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LeftistMuslimObama posted:Some good thoughts regarding the status of the Bible Overall I agree with your point, the Bible shouldn't be treated as a literal, factual recounting of history. However I think you do it a disservice to say it shouldn't be treated as an historical document, somewhat like I think someone saying we shouldn't treat Tacitus as historical because he clearly makes poo poo up to tell a compelling story. I think it's better to say it shouldn't be uncritically treated as an historical document. Yale actually has an awesome Youtube lecture series up on biblical history and it makes it clear how much you can, potentially accurately, unpack from what you find in the Bible (for this series specifically the Pentateuch, first 5 books). For example you can see from the fact that there are 2 different creation myths or the similarities with Babylonian flood myths, etc. that the early books of the Bible weren't originally stories from a single, hermetic religion but a confluence of the mythology and religion of the region the very earliest Israelites were in. There are parts (such as God meeting with other divines in (iirc) the second creation myth) that show the religion previously accepted polytheistic belief or at least henotheistic (there are lots of gods but we worship one and he's bigger and better than yours). The current popular theory is that it was during the Babylonian exile, which was likely the elite of the Israelites rather than all of them, that you saw a turn towards monotheism and a reform of the religion that involved editing their mythology and history to fit this new vision. Followed by a return after their release and converting or driving out of those who had stayed behind. Hell the relationship between God and his people does neatly mirror relationships between over-kings and regular kings and Mesopotamian strongmen at the time. How people viewed their relationship to God really does change in the Bible as people change their understanding of their relationship to 'the state' and the relationships between 'states'. Of course all that value and interest is lost if you insist that it's all dry factual recounting of events. Also I can confirm the speaking in tongues thing is present in UK Evangelical and some Charismatic churches. My dad was involved with Alpha stuff in the UK back in the 90s quite a lot and I got dragged to camps where I'd be bored listening to guitar music while dreaming of incense and organ music and we'd often get that kind of stuff going on. At University I knew quite a few very conservative type Christians, one of whom claimed he'd witnessed someone's leg grow 3 inches to even out an imbalance after an injury. Surprisingly citing Hume's arguments against miracles didn't seem to convince him that he wasn't going to convert me to his church right then.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:48
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Great Metal Jesus posted:Do you have any reading recommendations on this? This is one of the things I find most fascinating about religion. I originally started looking into it largely through a thread on these forums in Ask/Tell (Ask me about biblical history iirc). If you've got Plat or archives you should be able to get it, not sure if it's archived yet or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-YL-lv3RY This is the Yale lecture series, which is pretty cool. In Our Time (BBC Podcast) has an archive on religion, they've covered some cool stuff as well like Paul's life including a bit I wasn't aware of that his disagreements about non-Jews being able to become Christians were actually with the other leading figure in the early church, Jesus' brother James. Which raises interesting questions about how much Pauline Christianity is something Christ would actually recognise when it's clear his brother had some real problems with aspects of it. They also have an episode on Revelations (I think it was here I heard it). The History of Byzantium podcast has featured a lot of cool stuff on the development of the Orthodox church and some of the major doctrinal debates going on in the East. There's also the History of the Papacy podcast if you want to know more about the early history of the Church. It's interesting because there are a lot of aspects of Christianity which we accept today as fundamental beliefs you need to share in order to be a Christian but they're heavily disputed early on. Tom Holland has some good Pop History books, In the Shadow of the Sword is really more about the early years of Islam but he puts forward an argument that religion as we know it today (an unified and exclusive body of beliefs and practices) was really an 'invention' of the 6th-8th century. Prior to that it was not unusual for communities to mix and match parts of what we'd regard as exclusive faiths. So people wouldn't just be Christian heretics but could be faithful Jews who also believed Christ was the Messiah. Or they could be Christians who believed that it required they follow the Old Laws and made them part of the the Chosen People, etc., etc. No book recommendations I'm afraid but I'm sure there's some stuff in there, especially the Yale thing should be able to list some recommended reading.
