[JRMurdock]

come on, join in. The water's are warm. :)

And we totally avoided any mean agressive bashing. Quite an accomplishment when dealing with theology.

[Miriamele]

I did join in Maus, several times, back a few pages ago...I agree that any mean agressiveness has been avoided here and that's why I'm following the discussion. Many have been the threads discussing matters of religion at sffworld over the years, and they almost invariably remain civil, even friendly! What fine folks we have around here. :)

[Gary Wassner]

It wouldn't be very productive otherwise. Then we would all lose. Questions of faith can be very sensitive. Sometimes, belief does not want to be questioned, so it defends itself by being dogmatic and irrational. In this case particularly, thanks to those participating, it has been interesting instead.

[Tari]

When I Come to the End of the Road

When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set on me
I want no rites in a gloom filled room
Why cry for a soul set free?

Miss me a little but not too long
And not with your head bowed low
Remember the love we shared
Miss me but let me go

For this is the journey we all must take
And each must go alone
It’s all part of the Master plan
A step on the road back home

When you are lonely and sick in your heart
Go to the friends you know
And bury sorrows in doing good deeds
Miss me but let me go.


This poem was writen by my cousin for my pop's funeral and i think we dont need or deserve to know whats afrer death it is simply "a journey we all must take alone" we aren't suppose to know what happens after death. i cant remember who mentioned it so im just commenting.

~ Tari

[Gary Wassner]

That's a very sweet poem, Tari. I think it is a waste of time and probably a waste of a life to spend it wondering what the after life will be like. While we are alive we have to live, and if we base our actions upon a hypothetical life when this one is done, how real can we possibly be? The only real impact we have is upon the living.

[ironchef texmex]

Ahh, I take a little time off. Get some work done. What do I have waiting for me when I come back? Post after post telling me what an idiot I am to believe the Bible.

Now I, being the idiot that I am, feel compelled to answer. The only problem is one of scale. 134 posts!?! Tell you what, I'll start at the beginning and take a bunch at a time. I'm not going to respond to each one. Some of them I agree with, in spite of the different POV. If any of you feel left out, just let me know and I'll try and get to your stuff as well. But, I should warn you, be polite; see, I actually have beliefs and that makes me a dangerous lunatic as well as an idiot. :rolleyes:


Post #1 Gary -- Gary, when you say counter-intuitive behavior are you talking about miracles or the Biblical worldview (what the Bible claims is the nature of humanity)? The reason I ask is that those miracles -

Post #3 Miriamele -- sound fantastic, don't they. My favorite is when Elisha calls down bears on the guys who called him 'old baldy'. Makes me laugh every time. But even that story isn't nearly as fantastic as the one about a being that exists outside of space and time and "willed" the universe into existence. If you go in for that one, something like a race of giants (people seven to nine feet tall) all of the sudden doesn't seem that fantastic anymore. A God who can create a universe would probably be able to make a river turn to blood as well.

Post #4 Maus -- Aliens in the Bible? Sounds... interesting. The Biblical account of the flood a ripoff? Hardly. It brings up a good point, however. Secular historians generally assume that whatever was written down the earliest came first. I don't blame them. What are they supposed to conclude? And it's hard to argue against with something like the Eden account of creation which has about seven or eight close relatives in nearby ancient religions (including a Sumerian account). Something like the flood, however, highlights the inherent problems with the assumption. There are over three hundred ancient accounts of the flood from cultures that span the globe. Even if you think that the Hebrews took their story from the Sumerians, how do you explain the Inuit account, the Pacific Islander? They migrated too long ago to have been influenced by the Sumerians. There are only two possible answers: either all the recorded stories originate from an earlier story, or all of the stories originate from an earlier event. If the answer is the latter, then the question becomes one not of which culture first developed writing, but which culture most faithfully recorded the event.

Post #6 Gary -- You want to know why it has endured so long? I could tell you, but you wouldn't believe me. Let me put it this way: The Bible is unique among religious works in regards to prophecy. The book contains about two thousand prophecies, most of which have already come true exactly as written (I'm sort of hoping the final couple hundred don't come true in my lifetime). Not impressed? Take the prophecies that talk about the destruction of Bablyon. There's over one hundred, very specific and utterly outlandish. Walls destroyed [Jeremiah 51:58] (they were eighty feet thick), desolate [Jer 50:13] (Heroditus said the region was so fertile that he was afraid to describe it less he be called mad), no one will ever live there again (the walls encompassed 196 square miles). So what happened? The Roman emperor Julian ordered the walls of Babylon deconstructed because they were being used by opposing Persian forces. The walls were made of clay that contained niter. Niter is poisonous to vegetation. The bricks rendered the soil sterile. And they're still like that today. There's no way to say that the prophecies were written after the fact. They were in the Septuagint when it was translated into Greek in 150 AD, if not before -- centuries before the final destruction.

