Merged (edited) General thoughts about Christianity and the bible

[Gawdzilla Sama]

As religion can't do that we don't see a reason for religion, it has no value.

 

[Olmstead]

What is the value of a religion if not to tap the regions unreached by human efforts alone?

In your case, it keeps you from having a mental breakdown due to your mortality and insignificance.

I don't need it though.

 

[arthwollipot]

Who spoke to me when I was eight years old? What's your explanation?

Yourself? You heard a voice in your head and you attributed it to something supernatural.

It certainly wasn't my own train of thought. It was a total paradigm shift for me.
Rocked my world. Would I do that to myself?

In other words, you had an idea.

In my testimony about vision like an eagle, who orchestrated the automobile
accident that brought me together with the cancer patient in need of prayer?

Nobody.

The vision had come weeks earlier. I almost missed the opportunity.

If it were really a prophecy, why did you almost miss it? I'll tell you why: Because prophecies can't be interpreted before the events that they are said to prophecy, only recognised as having done so after.

The man with the cane left the meeting pain-free. God healed him on the spot.

Endorphins will do that. No need for God.

I didn't anticipate nor manufacture this. I just did what I was supposed to.
He reported the same heat I was feeling on my hands.

The body runs at 37°. If you ever measure any heat significantly above that, you should go immediately to the doctor.

 

[Dave Rogers]

What is the value of a religion if not to tap the regions unreached by human efforts alone?

There are no such regions that are reached by religion either. The arts and sciences, conversely, tap ever greater regions of human achievement, rather than confining our thought to the ignorance of an earlier age. I pity you for missing the glories I see daily, that you refuse to.

Dave

 

[JayUtah]

What is the value of a religion if not to tap the regions unreached by human efforts alone?

You haven't "tapped into" anything. You just imagine a bunch of mostly irrelevant stuff, pretend it's true, and act accordingly. It's just LARPing.

 

[arthwollipot]

You haven't "tapped into" anything. You just imagine a bunch of mostly irrelevant stuff, pretend it's true, and act accordingly. It's just LARPing.

Please don't compare it to LARP, which is a fun and engaging game.

 

[JayUtah]

Please don't compare it to LARP, which is a fun and engaging game.

Point well taken. Sorry. In case it's not obvious from my avatar, I really like LARP. But the difference is that I don't really believe I'm a founding father.

 

[Olmstead]

Also, the implication is that miracles are Yahweh's little parlour tricks to keep his flock interested. That's certainly a take.

 

[JayUtah]

Also, the implication is that miracles are Yahweh's little parlour tricks to keep his flock interested. That's certainly a take.

I agree it is. If one joins a religion as an excuse to believe in miracles—"Take that, atheists! We have miracles and you don't!"—then you need an ongoing supply of them.

But it's just tantamount to believing magic is real. It's not like you're just reaching for something that's poorly understood but might have a reasonable explanation. The assertion is specifically that it must lie outside human effort. It must be magic. It's specifically repudiating the observable, testable world.

 

[JayUtah]

To continue the line of thought from the previous post, it seems that some people cling to religion because they just really, really want to believe in magic. It starts with the presumption that things can occur entirely outside the body of laws that apply to everything else. Or in other words, they presume magic exists and is real. It's not just an application of a higher or hidden law. It's a flagrant defiance of law.

Then you get a god, which is a being who can do the magic. Having powerful friends is a pleasing and flattering thought, so pretending you have a personal relationship with a magical friend becomes attractive. Your friend can do magic on your behalf, and might consent to do so.

But then some people are more friendly with the god than others. Or so they say. And to prove they are more friendly with the god, they do magic tricks too, because the god lets them. And they get megachurches and private jets to reward them for their special status as assistant magicians. What's wrong with this? That's how you get people like Peter Popoff, who explicitly faked the magic. That's not to say everyone who claims the ability to work the magic is explicitly lying. In most cases you just have to get people to share your delusion in a rhetorical framework that excuses failure: "You weren't faithful enough," or "It's simply God's will to the contrary," etc.

