the Septuagint (Greek translation) and 2. They are not cited in the New Testament.) For reasons you can easily read up on, Catholics went one way; Protestants the other on the question of including them.
And, of course, Protestant Bibles DON’T contain the deutero-cannical works, posing a little problem for your inclusive “Christianity” there. I think you meant “Catholicism,” which, last time I checked, was a subset of Christianity.
Utterly, ignorant rubbish. Christian unity or “inclusivity” has nothing to do with the books of the Bible. We do not worship the Bible. Christian unity derives from our belief in Jesus Christ and his atoning work. A Christian body that threw out half the Gospels and all the epistles (or vice versa) would still be one of us, if they agreed on the essentials of our faith. It would be very odd and hard to imagine but then two days ago I could not have imagined the intellectual dishonesty and belligerent arrogance I have encountered here. Clearly, anything is possible.
Poor, Ichthyic. Still off-topic and determined to remain so. Fine with me. Will you be going out into the backyard to eat worms, too? Or will you content yourself with holding your breath,until you turn blue, unless I bend to your will?
aratina Please sharpen your reading skills. I called no one a swine.
Don’t you have test tubes or something to wash?
don’t you have more people to go pray for?
Likewise, if you took 33 AD literally!, well what can I say?
yes, why should we take what you say as if you had actually used words to say it? we should just fucking read your mind instead, right?
pathetic.
I am having a hard time refraining from laughter at your “questions”
ditto.
I am nearly deaf, now!
you were deaf long before you entered the room. blind, too.
This is so beside the point.
move goalposts much?
Utterly, ignorant rubbish.
pure and utter projection.
A Christian body that threw out half the Gospels and all the epistles (or vice versa) would still be one of us
the Pope would brand you a heretic.
I could not have imagined the intellectual dishonesty and belligerent arrogance I have encountered here
more projection.
with this much denial and projection, you must have some serious underlying psychological malady.
suggest you seek treatment?
You are an apologist for child abuse. What part of a loving God or a loving church sanctions a priest buggering an altar boy?
Hint – this really is the “wrong kind” of love.
And it’s not even forbidden in the Bible.
Sanctimonious monster. You don’t fool us. You’re talking to atheists now, remember, and we don’t do hypocrisy.
Maggie’s performance here, on Barbariccia’s trumpet, will long linger.
Don’t think she’s finished yet, Ken. She’s mad now, and she imagines that if she keeps on arguing we’ll give up. Fat fucking chance. Does she not realise that, in part, Pharyngula exists to skewer just the kind of hypocritical religious fuckwittery she spouts?
Real christians don’t come here to argue for their beliefs, they live their lives in harmony with others, admirable people whose faith is a credit to them. Those are the people I ask gently to explain what Christianity means, not the screaming harridans like Maggie who parade their debased Christ in front of us to be mocked again.
maggie @#616:
maggie @#696:
Pharyngulanists, we have discovered something: Mags is, in fact, secretly Humpty-Dumpty. Words have meaning, all right — her meaning, and no other. And if you can’t read her mind to know which meaning she in fact means, too bad. And if she changes her mind about what the words mean so that they now mean something else, too bad. How stupid of you all not to know exactly what she has in her ever-changing mind!
<*eyeroll*>
I guess you can’t imagine reading your own comments full of nothing but intellectual dishonesty and belligerent arrogance.
PS: Still waiting on the definitions of “God” and “death”. What do they mean inside your mind, at this point in time, anyway?
Does she not realise that, in part, Pharyngula exists to skewer just the kind of hypocritical religious fuckwittery she spouts?
Of course not. I haven’t seen that she’s commented on any other thread, ever. I’m wondering how she managed to find this one, honestly.
if you took 33 AD literally!, well what can I say?
Try intelligent writing. You subscribe to the fairy tale of an unbroken Apostolic succession, correct? From roughly 33 AD? What is there in this that you mean figuratively?
I could not have imagined the intellectual dishonesty and belligerent arrogance I have encountered here. Clearly, anything is possible.
You are a fucking piece of work. This, from one of the most arrogant twits I have ever encountered. You have given nobody any reason to believe that you were interested in any kind of discussion at all that didn’t involve you deigning to educate the stupid, benighted atheists. When we didn’t stay on your self-serving fantasyland script (i.e. we turned out to be educated in these matters already), you went into full-on asshole mode, and you haven’t looked back. “Belligerent arrogance” indeed.
As for intellectual honesty, you wouldn’t recognize it, frankly, so I’m not surprised you feel the need to project your execrable mendacity onto decent people. You ignore arguments and pretend they’ve been “dealt with,” you use ad hominem to disregard sources you show no evidence you’ve even read, you pretend superiority and lack of interest to avoid engaging with ideas foreign to your blinkered fantasy world. You’re not just intellectually dishonest, you’re a despicable moral coward as well.
The only positive side to any of this is that in the 30-odd turds you’ve dropped here you’ve provided all the proof anyone could ever wish for of the intellectual bankruptcy of your worldview and the extent of cognitive dissonance required to believe in and approve of the malicious lies called Catholic doctrine.
Yup. That too. I’ll shut up for a while and let everyone else have a go, it’s not my party so I don’t get to eat all the cakes.
Spong! (It’s my favourite new word!)
Yeah, CJO, couldn’t you tell that:
There is only one church.
It started, roughly, in 33 A.D.
was really a poem? Can’t you read Maggie’s claims intelligently, and understand the genre she is using at the moment?
At #646, Maggie wrote:
I don’t think I disagree with that. But as for your next claim:
I don’t see where you’ve presented any evidence to support that claim of divine inspiration, especially if the source of this alleged inspiration is the omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God you believe in.
I agree that the OT contains allegorical stories, but, wow, I thought many atheists had nasty things to say about Christians who are biblical literalists, but I think you’re the first Christian I’ve read do so. Good for you!
In addition, you haven’t presented any convincing argument as to why your, or the Catholic Church’s, particular interpretation of what those allegories mean should be given any greater weight than other interpretations.
No one disputes the OT contains “laws,” but, so what? There are other religious belief systems which contain laws. There’s no evidence that those in the OT are any more God-given than the laws of other religious belief systems.
And much of that history is literally wrong.
Once again, you’ve presented no reason why your intelligent reading of that poetry results in the correct interpretation.
Classic avoidance technic Maggie. It tells me you know you have nothing, you know you lie. So, if you knowingly lie, and we keep catching you out in those lies, what are you doing here? State your goal.
Sorry to burst your bubble, Maggie, but I’m actually not reading what you write because from the start you have been little more than a confused troll. I’m reading what others say about your comments and only skimming your words, from which I saw this gem:
Please, call us swine. Don’t hold back. We love it when you shower us with your affection.
Bacon? Who aaid bacon? We love it, and at least the Bible says we can have that!
If not – biblical miracle – *waves hands mysteriously* – ‘swine – ‘swater.
No probs
I thought that these days the old testament is considered a socially-constructed human-edited volume. If that is divinely inspired, then whatever deity that inspired it is pretty pathetic. I’m with Sam Harris on this, just what makes that abortion of a mythology “divinely inspired”?
Please, call us swine.
Maggie’s a swineherd? Call some swine for me too. Extra demons in mine, please.
Maggie,
How do you square your acceptance of the Theory of Evolution with your belief in the Original Sin which required our redemption by Jesus?
You’ve said the the story of Adam and Eve in Eden is allegorical. So:
At what point in evolution was the Original Sin–which you interpret as the breaking of the bond between man and God–broken?
Was it before or after Homo spaiens evolved?
Before the point when the Original Sin occurred, did our evolutionary ancestors live free of the suffering that was the result of the Original Sin?
Did our evolutionary ancestors go to heaven after they died since they were without sin?
What about members of related species such as Homo erectus? Were they free from the suffering the resulted The Original Sin? If not, was the Original Sin committed by a common protohuman ancestor?
Because, at no point, according to the TOE, were there only two members of Homo sapiens or other species, how many humans committed the Original Sin? Was it only two humans (or protohumans), or a group of them, or the entire population?
Are those responsible for the Original Sin the direct ancestors of all modern humans?
If not, why should everyone suffer for their break with God?
Wowbagger, You continue to impress me with your intelligence and ability to find and hone in on the flaws in a commentor’s claims–and your dogged persistence. Great job!
bastion of sass, you clearly have a profoundly unsophisticated view of poetic, metaphorical aspects of the Bible. You keep demanding that it is necessary that Maggie’s beliefs somehow “make sense”, that they be “rational” or “fit the evidence”. I’m sure Maggie can cite dozens of respected theologians and scads of books that would argue against such necessity.
D’oh! Maggie pulled the same wordplay with ‘swine’ that she did with ‘church’ earlier in the thread. Everything is pick and choose your own genre/definition with maggie.
Now that Catholic Maggie has declared biblical fundamentalists “fools,” it would be mighty interesting–and I think rather entertaining–if a member of one of the Christian sects who believe that Catholics are not Christians, and that the pope is the anti-Christ, would join this discussion.
I wonder how much agreement on Christian unity of belief we’d see then.
BoS, Maggie vs. Heddle?
Maggie summed it up so well:
You hate intellectual honesty? Colour me unsurprised.
And I’m still waiting for you explanation of why you didn’t know that the word ‘incarnation’ has more than one meaning – as shown by me in post #651.
This is particularly hilarious when you consider that you tout yourself as such a sophisticated, critical analyst, capable of extracting the ‘true meaning’ and nuance from the bible (unlike all your ‘uneducated’ co-religionists and atheists) – and the you don’t even bother to check a dictionary to see if the word a person has used might actually be a correct usage that you happent to be ignorant of.
‘Intelligent reading’ indeed.
I can’t imagine you’re the sort who’ll apologise, but if you want the readers here to retain any respect for you you’ll at least admit you were wrong.
Can you do that, Maggie?
Whoops, I made a mistake – ‘…happent to be ignorant of.’ should of course be ‘…happen to be ignorant of.’
See how easy that was, Maggie?
Heh. Alan Clarke, over on the “Science of Watchmen” thread, first suggested that the Catholic relics of Jesus were evidence of the existence of Jesus, and I actually had to remind him that he was not Catholic.
He then later performed a 180 degree about-face (no doubt after looking up what his church said about Catholics), and started insisting that Catholics were not Christians (so much for the Apostles’ Creed, and the Nicene Creed, and so on until the Reformation).
He has also slagged off on Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, with the same vigor that Maggie calls fundamentalists “fools” for reading the OT literally.
A cage match between them would be …. um. I am not sure whether it would be terrifying or hilarious or both.
Hah! Humpty-Mags-Dumpty will no doubt claim that that word only means “to construct an apologetic”, and insist that she has been doing just that all this time. So there, too!
PS: Kudos on the analysis and deconstruction, btw. Maggie is just jealous, I’m sure.
Maybe maggie thinks her posts here are “divinely inspired” and as such are inerrant. You’d think if she had any intellectual honesty she’d take back her dismissal of any old testament criticism by dismissing any interpretation that is not her own as “fundamentalist”
I knew I was right to drop out of this discussion. Maggie’s smug, condescending pomposity was grating on my nerves, especially since there was no justification for her air of superiority.
Wowbagger, your four part rebuttal was superb. You have my permission to spell defence any way you want. You may even put unnecessary “u”s in labour and harbour.
What amuses me is that somewhere there’s a Maggie who is incandescent with fury that her reasoned defence of her faith has met such abusive, uniformed, ridiculous opposition – and yet, as she knows, she lost utterly. How did that happen?
And of course, as we all know, if we get a drubbing on an internet forum there’s no way we can ask anyone else for understanding or sympathy
I hope she doesn’t have kids, because otherwise mum’s gonna be real grumpy for a long while….
Or even worse, she’s positive that she’s won, but is furious that we just can’t see that.
AnthonyK @ 723:
We were supposed to wear our uniforms while commenting on this thread?!
I never got the memo!!
Honestly!
We were supposed to wear our uniforms while commenting on this thread?!
Don’t you post naked too? Isn’t that the uniform?
I didn’t notice this the first time I read Maggie’s response to my 4-part takedown but I was going over it again and it hit me. Like a pile of sickening bricks.
Here’s what I’d said:
Here’s Maggie’s response:
Holy fucking shit. I had a low opinion of her before; now I’ve realised just how fucking reprehensible a turd and how truly vile a scumbag she actually is.
What she appears to be saying is that the reason that Christians, despite knowing full well that Christ was against slavery (since it’s in Galatians and is unequivocal in meaning to anyone applying ‘intelligent reading’, after all – something that Christians have been doing all along and not in any way a recent modification influenced by society), allowed it to continue for nearly 2,000 years because of ‘sin’.
They allowed it to continue because of sin.
Whose sin, Maggie? The sin of the enslaved? What sin would necessitate such punishment of one generation, let alone many?
I’d love to know the particular biblical inspiration for Maggie’s revelation – oh, you do realise that doesn’t just mean a book in the bible, don’t you Maggie? I wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself again by saying I don’t know what the word means.
Would it be the Mark of Cain, from Genesis? If so, I’m guessing it must be one of those rare ‘diamonds’ of literal truth amongst the rough of conveniently genre-excluded sections like the monstrosity of a god who would ask Abraham to murder his son – even if he was ‘only joking’.
Or perhaps it’s the story of Ham, who was cursed by his father, Noah, for seeing him naked – often cited as one (of the many) bible verses supporting slavery. And it’s usually combined with justification the enslavement of people with darker skin – that being how you can identify who’s meant to be a slave and who isn’t.
Hmm, where else I have heard that used to defend? Oh, that’s right – fucking piece of shit racists. The KKK and the Catholic Church – traditional rivals, as they say – in agreement? Will wonders never cease?
So, this is what I’m getting from Maggie: Christians knew all along that Jesus was against slavery and specifically came to forgive the sins of humankind – but they chose to allow slavery to continue because they felt that the
darkiesdescendants of Ham deserved what they were getting because their ancestor looked at his father when he was naked.As someone who’s a descendant of at least one slave, Maggie, I say this from the bottom of my heart: fuck you.
All this Maggie talk makes me want to listen to Redbone’s Maggie. Sadly it’s not on Youtube.
Just think Wowbagger, in 50 years time when equal rights for homosexuals becomes the prevailing moral zeitgeist – all the religious groups will talk about how Jesus said to love your neighbour as opposed to quoting Romans 1:32. And at that time they’ll say that the people in the past interpreted the bible wrong. Maggie is a victim of this secularist world and thus is interpreting the bible as such. You are spot on in your assessment of her and of Christianity Wowbagger. very nice takedown.
Maggie
Your interpretation, your view, your argument here is that your view of the old testament is exactly the same as that of the early christian community. It is there in that first paragraph quoted. Your words, Maggie.
Yet you claim that Genesis is allegory, whereas the early christians claimed that it was fact, not allegory. They even have a genealogy that links Jesus, through David up to Seth(!), son of Adam and Eve.
And many people today believe it is the truth.
So even if the early christian community was consistent in their belief, you do not share those beliefs, by your own words, you heretic you.
The same with the quote from Matthew and the days of Noah. The early christian community are selling the certainty of the second coming on the premise that the story of Noah is literally true.
You do not belief in the literal truth of the flood, again by your own words, Maggie the heretic.
The topic was the consistent view of you and the early christian community, which I was pointing is not consistent at all.
Off topic indeed! Ducking and weaving, eh. Your dishonesty is showing.
_____________<;,><_____________
It has also been explained how the early christian community was not consistent in its beliefs. It disagreed on things such as the divinity of Jesus, diet and circumcision. We’ve read the literature. Yet all you have as an answer is unsupported assertion and ad hominem attacks.
_____________<;,><_____________
As CJO pointed out, after Jesus was crucified, his followers would have been jewish. It is not until Paul that the christian notion of the ressurection after 3 days is first recorded. As we do not know what the beliefs of the jewish followers of Jesus were (other than they differed in several respects to Pauls) your assertion offered as fact that there was a christian community in AD 33 is based solely on your belief that the bible is true, not on evidence. To quote you “it is simply ignorant to claim otherwise”.
Wowie, thank you for proving my most important point. You people have no idea what Christianity teaches. Your latest diatribe was simply superb– it can’t be improved on, ever.
Sin. Let’s see. What does Christianity teach about sin. Hmmm. Well, it teaches that everyone is a sinner. Everyone, without exception. So, why did it take so long for Christians to fight to abolish slavery?
Christians are sinners.
Wow!! (no pun intended). How easy is that to understand? And now you know something factual about Christianity and I managed to convey it without uttering a single vulgarity.
Maggie, vulgarity, no. Great gobs of sarcasm and superciliousness, but no vulgarity.
Are you proud of that?
Maggie, you will never get anything right if you don’t check your facts. Many atheists are ex-christians, so you got caught in another lie. We know what christianity is about. That is why we are atheists. Time for you to see the light of reason and give up god and religion. The clarity of thinking is astounding.
Maggie is like my mom – any logical argument that refutes her imaginary bullshit is rebutted with a whole new set of made-up bullshit ideas. Since it’s all “heartfelt”, it’s all correct, and I’m just a mean and heartless cynic who doesn’t appreciate her “truth”, whatever that is at this moment.
If you just make shit up as fast as you can think of it, nobody can keep up with you because you can come up with three times the bullshit in the time it takes to refute the first piece.
That was actually how I interpreted Maggie’s “sin” reduction of Wowbagger’s “prevailing moral zeitgeist” comment. It shouldn’t necessarily change Wowbagger’s opinion though, since reducing simply to sin tacitly absolves them of any real responsibility of not having begun the fight earlier.
“Sure it was a repugnant way to treat people. Sure we as a group should have done something far earlier. But you know what? We’re all sinners. (*shrugs shoulders*) Our bad. Regardless of how often we live up to our own teachings though, you should still use us as your moral compass.”
@KI: funny–that’s exactly how my mom is.
Maggie is still here?
She could not be more wrong that we do not understand what christianity teaches. It teaches that humans have a sin filled nature and are unworthy of god’s grace. Yet god loves humans enough to give them a chance to be on his good side, accepting christ. That is no great mystery.
But she assumes that people who will not accept the gift cannot understand the message. This sense that she is intellectually and morally superior to we heathens here show in every fucking post she puts up, as if she is explaining a simple point to simple minded children.
News flash to maggie. We get it. We understand it. Most of us grew up with it. And even if one was not raised in a christian household, one cannot escape the influence. We just do not see that there is a gift to be had. It really is that simple. We do not see that their is a great big daddy figure out there to save us from ourselves.
Have to love how maggie thinks that being smug and condescending is oh so better than using profanities. But guess what maggie, Wowbagger is so much more intelligent and knowledgeable than you. The only thing you have is the believe that you have been saved from your sins. But that means nothing to people who do not see sin as a valid concept.
I add my voice to the chorus of “Fuck you, maggie!”.
What does Christianity teach about sin. Hmmm. Well, it teaches that everyone is a sinner. Everyone, without exception.
“What a smell of sulfur!”
Boy, all the sisters and priests at my Catholic grade school and high school would be really disappointed to hear that. So would the leader of my confirmation classes. So would the priests for whom I was an altar boy. For that matter, so would the Cistercian monks at the monastery I did a retreat at in high school, and the Basilian seminary I visited for a week in elementary school.
I guess I know nothing about Christianity.
At #731, Maggie wrote:
Oh, dear.
And here, I thought that the parochial school nuns who taught me for so many years were teaching me Christianity. But, I guess they weren’t. So what were they teaching me?!
Same for the priests and brothers who taught me, allegedly about Catholic doctrine. Also the CCD teachers, Newman Club advisers, and just about every single adult I knew growing up.
I don’t know how I managed to remain so ignorant of Christian doctrine. After all, I grew up seeped in Catholicism in a very religious Catholic family in an area where probably 90% of the residents were Catholics of some sect, and 9.9% were mainstream Protestants (heretics!) of one kind or another.
I was baptized, learned (I thought) my catechism, read bible stories, confessed, took communion, was confirmed.
I attended mass six days a week for years, hearing hundreds of sermons in the process. Once I was old enough, I confessed at least once a month, and took communion at every mass I attended.
