Question about Christianity and Social Media

I'll wait for @Diacanu to confirm that that's what he meant.

Definitely. It's entirely possible I read his response the wrong way.

1. No it does not count.
2. Absolutely Christianity needs to lower our reported numbers.

This.

Also this.

Nope.
I just think we can exclude Leprechauns.
And I don't have to be Doctor Manhattan level smart to do so.

Just get all the leaders of all the sects of Christianity to agree with you, and....
(Knows that'll take a squajillion years, so relaxes)

Summing up, then: Everyone's truth is their own individual truth. The only absolute truth is gravity.

Given that the big bang may have been set off by a sort of gravimetric fart bubble in the hyper-spatial fabric of reality, then...yeah.

But that doesn't answer the question of why you are not a "Christian" based on the environment you were born into.

In fact I think he answered you quite well. You just don't accept the answer.

People are capable of growth and change, of rethinking the beliefs they were raised on. Sometimes they move on, sometimes they return to where they started. Hasn't that ever happened to you?

Thank you. That is an excellent illustration of the point I was going to make.

OK, thanks. I was beginning to wonder if I was losing my memory in my old age.

So, by stretching the point far enough, you can say you were "brought up Christian". Why, then, aren't you still Christian? By your logic, if someone is brought up Muslim, they will always be Muslim, if someone is brought up Mormon, they will always be Mormon, and so on. (That was the whole point of post #86.)

It seems to me that you are disproving your own statement, unless you still consider yourself a "watered-down Christian".

Unless your upbringing taught you that "Christianity" (it sure doesn't seem to me, from what you describe, that it was anything even close to what Jesus actually taught) is not something important enough to make any difference, or true enough to be bothered with, in which case your current position is pretty much what you were brought up with. In which case I would still ask: is your position based on logic, or is it just because "you were brought up that way"?

Actually, you don't. Which is a shame, because I am convinced you would be able to.

But instead of presenting logical arguments (the way K. and RickDeckard do; even when I disagree with them, I know they're going to be able to present and defend their case), you just make fun of those who disagree with you, and call them names. It's actually about the same thing as what Donald Trump does, although you admittedly do it in defense of somewhat better positions than he does.

But everything I have seen over the years indicates that you would be capable of going beyond that childish "point and laugh and insult those who who disagree with you" approach. It's a shame you don't even try.

Not me.

I agree with you thoroughly that religion should keep out of politics. That is one of the things I disagree with the most as regards American Christianity. It is bad for politics, bad for Christianity, contrary to the teachings of Jesus, and contrary to the principles written into the American constitution to attempt to legistlate your own particular variety of religious belief into law.

Nevertheless, even if religion did get completely out of politics, I would still be opposed to it. Religion is a human invention, designed to manipulate God by claiming that "If I do thus and so, God has to give me such and such blessing." Religion was one of the greatest obstacles to my discovering God. All I was interested in before (when I was "religious") was doing and believing the right things to earn that eternal "get out of jail free" card.

God set up a whole religion in the Old Testament to show people how that would have to work: "You want to earn things? Here's what you have to do." And what was the result? Oppression, unfaithfulness, bigotry, and all the other evils you can imagine in the name of that very religion. It seems to me that God made his point rather well: religion will never fix man's ills. It will always just be one more tool for people to use to oppress others. It's not for nothing that religion was the primary opponent of Jesus.

So it would appear that I am even more opposed to religion than you are. For you, it is enough that it leave you alone. But for me, religion is at the very best a dead-end street, and in most cases a manifestation of the very nastiness that it is supposed to be "curing".

All understanding of truth is subjective.

But truth itself is objective. I might believe in that famous "teapot in orbit around Saturn" (I think it was...), depending on my frame of reference, but in actuality it either is there or is not there, independent of my belief.

That is why I draw a distinction between religion and faith. Religion is what happens when faith fossilizes.

Actually, relativity and quantum mechanics tells us that even what we think of as the bedrock "truths" of physics are dependent on the frame of reference. Does the teapot orbit Saturn or is Saturn orbiting the teapot? Or are they both orbiting a common barycenter? And is either object there at all when not being observed?

There was one anthropologist who said something along the lines of: "The difference between religion and faith is whether the god obeys the priest or the priest obeys his god." A very fine distinction, IMO.