The end game is when everyone gets to be a magician. Instead of just praying for intercession, the congregant comes to believe he is a magical agent on his own. It's still delegated magical authority from on high, but the newly minted magician gets to believe he is special because the magic is wrought with his direct involvement. This isn't just limited to Evangelicals. Every Mormon male is told he has a magical priesthood that can work miracles. There's a whole ceremony where that magical power is conferred.

Who wouldn't want to be part of a system where you get to defy natural law? You have magical powers that others don't. You never have to actually prove you have any such powers. There's always an excuse for why evidence is missing, or why asking for it is inappropriate.

That's the carrot. We have already discussed the stick at length.

 

[The Norseman]

Thanks for the link. It only applies to the new testament.
Bart says... Peter and John were illiterate. (Acts 4:13)

Figures. See, that's why I will not spoon feed you. Anything presented to you, you will find a way to excuse it. It's literally not worth my time to find proper works, get links and load them when this is your response.

I'm familiar with Bart.
I appreciate some of his observations. (don't recall which ones at the moment)
His debates with Dan Wallace are good. But Dan usually wins.

But if it was fiction, why not make them look better?

You're just dodging. Why they weren't written according to your modern sensibilities is utterly irrelevant to the FACT that they are still forgeries and are still there.

You still have yet to answer my question.

Which you don't have to, of course. But then be honest and say so rather than present these pitiful justifications why one book doesn't meet your standards.

You are aware, are you not, that there are dozens and dozens of scholarly works which dive in great detail about the forgeries that have been revealed over the centuries? (rhetorical)

So, once again, your bible which is supposed to be the truth and an accurate record of history to you contains forgeries and used to have many more compiled in previous versions of your bible. Why does this not change your view on what is true or not?

 

[arthwollipot]

But if it was fiction, why not make them look better?

I skipped some, so forgive me for going back.

For the same reason you write villains and flawed characters into any fiction - because it makes for a more compelling story.

 

[Joe Random]

 

[JayUtah]

View attachment 72247
Or maybe JD Vance.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

In my testimony about vision like an eagle, who orchestrated the automobile
accident that brought me together with the cancer patient in need of prayer?

You worship a god who you believe to cause car crashes?

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Wow - you are a very fast reader.

Unlike Peter and John.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Why they weren't written according to your modern sensibilities is utterly irrelevant to the FACT that they are still forgeries and are still there.

False attribution covers quite a wide range. Much depends upon how seriously those attributions were taken by contemporary and subsequent readers.

Few were taken in by Kilgore Trout's authorship of Venus on the Half-Shell, or by William Goldman's abridged version of S Morgenstern's The Princess Bride, or by Richard Stark's Parker novels. With Stark, however, we're moving into the realm of pseudonymous authorship, which is quite common and generally accepted as harmless.

The Biblical books of Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon do not claim to have been written by Solomon, but use what their authors intended to be a Solomonic style, much as Venus on the Half-Shell was written in the style of Kilgore Trout. It is entirely possible that their early readers were aware they weren't written by Solomon, leaving it for Christians of much later centuries to think they were. Particularly because those books didn't appear on the scene until a century or more after Solomon's death.

We have no idea who wrote the first five books of the now-canonical Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), other than our strong impression that those books were written by multiple authors and editors. Some who attribute those books to Moses may just be attaching a famous name to those books, as Farmer did with Venus on the Half-Shell, but there are some (even today!) who genuinely believe Moses wrote all of those books.

Much the same can be said of several other books, including Psalms, Proverbs, Daniel, and the New Testament books of Hebrews, along with almost half the books that have been attributed to Paul. It is generally understood that I and II Peter are forgeries whose false authorship was intended to give them more authority. We don't know who wrote the first, second, and third books of "John", or the Revelation of John. Authorship of the gospels is murky and disputed as well. Of the 27 books in the New Testament, only 7 claim to be written by an author whose authorship is generally accepted.

False attribution doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. Substantial chunks of Isaiah are generally regarded as forgeries, along with most of Zechariah and much of Ezekiel.

We should keep in mind, however, that Thucydides invented (or reconstructed) many of the speeches presented within his History of the Peloponnesian War. Even so, many of those inventions tell us as much as we will ever know about what the Greek world thought was going on at the time.