I prayed several times each day. Read books about the lives of saints. Sang in the church choir. Earned a Marian Medal as a Girl Scout.
I wore a scapular for years. Went on religious retreats. Led May Day processions in honor of Mary. Was an angel at Christmas midnight mass. Carried flowers in church processions. Prayed novenas, litanies, and the rosary regularly.
But somehow, with all that, I still managed to miss learning anything about Christianity’s teachings. Wow! Wait until I tell my mom, who despite being a(n allegedly) good Catholic, probably doesn’t really know anything about Christianity either!!
Tulse and Bastion of Sass–
You got better!
Ah but bastion of sass, you were a catholic. You worshiped idols so you cannot know what it is like to be a true christian and have a personal relationship with christ. While I had a more mainline protestant experience but I must have never truly accepted jesus in my heart. Me being a teen lay member and being part of the Christmas and Easter ceremonies were just activities, not acts of conviction.
“The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble.”
Bertrand Russell
At #742, Ken Cope wrote:
I agree.
My Catholic years were miserable and depressing, especially after I was old enough–maybe 6 or so–to start thinking critically about what I was being taught.
The cognitive dissonance and self-loathing were awful. Leaving the Church was probably the best decision I ever made.
At #742, Janine, Insulting Sinner wrote:
You need to alert Maggie!! She says she’s a former atheist who converted to Catholicism. How did she manage to go from being damned to…being damned? Damn!
But maggie is not here to listen, she is here to teach.
and chide.
You people have no idea what Christianity teaches.
Oh, that is bad. Leading small group Bible studies, teaching Sunday School, night church, and Vacation Bible Schools for years, occasionally giving a guest sermon, being part of leadership teams that chose curricula, I guess I really shouldn’t have been doing all of that since I have no idea what Christianity teaches. My bad.
Walton:
I know you and Strange Gods have already batted this around, but in my continuing quest to talk about Things Not Directly Related to Maggie™ on this thread…
Stipulating your summary of the claims…
…even so, the answer to this…
…is no! Your problem is that you’re measuring the term “very few” in (1) and “a lot of” in (3) against the same scale, without any justification. Let’s do this with fake math, shall we?
Assume:
alt is the number of late-term abortions,
atot is the total number of abortions,
dlt is the percentage of late-term abortions necessary to prevent the death of the woman,
…and assuming that the value of dlt meets some reasonable definition of “most,”
…then I assert that there is a range of values of alt for which both of the following are true:
alt < < atot (i.e., Premise 1 above)
and
(alt × dlt ≥ “a lot of” deaths (i.e., Premise 3)
No, the assertion was that late term abortions for any reason were very rare, but that “most” of them (and from what I read, any claim less than “virtually all” is conservative) are necessary to save the woman’s life. Thus, the number of late-term abortions not necessary to save the life of the woman is tiny, if not infinitesimal (i.e., rare – (most × rare) = almost none), and…
…any restrictions on late-term abortions would necessarily either affect necessary ones or have essentially no effect at all.
Therefore, it’s easy to see that any meaningful restrictions on late-term abortions will almost certainly result in a nonzero number of preventable deaths of women.
And, as you’ve already agreed, when it comes to preventable deaths of women…
nonzero = too effin’ many.
QED
Dammit! Too cute by half!
This…
…should have been:
Is it just me, or is HTML the work of the Devil?
That was actually how I interpreted Maggie’s “sin” reduction of Wowbagger’s “prevailing moral zeitgeist” comment. It shouldn’t necessarily change Wowbagger’s opinion though, since reducing simply to sin tacitly absolves them of any real responsibility of not having begun the fight earlier.
It does no such thing. It is a painful reminder of how far short we fall. All mortal sin, and cooperating in any evil, like slavery (and abortion) is a mortal sin, is a one way ticket to hell, if one does not repent and make amends as far as one is able.
Again, this snide comment is a demonstration that you really don’t know what Christianity teaches. It doesn’t matter if your parents dragged you to church for your entire youth– if you weren’t listening, if you were not wrestling to make it your own, what do you suppose you learned?
Wowie is hopeless. He may be intelligent, but he has no common sense. He went out on a limb that could not bear his weight and wrote a magnificent diatribe based on the state of his digestion, apparently. It had nothing to do with reality.
Poor Janine! Still clueless, after all these posts.
Tulse, Carlie and Bastion of Sass– Shame on you. You have not demonstrated any understanding here but I will take your word for it that you have some. Had you done so, something like a discussion might have ensued, though I grant that that is not very likely.
Maggie, maggie, maggie… who died and made you God?
People like maggie are the ones who are always gossiped about in church for being full of themselves. Do Catholics really believe everything the Pope does? No. Do Protestants really believe everything their pastor/preacher does? No. One of the few redeeming qualities of Christianity is that nobody is absolutely right about it no matter how much it seems like everyone agrees on the core concepts, which plays well into the hands of atheists but cannot be denied no matter how loud maggie gets.
maggie=Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Maggie, you dumb fuck, you do not get it. None of us give a flying fuck for your “message of love”. Also, being called clueless by a know nothing like you makes me smile.
You are a lousy teacher and we are not your students. Get the point? You preaching is getting no where with us. Or are you trying to getting brownie points for trying to work on “the wicked”?
As I recall, I’d asked you for support of your statement that “Jesus proved his claims”, and more specifically for evidence of the resurrection. I haven’t seen you demonstrate any “understanding” on these issues — indeed, you seem to have confused the issue of Jesus’ mere existence with the issue of “proving” his theological claims.
But Tulse, if you accept Jesus as your savior, there is no need for maggie to explain. You would just know.
And I thank you for subtly making my point in the middle of a paragraph specifically designed to show how you’re not.
Again, your snide comment demonstrates that you really do have trouble with reading comprehension.
Fail, although you do get +1 for the inadvertent strawman. I never provided you with any intel regarding my religious upbringing. Other commenters did, and your sad inability to discriminate who wrote what is amusing considering the frequency with which you label commenters here with words like “clueless” and accuse them of “lacking intelligence” and “needing to sharpen their reading skills.”
Beam, meet eye.
But Josh, one sinner is just like an other sinner. Details just get in the way.
Don’t you know that its different for sinners
You’re all the same
Maggie the Gag lady is back with more jokes. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA You are so funny. I am laughing at you. You have presented no evidence for your imaginary god. You have produced no evidence that your bible is the word of god (can’t do that without a god). So Maggie the Gag lady, everything you say is a joke. Just a bunch of words put together for our amusement. HAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA
A creamy, sin filled center… mmm
Windy, I like the original banana flavored creme better.
Had you done so, something like a discussion might have ensued, though I grant that that is not very likely.
I doubt it as well, because from my version of Christianity, you’re the apostate heretic. Not emphasizing accepting Jesus as your personal savior, giving power of absolution to priests, praying to people other than God, not accepting the inerrancy of the Bible – totally going to Hell in a little Catholic handbasket. And your version of Christianity has no more support than mine does. None. We could pit Protestant theologians against Catholic ones from now to the end of time, and they’d never reach agreement on it because they’re arguing interpretations of something that was made up in the first place. The only difference is that I’ve realized that and you haven’t.
I suppose I did know back in the day — I guess I’ve just forgotten…
maggie @#616:
maggie @#673:
maggie @#731:
OK, in addition to defining “God” and “death”, define “sin”.
(Paging Euthyphro and Socrates… Paging Euthyphro and Socrates… Euthyphro and Socrates, please come to the Platonic table for a dialogue.)
Maggie should maybe look up again what the capital sins are, particularly superbia.
At #751 Maggie wrote:
Maggie,
Pfft.
I’ve asked you a number of questions about the nature of God and his relationship with man that, for the most part, involved your belief that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent.
You said these were interesting questions. But did you even attempt to answer them, and discuss your beliefs with me? No. You blew me off, saying basically that you didn’t have the time to answer them.
My parents didn’t “drag” me to church. I went willingly, full of faith, spirit, and love for God and his Church. I was a true and ardent believer.
You have no idea of how well I listened.
You have no idea of how, for decades, I wrestled with what I was learning. You have no idea of how much torment I went through, trying to understand what I was learning, and reconcile the Church’s teachings with reality, reasoning, and real morality.
But, in the end, reality, reason, and morality won out.
Walton,
I must admit you have genuinely surprised me. I was expecting some fluffy bunny concern trolling from you, some drivel about a need to “balance” a woman’s interests versus those of the fetus. Such ostensible balance is too often used to sneak in one foot of well-funded anti-choice goals under the guise of a golden mean. Better than nothing, but always a step toward further and further restrictions, first on abortion, then on contraception. I expected you to deliver a vapid but pretty ode to two irreconcilable interests, a compromise that satisfies no one. To my surprise and disgust, you’ve done much, much worse: bodily autonomy can go fuck itself.
Bodily autonomy is worth absolutely nothing, then, because it doesn’t even begin to compete with fetal viability. Supporting bodily autonomy before viability is like supporting my free speech to defend the government, or my right to be free of surveillance as long as I have nothing to hide. It’s a neofascist mockery of freedom, “you are free to do as we tell you.”
There are absolutely zero countervailing interests before viability, so to say that bodily autonomy overrides these interests is to say absolutely nothing. Your so-called bodily autonomy is a paper tiger, collapsing instantly at the first threat. Like I said, even more contemptible than the usual fluffy bunny with the golden mean; at least a bunny has teeth.
Person. A blastocyst is human. The concept you are trying to reference is called personhood.
See, you thoroughly cocked up that example with the bolded sentence. There is no ambiguity now; the answer is that the pregnancy should be aborted. You have no right to subject a woman to a 50% chance of death against her will. That’s some sinister shit, and you’re quite the monster for wanting to kill a full-grown woman to replace her with a half-aware fetus. We know for a fact that the woman has a great deal to lose, and is fully cognizant of what she has to lose. And we know for a fact that the fetus has no hopes or ambitions, no loves or relationships, no awareness of its possible futures, and thus no concept of what it has to lose. The life of the woman is objectively worth more than the life of the fetus. It is misogynistic to devalue the life of the woman to the level of the fetus, as you have done with your 50/50 proposition.
I think the more interesting and ambiguous question is, given the same example, what if the woman is uncertain, rather than demanding an abortion? What if she is willing to take some risk to her own life, in the hope of doubling down and getting both her own and the fetus’s life, knowing that there remains the significant risk of getting only one or the other, or neither? She has to weigh the risks to the rest of her family. Does she have other children who are dependent upon her, do they have other potential caretakers, and could they afford — psychologically and economically — the loss of their mother? What about her lover(s)? Her own parents? Siblings? Friends? None of their preferences can override hers, but she will undoubtedly be weighing them all in her decision. What precisely are the physical risks, and just how experienced are her doctors with these sorts of complications? A 50/50 chance in one doctor’s hands will be 60/40 or 40/60 in another’s. She asks for the doctors’ advice; what do they recommend? And the complications will be far more expensive than an abortion. Will her health insurance cover them? Does she have health insurance? Does she have enough savings to cover the procedures otherwise? What does she reckon is the political future of state care in her area, and does she have enough savings to leave for the care of the baby if she should die?
This is reality outside your little ideological prison, Walton. And you must admit, there is no law that humans could ever hope to write that would address these vital questions adequately for any single woman, let alone thousands of women all in different situations. Our only option is to trust the woman, and trust her doctors. Most people want to do the right thing. We have to permit them to make mistakes, because only thusly can we permit them to find the optimal outcome.
Freedom is messy. It’s perilous. Even terrifying. And it’s still preferable to the alternative. Welcome to the human condition.
Bill Dauphin shows his work! Nice.
Or in libertarianese, “when surgery is criminalized, only criminals will get surgery!”
Hm. That could probably be catchier.
You said these were interesting questions. But did you even attempt to answer them, and discuss your beliefs with me? No. You blew me off, saying basically that you didn’t have the time to answer them.
If you are the one who asked about the omni attributes, I did not say I had no time. I said I was exhausted– which I was at the time. I was finished (or so I hoped) making posts for the night. I also had wished to give some thought to my answer. I didn’t exactly lose sight of those questions but the barrage of vituperation that has followed since has kept me busy or, at least, distracted. Since there is no honest discussion to be had here, I really cannot see the point of following up at this late date– particularly as nothing I say will be satisfying and will only result in more nasty posts that will annoy me, even though I only skim them.
The thing I find most amusing in this last batch of posts is your accusation of prosletyzing. Again, this demonstrates no ability on your parts to hear what is actually said and respond to it appropriately. In fact I have not said that any of you should believe anything. I have not called you to repentance, have not threatened you with hell, have not described God or Jesus, have said nothing about the nature of sin … what, then, have I actually talked about?
Well, I think a sober assessment will demonstrate that I have tried very hard to stick to factual matters– that Christian claims rest on an historical claim that can be weighed like any other truth claim; that the Old Testament is part of sacred scripture. That one has to approach ancient literature (all literature, of course) and read it with appreciation (=understanding) of the language, culture and history of the author(s). None of this seems the least bit controversial to me and yet you fly into foaming, incoherent rage and refuse to stay on topic. Why is that?
I am sure some psychiatrist knows but I can’t say I much care. You will understand that in the absence of some post so brilliant that it, verily, illumines the night sky, I am done wasting my time here.
Maggie the Gag Lady, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Still making us laugh at you. And still not getting it. You aren’t debating, you are lecturing. Another word is proselytizing, since you are talking religion. We make that determination, not you. And it is a crime against Pharyngula. Now, either truly debate us, and acknowledge where we have refuted you, which is just about everywhere, or just not post.
Well, shucks; we aim’s to please! However…
…I’m always a bit bemused when people “repeat back to me” what they think I’ve said, and I don’t recognize the sentiment at all.
First, if you ever catch me speaking or writing real “libertarianese,” please rip out my tongue or break my fingers, as the case may be. I may be relatively civil in my arguments with Walton, and perhaps slightly less bitter and vituperative with the Oregonian Who Must Not Be Named, but don’t ever mistake me for an L-word-arian.
But aside from that, your bumper-sticker version doesn’t reflect what I was saying at all. I was saying (and I thought this was consistent with what you had said to Walton previously, but perhaps I misunderstood you), that because virtually all late-term abortions are necessary for the life/health of the woman, then any restriction on late-term abortion will unavoidably either prevent medically necessary abortions (because the life/health protections are inadequate) or be essentially meaningless (because adequate life/health protections leave so few other cases).
IOW, any attempt to restrict late-term abortion will either kill women or do essentially nothing.
I don’t see how that’s an L-word-arian position… unless you buy into their BS assumption that they have an absolute monopoly on caring about personal freedom.
I am done wasting my time here.
Please keep your promise.
Well, I think a sober assessment will demonstrate that I have tried very hard to stick to factual matters– that Christian claims rest on an historical claim that can be weighed like any other truth claim…
If it makes you feel any better, failed in this cause so brilliantly, you lit up the night sky.
Maggie, you will not be missed.
Maggie, why on your god’s green earth did you come here in the first place? Wait, I see you’ve already answered that:
Yawn, I put 2 tankards of grog on her posting again within 48 hours. These godbots are all the same, they never keep their word…
38,000 sects, and if you don’t get maggie’s sect perfect then you understand nothing ;)
What nonsense. We all know that sin doesn’t exist, and it’s thetans that cause all our problems. If it weren’t for L Ron Hubbard, then slavery would have never been abolished!!!
You’ve scolded like a ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, sadistic harridan, though.
Even after being asked to define your damned terms. Since you keep using those words, and others, in a decidedly Humpty-Dumpty-ish manner.
Mostly, you’ve been unpleasant, unsubstantive, hypocritical, and incoherent.
Maggie @769, adumbrated.
1. Yeah, I blew you off.
2. I’m accused of proselysing.
3. I’ve stuck to factual matters.
4. I am done wasting my time here.
1. True. 2. True. 3. False. 4. ????
Yawn, I put 2 tankards of grog on her posting again within 48 hours.
4 quatloos on the newcomer!
Bacon? Who aaid bacon? We love it, and at least the Bible says we can have that!
IT’S BACON!!!!
I love how the standards for rejecting Christianity are so much higher than for accepting it. They didn’t teach any wrestling in my confirmation class!
Firstly, a retraction (of sorts): in the light of Maggie’s explanation I can admit that I did, indeed bark up the wrong tree regarding what her explanation of how sin related to Christians celebrating and profiting from slavery for nearly 2,000 years of knowing it was, in fact, incorrect.
I was wrong – to an extent. In my defence I’ll say that I’ve never been particularly instructed in Christianity, and Maggie’s ‘explanation’ was limited to this:
One word, Wowie. Sin.
Not exactly a thoughtful, unambiguous, well-structured and involving explanation is it? But I was wrong and Maggie’s lack of didactic capacity is not entirely to blame.
However, that generations of people were forced to suffer one of the greatest injustices is still a problem. That Chrisitans like Maggie absolve themselves of blame for supporting it by writing it off to sin is, while not as vile as saying people of other races deserve it because of the piss-poor excuse of ‘Oh, well – we were sinners, what do you expect?’ is still as repellent (not just a substance to keep insects away, Maggie) as it is lame.
What it still doesn’t explain is why the sudden change after so many years of having the same instructions in front of them. Aren’t Christians still sinners? Did Jesus come back to earth in the mid-to-late 1800s and, while reminding them of the content of Galatians, remove just enough sin for them to realise that slavery was bad and they should do something about it?
And this is what’s at the very heart of my problem with Maggie’s position.
Christians have had scripture and have been capable of discerning what in it is meant to be taken literally from the very beginning – according to Maggie. But if that’s the case, why has everything that is considered non-literal in them only really been considered so, publicly and as official chuch policy, doctrine, dogma what-have-you, in the past couple of hundred years?
Creationism was only tossed out by a majority after Darwin; slavery was only ended a little after that. The concept of Divine Right of Kings was supported by the Church (and the kings, funnily enough) for centuries. There is nothing in the bible about democracy – Jesus didn’t relate to us any parables about ‘righteous is the man who votes’, did he?
And yet Maggie wants us to believe that her type have known all along that what’s in the bible was – oh, not wrong, as such; it’s perfectly correct as long as you read it in the right way (sounds a bit Orwellian, doesn’t it?) – able to be set aside in such a way that it would lead to people thinking and believing what they do today.
But the only attempt at an explanation she’s offered for why they did, why in over 1,500 years of appearing to believe in literal creationism, slavery, geocentrism and any number of other obvious falsehoods is sin – and remember, that’s only the acceptable Christian justification for allowing slavery, not anything else, and no explanation for why that sin suddenly disappeared.
For everything else it’s ‘it took as long because it took as long’.
Maggie’s threatened never to come back, but we know what the words of Christians like her are worth, don’t we? No doubt if she does slip she can always blame sin, can’t she? I guess it’s the ultimate get-out-of-jail free card for God’s chosen.
What about the definition of ‘incarnation’, Maggie – as pointed out by me in post #651? Did sin prevent you from checking a dictionary, or is it just keeping you from admitting your fault?
Not for nothin’ but I got my copy of Aviation Week today, and it has a brief article about the crash (remember the plane crash that started this whole thread?).
I could detect no hint, in this writeup, that crash investigators are looking for evidence of divine intervention, nor that they are considering the weight of the owner’s sins as a contributing cause of the plane’s crash. Go figure, eh?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming on the 24-hour MaggieChannel….
Wowsa. Reading this was quite an experience. I think I now understand what trench warfare was like for the poor Tommies.
What are the takeaways?
Well, Wowbagger rules. I think we can all agree on that. But where on earth does that impassioned condemnation of “cafeteria Christianity” come from? Are you afraid we’re too soft a target if we’re not burning witches? It did lead to many witty little jokes; I’ll take the Luann platter, please.
Owlmirror has a frightening grasp of theological Greek.
The Spong Defence. The genre defence. I use ’em; now I have a catchy name. From now on, instead of waffling around as I usually do, I’ll just post “genre defence”. That will save us all a lot of time.
Janine is a theological sophisticate of the first water. Her explanation of proper Biblical exegesis:
That works for me. I’ll add the “strain through Jesus defence” to the arsenal.
