[MP-Ryan]

Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed every religion thread seems to do this.

Yep, which is why Marcov posted the flamebait, knowing perfectly well that it would lead to another Luis/Battuta trainwreck of a thread.

You must admit, it's kind of entertaining when you're not a participant.

[General Battuta]

As a reminder to Luis Dias what we're waiting on is

All that matters in terms of the evaluation of religion are the empirical outcomes. The holy text is relevant only inasmuch as it impacts behavior. If the believers don't interpret it literally that's fine.

Yeah, I'm okay with that too, despite the sheer irrationality and nihilism lurking underneath your idea... no wait that's actually pretty bad.

anything to back this up.

You need to make a religious/philosophical argument that can somehow match my empirical take on things. (good luck)

[Dragon]

I can't really understand what the entire dispute ended up being about.
What I'm sure of is that you certainly cannot judge a passage out of context, by taking a single line from the bible without context you can "justify" and "prove" almost everything.
This had been done before, not only with the Bible, and rarely ended well.
For instance, people criticized Harry Potter by quoting a few lines spoken by Voldemort, of all people, and saying it's a demonstration of values the book is trying to propagate, which is a laughable claim for anybody who actually read it.
Using similar methods, you can have just about any idea, then look throught the entire bible to find lines which could sound like they confirm you're right and voila, your idea is now backed by word of God. There's a lot of words in bible, and if you look hard enough, you'll be able to justify everything from high taxes to slavery.
To truly understand text in bible, you not only need to know the whole text, but also realia of the age it was written in, as well as some things about translation, provided you're not reading it in original language. I've found how important the latter is after reading that recently, translators found that the whole idea of Mary's virginity might have come from translation, since the word translated to "virgin" could also mean "woman" in Hebrew. Of course, most people don't really need such comeplete understanding, but I'd recommend to read a whole book (as in, "bible chapter", not nessesarly entire bible) poassage in question is in and do some reaserch about times described in it before making any statements about it.

[Luis Dias]

Pull your argument together. You've conceded that evaluating individual lines of scripture is irrelevant to assessing the behavior of readers, giving up the line of attack you began in what I quoted.

If you let go of your Brick Wall alter-ego, perhaps we have a chance at an understanding here. Not otherwise.

So let's try again, first by ripping apart that silly sentence of yours. I don't concede things that I never stated. So if your case is a strawman, then argue with it, not me.

I said that we are able to judge the book itself. Not the people. No, rather the book as a moral guidance.

I said, words matter and deserve judgement.

You said, no, they don't matter until you see their effects. As if we aren't already embebbed with this experience of a lifetime. As if we are disussing something in a lab.

I said this:

Ok, I'm having trouble expressing my idea here. What I mean is that if Battuta is right in saying that "Words don't matter" inside the bible, what matters is the behavior that results from the interaction between the believer and the bible, then we are making a case for ignorance and irrationality, damning us to be stupid to not understand the book, while at the same time accepting that the believers are sufficiently "smart" in a "different" way to get good behavior out of what rational people would recognize as "pretty weak source for morality".

I'll try again.

We can judge these words in as much as we can judge people around us. We can say that there are awful things in the bible, without collapsing in any inconsistency at all.

We can also say that the metaphoricality or literality of these words have little impact upon their awfulness.

You OTOH, say this is impossible until we scientifically trace all the actual impacts of these sentences upon some historical truth. You ask, have these appalling sentences actually make any harm?

I could reply "YES, yes they did", but I obviously would be lying. Of course I cannot trace these things, they are untraceable. This does not render myself incompetent, it means that the method is another. You analyse the language. You analyse what kinds of concepts are inherent in the sentence. What does it teach? What kind of relationship to the universe it tries to convince you of? What kind of pressure is it trying to put yourself into?

These are not difficult things to do, you know, we do it all the frigging time, every single day, **** every second. We are EXCEPCIONALLY GOOD at this.

So there's an element of nihilism here. Relativism. As if the believer is in a "different" universe that we cannot really understand with the same tools we actually understand everything else.

totally unsupported and again completely confusing.

Not true. You are saying that we cannot judge a sentence by its merits, without observing from the outside how a believer will react to it.

As if you cannot say by yourself by reading it yourself! As if you are a completely different species than the believer, as if you are from some kind of an alternative universe! As if "English" (or any other human language) was somehow a transcendent language that you couldn't access, but at the same time, the believer "accesses" it and *that* you can study!


... bah I'm probably wasting my english but what the helll..... ok Battuta, what is it this time that you failed to understand?