You missed out CHAOS theory. The teapot and Saturn form a dynamical system whose phase space forms a strange attractor, which approximates a stable orbit.

The only way that the existence of the teapot is actually subjective is if one imagines it arising spontaneously from quantum fluctuations (a hideously unlikely event) within a subset of the universal wavefunction that has collapsed for one observer but has not yet done so for another. But generally, truths about the macroscopic world are not subjective.

Okay, thanks for the considered response. The implication of my question is not that you haven't thought out your position, which you clearly have. Or that you are some sort of hyper-literalist, which you are not. But I think there is a misunderstanding - I'm asking if, today, when you consider New Testament writings, the proposition that any part of them is fundamentally unreliable or contradictory of another is among the possibilities you're willing to consider when forming a conclusion about them.

(I believe that the answer is "no".)

Even the fact that you continue to refer to "The Bible" seems to me to be a category error and thus an admission that you take a position based on dogma. The Bible isn't one work. There are different authors within it, there are different versions of it and there are other writings which might have been included in it but which aren't. From the point of view of historical analysis, they must be considered separately. The very assumption that these writings be considered as a single unit to which appellations such as "trustworthy" might be applied or disapplied is evidence that your position has cultural and theological foundations rather than historical ones.

The claim that you have a wife is in principle testable and does not challenge existing paradigms, thus is unlikely to invite the kind of rigorous skepticism that you describe and which is warranted of larger claims.
Your including a revelatory experience in your reasoning may be a sensible thing for you to do, but it is certainly not scientific in any sense of that word as it is commonly understood. The scientific method requires rigorous collective effort and repeatability. Others cannot - and should not - admit evidence that is private to you or to anyone else, whether that concerns contact with a deity, abduction by aliens or sightings of Elvis.

If you wish to proceed scientifically, then you must demonstrate your claims without reference to your claimed experience. I submit that you aren't doing that. You are reasoning about the New Testament writings while accepting theological postulates which you think follow from your experiences - biblical inerrancy and so forth - as axiomatic.

It follows so automatically it's difficult to even break it down into language.

One who believes in the inerrancy of a work cannot admit to error or contradiction within that work. Therefore where one finds an apparent error or contradiction, one is forced to maintain that it is not such and to produce an explanation. If the effort to do this is sufficiently large, the explanation becomes contorted - hence a contortion. But since one must maintain that the work is inerrant, one cannot admit that they are contorting themselves and must pretend that the contorted explanation follows naturally from the text...

The thing that really ... irks me, is people who say "I know" when discussing their beliefs - which is also why I asked you why you look for documentation.

To me, we humans have absolutely no way of comprehending an immortal being who created the Heavens and Earth. So, no amount of documentation will ever prove the existence of such a being. We don't know. We can't know. All we can do is believe.

I usually try to press my point with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indiana, standing at the edge of that precipice did not know the bridge was right in front of him. But, after what he'd previously been through, he believed that his father had provided instructions for him and so far, those instructions had proved to be life-saving. He did not know a bridge was there. But, his father, in that book, said "take a step" and he did.

He didn't "know". He "believed".

And that is the difference between religion and faith.

That's pretty much what I "believe". Knowing..really knowing that God exists excludes the possibility of Faith. If we can scientifically prove the existence of God, then God is no longer a divinity. God's just an astronaut.

No, my point is, people always tend to be the dominant religion of their country/state of origin.
You're part of America's dominant religion.
If you came by, say Buddhism "logically", I'd be more open to the story.
And like I said, your Muslim counterpart probably tells the same story.
You can't both be right.

So instead of badgering private individuals on the Internet, you should be figuring out ways to oust the religionists - of whatever stripe - from positions of power.

I can't remember the last time I called someone a doody head over religion.


It probably feels like I'm mean, cuz I care not the slightest for vanity, or "leaving them some face".
Those have been used as escape pods for too long, so I just don't allow them.
I'm not a gentle hand-holder.
I'm coming in hot.
I also don't allow for people wrapping their identity up in a thing.
Sorry, should've gotten your own identity, so into the bin the argument goes, even if it has pieces of you stuck to it like cheese in a pizza box.