Guy, I’m flattered to be linked — but I’ve done much better takedowns of Hell than that one. I’ll try harder next time.
When all is said (and said, and said again) and done, I think I’ll stick to my own position, standing firmly on all sides at once as any good liberal Christian should:
Leigh Williams wrote:
I don’t actually have a problem with liberal Christianity, since it’s ridiculous to be any other sort when consider how wrong the OT is on so many things – but I can’t go into detail now because I’ve got no time; however, I guarantee you I’ll come back later and explain.
Suffice to say it’s the reasoning process.
Wowbagger, I think I can probably predict the gist of your thoughts on cafeteria Christianity — those of us in the mushy middle have heard it, at stereophonic amplification, before — but don’t fret about it unless you have a desire to lay out the argument.
I’m not detecting even a hint of battle fatigue. You guys sure are some indefatigable brawlers.
Me, I’d planned to lay low here in the bottom of this trench. I guess I shouldn’t have raised my head up, huh?
I feel perversely driven to say, “Holy crap! Are y’all still at it?”
For me, it’s the way people ascertain knowledge. That any interpretation of the works is going to be based on their current cultural climate – and thus the dogma persists without revision. It would be far more honest to condemn the more archaic and draconian passages instead of just pretending they don’t exist, or reinterpreting them to something that would be unrecognisable by modern standards.
It’s the notion that the bible is infallible, rather than a recognition for what it is – a socially-constructed, human-edited volume. Today people are saying Genesis is fully compatible with evolution, but I’m guessing that if tomorrow it turned out that irrefutable evidence came up of creation, that every moderate who talked of the compatibility of the scriptures with current scientific knowledge will say the bible was right all along. It’s that notion that the book being regarded as holy while interpreting it to suit whatever the prevailing cultural standard of the day that makes moderate Christianity seem meagre.
At least in my opinion.
Kel, “meagre” I can understand. And how do we define Cafeterianism, anyway? I’ve only heard it used contemptuously by hardshell Baptists who don’t understand why I stand for gay rights. The same folks, by the way, who don’t wear hats in church. Go figure.
But I suppose part of the issue is that I’m too liberal to even be a cafeteria Christian — I’m over there with John Shelby Spong, hanging off the leftmost precipice by my toes.
For exmaple, you say
I do. Vociferously, at times, though since I don’t do much Bible-quoting on this forum, you might be unaware of it.
But I don’t know many liberal Christians who wouldn’t agree with you there. We Methodists, for example, say that the Bible is “authoritative in matters of faith” and reject the notion of infallibility (Catholic?) or inerrancy (Baptist and other conservative Protestants). The liberal Christians I know think of the Bible as a work in progress throughout history, including today; in fact, we explicitly say so in our Bible studies.
Oh, no. We’d be more surprised than anyone if our Bronze-age creation myth turned out to be literal scientific fact. But which creation myth do you suppose it would be, the story in Genesis 1, or the earthier story in Genesis 2?
On second thought, that last part should read:
We’d be more surprised — and horrified — than anyone if our Bronze-age creation myth turned out to be literal scientific fact. It would play hell with our way of reading the Bible, so much so that most of us would have to bail out. I just couldn’t get down with all the slaughter if I supposed the God Almighty really commanded it, instead of its being justification for the land-grabs of a particular primitive Semitic tribe of nomads who were tired of wandering.
Not to worry, though. Inerrancy cannot be retrieved, for which creation myth do you suppose it would be, the story in Genesis 1, or the earthier story in Genesis 2?
I guess when there are ~2,000,000,000 making blanket statements is not going to hit some individuals. It seems my criticisms don’t necessarily apply to you, not that they were ever meant to. Rather it was against those ‘moderates’ who aren’t really so. And by that I mean those who interpret the bible to suit the culture at the time – for instance all those who claim that the bible supports big bang theory. It’s that they hold the same authority in the texts, and then forego all criticism by saying the text means something else. That I find really frustrating. Why use the bible at all if all one is going to do is base it on whatever the prevailing ideas of the day are?
Why was it that for close to 1600 years the prevailing belief was that the bible supported slavery, then only in the last 200 or so it’s changed? Why is it that the bible for 1700 years supported racism, then only in the last 50 or so it’s really changed? I’m betting that in 50 years time, all those anti-gay passages will be interpreted another way too. Just as those passages supported geocentrism have been reinterpreted in the last 400.
To me, it’s still looking at the book as if it were the work of God, that an omniscient and omnipotent being had it’s hand in the work (which is silly on all accounts) and thus there is some divine truth to be derived from the books. Again, this doesn’t seem to apply to you so please don’t take this like I’m attacking your faith. I do recognise there are a lot of ‘liberal’ Christians who don’t fall under what I’m saying.
On a side note, how is it that people can take the gospels as eyewitness accounts and then say that the bible is written by God. How can it be both?!?
Kel, please say anything you’ve a mind to. I’m not so fragile, though I do appreciate your politeness; after all, I play at Pharyngula by choice, and I have noticed that intellectual rigor is valued here over mere kindness.
And in fact I’ll join you quite cheerfully in some of your criticisms. I also find this firm conviction, held by fundamentalists and evangelicals, that the Bible is historically accurate and without error quite incomprehensible. It’s as if they haven’t even read the damn thing. And yet I know they have, and the mental gymnastics they put themselves through trying to reconcile its inconsistencies are both exhausting and rather sad.
Better by far, I think, to admit freely to oneself that the book, or more accurately collection of documents, is the product of human minds. Our understanding of its words IS constantly changing; whatever our method of exegesis, we unavoidably bring ourselves to the text as we interact with it. And our selves are the product of the surrounding culture. We live and breathe it, it permeates all of our judgment and priorities. This was true also for the people who first wrote down, collected, and edited the documents. Everything is viewed through the prism of colture.
This, of course, is the reason the Bible now says slavery is wrong, whereas it didn’t before. And it’s why, in thirty years (I’m more optimistic than you), most people will say it doesn’t support anti-gay bigotry.
Which leads me to the next problem, and it’s something I do think applies to me, a question I will try to answer:
For us liberal Christians, the Bible is not the Word OF God (at least not in the way fundamentalists mean it), it’s the Word ABOUT God. Even further, it’s A word about God. We view it as one of humanities’ stories of the interaction between human beings and their ideas of who and what God is.
In that context, the Bible is very interesting and valuable to those of us who retain (or who have acquired through experience) the idea that God is real. It’s good to know where you’ve been before you decide where you want to go. There are words in the Bible’s pages that have offered deep comfort and aid to me as I’ve struggled with life’s vissicitudes; others before me have faced the same challenges.
So then you ask (if you’re still paying attention), why THAT PARTICULAR BOOK?
Simple answer: it’s the book of my culture.
Longer answer: I find the metaphor of humanity as the children of God uniquely compelling. The idea that the Word became flesh, coming as a servant and a brother, in service to all humankind, speaks to my heart and informs my understanding of what is it to be human.
Look, for us liberal Christians the Book wasn’t finalized at the Council of Nicaea or the Council of Trent. True, we don’t add new books to it now. But we hold that every new generation of the Body of Christ adds to our knowledge and understanding of it, as does the history of the Body since the canon was closed.
And in any case, it’s the Word we care most about, and for us, that’s to be found in Jesus and in the walk we take with Him in humble service and in His footsteps.
Gah. This is difficult.
I don’t have a problem with liberal Christianity, and certainly not compared to the alternative – as the baffling content of the thread illustrates.
Maggie’s ‘liberal’ Christianity, however, is another story.
If you don’t take the whole of the bible as undeniable fact then you can’t take any of it as undeniable fact – because if the writers and editors and those who chose which parts to include and which to exclude were wrong about one part of it, who’s to say that they weren’t wrong about another part?
Want to pick and choose bits of the bible? Fine. Just don’t try to concoct ludicrous, self-indulgent pseudo-intellectual theories to justify it – just admit they got stuff wrong.
The genre defence is a piss-poor dodging of the fact that it’s reality that’s proven the OT to be false, not the ‘keen insight’ of ‘sophisticated Christians’. Something can be excluded because it’s written in verse? My example of The Ballad of Reading Gaol showed how empty that argument is – it contains both fact and device; you can’t just assume that one negates the other.
The Maggies of the world won’t admit that – and she most certainly didn’t – because they need that part of the bible to be ‘true’ enough to justify everything else they like about the bible – in her case it appears mostly linked to using it as the cornerstone for why her version of Christianity (Catholicism) is the correct one – something that, in itself, appears far more important to her than the actual concepts Christianity espouses.
She should try arguing with a Greek Orthodox; that’s the real church Jesus founded – at least according to them (funnily enough).
Maggie’s type want the bible to be invincible. It isn’t, and they just can’t cope with that – because admitting it would mean they wouldn’t be able to stand up and do what they love to do most – instruct other people on how they should live. When you want to tell people that abortion, homosexuality, divorce and so forth are wrong you can’t have them turning around and telling you you’ve got no reason to think that apart from a book that’s unreliable. It takes away your justification.
Christians, as I see it, have to live with the dilemma that, because a large part of their holy book clearly isn’t perfect (or even close to reality in some parts), they can never be 100% sure of anything else in it either. There seems to be plenty of them who are not only content with that, but happy about it – though these, of course, are Christians who don’t want to tell other people what to do or how to live; they enjoy living the life because it appeals to them.
Unlike our dear Maggie.
And I’ve got no problem with that. In fact, I’d have a problem with anyone who did have a problem with that. I don’t go to Christian blogs and harass them for their beliefs* for that very reason. Christians coming here and telling us we’re wrong, on the other hand, is another story. Hence the reaction to Maggie.
*In the interest of full disclosure I will admit that I did, once or twice, visit Ray Comfort and Vox Day’s blogs and comment in response to some particularly inane drivel pertaining to Pharyngula, its Bearded Overlord and/or its regulars; I don’t anymore.
Leigh, (my emphasis)
Why the capitalisation? Do you really consider Jesus to have been/be divine?
Leigh, I have to say that’s the most comprehensible explanation of liberal Christianity I’ve ever seen, ever. I still don’t agree with it, and I still don’t understand how you could take it to have any truths about God if none of it is really true, but coming from an inerrant fundamentalist background, this is the most understandable liberal Christianity has ever seemed to me.
(unlike what some other people with the first initial of “Maggie” have written here)
Thanks for your reply. The ‘politeness’ was no means to imply you are fragile, but I’m trying to be a bit more diplomatic in the way I discuss things with others. Apparently I go on the attack a little too quickly so I’m trying to rectify that.
One question I had is how do you value contemporary theologians in the quest for you to understand God? Are they as important, if not more important than the authors of the books, and if so who are the stand-out men (or women) who you felt have advanced both your and humanity’s understanding of God?
Bill Dauphin and strange gods before me:
We don’t claim to have an absolute monopoly on caring about personal freedom. What we claim is that we are the only political group who believe in consistent maximisation of personal freedom in all areas of public policy. We don’t believe that social freedom is valuable without economic freedom, or vice versa.
Or at least most libertarians so claim. However…
OK… how about this? You, A, are standing outside a burning building. You know that there is a newborn baby, B, trapped inside. If you do nothing, B will die, while you will live. Conversely, if you rush inside the burning building to save B, there is a reasonable chance that you yourself will die. Would you take the risk, in order to have the chance to save both lives? Or would you stand by and save your own life while letting B die? You didn’t choose to be in this situation; it isn’t your fault. But you have a choice to make: your life or B’s?
Of course, I can hear you protesting that a foetus is not a baby. But…
…all of which is also true of a newborn baby.
In my example above, what should A do? What would you do in A’s position? And – the million dollar question – should the State step in and force A to do anything? Should he be prosecuted if he does not? The latter point, of course, is where freedom really becomes an issue.
In fact, real true-blue libertarians would absolutely agree with you. They would contend that no person should be forced, by the coercive power of the State, to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of someone else. They would argue that, however unethical A’s conduct in the above scenario may be, he would be acting perfectly within his rights to stand by, save himself and let the baby die. And they would argue that, in our earlier scenario, X is absolutely entitled to save her own life at the expense of Y’s – because her body is her own, not the State’s. Whether she should or not is immaterial; she is entitled to make her own choice. Sacrificing one’s own life for another’s is “part of the morality of aspiration, not the morality of duty.” It is not something which the State has a right to compel you to do.
And, indeed, I think they have a point. I will concede that, in my original example, X has a right to have an abortion and to save her own life at the expense of Y’s. I don’t think she should do so – just as A, in my second scenario, should risk his own life to save B’s. But I don’t have the right to force X, or A, to run the risk of death against their will.
Who knew that Wowie would write a post so brilliant that … well it didn’t exactly light up the night sky but is worth responding to, especially because it illustrates the problem of ignorant people pontificating about matters they do not (by their own admission!) understand:
1. Maggie’s ‘liberal’ Christianity, however, is another story.
Maggie is a very conservative Christian. She believes in the faith as summed up in the Nicene creed literally and without reservation. (http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/history/nicene381.html)
2. If you don’t take the whole of the bible as undeniable fact then you can’t take any of it as undeniable fact – because if the writers and editors and those who chose which parts to include and which to exclude were wrong about one part of it, who’s to say that they weren’t wrong about another part?
This is a fundamentalist’s understanding of the Bible, and an ignorant fundamentalist, at that, which treats it as a book dictated directly by God. How hard can it possibly be to understand that the Bible is a set of documents and is not a history textbook, a biology textbook, a physics textbook, a medical textbook, etc, etc, etc.
3. This is simply preposterous and demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of literature (of any kind): The genre defence is a piss-poor dodging of the fact that it’s reality that’s proven the OT to be false, not the ‘keen insight’ of ‘sophisticated Christians’. Something can be excluded because it’s written in verse? My example of The Ballad of Reading Gaol showed how empty that argument is – it contains both fact and device; you can’t just assume that one negates the other.
So when David writes that the mountains clapped their hands, he really thought mountains had hands, huh? Or, perhaps his bowels really did turn to liquid within him, since it is a *fact* that he really was miserable when he wrote that psalm?
4. More proof of utter ignorance: She should try arguing with a Greek Orthodox; that’s the real church Jesus founded – at least according to them (funnily enough). Yes, they are the church that Jesus founded. Orthodox Christians are recognized by the RCC as part of the Catholic Church, as are a whole bunch of Eastern Churches you have never heard of. (Funnily enough).
5. Maggie’s type want the bible to be invincible. It isn’t, and they just can’t cope with that – because admitting it would mean they wouldn’t be able to stand up and do what they love to do most – instruct other people on how they should live. Invincible? That is another one of those polysyllabic words you are misusing. I suppose you mean inerrant and I, like virtually everyone else in Christendom, define inerrancy as “The scriptures properly interpreted”. It kinda makes a difference how you interpret it, ya know? Like, it is stupid to take literally what is meant figuratively. But heck, Augustine already said that 1700 years ago, didn’t he? But that didn’t convince you.
6. Can anyone parse this? Christians, as I see it, have to live with the dilemma that, because a large part of their holy book clearly isn’t perfect (or even close to reality in some parts), they can never be 100% sure of anything else in it either. What does perfect mean in this context? You are so mixed up it isn’t funny. The question is– does the Bible tell us what God wants us to know about him, his purposes and how we are to live or does it not? The answer to that is yes. Does it tell us everything we want to know about everything? No.
7. This is hilarious. I don’t go to Christian blogs and harass them for their beliefs* for that very reason. Christians coming here and telling us we’re wrong, on the other hand, is another story. Hence the reaction to Maggie. Your inability to interpret the written word is pretty comprehensive. I am not hear to “harass” you about your beliefs. I am here to set you straight about ours. Show some dim comprehension of that, and I will rest content.
Finally, since you asked so nicely, I will tell you that I know and have known all the meanings of incarnation for many, many years. Even using it to mean “embody” which is the same thing as “in flesh” (in body), you misused the word in the context you used it in. Let’s return to the scene of the crime:
If your view of Christianity was universal (historically and contemporaneously) then I would have, as they say, no leg to stand on. But it’s a demonstrable fact that Christianity has changed, and changed much. Why? Because you and other Christians are as (or almost as) liberal and scientifically literate as the society they belong to.
So, you abandon the parts that don’t fit the current incarnation
Incarnation of what? What has been embodied? What? This simply doesn’t mean anything here.
You mean something like: “abandon the parts that don’t fit the current understanding” or “the current fashion” or “point of view” or ???
By the way, how has Christianity changed and “changed much”? Have we stopped believing in the resurrection? Have we stopped believing in his atoning death? Have we stopped believing that he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead? Have we stopped believing in heaven/hell? Do tell …
Uhm… maggie seems to have lost her bite. I call April Fools on that one (#797).
Actually, I think Wowie has pulled.
And I thought Clinteas was into catholic women.
Maggie lied! She came back! Mags, you promised. Jesus doesn’t like it when you lie.
This is a fundamentalist’s understanding of the Bible, and an ignorant fundamentalist, at that, which treats it as a book dictated directly by God. How hard can it possibly be to understand that the Bible is a set of documents and is not a history textbook, a biology textbook, a physics textbook, a medical textbook, etc, etc, etc.
Fucking hell, Maggie, then what is it a set of documents about? The only answer left to you is that it’s a set of documents about the nature of God. Ok, if so, how did people find out about this God? Was it a divine revelation? If so, you would have to agree that those documents were inspired by God himself, yes? And if so, then why would he allow it to be so shoddy and full of errors? Either God inspired it and it’s entirely correct, God inspired it and he’s incompetent to get his meaning across, or it’s all made up.
Maggie, have you met Heddle?
Look, here’s the point. These two statements cannot both be true:
1. The Bible is inerrant.
2. The Bible is demonstrably wrong in many particulars.
Statement #2 is true. Now you (and Heddle and every other intelligent, educated christian) have to resort to semantic quibbling and scrambling sophistry to preserve #1. Your way is to condescendingly claim some insight, presumably denied the rest of us mere mortals, as to how each Biblical sentence should be interpreted. But your interpretations are subjective and, in many cases, contradicted by other equally intelligent and educated people’s interpretations. What makes your ideas more correct, other than your off-puttingly snide and superior attitude?
Pay up Ichthyic. Meet you at the saloon, first round is on me.
Maggie, your reappearance confirmed you are not a TRUTH teller, so everything you say is supsect. Also we really don’t give a shit about your beliefs, just your insistance upon foisting them upon us. Which.must.stop. That is proselystizing. We won’t refute your idiocy if you keep it to yourself.
You have a profoundly parochial view of Christianity if you think it is co-extensive with Catholicism. There are indeed varieties of Christianity that don’t believe those various things, although I’m pretty sure that Catholicism calls them “heretics”. Here’s an extremely cursory list of examples:
Have we stopped believing in the resurrection?
Docetism
Have we stopped believing in his atoning death?
Docetism
Have we stopped believing that he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead?
Full Preterism (or “Hyper-Preterism”)
Have we stopped believing in heaven/hell?
Socinianism rejected hell.
Of course, some of these beliefs aren’t around any more. For example, the docetistic Cathars were pretty much wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade by…the Catholic Church. (This is, of course, the Crusade that gave us the phrase “Kill them all and let God sort it out”, or more accurately, “Kill them all. God will know His own”, uttered by the Papal legate Arnaud-Amaury before the massacre of the city of Béziers, in which everyone, man, woman and child, regardless of religion, was murdered by the Catholic forces.)
Do you honestly believe that Christianity is only what you (or the pope) think it is?
Simon,
Seriously, piss off.
Maggie is an educated and reasonably articulate defender of Christianity; I don’t agree with much (if any) of what she says, but she adds a valid point of view to the discussion.
You, by contrast, seem to veer between hate-filled rants, misogyny and downright incoherence. I haven’t seen a single occasion on which you’ve added anything remotely useful to the discussion. I don’t know if you’re posting here for some kind of twisted fun, but I wish you’d stop. Some of us are actually trying to have a civilised conversation about important issues.
Simon, you’ve been banned. Trying to get around the filters and post anyway is terribly pathetic. Go find a place your kind would be welcome. I suggest /b/.
And those who did not were killed. That’s supposed to make it better?