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Jul 9, 2015 08:27
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Dux Supremus posted:On the one hand they're advocating "never help anyone, ever," and on the other advocating "'help' other people, no matter what." It makes no sense at all logically. It must take some really craziness to not see that, but what's new? You can see that it's an entirely fear-driven religiosity: they're afraid of punishment and afraid of failing. It's simple in the sense that they think Satan is testing everyone, if you succumb to temptation and fail it is a personal failing. You were weak and sinned (though if you're truly contrite God will forgive you, which you can express by being appropriately deferential to your pastor and local community). On the other hand they see it as their moral duty to help others resist or even minimise the risk of damnation. You can say that giving power to Satan means he's part of God's plan but equally Jesus came back and revealed his message so clearly God is putting salvation through knowledge and helping others just as much within his plan. Evangelicals see spreading the Good News as part of their holy duty, minimising access to the 'Bad News' of non-Christian beliefs can function quite easily for them as the flip side of this. Of course that's side stepping the overall doublethink required to deal with the fact that an omnipotent God created a world where there's an actual empowered force for pure evil running around causing problems. Having temptation and the possibility to sin through free will is one thing but God creating evil specifically to test and possibly condemn people isn't really consistent with an all good creator. Of course some Evangelicals are pretty influenced I think (without being aware of it) by the proto-Existentialism of Kierkegaard's theology. Faith in God supercedes moral right and wrong, acts which are evil but are committed in the name of Faith in God is a higher calling than being a good person. Of course they then simplify it by just insisting that moral and right and wrong is exactly what God says, keeping everything nice and white and black and makin Euthyphro's dilemma of whether Good things are Good because God commands them or God commands them because they're good a much shorter Dialogue. Also just to be clear, when we're talking of Church doctrine, etc. in this thread it's Evangelical churches right? Because I'm used to Church referring to established churches such as Roman Catholicism or the Church of England and neither of them outright condemn all non-Church teaching as occult knowledge or wrong. The Catholic Church has for a long time officially insisted (and always had a strong tradition within it) that worldly knowledge is perfectly legitimate way to gain further knowledge of God's creation.
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Jul 15, 2015 11:03
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Beats me I never read it. It is totally taken from Milton and kind of hilarious that an epic poem designed, in part, to make the devil sympathetic has firmly taken root in the consciousness of evangelical Christians as some sort of scriptural element. The original title of Satan was indeed adversary and was meant to be a kind of court station rather than an individual. Basically it was what we'd now refer to as playing Devil's Advocate, arguing against someone or something in order to establish a stronger position and make sure assumptions weren't being made. In the story of Job Satan is an angel serving God by raisining the question of whether Job is faithful because he's a faithful man or whether he's simply worshipping because that has so far brought him success. This figure has then been conflated with pretty much every other god, demon or mythological figure mentioned in the Bible (along with a host of non-biblical sources such as Milton and Dante) to create the modern idea of the devil. It's doubly hilarious that biblical literalists are the ones that most strongly buy into an idea of Satan that has little to no Biblical foundation. Also Protestantism is somewhat different from early Christian heresies in that it's an explicit rejection of the Church as a source of authority. Nearly all earlier heresies included some idea of a bishop or church structure, Protestantism as it evolved into something specifically opposed to the authority of the Roman Catholic church also struck a hard line (in many sects) of the relationship with God as being a thoroughly individual one with everyone having, potentially, the same access to God and his authority as any other person.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:59
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All assuming that the human concepts of logic would apply to an omnipotent God, which is really kind of an interesting intersection of Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy that the early Church theologians ran into. Christian Mysticism is still very much a thing.
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Jul 19, 2015 17:43
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All we can say of fngth is that it is not htgnf.
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Jul 20, 2015 08:33
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Umm.. What Christians are these because... No it's not. Jesus was God made man, who walked among us, suffered death to redeem our sins and was resurrected on the third day. The Bible is a book, albeit one meant to help impart the lessons God wants us to learn and to bring us the news of Jesus. At least that would be the Christian perspective, which is one of the interesting departures in the the treatment of sacred scripture between Christianity and Islam. By the time the Qu'ran was fully brought together in Islam it had acquired the status of being the direct word of God himself, transcribed as he spoke. Historically pretty loving dubious but in establish Islamic theology the Qu'ran is God's revelation, so technically for Muslims burning a Qu'ran is a lot close to burning Jesus than burning the Bible.