[WeatherOp]

Well to be totally honest, that is basically what the Bible says. I haven't read enough of his words to see if he does go too far, but of what you posted(besides some of the Catholic parts) is inline with the Bible.

Only if you take it literally, forgetting about the time it was written and thus overlook the real meaning, which means completely missing the entire point.
In fact, if taken literally, Bible might seem like a piece of really fantastical fiction, with some historical elements put in. What makes it special is the methaphorical meaning, which is much deeper than many people think. Unfortunately, only the intelligent people understand that, unintelligent ones either dismiss Bible as lies or belive the literal meaning, like most creationists or mr. Stewart. Literal meaning could have been good for unintelligent people when the Bible was written, though (For example, lack of tolerance for other religions could be explained by the fact Israelites were surrounded by cults which had beliefs that could be dangerous, e.g. human sacrifice (just an example, I'm not sure if any of these tribes actually did that). It was then important to make sure they won't convert to one of these primitive religions). Times had changed, so people who don't see the methaphorical meaning (which is valid no matter the time) are trying to follow a 2000 years old guidelines, some of which are no longer valid.

Personally I do take the Bible literally, and that was the way I worded my post. Of course if someone does not, then you are correct. However, I was basically saying why I agreed with what I read of Mr. Stewart, and that what he believes if neither radical or extreme in  the views of Christianity.

[Luis Dias]

As a reminder to Luis Dias what we're waiting on is

All that matters in terms of the evaluation of religion are the empirical outcomes. The holy text is relevant only inasmuch as it impacts behavior. If the believers don't interpret it literally that's fine.

Yeah, I'm okay with that too, despite the sheer irrationality and nihilism lurking underneath your idea... no wait that's actually pretty bad.

anything to back this up.

You need to make a religious/philosophical argument that can somehow match my empirical take on things. (good luck)

That's a more subtle point, to which I am pretty pessimistic at your... ahhh.... acceptance of it.


It boils down to this simple logic. If you state that the words in the bible cannot be read by "us" and judged by the reader directly, but rather they ought to be judged by the behavior resulting in the actions of the believer by reading them (and accepting them), then it follows that:

- Either the reader of the bible is more intelligent than you, or you are both incapable to understand what kinds of actions a certain sentence compells you to do;

- If both of you are incapable to understand what kind of behavior a certain passage compells you to do, then we are left with two options. Either the sentence is fundamentally meaningless, since there is no behavior that can result from a non-understanding (obvious), or the sentence has "mysterious powers", lurking in the mental background, as some kind of voodoo magic, compelling the believer to act in a X or Y or Z way, without having to understand it at all.

Now, if this is the only (good) option you got left, you have to choose it. But by doing so, you are effectively stating that biblical words have some kind of a "power" that ordinary words "don't have". But since the words in the bible are quite ordinary (and suffer from multiple translations, etc.), we must conclude that all the words have this "characteristic".

And thus you are effectively stating that we can't have any opinion on any kind of word, sentence or paragraph for that matter. That the only way to do so is to have a "holistic approach", seeing every action that such word, sentence, paragraph, book causes.

This means that *everything* we ever write should be classified as "meaningless drivel".

Now, I'm not (at least here) suggesting that you shouldn't reach this conclusion. Perhaps you do, perhaps it's what you believe.

But this is, in a nutshell, Nihilism. Congratulations, you just reached the point where Nietzsche predicted you'd arrive at if you weren't careful, 200 years ago.

[General Battuta]

Personally I do take the Bible literally, and that was the way I worded my post.

No you don't. I do not believe for one second that you obey the literal scripture of the Bible.

Of course if someone does not, then you are correct. However, I was basically saying why I agreed with what I read of Mr. Stewart, and that what he believes if neither radical or extreme in  the views of Christianity.

I'm not defending that kind of silliness for one second.

[Luis Dias]

I can't really understand what the entire dispute ended up being about.
What I'm sure of is that you certainly cannot judge a passage out of context, by taking a single line from the bible without context you can "justify" and "prove" almost everything.

Yeah this is a fair criticism, one which I defended many times in the past, until someone asked me the obvious question. "OK, so now tell me, in what ****ing context does that sentence get any better?"

So I'll redirect that question to you, since I was unable to produce a defense for that.

This had been done before, not only with the Bible, and rarely ended well.
For instance, people criticized Harry Potter by quoting a few lines spoken by Voldemort, of all people, and saying it's a demonstration of values the book is trying to propagate, which is a laughable claim for anybody who actually read it.

Yeah, but unless you are saying that Jesus is the devil and shouldn't be quoted for stating immoralities, there's really no good analogy here.

