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The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

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Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

leswp1 said:
Reading above post you would think I am a non-believer. Actually I am the opposite but I have a hard time with literal interpretation. It feels like revisionist history to ignore the history of how things developed in the Church and assume the Church has always been the way it was with the set Liturgy, Bible, beliefs. They have all evolved and been interpreted within the context of the culture at the time.
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This is a very reasonable post. I don't doubt you are a believer. Regarding the Catholic Church (and any other church/denomination for that matter), there have been many changes over its history, many informed by the times they happened in. Such is the nature of any institution on this earth and to expect anything else is to not understand human nature. That said, there is of course the church, Christ's bride, the "radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless." How can it be so? It's God's doing, not man's.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

5mn_major said:
so i was responding to the question of how could the gospels be the word of god. Is that your point? True, the gospels were written at different times and for different authors. But the 'synoptic' gospels as they are called are believed to all rely on mark (as well as another source). And most historians believe mark to be written on or before 70 ad or 37 years after jesus resurrected. The last apostle passed away about 100 ad. So there were plenty of witness around. Also remember that the apostles focused their collective lives to spreading the word...doesn't it make sense that they would have done what they could to reassemble it in the time immediately following his resurrection?

Is every word exactly what jesus said? Who knows. But if one can't buy that these are the pretty specific concepts that jesus advanced inspite of the disciple focus on the word immediately after jesus resurrected...then you're either a skeptic trying to discredit the word or in a phenomenally skeptical person. And its really not worth discussion.
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ok
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

If you want to have a nutty, follow the various web pages on the Synod on the Family in Rome. Some are going with vast conspiracy theories and others are praising it from the high heavens.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

Another meme that deserves a painful death:

"Whenever you are going through something hard and wonder where God is, remember the teacher is always quiet during the test."

Such a statement is not comforting, it does not cheer me up, and just reinforces the notion of God as a bully and someone who chooses not to hear me during a difficult time. If he remains aloof during difficult times, that's no different than the idols of stone the Bible condemns.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

unofan said:
We have (at least) four pretty devout Christians on this board that post regularly.

Joe the Catholic, Bob the Martyr, 5mn the Philosopher (if I recall correctly, you're the one that takes the more Buddhist approach to Christianity. If I'm mistaken in that and confusing you with another poster, I apologize), and Timothy the Evangelist. All four of you contradict one another's beliefs fairly regularly.

Timothy is a Biblical literalist. I'm pretty sure I recall Bob being mostly that way as well, though it's been awhile since he's provided actual information on such things. 5mn appears to be a literalist when it comes to the Gospels to the exclusion of almost all else including other parts of the Bible, and Joe takes the mixture of Bible readings with Church doctrine like most Papists.

All of which is to say, if the four of you appear to disagree on some fairly foundational tenants of the religion, can you not see why the rest of us throw our hands up and say forget it, this makes no sense?
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Being a literalist, IMHO, is the truest form of belief in Christianity, and 3 of us for sure have literalist veins inside of us, so that is a common bond. If a mere human adds to or takes away/discards parts of the Bible, you are changing the meaning and the message. That being said, it's very important to keep in mind that all of us posting, believers and nonbelievers, are just mere sinful imperfect human beings who do not have the ability to fully comprehend what God put in the Bible, hence we all have different ways of looking at things. The other important thing is that though we have differences, as followers of Christ, we'll all be in Heaven together someday due to our common core.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

Timothy A said:
Being a literalist, IMHO, is the truest form of belief in Christianity...
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This statement being made by a Biblical literalist. You could just knock me over with a feather right now.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

Timothy A said:
Being a literalist, IMHO, is the truest form of belief in Christianity, and 3 of us for sure have literalist veins inside of us, so that is a common bond. If a mere human adds to or takes away/discards parts of the Bible, you are changing the meaning and the message.
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I am curious as to how a person could both claim to be a "literalist" and then also say "if" a human adds to or takes away parts of the Bible, given how it was originally worded and constructed.