Listen, if you can do that in your fantasy writing, stop writing fantasy. Start writing cult pamphlets. If you can't, then stop trying to compare your made up stories to the book that can.


Post 7 Miriamele -- [I]"The Bible says fear is of the devil." No, it doesn't. It does say that he preys upon people's fears. That might be where you're confused.

As for the part about God punishing as much as He blesses, yes, that's quite right. And if you have, or ever have, children of your own then hopefully you will both punish and bless them as is required (in much the same way that we christians say that our spiritual father does for us).

Post 9 Scott -- "The fact is we're hardwired to confuse our hopes with facts." Which naturally leads people to a faith that begins with a message of human depravity, requires them to humble themselves below both God and other, then lets them regularly go to a church service where they can sing songs about how God has "saved a wretch like me"? Scott, once again, your perception of christianity has left me... dumbfounded.


Too be continued

[Gary Wassner]

You can believe what you choose. I am not calling you or anyone who believes in the bible and idiot. I am questioning the process of faith, not the believer. Faith precludes reason, doesn't it? Aren't they diametrically opposed to one another? My question in the beginning of this thread was designed for the person of faith. I want to understand how that person interprets scripture. Is it viewed as history? Or is it viewed as mystery, sufficiently obscure to allow for believers, but not so obscure as to allow for blasphemers? How important is it to one's faith to accept the bible as fact or as metaphor?

This is a difficult subject to discuss. Your input is very valuable. And I don't presume to be writing anything as fecund and enduring as scripture. My point was totally different. If one believes scripture to be metaphor, then why this particular book? What has catapulted scripture to the top of the heap? If one sees it as fact, historical fact, then why not accept other fantasies as well as potentially factual?

[ironchef texmex]

Post #10 Gary -- "If scripture is truth, then anything is possible and we should truly be in a state of panic all of the time." That's an odd thing to infer. Seems to have the exact opposite effect. People seem to take solace in the belief that the creator of the universe knows them, loves them, "works all things for the good of those who love Him." They've done studies. Turns out deeply religious types tend to have lower stress levels, live longer, that sort of thing.

Post #12 More Gary -- "We could adopt a philosophy that embraces life in response, instead of one that looks forward to a hereafter." I'll admit it sounds good. Early returns aren't too exciting though. Think about the American Revolution: Those stodgy deists wanted to found a nation on christian principals because they thought the moral framework would serve to restrain the base instincts of humanity. The results? Hmm, debatable. It is interesting that they instituted a system with all those checks and balances. You know, reigned in their own power. Now compare the American Rev to the great, anti-religious revolutions of the past -- French, Russian, Chinese. No Guillotine, no gulag, no Mao's 'Great Leap Forward'. Human self-discipline is a nice slogan, but it doesn't have much of a track record. Another attempt at a humane, non-religious government? What's that they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

Post #13 Kater -- Actually I agree with most of your stuff, Kater. But I just wanted to make a quick point about your comment that belief in christianity was a "win-win situation" even if not true. Just so you know, that's not what the scriptures say. I think Paul's exact words were that we are to be "pitied above all men" if Jesus didn't rise from the dead. Apparently he thought that if there was no God, then christians were wasting there time, and missing out on a whole of lot of skinky debauchery.

Post #18 Kahnovitch -- Well as long as you're keeping your eyes open, here's the skinny on the gospels: The oldest actual document that we still have in possession is a fragment of the book of John that dates back to about 90 AD. Possibly old enough to have been written while John was still alive, but still not an original. All the originals are gone (papyrus decomposes). The books that you see in a modern Bible are compiled from the hundreds of copies and pieces of copies that were floating around the Mediterranean and Asia Minor during the second and third centuries. The agreement between fragments is uncanny, almost 100%. And no one is trying to pull the wool over your eyes, on the bits of disagreement and the sections that only appear in the later copies, any good modern translation (NIV, NAS, etc) will close the words and phrases in brackets and let you know in footnote that the piece is debatable. They'll even tell you why (ie: not in the earliest manuscripts, or some transcripts use the word, etc).

The gospels of Matthew and John are eyewitness. The book of Luke is compellation of interviews with eyewitnesses and the book of Mark is partially taken from Peter (Mark was a disciple of Peter) and included one possibly two, prewritten accounts of various events. Based on the accounts of early historians 100 - 200 AD, Mark was finished about 50 AD, Matthew and Luke about 60 (near the time of most of Paul's letters), and John clocked in last near 90 AD. Think it's odd that they didn't start writing sooner? Actually that was very soon for the age. It took six centuries after his death for Buddha to get his first biography, Muhammad's sayings are in the Koran, but his first biography was written over a century after he was gone. The Zoroastrian scriptures weren't written until over 1,000 years after Gathas, the founder, died.