Using similar methods, you can have just about any idea, then look throught the entire bible to find lines which could sound like they confirm you're right and voila, your idea is now backed by word of God. There's a lot of words in bible, and if you look hard enough, you'll be able to justify everything from high taxes to slavery.

.... which were not only condoned but actually advised as being a good practice, not by a Voldemort character, but as a direct moral code.

If the writer of Harry Potter remembered in the middle of the book to write herself to the reader directly and advise him/her that magic does really exist and that they should just quit school and figure out how can they fly, surely you wouldn't dismiss it as "uncontextualized".

To truly understand text in bible, you not only need to know the whole text, but also realia of the age it was written in, as well as some things about translation, provided you're not reading it in original language.

This is called biblical scholarship. And when you learn how the bible was created, transformed, written by multiple writers, edited, censored, added, etc.,etc., you will end up with an astonishing web that smells of nothing but human tinkering.

I've found how important the latter is after reading that recently, translators found that the whole idea of Mary's virginity might have come from translation, since the word translated to "virgin" could also mean "woman" in Hebrew. Of course, most people don't really need such comeplete understanding, but I'd recommend to read a whole book (as in, "bible chapter", not nessesarly entire bible) poassage in question is in and do some reaserch about times described in it before making any statements about it.

Yes, the translation error is widely known by now. This asks other set of questions, like, what if this mistranslation never happened? Would St Mary be even a saint? Would she have been said to born without sin? Would the sexual prescriptions of the church be the same?

There's a whole theological building sitting on top of a mistranslation. But this is yet another problem. I have no trouble in saying that for the purposes of dealing with specific sentences within the bible, I don't care about these things, because we know that the christians don't get the "original" (if it ever was one) bible, they get their own King James (most likely) version, and so that's the one I was discussing here.

[WeatherOp]

Personally I do take the Bible literally, and that was the way I worded my post.

No you don't. I do not believe for one second that you obey the literal scripture of the Bible.

Of course if someone does not, then you are correct. However, I was basically saying why I agreed with what I read of Mr. Stewart, and that what he believes if neither radical or extreme in  the views of Christianity.

I'm not defending that kind of silliness for one second.

Do I obey all the law? I'd be lying if I said I did. Do I obey all that is stated for Christians to obey in the New Testament? I'm sure trying.

Also who said I need to be defended? It is what it is.

[General Battuta]

Well that's a lot less silly, at least.

[Dragon]

I can't really understand what the entire dispute ended up being about.
What I'm sure of is that you certainly cannot judge a passage out of context, by taking a single line from the bible without context you can "justify" and "prove" almost everything.

Yeah this is a fair criticism, one which I defended many times in the past, until someone asked me the obvious question. "OK, so now tell me, in what ****ing context does that sentence get any better?"

So I'll redirect that question to you, since I was unable to produce a defense for that.

Could you provide the number and book in which the line you quoted was in?
I have to work with a Polish version of bible, so this makes looking for it difficult. I have to know what context it appears in, because there are many possiblities.

This had been done before, not only with the Bible, and rarely ended well.
For instance, people criticized Harry Potter by quoting a few lines spoken by Voldemort, of all people, and saying it's a demonstration of values the book is trying to propagate, which is a laughable claim for anybody who actually read it.

Yeah, but unless you are saying that Jesus is the devil and shouldn't be quoted for stating immoralities, there's really no good analogy here.

I agree that the line indeed seems immoral, but as I said, I need to know where it is to know exactly what he was talking about. It is very difficult to talk about a single line in the bible, especially without knowing it's location.

Also, note. Talking about general sense and how bible should be understood is one thing, but when we'll be talking about specific lines, language differences may come into play. I only know a handfull of quotes from the bible in english, so if you have the King's James Bible and I have the Millenium Bible (Polish translation from what was considered "original language" about 60 years ago), the text may noticably differ. Don't be suprised if the wording used in Millenium Bible will lead to a somewhat different conclusion that the one in King's James Bible.

[Marcov]

Ok, let me try giving an example. Let's admit that the bible has the following passage:

But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.

It isn't Jesus who said that, he was describing a King who got angry at his servant.

Battuta says that the Bible doesn't do anything else then affect people's behavior because he's atheist and doesn't see anything beyond what seems logical as far as we know.

[Marcov]

Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed every religion thread seems to do this.

Yep, which is why Marcov posted the flamebait, knowing perfectly well that it would lead to another Luis/Battuta trainwreck of a thread.

No I didn't. I just wanted to reveal this site, this heck of a site.

From what I've heard Luis Dias and Battuta seem to be archenemies in debates, but above that, I have no knowledge of.

[Luis Dias]

It isn't Jesus who said that, he was describing a King who got angry at his servant.