So which part of my post are you denying? That all the occupants of Béziers, including women and children, Cathar and Catholic, were not all massacred? Did you even read the Wikipedia entry that you linked to? It quotes the letter of Arnaud-Amaury to the pope, which read in part: “Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt.”
Sounds like a charming religion, no?
Maggie @769
Let’s take a sober assesment then.
It was weighed and found wanting.
No disagreement from me here.
Agreed. You should try it. Especially the historical bit.
To me neither. Again, you should practice what you preach.
Read your first post again, number 191. You came in all guns blazing, presented no evidence, and anything presented to you that you did not accept, you dismissed with Ad Hominem and unsupported assertion. And the only person who appears to have flown into a foaming, incoherent rage is you.
You gave us so much material to prove you incorrect, how could we resist.
Well that didn’t last long. Seriously, what are you doing here?
_____________<;,><_____________
Walton, well said.
And that justifies killing all the children? All the women? All the noncombatant men? What kind of monster are you?
(I should just note that I find it particularly appropriate that we have begun to talk about an incident of Church-approved slaughter of children in the thread on abortion.)
Walton:
Re your “burning building” scenario (@796)…
Actually, not so much. If A does nothing, she lives and B dies; if A attempts a rescue, the most probable outcomes are that both live or both die. Notwithstanding TV-drama images of dying heroes using their last drop of life-force to toss the baby out a window into the waiting arms of a firefighter on the street, it’s hard to imagine any large number of practical scenarios in which A actually trades her life for B’s, as your formulation suggests… and it’s especially hard to imagine such an outlier scenario playing any important part of A’s decision-making process in real time.
I’m not an emergency worker or first responder, but AFAIK people who are in those positions are generally trained to put their own safety first, specifically because it’s almost impossible to save someone else’s life when you’re in the process of losing your own.
Of course, your scenario is a bad analogy for abortion (and especially for late-term abortion). The pregnant woman isn’t similar to an innocent bystander, trying to decide whether to risk her life in service of a stranger; instead, she’s more analogous to the building: There’s an ongoing crisis (remember that we’ve established virtually all late-term abortions are matters of urgent medical necessity), and she is potentially in competition with her “inhabitant” for the time and resources necessary to effect a rescue. Of course, the abortion scenario is morally inverted from the burning building scenario: Because the woman is a person rather than an inanimate structure, she has moral rights; because her “inhabitant” is a fetus rather than a baby, it does not. So while saving both the “building” and the “inhabitant” is obviously the best possible result (keep in mind also that the pregnancy is probably wanted, since most unwanted pregnancies will have been terminated earlier, if at all), if it comes to a choice between woman and fetus, it strikes me as a crystal clear one.
I’m fascinated by your comment that…
Even though I don’t necessarily agree that women should risk their own lives in favor of their fetuses (more, that is, than the considerable extent to which they are already doing so by being pregnant in the first place), I certainly agree that they shouldn’t be compelled by law to do so.
That said, I’m interested in your suggestion that there are things people ought to do, from some moral perspective, that contradict their individual interests and sovereign rights. In the absence of a belief in divinely ordained moral absolutes, it seems to me that contention (with which I substantially agree) depends on the understanding that there’s something distinct from, and larger than, the individual, with interests and moral rights of its own. <ChurchLady>Could it beeeeee…. society?!?!?</ChurchLady>
There may be hope for you yet, m’boy! ;^)
So maggie is a liar. I did not see that coming.
No. It depends on the understanding that other individuals matter, and on a desire to put their lives ahead of one’s own.
I would distinguish between the morality of aspiration and the morality of duty.
No rational person wishes to live in a society in which the strong are entirely free to prey on the weak, as there is always someone stronger than oneself. If, say, I were to steal the possessions of those weaker than myself when it pleased me to do so, I could hardly complain if someone stronger than myself were to do the same to me. Accordingly, in order to prevent this, we invent the concepts of “rights” and “duties”. The duties come with the rights, because if we wish others to respect our rights, we must in turn respect theirs. All such duties are entirely negative in character; it is not possible to owe a positive moral duty to another person. This kind of morality is obligatory, and the legitimate purpose of the State (the only legitimate purpose of the State) is to enforce it.
Conversely, the morality of aspiration consists of altruistic self-denial over and above the fundamental duties which we owe to one another. I do not have a duty to give money to a starving beggar in the street, and I feel no particular guilt when I do not do so. He has done nothing for me and I owe him nothing. But when I do give money to a starving beggar in the street, I feel good about myself – and the fundamental reason for this, I believe, is that if our roles were reversed, I would like him to do the same for me. This latter type of morality – which we may term the morality of aspiration – is not something which should be enforced by the State, nor does it relate to rights and duties. It relates to things we ought to do, not things we must do.
There is nothing un-libertarian about recognising this distinction. The morally objectionable thing about taxation-funded “social welfare” programmes is not that they help the poor, or that they constitute a sacrifice of individual interests; rather, it is that they are coercive in character. Essentially, the State robs one person (A) at the point of a gun in order to provide for another person (B). A is therefore, in a sense, being enslaved by B; the wealth that he earns through his labour is being confiscated for B’s benefit, so he is working for B’s benefit without remuneration.
But if A wants to volunteer his wealth in order to provide for B, he is doing something morally good. He is not fulfilling a duty; he is going beyond his duty, and, of his own free will, sacrificing himself for a benefit of another. And why is his action in this instance a morally laudable one? It is because, if their roles were reversed, A now has a reasonable expectation that B will do the same for him.
While I have attempted to provide an objective, rational justification for the “morality of aspiration”, this kind of morality is fundamentally individual in character, whereas the morality of duty is collective in character. Everyone in a given community has the same rights and owes the same duties to one another; this is a given, as the coercive character of such rights and duties could not otherwise be enforced. If I were to claim suddenly that I have, say, a “right” to dance naked in the street, and were to do so in the middle of Podunk, Idaho, my self-proclaimed “right” would not be respected. So the morality of duty is collective in character, because our rights and duties are defined by consensus of the community. Conversely, the morality of aspiration is completely individual and is defined by each individual for himself. For some people, for instance, one of their “moral aspirations” is to live a life of celibacy and chastity. Others see this as a completely pointless form of self-denial. It doesn’t matter, because this is a category of morality which one chooses for oneself and for one’s own lifestyle.
Sorry for this rambling post of waffle (I realise this thread is getting rather long, but, in my defence, most of that was produced by Maggie and her antagonists). But I thought this was an interesting point which was worth exploring.
Self-correction:
This is, of course, wrong – I neglected to consider the moral duty, for example, to keep one’s promise under a contract, or to perform one’s professional duties with skill and care. Rather, it would be better to say that there can be no positive moral duty imposed on a person unless that person undertakes it voluntarily.
Still, no one has satisfactorily explained the distinction, in terms of moral rights and moral capacities, between an 8.5-month foetus and a newborn baby.
Still, no one has satisfactorily explained the distinction, in terms of moral rights and moral capacities, between an 8.5-month foetus and a newborn baby.
You just don’t like the answer, Walton, which you’ve been given many times: the difference is the health of the mother. Perhaps this issue will become moot when babies can be Star Trek teleported out of the womb upon reaching the optimal moment of health and independent viability, and anti-abortion hysterics actually begin to behave like they give two shits about newborns, instead of being a load of misgynist boot-heels who regard women as nothing more than vaguely sentient wombs, but the rest of us try to deal with things the way they are while working to make things better.
Look, Walton, this is all some bizarre abstraction to you. Pregnancy terms are discussed in terms of weeks, not months, so your 8.5 month fetus would be said to be 38 weeks. Biology is messy, and non-deterministic. As I’ve had to learn the hard way, not every pregnancy is going to result in live birth. We have only two children rather than three because our first pregnancy ended in a stillbirth at 41 weeks (a first pregnancy often extends past 40 weeks) and medical caution was against inducing labor. We induced labor on our second pregnancy at 39 weeks, and for our girl at 36, when her behavior changed dramatically and it was time for her to come out. We’re very sad to have lost what might have been our first child, but it would be insane to view it as some sort of manifestation of divine will–that’s utter batshit madness. It’s senseless to equate potential with realization. Nature is profligate, and wasteful. A human pregnancy is a tremendous, life-changing investment in energy and resources, a human life, that of my wife’s, far more so. If it was between her and that 41 week pregnancy, no question, that potential life remains potential, end of story. It’s not an outcome we would have wanted either way; people who are expecting to be parents, and suddenly find out that they aren’t, undergo tremendous grief on a deeply hormonal level. A neonatal unit is the worst possible place to recover because you’re keyed to respond to the sound of a newborn, only none of them are yours. We had to fend off an idiot priest who thought we’d be comforted by his effort to assign deep cosmic meaning, and he got an earful from the two atheists he wasn’t expecting to encounter. We had to end up comforting him. People are just deeply fucked up about a load of superstitious bollocks around biology, and catholics are the worst.
Oh, I know this. I was just having a go at Walton. He has trouble understanding concepts that are not formulated for easy digestion by his ideology. Hence my translation.
And so I was saying that since legal restrictions are going to almost exclusively affect women who need this surgery, those who nevertheless seek their necessary surgery on the black market will be made criminals. I still think my comment was relevant to yours, but it may have been more of an extrapolation than a translation.
thanks, Ken
Oh, dear. Don’t you all find this incoherent rage, exhausting? Is there really nothing valuable to be found in learning where your ideas are incomplete or totally off-base?
Carlie said:
Maggie lied! She came back! Mags, you promised. Jesus doesn’t like it when you lie.
I made no promise. I said I was done unless something *really, really* interesting (brilliant) got said. Wowie came close enough.
Fucking hell, Maggie, then what is it a set of documents about? The only answer left to you is that it’s a set of documents about the nature of God. Ok, if so, how did people find out about this God? Was it a divine revelation?
Yes. God revealed himself and still does.
If so, you would have to agree that those documents were inspired by God himself, yes?
Yes, indeed.
And if so, then why would he allow it to be so shoddy and full of errors?
Shoddy is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It doesn’t make sense to me applied to an ancient document rather than to, say, the construction of a fence, but whatever.
Either God inspired it and it’s entirely correct, God inspired it and he’s incompetent to get his meaning across, or it’s all made up.
Ah! Here’s the problem! Two of your propositions are false. God inspired it; he got his meaning across. Proof? How many millions of followers have there been since 7:32 a.m. July, 7, 33 AD? (Keeping in mind that someone would surely try to argue the date with me, I added lots of detail that should indicate to the alert reader something of value about my choice of year. Lets see if adding it here prevents unnecessary huffing and puffing).
If that many people in so many different places, in so many different cultures have gotten it over the last 2000 years, I’d say the book and its ultimate author have done the job. After all, a number of those documents state plainly that many will reject the message. Covering all the bases, as it were.
Then Sven jumped into battle, guns ablaze!
But your interpretations are subjective and, in many cases, contradicted by other equally intelligent and educated people’s interpretations. What makes your ideas more correct, other than your off-puttingly snide and superior attitude?
Interpretations that are entirely subjective aren’t worth a damn. Interpretations based on sound understanding of the language, religious beliefs, history and culture of the author and his audience are extremely helpful in elucidating the meaning of the text. Moreover, there is not usually one “right” interpretation of most texts. It would be more accurate to say that there are often several plausible readings that have been offered. Some have stronger support than others– all that are truly evidence-based add to our understanding of the text.
“My ideas” are not my ideas. They are common, ordinary, run of the mill ideas shared widely by educated Christians and found in most of the commentaries the RCC uses in its many scripture studies aimed at non-scholarly and scholarly Christians alike. In my case, most of my understanding of the OT has been deeply influenced by Jewish scholarship. Two accessible, major stars in that firmament are Robert Alter and Gary Rendsberg. That last is Chair of the Dept. of Jewish Studies at Rutgers and many of his articles can be read here: (http://jewishstudies.rutgers.edu/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=132&Itemid=5). Anyone who wants to take the trouble can take several non-credit Jewish Studies course online at Rutgers (findable from that link) where much of interest and value can be learned.
Not everyone pretends to an understanding of serious, complex matters the way you folks do. In fairness, I think most of you really don’t know that biblical scholarship is made up of a large number of serious disciplines and not all of them are themselves “religious”. There is nothing inherently religious about becoming fluent in Hebrew or Ugaritic or Greek. Nor is there in specializing in mid-eastern archaelogy. Or in specializing in ancient history. I rather imagine that you don’t know that there are no religious tests for entry into graduate school in any one of the dozens of disciplines that feed New and Old Testament study. There are atheists (as you know) working in the field and, I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to turn up the odd Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, as well.
Tulse Oh, dear. Are you Humpty-Dumpty? Did all the King’s horses and all the King’s men but you back together again? Hallelujah! It’s a miracle!
Words do not mean whatever you say they mean. Anyone who rejects the faith, as summarized in the Nicene creed or in the other Christian creeds, is not a Christian. That doesn’t make them bad people and it doesn’t mean that their beliefs did not have their origin in Christianity, as say the Mormons’ beliefs did. It does mean that they are not Christians and it is not accurate to describe them that way.
Maggie, Yawn, you still haven’t shown evidence your imaginary god exists, without which your bible is fiction and your church’s dogma is nonsense.
Walton @ #796:
Rejecting all emotional arguments: If it’s really just a straight choice, then surely it’s better to save the life of an adult — in whom considerable time and effort have already been invested in the form of an education, and who through their work is making a valuable contribution to society — than a baby who can be replaced more or less at will?
(Anyone horrified by the above — which, I freely admit, is brutal — is invited to supply a counter-argument not based principally on appeal to emotion.)
Irony, thy name is maggie.
An argument from popularity? Surely you know that christianity loses any such calculations pretty badly.
* eye roll*
Forgive me for forgetting your strange semantic literal-mindedness. By “your ideas” I meant “the ideas you are espounding.” And their popularity among Catholics is irrelevant.
What my comment was specifically aimed at but you wiggled right away from was that the “ideas” used to rationalize biblical inerrancy by one group (say, Catholics, or certain scholars of biblical-studies) are quite different from those used by others (Baptists, Calvinists, other groups of biblical-studies scholars). Yet you steadfastly proclaim the correctness of the RCC view. That’s a subjective choice, not a rational conclusion.
Funny, that’s exactly what I believe.
That, and that unrestrained capitalism is not conducive to economic freedom.
I’m not going to get into this right now; it’s been explained to you before by SC, Knockgoats and others. I’m just not going to let that little pile of rhetoric slip by unprotested.
No, at that point I was protesting that you’re conflating a voluntary choice with government force, so your analogy is absolutely worthless and irrelevant. Makes no sense to bring it up, except that you’re determined to keep talking about how, since you’ll never have an abortion, you are morally superior to women.
Quack quack quack. Thanks for the duckspeak.
(It’s sad to see you constantly subordinating your individual identity like this to the group identity of whoever’s affirmations you’re seeking. Used to be “real conservatives this and real conservatives that.” Now it’s “real libertarians.” Nobody cares. Yes, I make fun of you for being a libertarian borg drone. But I’m trying to talk to you, Seven of Nine. Not the collective.)
That’s nice. It’s nice that you have the unexamined male privilege that allows you to say all this with such conviction.
In your burning building, you can’t conclusively say that you would run in to save the baby. It depends. Is there just smoke coming out the front door, or are there huge flames billowing out? You won’t have the courage to run directly into a huge conflagration, a wall of fire, particularly if looking further into the building, you can’t see a safer place to run to. If there’s just more flames behind the flames, your fear reaction will win. Has the fire been burning for only a couple of minutes, or is the frame visibly straining as the fire consumes it? If you subconsciously detect that the house is about to collapse, your amygdala will decide for you, “nope, not going in there!” Do you have a wet cloth to cover your nose and mouth? No matter how determined you are, once you start to inhale too much smoke, you will fall to the floor, and you’ll be lucky if you can crawl back out the door to your own safety. Etc, etc.
These circumstances are analogous to the woman’s circumstances in my comment 767. You can no more predict what you would do than you can predict what she should do.
Well, you were saying this before, while you were defending the current law. Do you now believe late term restrictions should be lifted, or are you still courting hypocrisy?
Walton:
Yes, yes… but what could possibly motivate such a desire, other than belief in some moral “infrastructure” larger than one’s own self? In the context of a strict belief in personal sovereignty, what could possibly make it sensible for individuals to put others’ lives ahead of their own? Some level of personal sacrifice makes sense, if there’s an expectation that it might be returned in kind (or a fear that failing to make the sacrifice will have some cost that matches the risk)… but mortal sacrifice can’t be motivated in this way, since there’s no possibility of reward or punishment after death (n.b., if we were talking about a belief system that included judgment after death, and presumably a supernatural lawgiver, this would become a whole ‘nother conversation). Why would anyone risk death on behalf of an unrelated stranger? It’s easy to wave your arms and attribute it to altruism, but where does the altruism come from?
My own answer is that most of us understand that our own lives and wellbeing depend utterly on the health and wellbeing of the society within which we live. Without the web of other people and their actions and works, none of us could long survive (nor, I imagine, would many of us care to). As John Donne put it, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
That being the case, we assign moral value to behaviors that tend to defend, preserve, and improve the society upon which we all depend, and we understand that those behaviors sometimes involve personal sacrifices, whether small ones like paying taxes or big ones like risking ones’ life for others.
You seem to be invoking a sort of Golden Rule sense of moral reciprocity as the source of altruism, and I agree as far as that goes. But it seems to me that recognizing the moral equivalency of others to yourself is incompatible with a strict belief in personal sovereignty. Once you admit that others’ rights are equal to your own, and observe that the world consists of more than just individuals or bilaterally reciprocal pairs of individuals, you are irredeemably sliding down the slippery slope to the conclusion that society is!
You say…
…and that strikes me as indisputably true. But then you go on to complain that the formalization of society’s rules — aka “the State” — is inherently coercive. I think coercive is a rhetorically loaded term, and would prefer something like mandatory or compulsory, but leaving my rhetorical quibbles aside… how could it be otherwise?
How do you imagine “society” can possibly be structured so as to prevent the strong from being “entirely free to prey on the weak,” except through mandatory regulation? Even if you posit (as I do not) some external (supernatural?) impulse to otherwise irrational altruism, evidence suggests that not everyone possesses it, and as you yourself say, “there is always someone stronger than oneself.” Inevitably, some of these stronger someones will not have any personal impulse to altruism, and thus will prey on the weak unless they are stopped. How do you expect to get bullies to stop bullying without employing some level of “coercion”?
For society to stop such behavior in any sustainable, nondiscriminatory way, everyone must be prepared to subordinate their individual sovereignty, to some degree, to the collective sovereignty of the group: If any individual is “above the rules,” then for all practical purposes there are no rules, and thus no mechanism for preventing predatory behavior… and you’ve already agreed that predatory behavior is A Bad Thing™.
You may persist in your belief that the state is “coercive”; I persist in my belief that absent some sort of state (and I’m always eager to work on perfecting it), life itself is unsustainable. Much as I hate to invoke teh Bibble, it’s a cast-your-bread-upon-the-waters situation: Each of us casts some of our personal liberty upon the waters of society, and it comes back to us in the form of all of our liberty and rights, which depend entirely on the existence of society.
Walton, #813: Still, no one has satisfactorily explained the distinction, in terms of moral rights and moral capacities, between an 8.5-month foetus and a newborn baby.
If you mean in terms of moral rights and moral capacities of the fetus/baby, then, personally, I don’t think there is one, but that may just be me.
But there is one important practical distinction: if a woman doesn’t want to be a mother, newborn baby is much, much easier to remove from the mother without killing it than removing a fetus.
strange gods:
Fair enough; thanks for the clarification.
You don’t get to keep asserting this, when I’ve done it at least twice now — at 767 and the October comment that links to — and you’ve never contested that part of my reasoning.
Sven: You aren’t up to witty repartee much less real argument. I have not offered an ad populam argument for anything. Go look up “ad populam” and then take a look at the issue I was actually responding to.
And their [my ideas} popularity among Catholics is irrelevant.
It is highly relevant. The issue was the lame charge Wowie levelled that I was picking and choosing what I believe and what I don’t and that I was offering my pecular and individual read on matters. He was wrong. So are you.
