Kindest Regards, Liberty!
liberty said:
…unless juantoo3 is ready to support his/her ad hominem, I'm off to another thread!
I do hope you haven't left so soon. Of course, there is the little matter of priorities…I suppose mine may be a bit different than yours. My new wife and my household are first on my list, an intellectual sparring match for the sake of stroking egos is way down the list somewhere.
Moderator Post.....
Hi All, Let's remember that we are all here for interesting discussion and debate. Please let's remain respectful, keep on topic and refrain from personal comments.
Oh , indeed Luna! The comment in which I allegedly leveled an ad hominem was merely my making an educated elucidation based on past experiential observation. The scientific method hard at work…
If the Bible is the Word of God, how is it so easily twisted by humans? Is this not the equivalent of humans meddling in God's plan? Could a human have doused the burning bush? Could a human have stopped the crucifixion? If not, then how could humans so easily interfere in the proper understanding of the Word of God?
StreetBob was essentially correct, apples and oranges.
There is an error in this assessment that would be common among those who are not familiar with the context and application, an error alluded to by Thomas in another thread:
Thomas said:
and seeks, by attacking fundamentalism, to attack the whole of Christian orthodoxy on the same basis.
By opening a discussion in such a deliberately obfuscated manner, it is pretty well apparent to anybody familiar with the overall subject that the goal is to discredit Christianity with a series of *seemingly* profound questions. Questions deliberately designed to muddle the equation and mire the defense in explanations that the offense casually dismisses with little more than a wave of the hand and a bemused smirk.
The whole concept, crucial to Christianity specifically and as far as I know to Abrahamic religions in general, of
FREE WILL, is completely neglected and ignored in the basic assumption. No harm, no foul,
*if* that foundational element is re-inserted into the original equation:
Let us begin again; "If the Bible is the Word of God, how is it so easily twisted by humans?" Because, as Christians we generally are taught, that G-d created humans (Adam and Eve) with free will, and that by free will humans *chose* to forego (wittingly or unwittingly) an idyllic life in exchange for knowledge. G-d never did intend for humans to be automatons, He wanted a genuine return of the love He bestowed upon His *special* creation.
"Is this not the equivalent of humans meddling in God's plan?" No. Why would it be? If the Unmoved Mover can be dismissed with a casual "why?," there is no more reason to expect that exercise of Free Will is meddling in G-d's plan. If the Christian teaching holds any merit, then Free Will is
exactly G-d's will for humans to have and use. Now, don't get lost on a tangent thinking that this excuses all activities humans can devise…there are reasonably clear parameters laid out over time about what is and what is not acceptable behavior. The point is, it is our choice to conduct our lives within acceptable parameters of behavior, or not.
"Could a human have doused the burning bush?" Would it not be presumptuous and arrogant on the part of an ungrateful human to try? Literally or figuratively.
"Could a human have stopped the crucifixion?" Would it not be presumptuous and arrogant on the part of an ungrateful human to try? Literally or figuratively.
" If not, then how could humans so easily interfere in the proper understanding of the Word of God?" Apples and oranges. How can one possibly take two critical points of learning and equate them with the human propensity to view the world through their own unique lenses. It is like pointing a finger at the blind men trying to describe the elephant, and mocking them because they have not reached *identical* conclusions, and that because no two of them reached identical conclusions, elephants must not exist.
Christianity is well aware of the challenge it faces within itself over doctrinal inconsistencies between denominations. So are the Jews and Muslims aware of their own inconsistencies. The are multiple threads on thois site that deal with these issues. But it seems far more rare to hear intellectual atheists admit to the doctrinal inconsistencies among their own ranks. Are we to believe there are no such doctrinal inconsistencies? Hardly, inconsistency is part and parcel of being human…ahem, free will.
juantoo3, Read the thread. Now what?
Good. I've read a little Dawkins, and I am equally nonplussed and unimpressed.
Nearly everything that people say about god/gods is unbelievable. The idea that God created anything at all is unbelievable.