He was making a parable of his own kingdom, so it does matter. I could produce a lot of damning quotes all day, but you see, there are a lot of pages out there in the netz that already do this, so that would be a pointless exercise.

From what I've heard Luis Dias and Battuta seem to be archenemies in debates, but above that, I have no knowledge of.

At least until Battuta starts to misrepresent me, cry about how backpedalling I am (when I am not...), then simply quit the conversation. That's the usual pattern.

[Marcov]

He was making a parable of his own kingdom, so it does matter. I could produce a lot of damning quotes all day, but you see, there are a lot of pages out there in the netz that already do this, so that would be a pointless exercise.

Er, no, it was a king. Just a "master", whether or not the king is good or not doesn't matter; what he was trying to point out was "make as many as you can or what few you have will be taken" sort of thing. The thing about the king putting to death those who oppose him doesn't mean that all who are non-Christian should be killed.

Actually, sure, Jesus speaks of hell, those who aren't good go to it (speaking literally), but I don't think he ever means or implies anything that obviously bad. He stated bluntly that "whoever lives by the sword dies by the sword", so this should give you an idea that he isn't a cruel guy at all.

P.S. actually yeah, I kind of agree with Dragon as I'm the sort of person who believes in what seems morally correct and not utter fundamentalistic ignorance.

Though admittedly, I still struggle with my own faith currently, so cornering me to a debate where I will be forced to say that the Bible is full of thumper crap isn't a productive idea.

[Luis Dias]

So you are really arguing that in christianity, whomever doesn't follow Christ will not go to hell?

Let's make this clear, are you really arguing this falsehood?

[Marcov]

Take it easy, kid.

Firstly, no. I wasn't saying that. You seemed to be saying "hey, look at this?! How could such a good guy say these things?!!!". However, again, Jesus never likes killing, or theft, or greed etc. He just isn't into that, the Bible in its entirety makes it clear.

However, this has nothing to do with going to hell or not; it's "your choice" to be good or bad.

What I see here is that you accept two things; accept that everything in the Bible should be treated as a dictionary or be atheist. Sadly, as Dragon has explained numerous times, this is not the case.

The Bible is an epic, large, old book, written by thousands of writers and evangelists. Much evidence of the Church tampering with it too.

Plus the fact that as Dragon said, language before isn't exactly like language is now. So you CAN NEVER BE SURE that what the Bible says is bluntly what it means.

You will try to make an excuse saying "well, if you say all those things, then the Bible is just full of inconsistent crap". Now now, I'm no Bible scholar, but what I can say is, maybe a little research can make things clearer.

As I said, cornering me to a debate forcing me to concede is never a good idea. You go ahead and try it. Nothing happens. Better yet, argue with Dragon.

[MP-Ryan]

So you are really arguing that in christianity, whomever doesn't follow Christ will not go to hell?

I'd actually like to see you produce a quotation that says precisely that.  Considering the Old and New Testaments outright contradict each other in places, and translations vary wildly, and Bible versions also have a fair bit of variance, I think you may be hard pressed to do so.

I know it's a common interpretation in some branches of Christianity, but I'm fairly certain it's not a direct Biblical passage.

IIRC (and not being a Christian, I can't claim to have paid a lot of attention to the inner workings of the text) most Biblical versions refer to eternal salvation as a consequence of following Christ's teachings, and leave the consequences of failure to do so up to the reader. Christians, care to comment on that?

[Marcov]

You can find just about everything burn-witches in David Stewart's site.

I mean it. Wanna find a quote saying that whoever doesn't follow Jesus goes to hell? Consult the Stewart site.

[Luis Dias]

What I see here is that you accept two things; accept that everything in the Bible should be treated as a dictionary or be atheist. Sadly, as Dragon has explained numerous times, this is not the case.

Not at all, my point was much more limited and minimal, that is, that the bible possesses evil passages that we can judge, something that ran counter to someone here's point. Battuta sillily argued (and failed) that we cannot judge any passage by the bible without scientifically attest to the effects of it in the believers. The whole argument was about that particular point.

I never said that the bible should be "treated as a dictionary or else". I do think that you can read the bible in multiple ways, whatever fits your interests better. But if you are trying to prevent me from stating what I regard as evident, I won't have it.

As I said, cornering me to a debate forcing me to concede is never a good idea. You go ahead and try it. Nothing happens. Better yet, argue with Dragon.

Don't take it personally, I don't like it either when people reply to my questions with another set of questions as if it is an argument. It's just that I'm sick and tired of hearing people say that the Bible and Jesus are so great and we can't dare to propose otherwise that it nauseates me.