Question about Christianity and Social Media

One of my favorite things about Jesus was his ability to tweak the fuck out of the strict legalists.

This. A million times.

Yesterday a RL friend of mine shared this:



It sounded like typical conservative/Christian bullshit to me, so I searched the dead soldier's name and, sure enough, found that she'd been buried at the end of March. Long before Floyd and Brooks had been killed.

I responded to the post saying that and included the tweet from the British Army expressing sorrow that one of their soldiers had been laid to rest.

Happens all. The. Time. And 99% of the time I see it, it's is done by conservatives.

What's maddening is that people who do it that I know IRL aren't ignoramuses. But they sure come across that way when they post literal fake news while complaining about "fake news".

We don't have a lot of examples of Apostolic preaching. But, Luke's account in Acts give us a few examples. Whenever Paul went into a Synagogue to preach, he always started with the Law and the Prophets. He proved Christ using the Old Testament, which is convenient considering the New Testament didn't exist at the time.

I apologize for not participating more, but I simply don't have time to get into these sorts of discussions anymore. WF is very much a spare-time kind of endeavor.

I know brilliant people, people with Doctoral and Post-Doctoral degrees. Truly great minds, so long as it pertains to their field. These are the last people who you think would buy into fake news or conspiracy theories. But, they are often the ones "leading the charge" as it were.

One of my acquaintances is a Psychiatrist and a Psychologist. He has both degrees. To this day, he believes that the Sandy Hook School Shooting was a hoax and that it was all "Crisis Actors."

I simply have no words, especially after attending a symposium that featured the Chief of the Sandy Hook Police Department and the Dispatcher that was in charge on that day. It was gut wrenching.

There's a "condition" called "Nobelitis" where someone who gets a Nobel Prize suddenly thinks that they're qualified to comment on all manner of things, even if they're wildly far afield of anything the person has studied.

That's the way it is for all of us; no need to apologize.

I probably wouldn't be here at all if WF wasn't such a good place to gather news about the pandemic and the American election.

Though one of the things I always liked best about WF, the variety of posters and opinions represented, has fallen off quite a bit since the far-right found itself trying to defend the indefensible on both issues, and slunk off to hide.

Still, I try to come around every day or two just to find out what's new...

I don't need a Noble prize (as Donald Trump calls it...) to do that.

My user title is sufficient...

I'm still a little surprised more TNZers sick of the cliqueyness don't come over here. WF has a terrible reputation which is largely undeserved.

Actually what I like the most about WF compared to TNZ is the size of the place. In TNZ, I can reply to a thread, come back to it the next day, and the thread has moved on several pages and perhaps changed topics. This place is definitely more my style. (And even here, I was gone most of the time for several years, because I just didn't have time for it. The coronavirus has actually been good for me in some respects, by giving me a little breathing room in my activities.)

I know whereof you speak. I have an internet "friend" who still insists 9/11 was an inside job and a missile hit the Pentagon that day. Doesn't matter to him than pieces of the plane were recovered from the scene, that witnesses saw a plane, that ATC tracked a plane until it dropped below coverage, that the damage was consistant with an aircraft impact . . . no facts will alter his conspiracy theory view of the event.

Ugh. That's my Dad for ya. That and chemtrails.

Well, technically speaking, chemtrails are real. They're just not what the conspiracy nuts claim they are. Any aircraft operating at the right altitude and in the right conditions will general contrails. They're a mixture of engine exhaust and condensation of atmospheric moisture. Ergo, "chemicals." But not mind control for the lizard people or whatever.

If you watch old WWII footage, you can see the same kinds of formation around the props of aircraft at certain times and places during the war.

Here we see a flight of B17's spraying mind-control drugs over major German cities.

That's what conspiracy theories are all about.

The more facts you present, the more convinced the person becomes that they are right, because your "facts" show how far "they" (you know...) are willing to go in order to cover up the truth.

Thanks for the response, but unfortunately you're just enumerating the contortions that I referred to. I'll clip out the relevant parts.

The context is Jesus being asked specifically when his prophecies would be fulfilled. It is as illogical to think that when he said "this generation" he was referring to some indeterminate generation millenia hence as it would be to think that if I said "tomorrow" I'd be referring to some time other than the day after this one. Nobody (including you) would think that was reasonable unless they were being forced to by doctrines they considered unassailable.