What my comment was specifically aimed at but you wiggled right away from was that the “ideas” used to rationalize biblical inerrancy by one group (say, Catholics, or certain scholars of biblical-studies) are quite different from those used by others (Baptists, Calvinists, other groups of biblical-studies scholars).
Well, no they aren’t “quite different”. They are expressed somewhat differently to try and get at a nuanced view of what we mean. But they cannot be very different or the word “inerrancy” loses its meaning and expresses nothing.
Yet you steadfastly proclaim the correctness of the RCC view.
Wrong again, young fella. In fact, it came as quite a revelation to some of you when I finally told you that I was Catholic. At least one of you had a whole ‘nother notion of what I must be to hold the views I do.
I think you need to get together and get your stories straight. Or, maybe, you need to get together with someone who actually understands RCC views and other Christians’ views and examine what has been said here in the light of what you learn from that person (or from those persons) about the culture, religious beliefs, language and history of modern Christianity. It’s called … now wait for it … intelligent reading! (Has Wowie’s head exploded?) Reading that is critical and informed.
And for heaven’s sake! Stop feeding the troll!
What does “God” mean? What does “death” mean”? What does “sin” mean?
So… “Christian” means whatever you say it means, Humpty-Dumpty?
Not everyone pretends to an understanding of serious, complex matters the way you folks do. In fairness, I think most of you really don’t know that biblical scholarship is made up of a large number of serious disciplines and not all of them are themselves “religious”. There is nothing inherently religious about becoming fluent in Hebrew or Ugaritic or Greek. Nor is there in specializing in mid-eastern archaelogy. Or in specializing in ancient history. I rather imagine that you don’t know that there are no religious tests for entry into graduate school in any one of the dozens of disciplines that feed New and Old Testament study. There are atheists (as you know) working in the field and, I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard to turn up the odd Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, as well.
Bah. more of your arrogance. Yes, we know all this, we pretended nothing, and, funny thing! Those scholars who are not involved in Christian apologetics, but who subject the New Testament to the same type of analysis as they would any other ancient texts, have come to the conclusion that the gospels have their origin in a scribal tradition, an active and deliberate process of mythmaking, not in an oral tradition transmitting eyewitness accounts of anything.
Anyone who rejects the faith, as summarized in the Nicene creed or in the other Christian creeds, is not a Christian. That doesn’t make them bad people…
What about Bishop Spong? In your words, he “is a heretic who needs to debunk Christianity, since he is an atheist who didn’t have the minimal integrity required to get out of the church and stop pontificating on its dime, once he decided it was all bunk.”
But, other than that, he’s a stand-up guy!
They always come back. They say they’re gonna leave, but they always come back.
No Maggie, you need to get your story straight. It is veering off in all directions. You are a proven liar, so we discount everything you say. Keep that in mind.
maggie @#817:
I guess “ad populam” is another phrase that means only what maggie means (or rather, does not mean) by it…
(July 7??? Oh, right. Because maggie says July 7.)
I suspect I’m going to have to spell this out anyway, though.
The woman’s life is objectively more valuable than the fetus’s or the newborn’s. So the difference between the fetus and the newborn is: protecting one forces us to endanger the woman, to whom we own greater moral consideration, while protecting the other does not. This is why the fetus’s interests cannot be granted the same consideration as the newborn’s.
Excellent, that means God is subject to empirical inquiry. Now all you have to do is devise a potentially-falsifiable test that can demonstrate the existence of God… otherwise all you are doing is a baseless assertion.
Well, I think a sober assessment will demonstrate that I have tried very hard to stick to factual matters
ah, so that’s what it was, you were so drunk you couldn’t see straight.
now that you’re sober, what is your assessment of your posts?
*looks at new posts from Maggie*
oh, wait…
you’re still drunk.
nevermind.
btw, I bet 4 quatloos on your early return. who do I see around here to collect?
God inspired it; he got his meaning across. Proof? How many millions of followers have there been since 7:32 a.m. July, 7, 33 AD?
Are you kidding me? How many denominations of Christianity have there been since then? How many are there right now? (about 38,000 according to Christianity Today) Do you know why they all exist? They exist precisely because the Bible does a terrible job of getting meaning across, and it’s interpretable in hundreds of different ways. Let’s take something simple, like the ordinance (sacrament, if you like) of baptism. Should infants be baptized as a sign that they are going to be brought up in the church, or baptized because they can’t get to Heaven if they aren’t baptized, or should only adults be baptized because it’s a public declaration of a decision made after the age of accountability?
Take any piece of information you want out of the Bible, and there are hundreds to thousands of interpretations, many at absolute odds with each other. How can that possibly be getting God’s meaning across?
Maggie is an educated and reasonably articulate defender of Christianity
Were you drinking with her, Walton?
for shame.
Bill Dauphin at #823:
I take your point, but I reiterate the absolutely crucial distinction I was drawing between the morality of aspiration and the morality of duty.
The “morality of duty” consists of a few basic rules: do not interfere with your neighbour’s person or property, keep your contractual obligations, etc. These are things that, as you correctly point out, must be imposed coercively by the State – because if these rules are not enforced, the weak become victims of the strong, and the strong, in turn, become victims of the stronger. I’m certainly not advocating the abolition of the State. Indeed, I emphatically believe that the State should vigorously enforce private property rights and contracts, protect peace and order, and ensure that the strong are not able to coerce the weak. That is the purpose of the State.
The “morality of aspiration”, on the other hand, constitutes (in the vernacular) doing nice things for other people. It constitutes things which you need not do, but which you choose to do, going above and beyond what your neighbour has a right to expect of you. And why is it good to do these things? Because, if your positions are reversed, your neighbour may do the same for you someday.
Doing something positive to benefit another person, at your own expense, is generally part of the morality of aspiration, not the morality of duty. Assuming you owe them no contractual obligation (nor any analogous duty, such as that of a parent to their child), you are not morally obliged to help them. But if you choose to do so, I would say that you have performed a morally good act. To put it another way; it is not immoral to fail to help your neighbour, but it is moral to help your neighbour.
Does this make any sense? I am, of course, inventing this on the spot, and I apologise if it isn’t coherent.
What part of “contains both fact and device” didn’t you understand?
Why is the Nicene Creed the standard? By whose criteria? Catholics? You do realize that a large number of people who call themselves evangelical Christians argue that Catholics are not actually Christians, right? And that, by the standard of sola scriptura, since the creed doesn’t appear in the Bible, it is by no means authoritative? How do you respond to them without courting Humpty-Dumptyism?
And when you say “the Nicene creed or in other Christian creeds“, how is that not circular? How do you distinguish which other creeds pass muster as Christian? For example, the Apostles’ Creed, which as you know is used in most Catholic services, is earlier than the Nicene, and thus doesn’t explicitly address issues relevant to such “heresies” as Arianism and Unitarianism. So are those heresies Christian or not? For that matter, “the” Nicene Creed actually went through several revisions — the “original” in 325 C.E., then 381 C.E., (the “Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed”) and then the “Filioque” controversy in the sixth century (which was partially responsible for the East-West Schism, possibly implying that, by your standards, even the Eastern Orthodox Church is not “Christian”). So which of these are the “real” Nicene Creed, and which are only professed by “non-Christians”? What standard do you use to tell?
The same could be said for the Qur’an (and there are more adherents of Islam that Catholicism in the world). Are you really going to argue numbers? Especially when the percentage of Christians worldwide is dropping, and the percentage of Muslims is increasing?
You’ve completely and utterly misunderstood what I was saying, not for the first time. I am not a true-blue libertarian, of the type to which I was referring. I’m a rather milquetoast “classical liberal”. All political ideologies are a spectrum, not a homogeneous group. I’m not a Rothbard or a Rand.
Unlike the more hardcore libertarians, I do believe that, in addition to defending private property rights and enforcing contracts, there is a legitimate role for the state in providing a minimal level of support to those who cannot support themselves. (So did Friedman and Hayek, incidentally; indeed, Friedman advocated a “negative income tax”.)
So no, I do not subordinate my personal views to those of a mythical “collective”. Indeed, the libertarians I know are among the people least likely to take that kind of approach; unsurprisingly, many of them are rampant individualists (and some are rather asocial). I disagree profoundly on many things with many of the people who fall within the “libertarian” spectrum. I am much less of an isolationist on foreign policy than the mainstream of libertarians. I’m not in favour of legalising all (hard) drugs (though I strongly support legalising marijuana). And don’t even mention monetary policy (an area in which all the leading thinkers of libertarianism are passionately divided amongst themselves). Not to mention, of course: abortion.
Accuse me of being a lunatic or a callous bastard all you like; you’re not the first to say so, nor will you be the last. But don’t accuse me of following the crowd.
CJO– Spong hasn’t been a Christian for a very long time. Are you going to tell me you don’t know that? What exactly don’t you understand in such claims as– Christianity is bankrupt, Jesus was not resurrected, there was no virgin birth, there were no miracles, God does not answer prayer etc. ad nauseum?
Or are you asserting that I am saying he is a bad person? If so, that is absurd. The OED defines “heresy” as:
1. a. Theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the ‘catholic’ or orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox.
I don’t see anything there about the personal moral qualities of the heretic.
Kel– Excellent, that means God is subject to empirical inquiry
Nope. That is silly beyond any belief.
Owlmirror doesn’t understand the meaning of “ad populam” either. Sad. Very sad. I sense a pattern emerging here of people using words and concepts they don’t understand. There is a nice definition to be found here: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-popularity.html
When you have read it, see if you can make a case that anything I stated demonstrates such an appeal.
Yet in modern times, the fastest growing religion is Islam. Should we conclude from that Muhammad was the final prophet of God and that the Koran is God’s revealed word? It would be more likely if Jesus were a prophet as opposed to a man-god. But I’m sure you’d object to that, for the same reason we are objecting to your rationale. It’s an argumentum ad populum, an appeal to the masses. Never mind it’s a bad one what with Christianity largely spreading through political means more than anything else.
How many denominations of Christianity have there been since then?
OTOH, how many sects of Judaism are there?
5 (3 if you go conservative).
One wonders what happened to xians to make them so much more confused about a bunch of old texts.
oh, that’s right, that whole “christ is god” thing.
heh.
A certain arrogant troll does not understand the difference between tradition and history.
I sense a pattern emerging here of people using words and concepts they don’t understand.
LOL
more projection.
seriously, girl, stop with the drinking already. Your liver will thank you.
Proverbs 6:16-19
Of course it is, for actually asking for evidence to support an extraordinary claim? That would be heretical! Rather the only way to know God is to take someone else’s word for it that God talked to them… and dismiss those people of other religions who claim divine revelation (such as the Indian gurus) as being self-deceived!
You have been waiting to that one, haven’t you Chimpy? I wonder if the arrogant troll dismisses that as being literary?
He’s an Episcopalian Bishop! You say he’s not a Christian.
Or are you asserting that I am saying he is a bad person? If so, that is absurd. The OED defines “heresy” as…
I was thinking more of “didn’t have the minimal integrity required to get out of the church and stop pontificating on its dime”
How does the OED define “minimal integrity”?
Does anyone else find it absurd that maggie talks like God interacting in this universe is a fact that you’d be a moron not to acknowledge, yet when it comes time to move beyond assertion any attempt to test God is dismissed. Why is that magaggie? Why can’t you back up any of what you say with evidence?
Carlie– it is amazing to me that you have so many factual matters right but still can’t draw the right conclusions from them.
Let’s see. I said:
God inspired it; he got his meaning across. Proof? How many millions of followers have there been since 7:32 a.m. July, 7, 33 AD?
You replied: Are you kidding me? How many denominations of Christianity have there been since then? How many are there right now? (about 38,000 according to Christianity Today) Do you know why they all exist? They exist precisely because the Bible does a terrible job of getting meaning across, and it’s interpretable in hundreds of different ways.
This is simply not true. The core beliefs of Protestants and Catholics are the same in the essentials. That is why Protestants are part of the Church, as the Catechism clearly states.
You have used baptism as an example. Yes there are differences of understanding about it. But we all agree that is it a necessity.
Take any piece of information you want out of the Bible, and there are hundreds to thousands of interpretations, many at absolute odds with each other. How can that possibly be getting God’s meaning across?
Seems to me that we all agree that Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God. We all agree that he was crucified, died and was buried. We agree that he rose again on the third day in fulfillment of the scriptures. That there will be a final judgment and that those found in Christ will be with him for ever and that those who have rejected him will be allowed to have their way and end up in hell. These are the essentials. We are all in agreement on them.
I must say that I am glad you have brought up “sola scriptura” because it answers your own question about the 38000 Protestant bodies. Obviously, if everyone can interpret the Bible for himself, no matter how limited his understanding (brains, I mean, not to be coy about it); no matter how limited his education; no matter how mentally and emotionally stable he is (think Fred Phelps), the only wonder is that there aren’t more than 38,000. Yet Catholicism is still larger than all 38,000 denominations added together. We lose sight of that because Protestantism dominates in the US.
Actually, it was the realization that sola scriptura was such a bag of baloney that set me on the road to Rome, so to speak, after 15 years as an evangelical Protestant. It is a perfectly incoherent doctrine, self-refuting and anachronistic to boot. It was impossible prior to the invention of the printing press and wide-spread literacy, there is no index in the Bible itself to say which books are inspired scripture and which not, so how do Protestants know which to read? (hint: They basically decided that in this one matter, the Catholics got it right, even if they did go too far by accepting several extra Old Testament books).
Check.
Maggie, is the amazing thing is how many factual matters you get wrong. Still no physical evidence for your imaginary deity, ergo he doesn’t exist. Welcome to atheism.
It seems that where we fail is that maggie is the only one who holds the right conclusions as she is God herself. She’s not fallible… it’s only us who get it wrong because our conclusion differs from her. Never mind she hasn’t shown the slightest bit of evidence that any of her assertions were true, and if we applied the same criteria of evidence she uses then we should have to accept a lot of weird beliefs including ghosts and alien abductions. But if anything is clear from this thread, maggie knows best and if you disagree with her it’s because you’re ignorant…
You’d think that a Christian would learn some fucking humility.
Walton bleats
Yep, it’s better that the poor starve in the gutter than the citizenry pay taxes which might preclude this happening. Thanks, Walton, for showing how you and your fellow libertarians HATE other people. And you folks wonder why normal people aren’t flocking to your ideology.
To paraphrase what Betty Davis said of Joan Crawford: “If you were on fire I wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you.” Now please stop proslytizing your ideology of selfishness and hatred.
Walton:
I’m not missing your distinction between the morality of duty and the morality of aspiration; I’m just not sure I’m buying it. In particular, I’m not inclined to buy the notion that honoring a contract, which strikes me as entirely pragmatic and self-serving (which, BTW, I do not mean as a pejorative) constitutes a higher-order moral obligation than unselfish behavior toward others, which (if I’m understanding you correctly) you see as purely optional.
When “nice things” involve any significant degree of personal sacrifice, it becomes a bad bet to “do nice things” in the diffuse hope of some possible future gain… and a total sucker bet if the sacrifice is potentially mortal. So in the absence of any rational expectation of net positive return, I’m wondering where you think the moral impulse to “do nice things” actually comes from? Again, it sounds like you’re implicitly invoking some external (which is to say, supernatural) moral absolutes here.
But wait! “Doing nice things” is a bad/sucker bet if life is just a series of transactional interactions between sovereign individuals. If, OTOH, life is a societal web of mutually supportive behavior, then suddenly those personal sacrifices aren’t bad bets with the individual dealing three-card monty on the corner anymore; instead, they’re contributions to the overall structural integrity of the web, and thus good bets after all.
This is what I believe: We behave morally not because it’s “nice,” nor in the hopes of “nice things” in return, but because we know that society depends upon moral behavior for its survival, and each of us depends upon society for ours.
I’m also not sure I buy the implicitly binary sense of this formulation. Rather than thinking of behaviors (including negative ones) as moral or immoral, it seems to me that virtually all behavior has a moral character. An act is more or less moral depending on how it affects, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the welfare of other individuals and the welfare of the larger society.
For evidence on whether I find you coherent (in general), please see the current Molly thread.
Still wrong, Kel. Read the definition of “ad populum” and then the message to which I was responding. While I have lost confidence, I still think it is possible you might get it.
Moreover, your “god” is too small. He is not part of the natural world and subject to “testing”. The idea is hilarious. I’m sorry you don’t know why. Your assumption that the natural world is all there is and that we should only believe things which can be proven scientifically is called scientism and it is really bad philosophy.
CJO– OK. I think Spong lacks integrity. He must have some redeeming qualities. I feel certain of it.
He is not part of the natural world and subject to “testing”.
then at best, a god who has no observable interaction with the world is entirely superfluous.
you’ve expanded your god into worthlessness.
congratulations.
we knew you would see the light.
has the hangover started to kick in yet, or are you still drinking heavily?
Maggie you’re really boring.
God is beyond nature? Beyond understanding?
Fucking prove it.
First time you’ve tried to explain how, though.
No, Walton, my point was that out of nowhere, when no one cares, you take the opportunity to yap up the virtues of libertarianism. Not that you’re exactly like the rest of them — different borg ships have slightly different personalities — but it’s always libertarians this and libertarians that. To the point of even lumping yourself in with the vile Africangenesis.
You’re like a pushy street evangelist. It’s sublimely boring.
Anyway, since you’re so adept at
changing the subjectmoving the goalposts:Have you yet abandoned your misogynistic stance that there is any reason whatsoever to restrict late term abortion?
Will you now speak out against the current law?
Have about your paper tiger bodily autonomy, do you understand yet how that idea was effectively meaningless?
Are you willing to admit that you can’t predict whether you’d be able to run into a burning building?
Are you still comfortable speaking from a position of male privilege without acknowledging the implications for sexism?
That is why Protestants are part of the Church, as the Catechism clearly states.
Martin Luther is doing backflips in his grave.
so are a large number of living baptist sects in the States, who are convinced the Pope is the anti-christ.
I thought inclusivity was not a universal CC doctrine.
sure wasn’t in the past.
ah, well, as all those liberals infest the holy mother church, even the church must become progressive or die, right?
now lets talk about condoms…
Yet Catholicism is still larger than all 38,000 denominations added together. We lose sight of that because Protestantism dominates in the US.
*sigh*
for someone who just looked up the definition of what an argumentum ad populum is, you sure do use it a lot.
Do I really need to break down this statement for you as to exactly how it is one?
Or are you sober enough to see for yourself now?
So when you said that you converted to Christianity at the age of 25, you neglected to mention that you converted to the wrong kind of Christianity first?
well, if that’s the case, I guess the Languedoc still isn’t considered Christian. planning any further crusades anytime soon? :-p
Maggie, the Old Testament which you so love specifies several ways of testing for God, e.g. by a competitive sacrifice-off, 1 Kings 18
http://www.padfield.com/2000/elijah.html
If your god isn’t subject to testing, it’s not the biblical god. Sorry.
maggie @#817:
How is claiming that the proof of the NT being inspired by God is the millions of follows of Christianity not an argumentum ad populum, Humpty-mags-Dumpty?
I’ll try to write a shorter post to see if that’ll make Maggie answer the difficult questions she keeps dodging.
Sure, that’s how you feel now – because science has told you that it can’t be, and you don’t want to look like an idiot for believing in something that is obviously untrue.
But the problem for – which I’ve pointed out a number of times, and which you’ve failed to answer (well, beyond ‘it took as long because it took as long’) is still this: it’s not how the majority of Christians for the majority of Christianity felt – and also it’s how many Christians still feel today
Do you know what Christian Science is? Do you acknowledge that it’s based on the bible (OT and NT)? Do you acknowledge that it differs from your own beliefs on certain extremely important points?
If not, why not?
If so, why are they wrong and you right?
This is the crux of the matter, Maggie. You claim that all Christians believe what you believe. But they don’t – and not in the minor ways you tried handwave away, but in very significant ways beyond tradition and ritual.
So, once again, why are they wrong and you right?