 

[Pixel42]

Who spoke to me when I was eight years old? What's your explanation?
It certainly wasn't my own train of thought. It was a total paradigm shift for me.
Rocked my world. Would I do that to myself?

Many people hear a voice (sometimes multiple voices) in their head at some point. In extreme cases it can be a symptom of severe mental illness (schizophrenia), but usually it's nothing to be concerned about. If the thought that manifests in this way to your conscious awareness is worth taking special notice of is your choice to make.

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/hearing-voices/about-hearing-voices/

In my testimony about vision like an eagle, who orchestrated the automobile
accident that brought me together with the cancer patient in need of prayer?
The vision had come weeks earlier. I almost missed the opportunity.

There are umpteen possible coincidences that could have occurred in those weeks that you could have interpreted in the way you chose to interpret this one. Whilst the chances of any particular one occurring was small, the chances of at least one of the umpteen occurring eventually was high.

The man with the cane left the meeting pain-free. God healed him on the spot.
I didn't anticipate nor manufacture this. I just did what I was supposed to.
He reported the same heat I was feeling on my hands.

We've already given you the mundane explanation of this one.

 

[The Norseman]

False attribution covers quite a wide range. Much depends upon how seriously those attributions were taken by contemporary and subsequent readers.

Few were taken in by Kilgore Trout's authorship of Venus on the Half-Shell, or by William Goldman's abridged version of S Morgenstern's The Princess Bride, or by Richard Stark's Parker novels. With Stark, however, we're moving into the realm of pseudonymous authorship, which is quite common and generally accepted as harmless.

The Biblical books of Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon do not claim to have been written by Solomon, but use what their authors intended to be a Solomonic style, much as Venus on the Half-Shell was written in the style of Kilgore Trout. It is entirely possible that their early readers were aware they weren't written by Solomon, leaving it for Christians of much later centuries to think they were. Particularly because those books didn't appear on the scene until a century or more after Solomon's death.

We have no idea who wrote the first five books of the now-canonical Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), other than our strong impression that those books were written by multiple authors and editors. Some who attribute those books to Moses may just be attaching a famous name to those books, as Farmer did with Venus on the Half-Shell, but there are some (even today!) who genuinely believe Moses wrote all of those books.

Much the same can be said of several other books, including Psalms, Proverbs, Daniel, and the New Testament books of Hebrews, along with almost half the books that have been attributed to Paul. It is generally understood that I and II Peter are forgeries whose false authorship was intended to give them more authority. We don't know who wrote the first, second, and third books of "John", or the Revelation of John. Authorship of the gospels is murky and disputed as well. Of the 27 books in the New Testament, only 7 claim to be written by an author whose authorship is generally accepted.

False attribution doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. Substantial chunks of Isaiah are generally regarded as forgeries, along with most of Zechariah and much of Ezekiel.

We should keep in mind, however, that Thucydides invented (or reconstructed) many of the speeches presented within his History of the Peloponnesian War. Even so, many of those inventions tell us as much as we will ever know about what the Greek world thought was going on at the time.

I'm uncertain as to your response to my post to Rusty Tyler. Are you saying there are no forgeries included in what we can consider to be the 'modern' bible? That they are something less than forgeries as I'm using the common definition?

At any rate, your post still doesn't address previous forgeries that were considered a part of the bible that, seemingly, once discovered as actual fake gospels or whatever, were removed.

This is what I am getting at.

 

[Darat]

Many people hear a voice (sometimes multiple voices) in their head at some point. In extreme cases it can be a symptom of severe mental illness (schizophrenia), but usually it's nothing to be concerned about. If the thought that manifests in this way to your conscious awareness is worth taking special notice of is your choice to make.

https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/hearing-voices/about-hearing-voices/

There are umpteen possible coincidences that could have occurred in those weeks that you could have interpreted in the way you chose to interpret this one. Whilst the chances of any particular one occurring was small, the chances of at least one of the umpteen occurring eventually was high.



We've already given you the mundane explanation of this one.

Apparently many children have an imaginary friend that fades away as they get older.