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Jul 21, 2015 16:13
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icantfindaname posted:The problem is that in reality the Bible is a composite of at least 3 texts with entirely different theologies and authorial intents stapled together: the Old Testamant, the Gospel of John, and the synoptics. Well not really, it's far more than three. The OT is composed of many different texts, every 'book' of the OT is in fact a separate text that was compiled into a kind of cultural library for the Jews over the centuries. It's likely the first 5 were brought together and heavily, heavily edited during or just after the Babylonian exile by Israelites who had turned to monotheism and so there are some weird bits in those books where, if you read it through the lens of polytheism/henotheism, the stories make a bit more sense (like the creation myth where God talks with the others, usually described as angels or the whole fact of God not being obviously omnipotent). I'd also say that Paul's letters really form another area of text separate from, but in modern christianity just as important, as the gospels. Paul made major changes to the practices and beliefs of the early church even coming into conflict a few times with Jesus' brother (who didn't think gentiles could be Christians) but ultimately Paul won out and so his instructions to various churches and guidance on matters take as much authority as the stories we have of Jesus. Biblical literalism, especially the type that take the King James version of the bible as the inerrant word of god, is so pants on head retarded I get embarassed for people who profess it.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:10
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OwlFancier posted:Broadly, agnosticism is "I don't know." It is professing a lack of knowledge about god, either not knowing whether god exists, or whether it is even possible to know if god exists. Atheism is the belief, founded on a metaphysical position of some type (nowadays typically some form of Physicalist empircism that seeks scientific proof), that there is no God. This can be soft atheism (we don't have any proof for God so we don't know the answer) or hard atheism (we have effective proof that there is no God). Deism is the belief that there is some creator God or force but one that is on some fundamental level unknowable. You can worship God but all we have to go on regarding the 'Good Life' is the evidence of our senses and intuition. Theism is the belief that there is a God and, typically through some religious text or prophet, we can know some of his intents and/or desires. Agnosticism properly is the claim that the question of whether there is or isn't a God is by its nature unanswerable for us. It's analagous to trying to determine the truth value of 'This sentence is false', at best it demonstrates there's some problem with the question. These are the meanings of the terms I've come to be familiar with, I'd be interested if someone has some radically different understanding. For some reasons a lot of New atheist types feel the need to co-opt agnosticism as soft atheism, accusing people who hold it of just being cowardly about denying the existence of God when the position is that thinking about whether there's a God is an exercise in futility.
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Jul 22, 2015 08:14
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Oh don't get me wrong, both are going to be totally anaethema to fundamentalists. I think the question over agnosticism is more one for the whole New Atheist movement, which I've seen people who identify with on a few occasions simply claim agnosticism isn't a real position, it's just an intellectually dishonest cover for 'soft' atheism (the position that we don't have proof for God's existence, so there's no proof of God). Most atheists would also claim to be soft atheists, in the sense that they allow if they were shown incontrovertible proof of God's existence they would accept it, which neatly sidesteps charges that atheism is as much a faith as religions. I won't derail the thread with discussions of the New Atheism thing though, although I think that part of the cause for that whole movement was the increasing power and political influence of fundamentalist and evangelical Christian groups in Western nations combined with increasing awareness of fundamentalist Islam and Islamism. Honestly I find biblical literalists and fundamentalists with a set interpretation of the Bible and their theology kind of sad. There's no awareness of the incredible history of the religion, the rich possibility for understanding in the book itself, the different ways people can experience and be helped by the faith. I say this as someone without any particular faith myself but I find the ideas fascinating, I've got friends who have devoted their lives to studying it (one of who has found faith through that) and then I see these people using it for magical thinking, talking in tongues and as a form of social club and yet they're the ones who insist everyone else is doing it wrong.
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Jul 22, 2015 10:55
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Guavanaut posted:It depends if you're talking about weak agnosticism (I don't know) or strong agnosticism (the nature of God is inherently unknowable, and therefore all formal religion that professes knowledge of God is fallacious). The latter can be directly contrasted with gnosticism, that there is some hidden or mystical path to knowledge of the divine. The strong agnosticism you mentioned there isn't agnosticism, it's Deism in that it accepts the existence of a God. I guess I'd define agnosticism as the rejection of the question itself, the answer to a question isn't always "yes/no".