This is not a claim you should put forward with too much confidence. Adherents.com estimates 2.1 billion Christians and 1.05 billion Catholics, but that latter number includes self-identified Catholic churches not in communion with Rome, aka heretics.
You said Proof? How many millions of followers have there been since 7:32 a.m. July, 7, 33 AD? – that is exactly what argumentum ad populum refers to. You are making logical fallacies left, right and centre yet you don’t even have the slightest ability to be aware of your own fallibility.
Without testing, how do you know that God is there? How do you know it’s the Judeo-Christian construct of God? You claimed: Yes. God revealed himself and still does. Can you actually demonstrate this claim or is it nothing more than a baseless assertion? This has nothing to do with ‘scientism’ this has to do with how you claim to know without evidence. A hindu would say “Brahma has revealed itself and continues to do so”, how is that any less substanciated than your claim about the Judeo-Christian construct?
*sigh* you really really don’t get it. It’s such a shame that you have such a high opinion of yourself that you refuse to even consider that you could be mistaken or that someone else may have come to a different conclusion based on the same evidence. Humans are fallible creatures, why don’t you ever show some fucking humility?
The core beliefs of Protestants and Catholics are the same in the essentials. That is why Protestants are part of the Church, as the Catechism clearly states.
No, they’re not. And even though your Catechism states that we’re part of your church, we sure don’t think you’re part of ours. I was brought up to believe that most Catholics, though well-meaning, were going to Hell because they didn’t accept God the right way.
You have used baptism as an example. Yes there are differences of understanding about it. But we all agree that is it a necessity.
Argh. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to pull my hair out, because you are so arrogant in your supposed knowledge yet so, so wrong. You don’t know the first thing about Protestantism. We don’t think it’s a necessity at all. In Catholicism, a person can’t go to Heaven unless baptized. In Protestantism, NOT TRUE. Baptism is simply an outward expression of the inward change in one’s soul that happens at the time of their conversion, and is nice, but just a formality. A symbol. NOT IMPORTANT in the grand scheme of things. No one needs to have it done. You have it absolutely bloody wrong. It’s not a “difference of understanding”, it’s an entirely separate interpretation altogether. It’s like you’re saying that Catholics see the sky as green, and Protestants see the sky as pink, but since they’re both colors we actually agree. No, it’s like Catholics see the sky as green and Protestants see the sky as elephants. Denominations DO NOT AGREE on the VERY BASICS of faith, yet you claim that it’s easy to understand and that everyone knows it?
Hey Maggie, you failed to answer a key question that was posed to you earlier:
If the bible clearly opposed slavery and from the very beggining Christians understood this but didn’t act to abolish slavery for 1800 years because of sin, why did they then act to abolish sin given that as you say they were still sinners? If Christians were able to overcome their sin to abolish slavery after 1800 years, what prevented them from overcoming their sin 1800 years earlier to abolish slavery then?
Maqgie, your insane notion that god isn’t testable is hilarious. Absolutely bonkers. God is testable. So far, Kel and I have been running a test to see if water will turn into vodka. So far, god fails. If god did the miracles in the bible, they can be tested. The resurrection can be tested. Every test has failed. Ergo, your god is imaginary, existing only between your ears. Thems the facts. Live with it.
Kel wrote:
Short answer: ’cause you can’t be judgemental and domineering if you show humility. You have to make people think you’re infallible – especially when you’ve got no real basis for what you’re being judgemental and domineering about other than a book you want people to accept the authority of.
Look at Maggie’s desperate attempts to defend the authority of the OT – ‘the parts that don’t match reality or the ethics of contemporary society aren’t wrong; you’re just not judging it by the right standards.’
A new slogan:
Christians – shifting goalposts since 33CE.
I made a mistake. I said “If the bible clearly opposed slavery and from the very beggining Christians understood this but didn’t act to abolish slavery for 1800 years because of sin, why did they then act to abolish sin given that as you say they were still sinners?”
I meant to say “If the bible clearly opposed slavery and from the very beggining Christians understood this but didn’t act to abolish slavery for 1800 years because of sin, why did they then act to abolish slavery given that as you say they were still sinners?
Carlie,
That is not an accurate statement about Protestantism as a whole. Not even close. You are incredibly wrong. The Presbyterians, for example, would absolutely deny that baptism is “just a formality.” They view it as efficacious, as a means of grace. The Westminster Confession says, about baptism:
These mainstream Protestants would definitely say, like the Catholics in some sense, that something supernatural is associated with baptism. It is not just a formality. You are wrong–or at least too general.
Speak for yourself. Most Protestants I know would say that what is required is a saving faith in Christ, period–a faith which is a gift–a gift that God can certainly bestow upon Catholics. I doubt I have met more than a handful of Protestants–and basically I only hang around Baptists–and I live in the south–who say “Catholics are not Christians.” On those rare occasions I argued with them.
Now most would say the Catholic Church is teaching error–and that those teachers will be held accountable–but they would not, the majority of them, say that “Catholics are not Christians.” Now concerning liberal Protestants they are much more inclined to say such a thing. In my own church, southern, Baptist, conservative, affirming biblical inerrancy–I am the adult Sunday School teacher. Any time the opportunity arises I mention that I have great admiration for the Catholic church (while acknowledging what I view as its errors.) And, I tell my class, given the choice, I would go to a Catholic church before, say, a liberal Baptist church. No one has ever complained about those comments. You are (as is common on here) arguing stereotypes.
I don’t believe it. More posts, some new, but equally belligerent. You haven’t read or understood a thing I have said; how will more help? Well, into the breach– then I am going to sum up and have done with it.
Owl like all of you missed the point so I am going to be forced to spill more cyber ink to explain a very straightforward matter:
I had said: God inspired it; he got his meaning across. Proof? How many millions of followers have there been since 7:32 a.m. July, 7, 33 AD?
_______
How is claiming that the proof of the NT being inspired by God is the millions of follows of Christianity not an argumentum ad populum, Humpty-mags-Dumpty?
That was not the matter under discussion. The subject was the claim that God had done a poor job of communicating his message. I expressed skepticism that he had done such a poor job, since there are some billions of people who seemed to have gotten it just fine over the centuries. That has nothing to do with “proving” inspiration.
Ichthyic muttered hopefully: Martin Luther is doing backflips in his grave.
Absolutely not. He never intended to start a different Church– just clean up the abuses in the RCC. I rather imagine he will be one of the happiest people in Christendom when all divisions are healed.
Wowie, I have answered your questions over and over both directly and in answers to others. You just don’t get it. I’m sorry.
This is the crux of the matter, Maggie. You claim that all Christians believe what you believe.
I have not claimed that there are no differences and that everyone believes exactly the same thing. We are in agreement on the essentials.
For some reason I cannot make you understand that it doesn’t matter, for example, whether Joseph ben Smith believed in a literal Adam and Eve in 245 AD while most educated Christians in 2009 AD don’t. It is irrelevant. We all believe that God created us for himself, perfect, and that somehow we broke the bond between us and him. That is the crux of the matter.
I have repeatedly acknowledged that there are bodies whose founders had their origins in Christianity, like the Mormons, but whose sects have developed in such ways that they are no longer Christians but a unique religion. Christian Science, likewise. So what? The vast majority of Christians hold to the historic creeds. What more can I possibly say?
I need to the wind this up as it is starting to smell like 3 day old fish here and we are just repeating the same things over and over.
So, I shall summarize what I have tried to get at:
My reasons for believing in the truth of the Christianity rest squarely on the Resurrection. I argued that if it can be established as a historical fact, it eliminates atheism and other naturalistic world views, as well as Islam (which some one brought up quite recently) and other religions, since none of them have a founder who has risen from the dead.
I have also argued (or tried to)that by treating the evidence of the various books of the NT as ordinary historical sources, we can establish that the events that are described in them cannot be wished away- whether as fiction, hallucination, legendary accretion, or any of the usual ploys. Various theories have been proposed to explain the empty tomb, the multiple reports of people in small numbers and large encountering the risen Jesus, etc. They all fail at key points.
The truth of Christianity is based on historic, public events witnessed by many people. Its claims are entirely unlike the claims of Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, which make no important historical claims or the claims of Islam which are based on private, unverifiable revelations.
You have tried the usual gambits —someone mentioned that in one narrative there are guards stationed at the empty tomb, another one doesn’t mention them. Is that supposed to prove that the stories are made up? The real question is– where did the empty tomb story come from in the first place, if it is not true? It can be proved from Paul’s letters that belief in Christ’s literal resurrection arose almost immediately after Christ’s death.
So any theory that the story developed over time fails not only because of the evidence in Paul’s letters but because even the dating of the earliest Gospel (Mark in the mid 60s) doesn’t allow enough time for that kind of legendary development to take place. Many eyewitnesses were still alive. Moreover, the early Christians had already been preaching the Resurrection for decades.
Someone will trot out Bigfoot at this point again and I will content myself with saying that you can’t disprove the Resurrection by disproving Bigfoot.
Someone has already alluded to the unreliability of eye-witnesses. Well, I have already shown how widespread all the core beliefs were within a couple of years of Christ’s death. Paul himself interviewed the eyewitnesses, and claimed to have an encounter with Christ himself. You still need an evidential basis to explain the tradition that we have in the NT. You can’t just say, things like “witnesses of accidents get details wrong”. That is not a legitimate argument. How do you explain the massive agreement on the key claims?
heddle wrote:
Oh, you’ve got that right :)
Seriously, though; heddle, I wouldn’t mind your opinion on this – Maggie says, the bible unequivocally tells us that slavery is wrong (she cited Galatians 3:28) and Christians knew that along (i.e. for nearly 2,000 years) but didn’t do anything about it because of ‘sin’.
What do you think?
I’m not actually trying to get you and Maggie at each other’s throats (though I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t enjoy seeing that happen) – I’m just interested in what your thoughts on the matter are.
Only in your delusional mind Maggie. Big, big differences, and we are right and you are wrong. Get used to that.
Molly, you can’t use the persistence of _your_ sect’s beliefs to prove the truth of your sect, as you think every _other_ sect’s beliefs are wrong despite their persistence. Hinduism is older than your religion, therefore it’s truer :)
And no comment on 1 Kings 18 and the testable God? You coward.
Also LOL at this: “The real question is– where did the empty tomb story come from in the first place, if it is not true?”
People do make stuff up, you know. Christianity doesn’t even have the earliest empty tomb hoax: try Zalmoxis.
Waiting for water to become vodka? Now that’s a laudable test for God, Nerd & Kel! I guess you’ll have to do with your newly won tankards of grog until God intervenes, care of maggie.
Maggie, not surprisingly, you’ve hid from the question I asked, just as you hid from it when it was raised earlier. You claimed that Christians from the very beggining understood that the bible said slavery was wrong but that they didn’t do anything about it because of sin. Trouble is that 1800 years later as you stated Christians were still sinnners and then you claim they were responsible for ending slavery. Admit it, the truth is that contrary to your claims early christians understood the bible to be supporting slavery, Christians substantial beliefs about the bible changed because society had changed, that’s why some Christians opposed slavery in the 1800’s.
You’re a liar and a phoney maggie.
Wobagger, OM,
Hold that thought. I have to teach an E&M class right now, 7:00-8:15. I’ll be back and give you an answer.
There, fixed it for you.
http://www.carm.org/religious-movements/roman-catholicism/are-roman-catholics-christian
I rather imagine he will be one of the happiest people in Christendom when all divisions are healed.
And I am sure he he is one of the happiest people because some people acted upon the ideas in On The Jews And Their Lies.
Maggie,
Where, exactly, have you answered the question of what changed so that Christians, who – according to you – always knew slavery was wrong, actually did something about it?
Your answer, remember, was sin.
What happened to the sin?
You have tried the usual gambits —someone mentioned that in one narrative there are guards stationed at the empty tomb, another one doesn’t mention them. Is that supposed to prove that the stories are made up?
You know who mentioned it (#392). Alone, it doesn’t prove anything, except: a) Matthew has an apologetics issue with Mark’s ploy of invoking the ‘principle of embarrassment’ by having lowly women act has his witnesses, and so provides more, the guards. b) these traditions were freely modified in the years 70-90 CE for apologetic and theological reasons, suggesting there was no core of factual events on which writers could compare notes, but a process of mythmaking, and c) BOTH STORIES CAN’T BE TRUE. Mark’s 16:1-8 is incoherent if there are guards, and the end of 15 leaves out a significant fact for no apparent reason, if there were guards.
However, this, along with the literally hundreds of other examples I could provide of the stories in the synoptics being reworked in just this way strongly suggest that the stories are, indeed, made up.
The real question is– where did the empty tomb story come from in the first place, if it is not true?
The author of Mark likely made it up to put an ending, such as it is, on a story he got as a liturgical sketch, not a fully articulated narrative. Paul betrays no knowledge of the tradition of an empty tomb, certainly.
Paul himself interviewed the eyewitnesses
I argued against this already in my #373, and you haven’t deigned to touch it. In Paul’s time, there was clearly no tradition that Peter, James et al had been disciples of Jesus in his life. That tradition had to wait for the synoptics, as did the idea that a historicized version of the mythical Jesus had lived in the time of Pilate. They were apostles, just like him. Their resurrection experience was just like his, a vision of the risen Lord.
Maggie @876:
1. You claim to believe on the basis of a putative miracle.
2. The only historical fact you’ve established is that the followers of Jesus wrote that miracle claim in a book.
Note that, if being raised from the dead were evidence enough, the resurrection of Lazarus should have sufficed.
Not to mention resurrection stories are part of many religious mythos, not just Christianity.
Were you honest, you’d admit you’re making a leap of faith based on wishful thinking to evade facing the fear of your mortality.
Poor baby! Poor, sore-fingered widdle diddums!
Pharyngulistas, I give you “Big Sister” Humpty-mags-Dumpty, who insists, even when confronted with the very words that she in fact used, that those were not the words that she used! Doubleplusungood pravda!
heddle – thanks. I’ll be back and forth myself during the day (and/or night) so if you do write and don’t get a response don’t worry – I’ll see it eventually and comment.
Maggie wrote:
I’ve just thought of something interesting. Even if you could prove the resurrection, it wouldn’t be proof of God, it’d be proof of supernaturalism. You’d still have the burden of showing that magic of some kind couldn’t exist in any other form other than the divine.
Good luck with that. Jesus just could have been one of the world’s few real practitioners of magic who simply assumed the power came from a god. Silly? Yes. More silly than what the Christians assume resurrection would mean? Not even slightly.
Maggie also wrote:
Say what? Where exactly is it written that the legitimacy of a religion is contingent upon its key figure rising from the dead? If such a document exists, could you please let us know where it can be found? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d be keen to read it.
Someone needs to learn a little history…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammuz_(deity)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithra
Silly maggie.
heddle:
Speaking of which, would you mind terribly responding to my questions here (and if possible to my post a few down from there)?:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/03/those_who_believe_in_heaven_ar.php#comment-1485404
Thanks so much.
***
maggie – You want to use this as proof of those two propositions. It fails, and is a somewhat strange argumentum ad pop for the first. It is pathetically inadequate as evidence for the second, as “followers” is so ill-defined as to be meaningless. Followers of what, specifically? Believing in what message, specifically? This was the crux of the debate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection
Heck, just google “religions resurrection myth” for a wealth of sources.
Paul himself interviewed the eyewitnesses
CSI: Jerusalem!
Moshe, “Paul, none of the corpses are answering your questions, you need to either have god resurrect them or make something up.”
Paul, “Let’s see, Jebus rose on the third day…”
Good list, Steve_C @888; Dead-and-resurrected-gods are a dime-a-dozen trope.
Let’s not forget John Barleycorn:
There was three men come out o’ the west their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die,
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in, throwed clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn was dead.
Ah! Sorry, Steve_C – you beat me to it!
It’s been 6 months now and the experiment has run hundreds of times (on average twice a day) and so far God has a 0% success rate. Though maggie can’t take credit for the experiment, it was either Piltdown Man or Silver Fox who dared us to ask God if he exists. We did, no response. 6 months of not being able to get drunk at work for free…
We are in agreement on the essentials.
And therein lies the crux of the issue. What are the essentials, Maggie? No one agrees on what those are, much less what each consists of. You might think you know what they are, but you don’t understand the importance other sects place on specifics. You pray to Mary? Southern Baptists consider that praying to a false god. You have to go to confession by a priest before you die? We consider that usurping god’s authority. Etc., etc, and so forth, ad infinitum. If you want to pare it down to the absolute essentials that everyone agrees on, there’s no there there. There is not a single thing that is agreed on by all denominations, not even the nature of God himself.
heddle, are you a Baptist in the south or a Southern Baptist? There are up to around 20 sects of Baptists, too, depending on how you count them. And I’ll take your point that I don’t speak for you, if you take mine that I AM NOT STEREOTYPING about the ones I know. I am telling you exactly what a classic Southern Baptist church preaches, having grown up in a family of people who built churches, having spent over 30 years deeply immersed in them, having attended many in several different states, having almost every friend I had in college go into vocational ministry, having participated in church planting efforts, having taught Sunday Schools and Bible studies, having gone through almost every curriculum the Southern Baptist Convention publishes and then some. I know from Southern Baptists, ‘k? There are some differences among pastors depending on how old they are and when they went through school; the SBC seminaries in the 70s were kind of liberal, but then in the mid-80s they swung to radically conservative, had a bit of an easing up in the early 90s, but have been getting more conservative ever since.
Just as you might bristle that I’m putting words in your mouth, I bristle at liberal feel-good Christians claiming that fundamentalists don’t have a clue what they’re talking about and don’t really exist. You’re fucking disappearing entire groups of Christians in a handwaving of liberal interpretations. I’m an atheist now, and I think my denomination is totally bonkers, but you’re no better, and I can’t stand it when one group gets, literally, all holier-than-thou on them when they are standing on the same cloud of air that the fundies are.
Wowbagger, OM
I don’t want to get into a protracted discussion of the law, because I’ve done that too many times and am not interested in rehashing the same old arguments. But I have to say something about the law to answer your question. So I’ll answer, but will probably stop at that—unless someone asks a particularly interesting follow-up.
It is my view that all the OT law was set aside by Jesus, upgraded if you will by the law he revealed in the Sermon on the Mount and summarized by Jesus in the two great commandments (love God, love your neighbor.). (Please don’t ask me about the jot and tittle—assume that I am aware of that passage.) The most explicit statement of this is probably in Hebrews, where the writer goes on at length about the “flawed” old covenant being replaced by the new covenant, the old priesthood is gone, and he goes on and on about Jesus being the new high priest,. Then he writes: “For when there is a change of the priesthood, there must also be a change of the law.” (Heb 7:12)
All that sets the stage for claiming that while slavery was commanded for the Jews in the OT, it does not follow that it is lawful in the New Covenant. The law has changed. There was a phase transition when Jesus came.
How to decide what is lawful in the NT? That’s tricky because Jesus doesn’t give many do’s and don’ts. He basically teaches that sin is in the desire of the heart even before it manifests itself as action (lust is as bad as adultery) and that the guidelines are again the two great commandments. This is purposely nebulous—moral free agency, extenuating circumstances, all these are convoluted. The best summary, in my opinion, and surprisingly–considering all the theology that has been written about this, is the simple minded WWJD. I think the WWJD message captured it better than they might have imagined, although it really should have been What Would Jesus Think?
What is sin? The Christian is not given a list. He instead is given the two great commandments and told, in effect, to think what Jesus would think, to want what Jesus would want, based on the examples in scripture.
Finally we can get to slavery. To me if you approach it with a NT perspective it is clear. It is impossible to love your neighbor and also own him as a possession. Would Jesus own slaves? Of course not. So the NT, in my mind, is perfectly clear to anyone who wants to take a look: slavery is sin. But the onus is on you (the Christian) to figure that out. Just like virtually everything else. Personally I would not use Gal. 3:28 as the proof text, I’d use the 2nd great commandment.
Why didn’t Jesus just say “slavery is sin?” Because it wasn’t his habit to say this or that was sin—it was the OT law that judged action. In the NT declaring specific actions illegal (for the most part) is passé. The Christian is supposed to recognize, internally, what is wrong—not be told “don’t do that.”