This may seem needlessly cruel, but we don't treat political party this way.
We don't treat favorite restaurants this way.
We don't treat favorite shows this way.
Only religious belief asks for this special careful tenderness.

In my experience, only modern US Christianity asks ..., no, demands this special careful tenderness.

Well, American Christians whine and foot stomp, fundie Muslims will stab you.
But, yeah, it's on a continuum of privilege.

Oh. That may be. But, I've never met a fundie Muslim. and I did say "in my experience".

So, I'll concede that Muslims may do the same.

I admit that my position has become stronger over the years, as I've studied the issue more. And why shouldn't it? I would have been much more open ten or twenty years ago to the possibility that there might be something that is fundamentally unreliable or contradictory, because I didn't know as much about the issue.

Today, I would say, yes, in theory, I would always be willing to consider that as a possibility, but in practice, I'm not sure what people could bring up that I haven't already checked out. When you do enough research on a given subject, you tend to have very firm opinions about it. Since no knowledge is truly complete, there is always the possibility that something will come along and show that the idea is all wet, but that becomes more and more unlikely.

It's like a physicist who believes in relativity. (IOW, a true physicist.) Is he, in theory, willing to turn away from it if some fundamental problem were to be demonstrated with the theory? Sure; that's part of the scientific method. But he sure wouldn't do so lightly, or say "I'm still wondering about that." I've spent over 40 years coming to my present position on the Bible, and what were very definitely open questions 50 years ago are no longer as open in my mind. Because the answers I have found seem to point to a fairly reliable conclusion.

Believe me, I understand the implications of canonicity just as well as the other aspects of the question. Canonicity is a very fundamental part of the question of the trustworthiness of the Bible. That, also, is something I have studied in detail for many years. And there also, the more I studied, the more I found that things like "300 years after Christ, the Catholic Church made a choice about what books to include in the New Testament" to be just so much revisionist nonsense. That is a serious twisting of the facts, accepted by those who don't want the Bible to be trustworthy.

There is nothing wrong with having studied canonicity in detail also. That in itself does not demonstrate in any way your contention that my position "has cultural and theological foundations rather than historical ones". The truth is in fact completely the other way around: my historical studies on the issue led me to certain theological positions. Your assumption that all those who consider the canon of the Bible as we know it do so simply because it is the dogmatic assertion of the church is nothing more than a gratuitous assumption.

That is valid only when trying to prove something to others. (And even there, there can be exceptions, but for the sake of argument we will pretend there are and can be none.) But I have never claimed, pretended, or even expected that you or anyone else should believe in God because of my personal experience. That would be entirely unreasonable. What I have always said, very explicitly, is that you have no chance of convincing me that God does not exist, because my personal experience of God goes far beyond a simple, rational conviction that he exists. When I moved beyond "church" to a personal relationship with God, that put a permanent end to any possibility of thinking that he is simply a concept I was conditioned to accept by my upbringing.

And personal experience certainly is valid for one's own beliefs about what one has experienced.

Okay, I see I didn't understand what you wrote. In the original post, you had written:

I didn't go directly from "if biblical inerrancy is your fixed position" to "you will perform whatever contortions are required of you to reconcile the texts." But if you meant that latter statement to flow from "biblical inerrancy as a fixed position" rather than from "your personal relationship with Jesus", then I can understand how you could wonder how I didn't follow it. Because your claim does indeed follow inescapably from "biblical inerrancy as a fixed position".

But since inerrancy (as I accept it; there are some "biblical innerancy advocates" out there who would think I was a horrible heretic who doesn't believe the Bible -- I have had some tell me so to my face) is not my "fixed position" but the conclusion that I have come to more and more firmly over a period of between 40 and 50 years of studying out the issue, that really doesn't have anything to do with me.

Feel free to say you disagree with me in the authority of the Bible. In fact, I don't see how you could fail to disagree, because from your worldview (as I understand it), the existence of God, the reality of miracles, knowing the future, and anything else that involves supernaturalism, must automatically be discounted. So I have no problem whatsoever with you disagreeing with my position on the trustworthiness of the Bible.

But please don't pretend that my position results merely from theological dogmatism. It doesn't. It is a conclusion I have come to after facing up to very real doubts on the issue.