Judea in the first century was teeming with would-be Messiah's, and there was an entire genre of Jewish apocalyptic writing (Daniel, Enoch etc.) expounding on the coming end times. There were at least a significant proportion who expected the Messiah to establish the Kingdom of God any time now. It was understood as a literal kingdom, supplanting Roman rule.
Whatever way one wants to dress things up, the promise to establish such a Kingdom was exactly what Jesus was executed for. When he is also recorded as saying that the kingdom would come "in power", and associates such a coming with a figure referred to as the "Son of Man" (an apocalyptic trope that didn't originally refer to Jesus) coming "from the clouds", it simply isn't credible to pretend that he was referring to a nebulous and imperceptible (to all but believers) "victory over sin" instead. That's just a way of covering for his failure, grafting theology that developed centuries later onto actual history.

"We who are alive" is very clear and doesn't take any "reading into". Quite the reverse. You seek to read "we" out of the statement.

That's just factually incorrect. He wrote that it would be better to be married than to "burn", but that the best thing to do was not to get married.
He goes on to explain, my emphasis: "What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away."

Jesus also advocated dissolving family ties and leaving the dead unburied, so imminent did he think the end was.

Not what Jesus said. He said "the time has come and the Kingdom of God is near." What you are determined to see in mystical esoteric terms, first century Jews including Jesus understood in literal temporal terms.

You'll note that the sources I'm pointing to are the earlier ones - Paul's letters and the gospel of Mark. These are the ones that contain the most genuine historical material.
You are fond of quoting Luke, here and elsewhere. But Luke is largely a rewrite of Mark that took place decades later and which seeks to adjust the message for a later audience. As such it contains a lot of material of the type that I've already highlighted elsewhere - including excuses for why Jesus' hasn't returned as expected, remonstrances about not knowing the day or the hour. You find much less of that in the early sources. In particular, this episode with the Pharisees is not found in Mark. It is likely an invention designed to answer the awkward questions as you're attempting.

I mean, you can say this stuff, but you've jumped through a lot of very difficult hoops to get there. And it's a big red flag when someone starts talking about the "teachings of the New Testament" or "the teachings of the Bible" in singular. There are no such things. There are a large and diverse collection of writings by different people at different times and for different purposes, all edited and re-edited by later people with their own agendas, often at odds with each other. If you seek to find a singular message, you do so at the expense of any historical reality and essentially find whatever you want to.

If we're interested in history, then the most likely scenario is that Jesus thought of himself as a Messiah and expected his entry into Jerusalem to trigger the upheavals of which he spoke. When he ran afoul of the authorities they had him killed for exactly that and his dying words are recorded as a complaint at being foresaken by the God he had expected to intervene.

^ As I suspected, you dismiss the explanation as retconned history. But this approach has at least two major logical errors in it:

1) It is not "retconning" when it was the explanation given from the start. Jesus said, a number of times, that what is important as concerns the kingdom of God is that it is possible to enter into it now. They don't need to "wait" for it at some indeterminate, future time, because it is already right here.

Even if Jesus hadn't said those things, the most that could be said for your argument is that it would be one possible explanation of the facts (though often not the one that best fits the context). That would by no means make it the only possible one. As such, it would be insufficient grounds for saying that those who took others to task 40 or 50 years later for thinking Jesus' should have come back earlier were "weaseling out of" the "obvious" explanation of what Jesus said.

But even that option is invalidated by the clear fact that Jesus himself gave his statements a different meaning, right from the start. In light of that, there is and can be no "reconning" or "reinterpretation" or "gaslighting" or whatever else you want to call it.

2) You select and choose which parts of the Bible you want to accept on the basis of what will best fit your theories. That is the exact opposite of the scientific method. Instead of formulating your hypotheses on the basis of the data, you decide on the validity of the date on the basis of your hypotheses.

So you obviously don't want an explanation. You will hold to your theories no matter what information is presented. Fine. That is your right. But you shouldn't be surprised when that approach fails to convince others, who are willing to look at all the data, and not just those passages that suit them.