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Jul 22, 2015 12:11
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Mr. Wiggles posted:This was a pretty good thread about American Evangelical Christianity and all of it's intricacies for a while. Yeah sorry about that, I realised it was a touchy topic and should have left it out really. I don't quite care enough to make a new thread about it but glad to see that there's some new and interesting posts on actual Evangelical christianity. On a wider topic, does anyone know much about evangelical works abroad and co-ordination/communication with other parts of the world? I know the whole megachurch thing moved into the UK a few years back, which I'm guessing was a US importation. I'm also aware Holy Trinity Brompton (which my dad used to attend back in the 90's) and its Alpha Course have been spreading from the UK for a while now. Hell I'm living in Malaysia currently and just discovered there's a satellite church here next to my gym.
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Jul 23, 2015 03:49
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So are any of them even slightly aware of the irony of Neitzschean 'Christians'?
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Jul 23, 2015 03:58
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icantfindaname posted:Right, but the question was why do other people care about them doing it I guess there's a feeling that you're invalidating or undoing the original sacrament they received. It's on the same line (though obviously much less offensive) as digging up the body of a dead ancestor to rebury them according to the customs of your new religion, which for the convery is perfectly understandable. However a convert to a religion probably has relatives who are not of that religion and are having new sacraments applied to ancestors that shared their religion and they know would have probably been very unhappy with it happening. So I'm not that surprised it's controversial for the exact same reason I'm not totally surprised people want to do it.
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Jul 25, 2015 07:45
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Shbobdb posted:I still don't get what is hosed up about it. Why wouldn't someone want Anne Frank to go to Heaven? Better than being a Chick-style dick and saying she's in hell. As for Church discipline, these people are dead. It's not like they can do anything to them (and in the case of holocaust victims, do anything worse to them than they've already experienced). Like I said earlier, it's a sacrament from a religion the other descendants of that person are very aware that person probably wouldn't want that also claim to basically override the sacraments they were administered which they probably did believe in. It's pretty much the exact same motivation as the person doing the converting feels with the addition that they believe grandma wouldn't have wanted to be baptised into the Mormon church since she was a committed Baptist. Also on the UK church thing, I went to University in the last secular/seminarial college in the UK and it attracted a lot of evangelical Christian types (hilariously the secular side student Christians tended to have a lot more extreme viewpoints than the actual trainee vicars). There was definitely a lot of importation of US style Evangelicalism, there were a couple of Young Earthers (one of whom I knew studied Geology bizarrely) so I don't think that vision of Christianity is just an internet misidentification. They're by no means the majority of Christians in the UK but they are a sizable group and they are making greater efforts to have a political impact in the country. I asked a bit earlier what people know of regarding communication on this front because it seems to me that Christians in other Western nations have seen the effects the religious right has been able to have in the US and have been trying to take notes on how to establish that kind of power base.
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Jul 25, 2015 20:18
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I feel like we've hashed out the Mormon baptising thing pretty well and why many other religions would find it offensive, though the perspective that it's an attempt to answer that objection to a temporal religion of 'what happened to people who were born before the message was delivered' is an interesting one. Doesn't seem quite as good a response as Limbo, although that particular doctrine has largely gone away. Quick edit: Some of the earlier discussion got me thinking though, what's the status of non-Biblical literature in fundie circles? I ask because there seems to be quite a lot of, for lack of a better term, mythology in these cirlces derived strongly from Dante or Milton regarding things like the origins of Satan or some of the nature of Hell, the types of sins down there. There's little if any sciptural basis for this stuff so I'm curious whether there's some level of divinely inspired literature they accept, if it's taken as nice image through which to tell biblical lessons (though that's pretty suspect for someone who thinks the Bible is literal truth in the case of many fundamentalists) or if it's simple ignorance that these ideas are based in literature and poetry rather than the Bible. MrNemo fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Jul 29, 2015 |
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Jul 29, 2015 07:19
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