Why did Paul send Onesimus back? It was partly for the reasons given above (Philemon needed to understand the freeing Onesimus was right, not be told—if he was coerced into releasing Onesimus he would still be in sin) and partly because Paul placed the gospel above everything else—including circumstances. If Philemon didn’t free Oneismus—then he could still be a good witness as a slave. (There is also a lesson here about political activism: neither Jesus nor the apostles attempted to make sin illegal for unbelievers.)
So what about Christians and slavery? I have not read the previous posts. But I would agree that the shameful (and then finally proud) history of Christians and slavery was indeed due to sin. It was partly a failure to understand the new law as revealed by Jesus. It was partly co-opting the OT to justify what you wanted to do.
So in order to “prove” that Jesus resurrected, you’ll have more than anecdotal evidence to support it?
As usual, Maggie tells us that we haven’t read what she’s written, even though she’s been quoted extensively and questioned about what she’s written. What she really means is that we have accepted what she’s written wholeheartedly. We’ve been so rude as to actually doubt certain things that she’s been so gracious to tell us.
I wonder how many more times she’s going to try one last time to enlighten us and then flounce away? I believe this is the third announcement that she’ll “have done with it.”
Carlie,
Our church is not in the SBC. (For one thing, we are explicity Calvinistic.) Hardly matters–that’s a diversion. You stated in #867 that Protestants (not Baptists, not Southern Baptists, not the SBC, but Protestants) view baptism as a formality. That is demonstrably false. Some do, not all, some mainstream denominations do not–not even all baptists would go that far. You also, speaking generically of Protestants, stated that “we sure don’t think [Catholics are] part of ours.” That, as general statement is also false. Many Protestants believe that Catholics can be part of the catholic church. (And why “we” if you are an atheist–that’s rather untrue.) Had you picked some specific church, say John Hagee’s then you could make such claims. But in #867 you were speaking for Protestants.
Re: Resurrecting gods — don’t forget that Dionysus was, ahem, born again, by the will of his Father, and turned water into wine, and was supposedly somehow magically transformed into wine drunk at his rituals.
Hm!
Carlie,
Never been called a liberal Christian before!
Oh, and heddle, if you respond to SC, OM @#889, I would appreciate a response to my comment #197 on the same thread linked to.
Heddle,
The human psyche is amazingly malleable.
For many definitions of “love” (a truly flexible word), that assertion is patently false.
Heddle, you might care to define what you mean by love.
For example, in the Christian tradition*, men owned their daughters yet loved them. That’s why they were “given away”** at weddings.
—
* It has recently changed for the better
** For a suitable dowry, if possible.
Really says it all.
and
God is not subject to testing, unless the result is positive?
windy, apparently, there’s proof that isn’t proof, and the facts are established though they’re irrelevant.
Or it could be that Maggie’s conceptions are inchoate and her claims ad-hoc. She can’t see the fnord.
heddle,
You’re right, and I said you were – I shouldn’t have spoken for all Protestants. But my point then was that you can’t, either, nor do you have any basis to claim that your sect’s interpretations are any more valid than mine are. If Maggie had an ounce of discernment, she’d see that the very fact that we’re having this discussion, between two types of Baptist, no less, is a big piece of evidence that all Christianity is not one big happy family who all agree on how to read the Bible.
(and if I were Michael Steele, head spokesman of the RNC, I’d claim that I provoked you on purpose just to get this example out in the open, because it was part of my strategy.!)
Maggie, you’re in a scienceblog. You might want to tone the attitude down a little bit until you at least learn the basics of how science works. But of course that wouldn’t really be in your nature, now would it?
From the review of Plotz’s Good Book:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/books/review/Cohen-t.html?ref=books
The dowry was paid by the family of the bride to the husband.
Heddle on WWJT (just wondering, did Jesus ever have to think? Since he and the father were one, didn’t he just have to know?):
And whatever you do, don’t think for yourself.
In the early nineties, Walt Disney Feature Animation was having its big animated Broadway Musical fodder revival (Beauty and the Beast! The Lion King!) after wandering in the wilderness for decades in the aftermath of the death of Walt (The Love Bug, Pete’s oh gods don’t make me endure it Dragon), when I got to spend an afternoon as part of an audience with one of Walt’s True Disciples; one of the Nine Old Men, Ward Kimball. There was cultish adulation of the Messiah of animation at that studio at the time, and for all I know, still. There were artists who affected a thin mustache to invoke the Waltness of Walt. There were animators with a letter “i” in their name who draw the dot with a circle in the exact manner in which Walt’s name/logo was designed for him. We were regaled with tales of how Walt liked to dip his breakfast donuts in scotch, and why the first off-site cast-and-crew party was the last one Walt attended, with an orgy that spilled into the hotel’s halls while Walt tripped over naked bodies in an effort to obtain some midnight ice, and how glad Kimball was to get rid of those pie-cut pupils that Mickey Mouse started with, when somebody blurted out the question: “What would Walt think?
It was supposed to be a request for a blessing upon the status of the studio after the death of its founder from one among the inner circle, but it didn’t work out like that. Kimball jumped down the poor kid’s throat (it wasn’t me!). “That’s the stupidest fucking question anybody could ever ask! Nobody knew what the fuck Walt thought about anything from one day to the next! That was his genius! He always changed his mind, and fuck me if he wasn’t right more often than he wasn’t! So if anybody tells you they can tell you what Walt would have thought, about anything, you’d better laugh in his face!”
What Would Jesus Think? Who gives a rats ass? It’s important to heddle and Maggie that they be perceived as having the inside skinny, but here, Jesus has got a long way to go before he is regarded as any more than a pastiche of literary tropes, with a load of people clamoring over whose spin is definitive. I’m content to let Mags and heddle death-cage match it out, so long as neither of them come out alive.
How do you explain the massive agreement on the key claims?
“Massive agreement” occurs only in the synoptics, and it is easily explained by the dependance of Luke and Matthew on Mark.
If all four canonical gospels are based on the same historical person, how do you explain that there’s hardly an utterance put in Jesus’s mouth in John that wouldn’t jump off the page as anomalous if it were rendered that way in Matthew? And it’s not a matter only of style. The Euaggeliôn of John is not the same as the Euaggeliôn of the synoptics, and, in a less radical way, the synoptics have substantial disagreements as well.
Sheesh, and here I paid $0.25 for the Redhead (that got both me and my future FIL mentally bopped).
heddle wrote:
Interesting – because it’s not (the bold section at least) is what our new friend Maggie thinks.
Maggie claimed that everything Christians know today they’ve known since 33CE, because it’s all in the bible – and it not that anyone has changed how they interpret Christianity because of discoveries in science or – in the case of slavery – it is a reflection of the changing opinions of society (which is what I suggested was the real reason; Maggie dismissed that with no small amount of scorn – but no rationale other than ‘sin’).
But you have also referenced sin as a reason, so I’ll ask you what I asked her – if sin was responsible, what changed? What, in the mid-to-late 1800s (when slavery’s end began), did Christians experience to make them do an about-face on the practice?
Himself,
D’oh. Yeah, I knew that – I must be going senile.
Bad example.
I shouldn’t have spoken for all Protestants.
indeed, and the reason Heddle spoke up is because he thinks that’s HIS turf.
It’s his job to speak for all xians, and god and jebus.
He is Metatron.
…or is it Megatron?
I always confuse those two.
…OTOH, Heddle did do an excellent job of illustrating, albeit unintentionally, why there are almost 40K sects of xianity.
Ichthyic muttered hopefully: Martin Luther is doing backflips in his grave.
muttered hopefully?
wtf?
Absolutely not. He never intended to start a different Church– just clean up the abuses in the RCC. I rather imagine he will be one of the happiest people in Christendom when all divisions are healed.
you are da queen o denial.
Ooh, is there going to be a petty Catholic-Protestant fight? They manage even bring up their feud even on an atheist blog?!
Settle down, there are enough heathens here for both of you!
Well, it can’t beat this:
Just feel the Christian love.
Anyway, this whole Catholic v. Protestant, Protesant v. Protestant thing might as well be an argument over the correct way to read chicken entrails to me.
6 months of not being able to get drunk at work for free…
which implies you’ve been getting drunk at work, but just paying for it?
Is your work hiring?
Catholics in Christian PlayStation 3 club
sounds like Sony should sponsor some game developer to make a “Mortal Kombat: Catholics vs. Protestants” edition.
“FINISH HIM!”
Hang on – is Maggie saying that Christian Scientists and the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints aren’t Christians? I’m fairly sure they call themselves Christians, don’t they?
I think there’s an expression for this kind of fallacious reasoning – what is it? Hmm, maybe if I listen to some bagpipe music whilst wearing a kilt, eating haggis (with neeps, of course) and drinking whisky (not whiskey) it’ll come to me.
Ironically, there’s a country which has lots of people named Maggie living in it. Rod Stewart sang a song about a girl named Maggie; anyone know what his ethnic origins are (as opposed to his place of birth)?
Well, you could admit that your concept of Christianity is no more solid or justifiable than anyone else’s (incuding those dirty fundamentalists, Mormons and Christian scientists), that you don’t ‘know’ what God and/or Jesus want you to do with any certainty because everything you know comes from a book proven unreliable, and – this is the one you’ll have the biggest problem with – that, because of this, you have absolutely no right to tell other people that you know for a fact what God and/or Jesus want from humanity, if they even exist.
Live it yourself if you want – that’s your choice – but don’t expect anyone else to take it any more seriously than they would if you told them you believed in Unicorns and, in order to back that up, you produced a really old book featuring both fictional stories about them (including some in verse but which make them out to be less pleasant than is commonly accepted by those who believe in them today) and accounts of real people actually seeing them – all interspersed with the occasional verifiable historical event.
How’s that grab you?
Oops, #920 was suppose to link here.
Actually, yes it is hiring. Though no drinking at work. The best I’ve done is had a few beers at lunchtime on a couple of friday afternoons.
Figs?
Oh, and by the way, since some of you may have been wondering WTF? in response to my post about Ward Kimball (no, I wasn’t claiming Walt was God), and wondering who he is (or was, more accurately), he’s known for having animated Jiminy Cricket, whose admonition to “always let your conscience be your guide” is as useful for determining what the right thing to do might be as any other imaginary critter (like, for example, Jesus, the imaginary dead and resurrected hippie) has ever been.
Quit feeding the troll, or I am going to think that you need me and I will never be free.
I am going to be very selective here, since there is no dealing with all the repetitious silliness, outright lies, deliberate evasions, and the odd actual honest misunderstanding.
Because no amount of reason is ever going to be enough to convince Owlmirror I shall quote everything necessary for those honest enough to read it with some regard for what I was saying, before composing their next cheap, off-topic shot:
Carlie said: #797
To which I replied:
Can anyone honestly continue to maintain in the face of this that I was arguing that the number of believers proved the Bible was inspired? Well, to tell the truth, I do expect that some of you will continue to maintain that. So be it.
SC, OM
I will get back nonsense, if I do that. The wiki link says very little about the claims of other religions; it speaks mainly of how a couple other religions and the Greeks think/thought about the afterlife. It isn’t relevant to what I am talking about. A claim that in the year 399 BC Plato, Crito, Phaedo and all the rest watched Socrates drink the hemlock and die, that they then buried him and that three days later he came back and walked, talked and ate with them— now, that would be a claim worth investigating.
Wiki deals with disappearances, not resurrections when it speaks at the end of the article of the few cult figures it mentions. Please tell me when these “disappearances” took place? Who witnessed them? What is the proof for their claims? What is the relevance to the death and resurrection of Christ?
Heddle I thought that was an excellent summary of the nature of the new covenant.
Carlie said:
Yes, we do agree on the essentials. I have told you repeatedly to consult the Nicene or the Apostles creed. I have spelled out that the essentials are: 1) belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God; 2) belief in his atoning work, 3) belief that he was crucified, died and was buried, 4) belief that he rose on the third day in fulfillment of the scriptures. 5) belief that he will return in glory to judge the living and the dead. 6) belief that our eternal destiny is either heaven or hell.
Lord have mercy! We do not pray to Mary! We ask her for her prayers, just as we ask dear friends here and now to pray for us when we have needs. Likewise, we ask the saints. Because we believe in the communion of saints, which comprises those who have gone before, as well as the living, we can ask them to pray on our behalf.
Err, no that is not quite right. Although it is true that some might need to badly. Confession is a gift, not some sort of punishment or hurdle to jump. We confess mortal sins which are a ticket straight to hell, if not repented, because they *must* be recognized and dealt with. God turned over to the Church the power to bind and loose (you must know where that comes from, right?) “whose sins you forgive shall be forgiven, whose sins you retain shall be retained”. John, if I remember correctly, tells us to confess our sins to one another (why? Can you think of a psychological reason that would be a good idea?).
Yes, there is, as I have repeatedly shown. I do not deny that there are also many differences of opinion on a wide variety of matters. But the core is recognizable from Christian body to Christian body.
Now this was funny! Josh opined:
Nothing like making assumptions based on no evidence whatever. And there is no excuse for it. If you are going to attack my grasp of science, you need to know something about it. So, read #530, say something intelligent about what I wrote there and then we will see, if talking science with you would repay my time.
Scientism (n)–1. the radical notion that we should use the evidence available to our senses and integrate it with our reason to induce and/or deduce the operating principles behind observed phenomena. 2. what you’re practising if you’re into empiricism and rationality. 3. what you’re practising if you dislike letting frauds who like to claim to know things they rather clearly don’t based on voices they or someone else claim to have heard in their head get away with making such claims unchallenged. 4. or, at least, that’s what the frauds will call what you’re practising when you challenge them, to each other.
Notes: scientism is extremely limited as a method of inquiry, as empiricism is only useful for application within the whole of the observable universe and thus reason and empiricism together can only be expected to bear upon those observable properties and the properties of the universe which are not observable but which can be deduced and/or induced rationally from the observable properties. In other words, if you go and limit yourself to using reason and observation, you’ll be stuck working with the limited range of items that are the size of or larger than elementary particles, and which are smaller than or the size of the universe itself–besides, again, the principles governing their interaction, including such principles as are studied within such fields as nuclear physics, astrophysics, particle physics, organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, biochemistry, biophysical chemistry, geology, geography, biology, ethology, physiology, mathematics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, and so on. Sticking with just your senses and just your reason, you may also find some limited ability to work within many of the humanities, such as history, literature, music, the visual arts, and certain subdisciplines of theology such as the history of religion. Within more applied disciplines, you’re stuck within electrical engineering, materials science, aerospace engineering, civil engineering, architecture, metallurgy, industrial design, and a limited number of trades, crafts, and creative fields, from contracting to PR to fashion design to directing movies and writing fiction. Regrettably, if you go and insist on sticking to lines of inquiry amenable to reason and sensory evidence, you will probably find yourself unable to work as a medium, an astrologer, a faith healer, a mullah, a rabbi, or a priest–at least within many denoninations. Them’s the breaks.
Given these incredible limitations of our senses and of reason, it seems incredible that anyone would limit themselves to using just these for forming their cosmology–especially when the senses are a bit unreliable, now and then, and when just making stuff up is frequently so much easier. Proponents of empiricism and of reason point out that it they have one limited advantage, however: as impoverished as the methods that stick within these limits are, they do seem to be the best means we have of modelling the world we inhabit to any approximation actually useful for, say, actually living in it…
Which sounds impressive. But only until you consider how unspeakably dreadful are their competition at doing the same.
Nothing like making assumptions based on no evidence whatever. And there is no excuse for it. If you are going to attack my grasp of science, you need to know something about it.
holy crap.
you’re utterly insane.
we should definitely keep you here, just to prevent you from hurting others, or yourself.
You are guilty of doing all of those, how can you critise others for doing the same? Do you even know what the words humility and falliblity mean?
:D
Some trees take a beautiful fruit
And hide it away like some sin absolute
I want to be the one to walk in the sun
Oh gods they want to eat figs
Oh gods just want to have
That’s all they really want
Some figs
When the working day is done
Gods–they want to have figs
Oh gods just want to have figs,
They want to have figs,
They want to have figs…
from Maggie’s “science” post 530:
doesn’t need to.
what it DOES do, like i said before, is clearly demonstrate that the god you describe is entirely superfluous to the world itself.
so, yes, again, I tell you that you have defined your god into worthlessness.
funny, he seemed such an active, eager god early on.
must have gotten bored with us after his first kid.
Can anyone honestly continue to maintain in the face of this that I was arguing that the number of believers proved the Bible was inspired?
Um, yes? Unless the sentence directly after “Proof?” was entirely unrelated to that proof? Why else did you reference the number of believers right after you said “Proof?”, and if it wasn’t an answer, why didn’t you answer the question you had just posed? It looks like you’re claiming that your statements are entirely unrelated to each other and have no meaning.
And how is talking to a dead person and asking them for stuff not praying, exactly?
I have told you repeatedly to consult the Nicene or the Apostles creed.
Yes, I know it. Rich Mullens made it into a cute little song. But it still doesn’t get at all of the essentials. Let me ask you the fundamentally most important question for all of Christianity, Maggie.
How do you get into Heaven?
Do you not agree that this is the most important question to get the right answer to? That none of the rest matters if it ends up sending you to hell? How do you get there, Maggie?
I can guarantee you that the answer I learned is different from the one you learned. I can even guarantee you that if you ask three different Southern Baptists, you will get at least two different opinions. Ah, the hours I used to while away in my youth discussing the “Once saved, always saved” dilemma. In any case, you keep running around and around in circles. I can’t get anywhere else with this unless you tell me how to get to heaven under your interpretation.
Maggie:
Bwahahaha!
“Dude, this is Pharyngula!”
Carry on…
Mendacious Maggie is back with more posturing and little else. Loose the attitude Maggie. We have your number, as you have only the imperious attitude which we easily see through. Your god has no physical evidence. Your bible is a work of fiction. Proven facts. You can’t keep moving goalposts and switching facts around without us noticing. After all, creobots do the same thing, and they get nowhere here. We have no respect for such people and your are purposely putting yourself in the same shoes. I hope you find them comfortable.
And how is talking to a dead person and asking them for stuff not praying, exactly?
ooh! ooh! I know this one…
It’s because they are asking someone to “carry” their prayers to god on their behalf.
They ask “Mary” to “intercede” on their behalf.
so, you see, they aren’t really praying TO Mary, they’re just…asking… an imaginary… person to…
aww fuck it, I just can’t.
ROFLMAO
Carlie, for heaven’s sake– I thought you had decided to argue honestly.
You quite foolishly stated that God hadn’t conveyed his message competently and I told you that umpteen billions of followers showed that he had gotten it across just fine.
How do you *honestly* misunderstand that? Hmmm?
You quite foolishly stated that God hadn’t conveyed his message competently and I told you that umpteen billions of followers showed that he had gotten it across just fine.
umm, because this is that little logical fallacy we keep telling you about?
Ok, admit it. I call Poe!
nobody is this obtuse, not even silver fox.
…OK maybe silver fox, but still!
Nope, no major theological differences between Catholics and Protestants at all, no sir…
“Because we believe in the communion of saints, which comprises those who have gone before, as well as the living, we can ask them to pray on our behalf.”
This is really weird. For one thing, the distinction between “praying to Mary” and “asking Mary to pray for me” seems to me to be one of degree only. For another thing, why is a prayer supposedly offered by a dead saint on one’s behalf any better than one made yourself? Does God respond to the fact that the prayer is now being made by one of his more upper-level souls? Again, the distinction seems to be one of degree. Add to that the fact that saints are canonized by men and not God so we don’t really know if their word carries any more weight with God than say, Jimi Hendrix’s, and well…frankly, I’m glad I don’t have to trouble myself with it.
The Bible plainly teaches that salvation is the free gift of God made possible by the atoning blood of Jesus Christ. Trust him for your salvation and get on with the next part– following him.
You quite foolishly stated that God hadn’t conveyed his message competently and I told you that umpteen billions of followers showed that he had gotten it across just fine.