That entire post (minus the bible-specific bits) can be applied to any question in any area, as the behaviours you attribute to Rick are endemic to humanity in general. Especially this part:

What do you consider "the start"? The Jesus of Matthew and Luke, from where that comes to the extent that it exists at all, is not "the start". Those are later writings.
Mark's Jesus doesn't say it and Paul doesn't say it. The "start" is a historical event that we do not have direct access to and and which necessarily must be reconstructed using a critical analysis of the available evidence.

This is downright bizarre. Imagine for a second that we were discussing Edward Gibbon's work, and one of us were questioning the reliability of some aspects of it (as is certainly warranted). Would it be a reasonable charge for the other to insist that one not pick and choose from his writings and that one uncritically accept all of them if one wishes to understand the history of the Roman Empire? Would it be a reasonable accusation to suggest that the one holding that elements of the work were unreliable for any reason wishes not to have any explanation of history at all?

Theories of the historical Jesus do indeed emerge when one discards the notion that the New Testament is inerrant, but that doesn't mean that one is fitting the evidence around a theory. This can be seen in the lively disputes among historians as to which parts are historical, which are not and who Jesus was (or wasn't). Since we do not have direct access as I said, this can never be settled entirely - but certain things do emerge fairly clearly when one is not determined to imagine that all of these writers separated by time, space and culture are in complete agreement with each other and with reality.

^ I have studied the Gospels in detail, separately and collectively, for many years. I have found no significant differences in the "Jesus" they present. The differences arise entirely from differences in writing style, and the intended audience and goal of the writing.

It is true that Matthew and Luke are somewhat later than Mark; that is obvious from the fact that they incoporate 97% of Mark's text. But there is no valid reason to consider them "significantly" later (my best guess is on the order of 5 to 10 years, 10 years being the maximum), and no reason other than a presuppositional disposition to say "that can't be right" to claim that "the Jesus of Matthew" or "the Jesus of Luke" is somehow different from "the Jesus of Mark".

But reasoning from presuppositions ("This can't be true, because Mark didn't say it and I don't like it so I will claim it is a later addition with no historical basis") is "basing your data on your hypotheses" rather than basing your hopotheses on the data.

There are no quotations from early church history, and no manuscripts, that suggest that Matthew and Luke do not present historical data that is just as trustworthy as Mark. Sure, they add aspects of the story (the virgin birth, post-resurrection appearances...) that those who are presuppositionally disposed to refuse all forms of supernaturalism cannot accept, but that only says something about those presuppositions, not about Matthew or Luke.

The internal evidence, and the unanimous witness of the early church, point to dates in the early 60s for both Matthew and Luke.

The differences are enormous and it's well-trodden ground at this stage. You're no doubt aware of what I'm talking about. But I put it to you that where such differences exist, you play the same game you're playing with the rest of this stuff. You seek to reconcile and "explain" them. There is in principle no such difference that you would accept as such for your canonical texts. You simply don't approach them the same way as you would other writings. An admission of that would save us both some time here.

My "presuppostions" are only those generally employed in the historical method, usually uncontroversially. These view sources as more likely (but not certain) to be reliable if they are early, first-hand, multiply attested or speaking against interest (among other criteria).
Thus when there are differences in early Christian writings concerning the end times, where one observes that early writings considered this imminent and later writings did not, one must apply these tests to determine what is more likely an accurate reflection of Jesus' view.

And I'll note that sometimes this works to establish the reliability of certain aspects of Christian belief - for instance it is very likely the case that Jesus was from Nazareth, very likely that he was baptised by John, and very likely that he was crucified by the Romans.
So whether "I don't like it" or whether I do, isn't really an issue.

That ignores the many different tendencies within early Christianity, some of which held different collections of books to be authoritative. Marcion is one example, holding to a version of Luke and some of the letters of Paul, and rejecting the rest. The Ebionites rejected all of the now canonical gospels and revered the Gospel of the Hebrews. And there are a huge array of apocryphal writings that promote very different versions of Christianity.
Much of this is lost, and I will grant that most of it is later and historically unreliable. But it is referred to in the surviving writings of the church fathers, speaks to the fact that doctrine was not considered settled and is as much a part of "church history" as any of the rest, despite later purges against it.