If I am not mistaken (and I might well be, as I am operating on vague memory not current research), for the New Testament, Jesus spoke Aramaic, while (at least) one of the Gospels was written decades after his death in Greek, and then translated into Latin. Most of the manuscripts we have available in the "original" language are actually handwritten copies of earlier manuscripts. If you take two different translations of the Bible in English and lay them side by side, the wording is frequently different between the two. It seems inevitable that some human interpretation made its way into the texts along the way, given how many different lives were involved in passing the Message along from one generation to the next.

Jesus also spoke in parables, which by design are meant to be taken metaphorically, not literally (what does "inherit the earth" mean when taken literally? it probably does not mean that Jesus advocated that all real estate be seized and redistributed.....)
 
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Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

unofan said:
can you not see why the rest of us throw our hands up and say forget it, this makes no sense?
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Ironically, isn't that the Way of Zen? We cannot figure out religion using our rational minds at all? and Enlightenment comes through koans, which appear to be contradictory on one level yet illuminate when understood at a supra-rational level?

The Bhagavad Gita has a similar message in the scene where Arjuna asks Krishna to show him the Universe as He sees it, and then his human senses are overwhelmed when they try to cope with images of the Divine beyond human understanding.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

God's message is perfect and without error. However, we are imperfect and prone to error. As we travel along His Path, we get closer to the Truth. I (and the rest of us) will perfectly understand God's message the millisecond after I am (we are) dead.

In the meantime, I trust that on matters of Faith and Morals the Roman Catholic Church is the true depository of the His message.

The rest of you can disagree with me.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

joecct said:
God's message is perfect and without error. However, we are imperfect and prone to error. As we travel along His Path, we get closer to the Truth. I (and the rest of us) will perfectly understand God's message the millisecond after I am (we are) dead.
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Well said.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

joecct said:
God's message is perfect and without error. However, we are imperfect and prone to error. As we travel along His Path, we get closer to the Truth. I (and the rest of us) will perfectly understand God's message the millisecond after I am (we are) dead.

In the meantime, I trust that on matters of Faith and Morals the Roman Catholic Church is the true depository of the His message.

The rest of you can disagree with me.
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It's amazing how much you people worship death.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

Foxton said:
It's amazing how much you people worship death.
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Agrarian cults tend to focus on death. You plant god in the ground and he comes back up (as the "bread of life") -- this is simply the metaphorical celebration of the cycle of planting and harvesting. Humans participate in the god's resurrection either directly (reincarnation) or indirectly (immortality in an afterlife). When you consider how large a part of life death is for primitive peoples, it's not a big surprise.

The farce of religion is that people forget these myths are human-created self-help strategies, and instead hard-code them as literal facts long after they are no longer relevant to the culture. The isolation of these sects as they fall farther and farther out of step with reality feeds both their paranoia and their parochial self-centeredness as a "chosen" people. This becomes a tragedy when those sects become violent.
 
Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

I love this thread.

For the literalists- how do you account for all the Gospels that have been discounted and put aside as time has gone on? Before the ?Nicene conference there were more Gospels but these were rejected. Depending on which Bible you read there are books added or subtracted. How do you deal with stories that obviously contradict each other? Serious question, not flaming.

The Intern guy I had mentioned gave us a whole lecture once on how the Jews at the time the Bible was written did NOT rely on literal stories but on stories that were told in a way to stress the message which was indeed given by God- hence the multiple contradictions in the Bible. Each telling was to make a different point to a different audience. Knowing that has helped me look for the meaning/message rather than focus on the contradictions (which drove me crazy).
 
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Re: The Religion Thread: A Believer-Atheist Alliance

Timothy A said:
Being a literalist, IMHO, is the truest form of belief in Christianity.
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joecct said:
In the meantime, I trust that on matters of Faith and Morals the Roman Catholic Church is the true depository of the His message.
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Thank you both for reinforcing my point.

Also, I've asked this before, but since you said this:

Timothy A said:
If a mere human adds to or takes away/discards parts of the Bible, you are changing the meaning and the message.
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Which Bible is the correct one? Because different versions of Christianity include different books in their Bibles, so some of them are inherently adding to or taking away parts of the Bible. Which one is the true one?
 
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