Because your umpteen billions of followers each got a different message. If I were in charge of a company, and wanted everyone to do one particular job, so I wrote a manual explaining how to do it, and then came back a few years later and found everyone performing that job differently, that would be a pretty good sign that I hadn’t conveyed my instructions competently. That is what I’ve been trying to get across to you for two days, having this window up on my toolbar in every spare moment I have.
The number of followers don’t matter. What matters is whether they all got the same message. They didn’t. It’s like a game of telephone, with the original message being “Methinks it is like a weasel”, and the people along the route hearing “Ed Meece likes to whistle” and “Hairballs make fluffle” and “I like pudding”. You keep downplaying the differences between denominations, when they are astronomically huge. How do you get to Heaven?
Maggie,
Because you are making a fallacious argument. We know god got his message across because lots of people think so.
Your problem – a very common problem with theists who attempt to make ‘arguments’ based on theism – you are ignorant of your own sacred texts and traditions and you continually use fallacious or unsound arguments.
I realize that truths like this hurt, but better you learn it now. It will make you look less foolish in the future.
Trust him for your salvation and get on with the next part– following him.
Well, that’s vague. How, exactly? Do you just have to trust him once, or does it have to be continual? If I, for instance, gave my heart over to Jesus and then became an apostate, am I still saved? There are verses that support that I am, just as there are those that oppose it. Is salvation by faith alone, or by works? Faith without works is dead, but the field not cared for withers and dies and is told begone, you are no part of me. Do you have to say a particular version of an appeal to God, or is it more free-form? Is baptism a necessary component, or not? Is being a part of the membership of believers in a church necessary, or not? Is confessing your sins through an intercessor necessary, or not? Your statement really doesn’t cover it well.
Funny thing, we have primary source evidence that Plato, Crito, Phaedo and Socrates lived. We have no primary source evidence that Jesus lived, let alone was resurrected. You are trying to compare a claim that was never made to a claim the has no evidence. And you keep saying that we are obtuse.
You keep making claims that the bible is a historical document when none of the books can be tied to the contemporaries of Jesus. You have no idea how historical research is done. Yet you keep complaining that no one understands you.
You can yammer on all you want but you will prove nothing until you can pull out prove. You have gave none.
Also, I love how you dismiss Owlmirror. Guess what, he is more intelligent then you. He is better educated then you. And he puts forth a better argument then you. By avoiding him, you give up the meager claims that are your arguments. And your scraps were not worth anything.
One last thing, none of us are not forcing you to stay. It is not out fault. The choice is your about trying to teach us anything. But you have nothing to teach.
Maggie:
Um, we’re in the real world, here. There is no ‘him’, only the claims about ‘him’ written by disciples and other devotees well after ‘his’ death.
You’re asking me to trust the claims that devotees of a long-dead god-man claim he made in life, not the god-man himself. The person those claims were based on is long-dead.
Heh. Were you to ask me to trust the Dalai Lama, then at least this first hurdle (does the alleged trustworthy agency exist?) would not arise.
Care to establish the current existence of this person who you entreat us to trust, or is that too much to ask for?
Quoting that work of fiction impresses us not. You should have figured that out by now.
Maggie, I can’t help but notice you’ve dodged my question yet again:
You claim that sin is responsible for Christian inaction on slavery. But Christians stopped supporting slavery; ergo, sin changed. Which aspect of sin changed in the mid-to-late 1800s that inspired Christians to do an about-face on slavery? Why did it change when it did, and how?
Oops, #948 is me.
for simon, i still have cardiovascular system !
do you still have appendix ?
Let’s see what Maggie is up for in the Golden Plonk:
Godbotting
Insipidity
Slagging
Wanking
Nice job there maggie, keep up the god-complex because people love that shit here.
Oh, Janine, you make it too easy, you really do. Do pray tell: what are the primary sources for Socrates life? How near to 399 BC were they written? In what quantities do they exist? How old are the manuscripts that survive? You could do worse than consult this book (you can read the relevant bits on Google book) http://www.routledge.com/0415127386 but I will give you a hint. Most manuscripts are, at their earliest, from the 9th century. That’s AD or, 1200 years after the fact.
Hmm. 20-40 years after the fact or 1200 years after the fact? I can sure see why you think Socrates is fact and Jesus fiction.
Wowie, you keep trying to get my attention but what is the point? You do not understand what I say but that doesn’t stop you from going off on lengthy diatribes ascribing to me all sorts of positions that I do not hold and never have. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that you have gotten nothing right. Why am I supposed to keep trying?
Simon.
where do you live?
I wanna come to your house and crap on your dining room table.
you won’t mind, right?
Isn’t this what tends to happen when you start with an answer (such as ‘Yes, Jesus definitely existed’) rather than a question (such as ‘Did Jesus definitely exist?’).
Oh, and a question for anyone (other than Maggie): regarding the genre defence – can anyone tell me if there’s a specific logical fallacy that pertains to using irrelevant information (e.g. genre) to justify retrospective ‘predictions’?
What I see it as is like, at the end of a murder mystery you find out who the killer is and someone else says they knew all along (but who genuinely didn’t know who the killer was until the very end but who wants to make people think they did) – but gives, as evidence, something completely unrelated as the reason they knew ‘Oh, he mentioned liking parsley – I knew that meant he’s the murderer.’
Because that’s basically what Maggie and the Genre Defence All-Stars are doing – they only know that an aspect of the bible is non-literal because science tells us so; however, they claiming they already knew it’s non-literal because they’re ‘intelligent readers’ who can exclude that part because of the genre it’s in. Which is, of course, pure bunk.
But as much as I love the expression ‘genre defence’ I’d be happier if I can tie it in to a more well-known concept.
Maggie:
Bingo.
It was never the religious tenets per se, but the progress of civilisation, that made the Christians acquiesce to the zeitgeist and amend their understanding. Some of them, anyway.
forced Christians to face up to their sin in tolerating it.
tolerating it?
they bloody well embraced it!
so much denial, such a little brain to hold it all.
seriously, I call Poe. You can’t be that stupid and still write coherent sentences.
compare to Simon for a great example. He is that stupid, and is thereby unable to write a coherent thought, much less a complete sentence.
Wowbagger,
Dunno for sure. special pleading and non sequitur come to mind.
You don’t remember your own argument? Remember, you cited ‘sin’ as the reason Christians accepted and profited in slavery. Does this ring a bell: One word, Wowie. Sin
Your words! One thing was responsible – sin!
If slavery was allowed because of sin, and then – suddenly – it stopped being allowed, then it must have been something do with the sin!
An analogy: if the only source of a room’s light is a light bulb – and only a light bulb – then if it stops being light in the room then something must have happened to the bulb! Can you grasp that, oh ‘intelligent reader’? Let me know if you’d like a simpler explanation.
But, okay – maybe you were wrong about sin (will you admit it? No?); it appears now your saying it’s something else:
Had the enslaved not been crying before? Had there not been evidence of slavery before? ‘The people who saw the light’? What ‘light?’ Where did this ‘light’ come from? Why was there suddenly a light when before there was only darkness?
You know what you want to say, don’t you Maggie? Go on, say it with me. Three words: Prevailing. Moral. Zeitgeist.
Ken, what is this song (poem?) from post 933? The Fig Song?
I ask because I am a great fan of figs. Really, for true I am. I have a brown turkey fig tree in a 3-gal pot I’m going to plant tomorrow. I’m moving something else to put it where the deer can’t touch it.
Other than that, I’m in the trench right now, cowering at the bottom. I hear Heddle’s coming back, Carlie’s unmasked as some kind of weird Southern Baptist/atheist hybrid, and Maggie is a veteran of 15 years in an evangelical denomination on top of being a Roman Catholic — which come to think of it explains a hell of a lot.
Da-yum. That’s some heavy-duty theological firepower. Thank God they’re pointing that artillery at each other and not me, cause one thing for sure, all of ’em hate us wishy-washy heretic librul Christians.
Oops. Should have stayed down.
Leigh,
Nah.
It’s not about the faith, it’s about its acknowledgement justification. You have nothing to fear, because you’re honest in discourse. Heddle, I think, he tries to be.
Maggie… well.
The silly arrogant twit cannot bother to follow SC’s suggested search yet it is good enough for me. Dumb ass.
And yes, I place more weight to copies of works then to a collection of stories that was edited and reedited to be a proof of a religion.
And exactly you you get such a precise time and date for the death of Jesus? Idiot.
John Morales wrote:
Spot on, John.
Maggie can’t afford to be wrong; her kind of ‘faith’ depends on it. As a result she’ll use any means necessary to protect it from appearing to be anything short perfect in every way; we’ve seen the evidence of that throughout the thread.
Heck, the goalposts might as well be on wheels so she can move them more easily.
But it’s far more about defending it to herself than it is about defending it to us. Which makes me think – isn’t there a parable about the man who built his house on sand?
Nobody on this blog really cares what religion you subscribe to, as long as you are thoughtful and honest. It is true that believing in imaginary beings raises eyebrows, but most of us have been there, done that, thought about it, realised that the inconsistencies were unbearable, and the foundations were all wrong…..
Each of us had different tipping points. For me, it was the maniacal anti-semitic rantings of Paul being held up as more important than the words supposed to have been spoken by a very Jewish Jesus, and the way that Paul eclipsed the disciples. (was Jesus so wrong, or did such a bad job teaching the disciples that God had to send Paul to straighten out the message?) For others, the hypocrisy of the church, particularly the leaders, does the trick.
Maggie, please understand that counting converts to a religion where non-compliance is punishable by death does not count towards establishing the clarity and veracity of God’s word in a contradictory mess of ancient text.
Plato, Crito, Phaedo and all the rest
Chico? Zeppo?
(sorry, I’m feeling absurdist today)
you’re honest in discourse. Heddle, I think, he tries to be.
Heddle’s problem is that he can write more clearly than he can think. And he’s hoping that when he dies, God will fix him so that he won’t feel the need to shed tears on behalf of the damned, because whatever heddle’s monster does, if heddle’s monster does it, it’s good that he does it.
Oh, and Leigh? Cyndi Lauper just wants to have fun, not figs.
It’s different for me ’cause I’ve never belonged to, or believed in, any kind of religion, Christian-variant or other; I can’t really begin to understand the thought processes by which people who do (or once did) adhere maintain their beliefs in the face of all that’s around to undermine it.
This may have something to do with my resistance to arguments from authority – which, when you get down to it, is always going to constitute a significant proportion of a person’s belief in his/her religion, no matter which god’s at the helm.
Windy, you do know that Groucho claims that Zeppo was the funniest one.
No, no, guys . . . I didn’t mean I’m afraid of YOU! You’re just simple militant atheists. I can deal with that.
I’m afraid I’ll get caught in the crossfire between Maggie, Carlie, and Heddle. Besides, they could all unite and shoot at me because I’m a librul heretic!
Everyone (every religious one, I mean) hates us peaceloving hippie Jesus freaks. Prolly cause we just LUV everybody and see everybody’s side, all at once. Our doctrine is as diffuse as a marshmallow and our minds so open our brains fall out. For people who define their lives by doctrine, we’re anathema.
As someone upthread pointed out, we are the fluffy bunnies of theology. And of science, too, come to think of it. I annoy myself sometimes.
On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for recusing myself from the doctrine wars. It at least allows me to read David’s posts without frothing at the mouth. (Calvinism! Bleahh!)
And yes, I remember that I’ve got some questions from Kel and John to answer. I’m just in a whimsical mood tonight . . . I’ll be back tomorrow, though, if an Armistice isn’t signed tonight!
Ohhh . . . now I get it, Ken! What’s ironic is that I just declared “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” to be my theme song on Facebook. Clueless much, Leigh?
How about “Girls Just Wanna Have Figs”? I could really go for that.
I just can’t get all that exercised about Maggie and heddle differing about which of the Galaxy Quest historical documents were canonical, but I can point and laugh.
Librul Christianity doesn’t offend me.
Not recognizing Cyndi Lauper…
Leigh, I do not think you need to worry about Carlie. She is kind of like Patricia.
She will not be joining heddle or maggie at any time soon.
I don’t know – Calvinism involves God magically making you believe in him – in fact, IIRC, it’s the only way people can (truly) believe in him.
Which means that it’s the only kind of Christianity I can actually accept as a possibility; there’s no way I could make my brain acccept the other wacky contradictions unless the Big Dude changed it with magic.
The rest of it, though, is kind of ghastly. But I guess if God existed and changed my brain then I might understand it; however, I won’t know unless it happens.
Strange gods before me, you mean you do not recognize this?
I guess if God existed and changed my brain then I might understand it
That’s all very good for whoever it is you’d turn into instead of being you, Wowbagger, but turning into somebody else isn’t my idea of eternal life.
I mean I can sing it in my sleep!
I’ll forgive Leigh for just having a senior moment. ;)
Strange gods before me, it seems you also had a moment. Those missing words changed the meaning. But hey, it was an excuse to post an other song.
I’m afraid I have lost the plot.
You first stated; Not recognizing Cyndi Lauper…
It was than amended to; Not recognizing Cyndi Lauper… [now that offends me.]
No big deal, I think we all have descended into extreme goofiness.
Oh. Oh! Those missing words. I listened to your whole Cyndi video to see if there had been some clever changes.
I’m always glad when April 1 is over and I can relax to my usual levels of paranoia.
Another irony meter explodes. Seriously maggie, do you think that you are God’s gift to mankind? Please go and read your earlier posts and learn some fucking humility!
Goofy, whimsical, absent-minded . . . battle fatigue, I think they called it in WWI. No, that’s not right . . . SHELL SHOCK. And I didn’t have to google it, either. Take that, senior moments!
And of course including Carlie along with Heddle and Maggie was just a joke. It was the theological arguments that started me along that track. Heddle and Maggie are both articulate apologists (I’m not saying they’re RIGHT, or even always coherent, so don’t jump up and down, they are indeed articulate), and it was kind of funny to see Carlie jump in there and slug it out . . . since she had to argue with one arm tied behind her back, as it were (I DON”T believe this, but when I did, [theological argument], AND THAT’S WHY YOU’RE WRONG!).
Leigh Williams,brightest xtian light since Scott Hatfield said:
Please explain what,in your view,makes an atheist militant.
The atheists here as far as Im concerned,are mostly knowledgeable,patient,educated people with SIWOTI syndrome that will waste large amounts of time to try and explain to religionists where they are wrong and demonstrate their logical fallacies and lack of understanding,or knowledge.
Sorry,but I really do not like the term militant in this context at all.
Christians are easily offended,we all know that,doesnt take much more than so much as indicating their belief and faith alone might not be enough to have a rational argument.
That does not make one a militant atheist.
Clinteas, please, don’t be mad.
I was joking all this evening . . . carrying out my trench warfare motif. That’s all. The “militant” just fit in the artillery jokes, and cowering in the trenches. It was a sidewise swipe meant in jest.
Hell, Clinteas, I called my ownself a marshmallow and a fluffy bunny, and went on and on about FIGS.
The humor may have failed, and for that I’m sorry. But I really meant no offennse in the world.
[Besides, think about it . . . don’t you secretly WANT to be in company with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins? It could be the FIVE Horsemen, Clinteas . . . come on, you know you want to ride in that crew . . .]
OFFENSE . . . I really meant no OFFENSE in the world.
Can’t you see I’m a little tiddly from pain meds and exhaustion? Really, this elephantine whimsicality doesn’t become me at all. If anyone else reminded forcibly of Fantasia?
Fluffy bunnies indeed. More like fluffy mammoths.
I certainly do. Those men are both intellectual heavyweights and it would be incredibly flattering to be spoken of in the same ilk. ;)
Ooh, militancy! Are militant atheists issued cyberpistols? Do we have ranks?
I do not think that she was being entirely serious.
Still, seriously, what does militant even mean, anyway? Is it a bad thing? Why is it bad? Maybe it’s really a good thing? Maybe it’s a label that maybe we should proudly accept and subvert?
“I only know that people call me a
feministmilitant atheist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”And hey, maybe we militants can
stealborrow a trick or two from the Unitarian Jihadis?— Sibling Machine Gun of Sweet Reason
OF COURSE we get cyberpistols! What kind of rinky-dink minions do you take us for? You’re in this cephalopod’s army now, buddy, so you’d better shape up!
Sibling Pepper Spray of Enlightened Compassion
Clinteas:
Chortle! I know I always appreciate it when you show me where I’m wrong and demonstrate my logical fallacies and lack of understanding or knowledge.
Yeah, but SOME Christians are so EASILY OFFENDED!
(Boy, I hope you wrote that in the tongue-in-check way I’m assuming . . .)
But seriously, would I hang around so much if I didn’t like the company?
Leigh,
maybe you should put up a disclaimer that youre under the influence next time LOL
Its a bit hard to tell where youre joking and where youre being serious otherwise….
True. At other points in my life I might have welcomed becoming someone else; these days I’m really quite content – the sort of atheist that most Christians can’t seem to believe actually exist.
I did do truth-in-advertising a couple of nights ago, on another thread. I’m taking arthritis and fibriomyalgia meds that make me stupid and silly. Actually, I’m rather enjoying it . . .
Next time I’ll put in a smiley-face wink so you’ll know I’m trying once again to make humor.
Okay now, I hope?
All joking aside, I don’t think “militant atheist” is a slur. To me it just means atheists who are past “don’t ask, don’t tell” and intent on normalizing what is, after all, an eminently sensible and enlightened position of religion so that 1) mainstream Americans stop hearing *booga booga* when the word comes up, and 2) providing young atheists with role models. Good things, really.
But not what I had in mind upthread. I was just working my stupid joke.
Wowbagger, we’re glad you’re you, also.
Noting the completely scrambled syntax of my last post, I realize it’s bedtime for this Bonzo.
Happy trails ’til tomorrow, fellow minions!
Since “fibromyalgia” is a condition that requires belief and has no pathophysiological basis at all,that would seem appropriate…:-)
Or dont want to believe exists,doesnt fit in with their black and white worldview.
Clinteas:
Your concern is noted, but you are mistaken. Fibromyalgia is not an imaginary disease in which one must “believe”. It’s had diagnostic criteria since 1990 and is recognized as a clinical pathology by the American College of Rheumatology. We currently have one drug, Lyrica, with which to treat it. I am fortunate in that Lyrica offers a significant reduction in my pain levels, something even oxycodone was unable to do for me.
In my case, fibromyalgia started after some viciously fast polyarthritis took our my knees and ankles two years ago. The fibromyalgia cranked up into a real problem after I had both my knees replaced a little over a year ago. Both problems were sudden-onset.
We are also starting to understand a little more about the mechanism of FM. It’s a pain signal processing problem in the brain.
For example, the results of a French study (Nov 2008) show that blood perfusion patterns in the brains of FM sufferers are different from those in normal subjects:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/112207130/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
http://www.webmd.com/fibromyalgia/news/20081103/fibromyalgia-a-real-disease-study-shows
http://uscuh.staywellsolutionsonline.com/RelatedItems/6,620899 (USC Hospital resource)
The Bible is true because the Bible says so. That’s all the ‘evidence’ people like Maggie et al. are ever going to produce.
By the way, Maggie, I want to sell this second hand car to you. Belonged to a little old lady who almost never used it…
Here, it even says so in the dust on the hood: “This car has almost never been used”.
Leigh,
thank you for the links.
As you know,what I said was that no pathophysiological/organic basis has been found for FM,the pain pathways in the brain hypothesis is just that,a hypothesis.In your case it sounds to me like there is a good history of fulminant polyarthritis preceding your current symptoms,so I would be doubtful of the diagnosis of FM in the first place,and consider other causes like autoimmune disease etc,but I might of course be wrong.
Thats 50 bucks,and I dont bulk bill,thanks…:-)
The diagnosis was one that surprised and dismayed me. I hadn’t had the problem prior to the polyarthritis, but they’ve ruled out lupus and RA. I’m wondering, though, because sometimes RA does a really atypical presentation without factors.
I went back to the rheumatologist because the joint aches spread to my upper extremities. I feel sure a disease process is causing the joint damage; osteoarthritis just doesn’t move this fast, dammit.
On the plus side, I’m in somewhat less pain, and I have been able to return to normal activities, albeit at a reduced schedule.
I have some real fears about the future if this mess keeps migrating throughout my body.