In any event there are no quotations from Bronze Age Greek history and no manuscripts that suggest that Homer's Illiad does not present accurate historical data either. So that's a rather dubious criteria to use. It should be fairly obvious to anybody that a later retelling of a story which adds fantastical details not present in its original telling ought to be regarded as questionable at best.

It is funny how that kind of dating is only held to by (some, not even all) religious believers. The unanimous view of more disinterested historians places even Mark later than this (given his knowledge of the Jewish Revolt and other things) and both Matthew and Luke decades further on still.

^ All I can say to any of that is that I highly dispute the validity of just about everything you say.

Am I guilty of the same thing you are, that of accepting the sources that suit me (the Gospels) and disputing the validity of those who don't (the critics, 2000 years later, who are convinced they know "Jesus" better than his contemporaries)? Perhaps.

But as I said, I have never come across anything that validates any of those theories. The best supporters of them can come up with is "you can't prove otherwise".

Well, d'oh! You can't "prove" anything. (That is one of the most fundamental aspects of epistemology.) The inability to "prove" A beyond any possible doubt does not in itself validate, or even tend to validate not-A.

I will say this: when I moved beyond religion to a personal relationship with God, that put a final, definitive end to any possibility of rejecting supernaturalism. I can't prove the validity of supernaturalism any more than one of the Apollo astronauts can prove to a doubter that people actually walked on the moon, but for the same reason that those doubters have no chance of convincing one of the astronauts of their theories, there is no possible way I could ever be convinced of the validity of a fundamentally materialist philosophy. I have too much personal experience with God to doubt his existence. I can't "prove" to you that God exists, any more than I can prove to you that my wife exists, but I have no doubts about either.

And once you understand supernaturalism, there is no reason whatosever to doubt the historical accuracy of the Gospels. The nitpicking on details ("Mark only talks about one blind man at Jericho, but Matthew reveals there were actually two of them") are entirely consistent with what you expect different writers, with entirely different styles, aiming at different audiences, to exhibit.

I already find it amusing that "the assured historical scholarship" that proclaimed with authority a century ago that the Gospels were all written during the fourth or fifth centuries, and that the Synoptics and John must have been working from two entirely different traditions which had thoroughly branched off from each other long since, have had to backtrack on that and now admit that all four canonical Gospels were written in the first century. If their analysis, based only on their presuppositions about what "doesn't make sense", was so far off on that, why should it be trusted? Historical minimalists where the Bible is concerned have had to reverse themselves so many times ("There were no Hittites", "King David was a myth", "We don't even know if Jesus of Nazareth actually existed, let alone anything reliable about him"...) that their "scholarship" doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

This is a bit unfair. Especially in context with the rest of your post. You can't "prove" the Gospels", but "critics, 2000 years later" should be held to a higher standard. The statement appears to immediately discount the critics because "2000 years later", but you hold fast to documents that have been cherry picked out of thousands ... what, 300 years after the fact.

I realize theologians have read though all the documents and cite why "these" documents are correct but "those" documents are not. But, ... aren't they also basing those decisions, those reasons for choosing the documents the same as someone 2000 years later saying "what?! that's not right"

I'm a believer as well - not in the modern context of what is considered "Christianity", but a believer just the same. In my opinion, believing/having faith, is not something that needs to be - or even should be attempted to be proven or require validity.

I guess, what I'm getting at, is if you believe, why even bother with the documents? If someone 2000 years later says "these documents are false" - even if they can somehow prove them to be false, would that alter your belief? If so, then what's the point?

But even that question is a strawman, and it ignores the more pertinent one that I asked you. Are you in principle prepared to confront even the possibility of any substantial differences within the gospels and the other NT writings? Because if biblical inerrancy is your fixed position, then you cannot pretend as you implied earlier to be following the scientific method, and you must appeal to things like your "personal relationship with Jesus" instead. And from this it follows that you will perform whatever contortions are required of you to reconcile the texts, and you will have to deny that they are contortions.

The choice that I'm making is not between the gospels and modern-day critics, but between the gospels interpreted through the doctrine of inerrancy and the gospels interpreted through the historical method. I would hold that they are far more interesting the latter way.

Also a strawman. We've been through more substantial differences with regards to eschatology, and we could review several other areas as well.