Yet, amazingly, archeology and anthropology both tell us that people across a vast range of the Eurasian continents and Africa that peoples of antiquity uniformly believed in some form, kind or type of G-d. A rather complex invention for such simple minds, and not just the minds of Homo Sapiens, but of our closely related cousins Homo Neandertalensis as well. Not just a complex invention, but a counter productive and counter intuitive endeavor to be so uniformly engaged in, unless…there
is something to it.
Trying to recast the human animal into a modern mold without consideration of where we came from and why we are what we are, is illogical and irrational reasoning. Casual dismissal does not explain case after case after case of evidentiary remains from prehistoric times. One need only begin at Lasceaux, and traverse from there…
Every creative mind resides in a body. Does God have a body?
This is an assumption. An educated, but biased, assumption.
Every body has evolved from an earlier life form (I wrote that very carefully). Did God evolve from an earlier life form?
This is another biased assumption. Even *if* G-d did evolve, would that make you believe He existed? Whether G-d evolved or not is irrelevant to any of us in this existence.
I would like to borrow a comment from Thomas' Aristotle / Aquinas thread, in which you replied:
liberty said:
let’s look at the First Way - The Prime Mover… What necessitates a Prime Mover, other than the arguer’s desire to postulate one?
I would think the Big Bang theory to be a pretty doggone good modern explanation of Aristotle's Prime Mover. If you cannot believe the Big Bang, (except, I presume, when it is more convenient to do so,) how can one expect you to believe whether or not G-d evolved? The evolution of G-d is a pointed and pointless question.
I owe it to my integrity, my intelligence, and my commitments to the people around me to not claim belief in something without either rational proof, or a personal experience that would leave me with no doubt that I was affected by something outside of the natural world.
Any Christian scholar worth his or her salt would say something quite similar.
I would need something as profoundly earth-moving as a "road to Damascus"-style revelation.
Old French proverb: Be careful what you pray for, you might get it.
I also agree with Dondi that the experience of god/gods is subjective.
Ahem: "then how could humans so easily interfere in the proper understanding of the Word of God?"
Playing all sides against the middle?
Since I have never experienced such a thing, in spite of my years of effort to do so, I have to conclude that these gods that people talk about are things they make up in their own heads …
Kinda like a meme? Which, when one gets down to analyzing the nuts and bolts of the situation, is another way of saying "system of belief." Not at all unlike the scientific method; a system of belief, used to define and explain the world to assuage the innate fear of the unknown and unknowable with the reassurance of the illusion of knowledge in combination with self-congratulatory smugness? The primary difference between the religious meme and the scientific meme is that the adherent of a religion is not so self-assured and seeks elsewhere for assurance (the Abrahamic faiths call this they seek to G-d, others seek by other names and other paradigms). The meme of the scientific method seeks to elevate humans into the role reserved in the Abrahamic faiths for G-d. The issue underlying the magnified negative emotional response elicited by Abrahamic faiths towards the meme of the scientific method is the arrogant assumption by the meme of the scientific method that man can somehow in any manner stand in that place reserved for an Almighty Creator of Universe(s).
When people try to claim that their gods actually have an effect on the world, then I challenge believers to prove that claim. They never do.
Why should they? What would it prove? You would deny you saw the evidence in front of your face anyway. Your mind would not allow you to admit it. Consider yourself fortunate…it is probably for your own safety.
If you want to have an in-depth discussion about the structure of the Bible as a book, I'm all for it. But we'd need to be sure to develop common understanding of the framework in which we will be conducting the discussion.
OK, whenever you are ready. I suggest we use the "common understanding of the framework" of those intimately familiar with it though. Why bother surrendering intellectual authority to amateurs? One doesn't go to their hair cutter for financial advice…I seriously doubt it being reasonable or rational to go to an atheist to lay out the parameters for a discussion about a religious text…
If God exists, why have I had no experience of Him?
I don't know. Perhaps you may have and don't understand. Perhaps it is just as well. I cannot say. But if you think a metaphysical experience is something that must be re-creatable in a laboratory environment for your personal amusement, you come at the whole "religious experience" thing with an incorrect attitude to begin with. Not everything in life is rational. Not everything in life is logical. Why do we dream? Why do we love. Why do we have rational, abstract thought and a conscience? What is beauty? What is peace? What is contentment? What is serenity? If you approach these questions purely and only with logic and reason, you will miss the very essence of every one of them.