In other words, I don't think that documentary did a very good job of documenting.

Posts #19-29 et al -- "blind faith". Is scientific method different from religious learning? Of course it is. Is it reasonable to conclude from that that scientific claims are valid whereas religious ones are not? Not at all. In an earlier "all christians are morons" thread, I gave a list of eminent scientists who have written on the notion that science and metaphysics could never dispute one another, that they occupy separate domains. Einstien's already been mentions. There's a bunch of others. My favorite is Sir Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World. It's all about how science describes the world in terms of measurable effect whereas metaphysics (religion) describes it in terms of cause. Objects fall toward earth, why? Science -- Because of the force of gravity. Religion -- because God didn't want people falling off of His world.

But science is coherent, where religions differ. Right? Eh, kind of. You get all kinds of uniformity on issues where no one cares. Start adding in political/ social pressure. Wanna see a group of biologists squirm? Ask them how much of human sexuality is genetic. Science is free from the wishful thinking syndrome just as long as no one has any wishes on the topic. Density of a black hole? Who cares? Am I created by a God that knows me and has expectations for my life? Wait a minute. I have an opinion on what I want that answer to be.

Now compare: 1) I learned that movement rate of the Indian-Australian plate using global positioning equipment over a period of ten years. 2) I learned that living my life for the accumulation of wealth just doesn't fulfill me. It took ten years, but now I've found something worth living for.

Both are forms of learning. One yields to measurement. One doesn't. On the other hand, one changes your life. The other....

[Miriamele]

Great posts Ironchef, very interesting. You've obviously done a lot of reading. :)

[ironchef texmex]

Thanks Miri, I needed a little encouragement. Got a long way to go still *pant pant*.

Post #29 Tari -- Hi Tari, really I just wanted to say that I liked your posts, great stuff. But since I'm being all critical with everybody else I guess I have to pull out the red pen for you too (can't show favorites ;) ). 1.6 billion would have been the total number of christians (catholic and protestant together) back in the 1980's or so. Today it's probably closer to 1.1 bil for catholics and 800-900 million for protestants. We can't be sure of the exact numbers since most of the growth has come in places like China and the Phillipines where Christians are jailed or worse once they're found out.

Post #32 Gary -- "Where is hell". Gary, according to those scripture thingies, hell is the absolute absense of God. In other words, God is omnipresent except for hell, from where he withholds his presense. Like Heaven, it is not a structure that exists in the material world. We're talking about the spirit realm. Nothing wrong with mentioning 'hell on earth' in the context of behaviors that seem less than Godly, but when someone concludes from the colloquial usage that hell purely metaphorical -- in the sense of describing a bad place or condition here on earth -- they are denying the Bible.

Post #40 Scott -- "Conviction, quite frankly, is what kills" Here we go again. We do this one over and over, don't we? Scott,
You are my nemesis. You will appear at random throughout the city of Gotham and we will do battle. And each time you will fall into a river and I will never be able to confirm that you are truly vanquished.... 'cause it's a river. So it is. So shall it be.

Just had to get that off my chest. :D

Okay, where were we? Oh yeah, Christians are dangerous because they hold "beliefs", never mind the nature of the beliefs in question. One of these days I'm going to write some satirical bit of nonsense about an Amish takeover of upstate New York (in the story it turns out they're hiding weapons in those carriages, boy is everyone surprised :eek: ). And the whole point of the piece is that everyone should have been leery of them all along because they have "convictions" and, hey, doesn't that mean that they're dangerous maniacs? And no matter how crazy the story is, it won't be any more preposterous than what you just said.

Everyone has beliefs. Everyone has doubts. I have yet to see any doubt on your behalf that christians may not be the boogiemen you make that out to be. It almost makes me think that you have a deeply held conviction in that regard. Now, If the deeply held belief is in system that teaches killing as a means to attain God's favor, then yes, a little concern is probably in order at that point. If, on the other hand, the belief is in something like "love thy neighbor as thyself" then, who knows, that might even be a good thing.

Post #42 Scott... again -- (The joys of science). I Love science. Love studying science. I'm almost as interested in the mechanism of creation as I am in the one who created it. Still, I'm not holding out hope that science is going to one day satisfy the deepest needs of my soul; and I keep reading all these scientists who tell me that it never will. But if, one day, I am led to conclude that since science can deduce the physics/chemistry/engineering necessary to make a nuke that it's worth putting my hope for eternity in (even though it makes no claims for or against a spiritual infinite) then I promise I'll become a missionary for the cause and take message (along with a bunch of TV's) to the less fortunate around the world. I'll say "Ah, my bucolic friend, I know you were miserable hunting and farming and doing tribal stuff all day long, here's a satellite dish, washer and dryer, and a microwave. Happiness and contentment are now yours. No, no, don't thank me. Thank science."

Hmm, I feel another story coming on. :D