Well, reversing oneself is what the scientific method requires when new evidence is presented. The idea that this ought to be taken as a point against it, and that one should presumably adopt a position that is impervious to such trifles is what is wrong in this debate in the first place.
Further, a lively argument and a range of opinions is healthy and something to be expected when dealing with an area in which, lacking access to the events themselves, conclusions will always be tentative.
That said, much of what you list here are outliers from mainstream historiology. Christ-myth theories and dating the gospels to the 4th century have never enjoyed much support. There is a clear consistent line of research from people like Albert Schweitzer through Bart Ehrman and so on who have built upon and refined each others methods and whose views I'm more or less reflecting.

Not only am I prepared to do it, I did it. There was no way around it.

I was brought up with Christianity. (Not exactly the version I now defend, but the general idea -- I grew up in the King James only, fundamentalist, literalist tradition.) But early on (by the time I was 13 or 14), I got into logic, mathematics, and the scientific method. And I knew I couldn't just "believe the Bible because it is the Word of God". If you want to avoid circular reasoning, you simply cannot go that route. I'm sure I don't need to prove that point to you.

But the validity of the Bible cannot be separated from other questions. The Bible does not exist in a vacuum. Questions like: "Does God even exist?" "If so, what is he like?" "Would he care about us?" "What is sin, and how did it come to be?" If those questions cannot be answered satisfactorally, the validity of the Bible is not only meaningless, it is disproven from the start, since the Bible clearly teaches that God exists, cares about us, and so on.

So I got into a whole field of philosophical considerations (which led me into epistemology -- I wish theologians would try to reason rationally, rather than dogmatically, because dogmatism has no validity from an epistemological point of view). And over a period of years, I came to the conclusion that even though not everything can be proven (as I said, I soon discovered that that is almost axiomatic, and has little relevance to what should be accepted as truth -- we make decisions about what we believe on the basis of what is reasonable among the possible alternatives, not on the basis of absolute proof), the Bible is trustworthy.

But that still left me with the question: is it trustworthy only as a general, spiritual guide, or is it really trustworthy? It certainly isn't trustworthy if you try to take everything in it literally: no one I know of thinks the blood of Abel literally cried out to God from the ground, for example. Like everyone else, the authors of the Bible used figures of speech and writing conventions that corresponded to their cultures (which in some cases are very different from our modern, western, Indo-european thinking). But taking that into account, can one accept the Bible as truth?

That took me more years. I had to dig into liberal theology, and claims of critics, and defenses by various writers (some of which were dismally unsatisfactory, as I'm sure you know). But little by little I discovered that the "proofs" of the claimed errors and contradictions in the Bible are either based on "there is no collaborating evidence of this, so it must be a historical invention" (an obvious fallacy) or a fundamentally anti-supernaturalist philosophy ("this can't be true because it involves a miracle or knowing the future or something").

And why shouldn't I? That is a datum, a very important one. To ignore an important datum is hardly scientific, is it? Suppose you tried to prove that I was lying in my claim that I have a wife. I certainly couldn't prove you wrong: I could give you a name, date and place of birth, photos, telephone numbers of people you could call to find out if I'm telling the truth, and so on, but all that could be made up. Would there be any logic whatsoever in me thinking that "maybe you're right" and ignoring the fact that I know her personally? Why should my personal experiences with God not figure into my evaluation of truth? I don't see how there is any logical validity in saying they shouldn't.

If that "follows", please include the demonstration. I'm not seeing how it flows from the proposition.

And if you were born in Utah, you'd be Mormon.
Saudi Arabia, Muslim.

Sidebar: Does anyone know whether Mike Pence believes in the Rapture? That smug little smirk every time he listens to Donnie-boy speak suggests he might.

Which has nothing to do with the matter at hand, Captain Obvious.

It has everything to do with it.
Muslim/Mormon Async would be giving us the same exact " I arrived at it through logic", speech.

I looked it up, and I don't remember the details, but he's an odd duck when it comes to religion. He was raised in one Christian sect, then, at some point in his adult life, stopped going to the churches for that particular sect, and now, generally attends those of another sect, while still considering himself to be a member of both sects. I want to say that he went from Baptist to Catholic, but it might be the other way around, or it might not be the Baptist sect. The guy who leads the daily Bible study that Pence goes to, almost certainly is a Rapturist. He's got ties to The Family, and they like that idea.