Would anything ever make you believe the Bible? I mean, isn’t part of the whole Christian thing just having a little faith?
I’m not saying don’t be well-learned about your religion - plenty of the greatest apologists said you couldn’t properly be a Christian without knowing how to defend it, but when people get into these debates it usually seems like one side is just not going to accept someone not having the perfect answer for every single possible flaw they see with the Bible.
I used to wholeheartedly believe. And I am not opposed to religion/spirituality at all. I firmly believe in many spiritual/supernatural things. I don’t think that dimension or whatever one wants to call it is limited to what is/isn’t written in any religious text.
I was curious as to RT’s take on the issues (though, I admit, maybe I didn’t approach it as openly as I could have earlier in the thread). My issue with apologetics is that the interpretation is done in such a way to make it fit in modern society, no matter the logical leaps to get there. It’s starting with the beginning and end and finding a way to connect the two.
Right now I am studying Theravada Buddhism and find myself aligning a lot with the ethics/values/introspection prevalent in that philosophy.
This is what a STEM does when they are challenged about their belief, if they want to believe the Bible literally. They approach and question every detail. They analyze. They break down the parts. They question everything. Why would God not explain everything? There must be an answer.
Maybe. Or maybe we’re expected to just have some faith, or maybe there’s things our human minds cannot understand.
I’m not saying this is the case, but I think it’s certainly a possibility.
I don’t know very much about Buddhism, but I like a lot of what I’ve learned. There are things I disagree with as a Christian, but I think there are some really good things to draw from it.
As is the case with most religions.
My issue biggest issue is more with folks who use the Bible as a clobbering tool to put down others. I realize this is not all Christians by any means.
What? People were doing this two thousand years ago. There isn’t a question you have asked or answered that hasn’t been asked and answered already.
The better approach, the superior approach to STEM (whatever the hell that even means in this context) is a literary one. The first questions need to be who wrote it and who was the audience. The Bible was not meant to be understood by a modern reader who has a modern education. It was written to be understood by an ancient sheep herding people who still had one foot in a pagan society. With that said, even the ancients, who had the benefit of an education, realized that it would be silly to take everything in the Bible literally. These were people who had been exposed to Greek philosophers and used the literary analysis which the Greeks invented to explain the Bible. They could see the difference between an historical account and one based on a mythological/allegorical approach.
Because the Bible is a legal and moral text, not a philosophical, historical or scientific text. It’s about our relationship with God. You could see the Old Testament as concerning itself with a people’s relationship with God and the New one as an individual’s relationship with God. All of the incongruities and historical inaccuracies and textual errors are irrelevant provided the underlying message is preserved.
True,
I take issue with folks making claims like “the Bible is univocal”, which it is most certainly not. Or claiming that some English translation must certainly be equivalent to the original texts (which don’t exist anymore).
It’s fairly easy to see that the meaning of each book is tailored to the specific time of writing in Israel’s history as (at least in the Old Testament) they are typically concnerned with the issue of the day. Sure, maybe we can apply some of those lessons to modern times, but it behooves us to also fully understand the context under which they were written.
God didn’t intend for His message to be able to be received by all people for all of time?
I think that whenever someone says that the Bible is the word of God, they need to follow it with, “as related/interpreted/understood/etc. by the writer who then wrote in a way that would make what he learned comprehensible to his audience.” The idea that someone who wrote a particular book in the Bible was merely taking dictation is nonsensical; God could have just written it Himself. Why use a human as the vehicle or middleman to bring the word to the people?
So you take Noah’s Ark; it is unbelievable to a modern, educated reader but to an ancient who knew less about the number of different species on the planet, it might be believable. The details which we note when picking the story apart would not have gotten in the way of an ancient’s understanding of the underlying message. The problem is that we get hung up on the details rather than focus on the message because we think that we are supposed to take the story literally and can’t help thinking it’s a bunch of nonsense meant for superstitious people who were closer to cavemen than they are to us.
The message yes, the details no. We can read Homer and accept that it doesn’t relate a true historical event in an accurate way and still get something of value out of it for how we live our lives. The same with Hamlet or Moby-Dick.
So many people do take it literally though.
Always wondered that myself.
One of the folks I follow has a saying that the Bible has no meaning outside of what the readers of the text have negotiated with it to mean.
“My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not “appreciate Nature,” because they said that Nature was divine. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads.”
-Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Felt relevant somehow, haha.
Just keep them out of public office.
Especially when we keep in mind that God wrote the original Ten Commandments with His own finger (metaphorically).
I dropped the “maybe”, because I don’t believe it is a maybe. I know you know what I will add, but there are many who read this might not.
Matthew 19:14, “But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
God wants all to come to Him with the potential of faith that little children have. God wants us to shed the baggage we accumulate through life and come with our hearts open to believe.
I like to look at my baggage as the intense logic that I apply to everything in my life. Faith wasn’t easy for me. I developed a little at a time. One of my favorite verses is Mark 9:24b, “…Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”
Couple this with the title of Dan McClellan’s “There’s no such thing as “the Bible says so”…” I have not read or listened to that, but the title made me recall Anna’s comment that tugged at my soul.
I caution everyone who uses the Bible to justify a superior position or fleshy desires, to research the entire truth around such a use.
Example: A man quotes to his wife:
Ephesians 5:22, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.”
What a great husband! He stands on the word of God. Well, finish the context to get more truth to God’s commandment.
Ephesians 5:23, “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.”
And there is more details that follow in the next few verses. So the husband demands that the wife to be subject to him. That’s sounds good, and she might actually do especially good keeping that commandment. But look at the standard the husband is commanded to meet. The husband is to treat his wife as Christ would the Church. Well good luck on that coming remotely close to that standard.
I would trade places with the wife if I were concerned with living up the God’s standard. She has a fighting chance. It is an impossible standard to meet for the husband. So, my position is that a husband never quote Ephesians 5:22 to their wife. You look like a fool.
Absolutely, you’re already throwing logic out the window if you believe Adam and Eve populated the world so being a stem has fuck all to do with it.
It’s like trying to explain why Santa can deliver so many presents in the same night.
Believe it if you must but don’t think your STEM credentials have any relevance.
“Oh one has to apply the logic that comes with STEM training and consider timezones, so yeah, Santa can realistically cover the whole world. Besides, Africa, most of Asia and South America have only a few stops”.
Come on.
Bingo.
Sorry, I really do not mean to offend your beliefs, but I reaIly don’t think logic should come into this discussion.
I have to ask, do you really believe that Adam and Eve populated the Earth and all of mankind comes from them?
You have thought through your positions thoroughly and try not to take verses out of context.
That’s a rarity among many church goers that I have met. Couple that with the fact some of the “sermons” from evangelical preachers on youtube these days are absolutely insane, frequently having nothing to do with any theme of the Bible and it’s a recipe for disaster branching away from, at the very least, the intent of Jesus’ teaching.