Debate : 27991


Off-Topic / Debate / 27991	27990 \| 27992

Subject:	Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
Newsgroups:	lugnet.off-topic.debate
Date:	Sun, 22 Oct 2006 05:46:35 GMT
Viewed:	4339 times

In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Brendan Powell Smith wrote:

In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:

Well, let’s say that it “rings true” to me; I find the wisdom valid for my life. Why? I don’t know the reason. But it does.

To say that it “rings true to you” almost makes it sound like you are evaluating it based on evidence and logic, rationally determining it to be the best explanatory theory. But this is quite different than saying that you are absolutely sure of it based on a personal revelation, so I’m not sure which it is for you.

Must they be mutually exclusive?

Is it within the realm of possibility that you could be convinced otherwise?

How? Via torture? ;-)

That Jesus was mistaken about the nature of God and what God wants, and about his own identity as the Son of God?

I’m not sure I even understand what the term “Son of God” means. I do know that it isn’t merely a synonym of “Son of Man”, “Lamb of God”, “Messiah”, etc.

As for His revelation of the nature of God, I am convinced that He is correct AND it rings true for me:-)

Why do you believe what you believe?

I would like to think that I form and modify my beliefs based on the most rationally compelling evidence available to me. I will certainly not deny that I accept many things based on authority--that is to say, trusted sources--but that trust is provisional and based on the degree to which I am convinced such an authority ultimately bases their own beliefs or theories on a rational evaluation of the available evidence. I am always ready to reconsider and perhaps update my beliefs based upon reliable new evidence or a theory that makes better sense of available evidence.

That is reasonable, and I’m not much different.

Upon what rational basis do you (presumably) deny the existence of God?

I deny the existence of the Christian god by the same basis I deny the existence of the gods of any religion. Based on all the evidence, it seems to me resoundingly more likely that these are all equally figments of the imagination. I don’t attempt to prove their non-existence any more than I would attempt to prove the nonexistance of Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. It would seem the onus is not on me to disprove the existence of any hypothetical supernatural being someone might conjure up.

I didn’t say “Christian” God, I simply said “God”. Better yet, “Creator”.

How do you explain the existence of the universe? What “revelation” leads you to that conclusion?

I do not have an explanation for the existence of the universe. It is possible that we will never have a great understanding of the question of why there is something rather than nothing. But it hardly follows from the existence of the universe that the Christian god exists. I’m sure the Cosmological Argument has been discussed here before, but to put it briefly, positing some sort of intelligent being capable of creating a universe as the precursor to the universe is not an explaination at all. The unavoidable question becomes “What created this intelligent being?” If one argues that this intelligent being is somehow “uncreated”, that allows for something to exist “uncreated” and gets rid of the whole problem we were trying to solve.

Except one explanation provides meaning and purpose, the other provides meaninglessness and hopelessness.

Just because science may not have the answer to a particular question does not imply that religion is therefore qualified to answer it. The other unfortunate thing about simply positing that God created the universe and discouraging scientists from exploring the matter any further is that surely there is useful knowledge to be gathered about the universe by exploring different theories of how it came about. Perhaps the evidence will suggest our universe is one of many. Perhaps the evidence will suggest the universe in an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing. This seems like useful knowledge to have, and to simply give the matter over to religion where non-rational dogma prevails seems terribly misguided.

But how is “I don’t know” MORE rational than “non-rational” Creator explanations? It is a simple equivocation.

Eh, that is the nature of Religion, of faith. I seriously doubt that any two believers of the same faith believe exactly the same things. It is how peace-loving Muslims and butchering Islamo-fascists can pray to the same Allah.

Yes, this is what seems so dangerous to me about religious faith.

It simply is not fair to make moral equivalencies, unless you think it fair that I lump you in with Stalin....

Islamo-literalists can have blind faith that the Koran is the truth, and this leads to terrible consequences. And to live in a world where this sort of blind faith in dogma is not only accepted but given an aura of deep respect and freedom from critical inquiry is providing a fertile ground for irrationality and the acts of terrorism it can spawn.

A culture that supports blind faith creates people who (by definition) cannot be reasoned with.

To me, it isn’t germane how one acquired one’s beliefs or really what what one believes, but how one puts those beliefs into action in one’s personal life. It’s what Jesus was saying to the Pharisees-- if your piety doesn’t translate into a love of your neighbor, it is worthless.

This allows you only to judge whether someone’s actions are in keeping with their beliefs, but it does not allow you to judge whether their beliefs are themselves rational. By this standard, you might judge that indeed, the 9/11 hijackers were acting in perfect concert with their beliefs. You might attempt to criticize them by suggesting that the Koran doesn’t really support suicide attacks on non-Muslims, but that would be a rational argument based on evidence, and if you’re going to bother to be rational, you might as well ask what on earth a person in this day and age is doing basing their beliefs about the ultimate nature of the universe on a centuries-old book that makes no attempt to establish itself as a source of reliable scientific knowledge and instead simply makes claims about the way things are and how they should be, appealing only to itself for authority.

But AUTHORITY is what it all boils down to. Do you have the authority to make claims? Do I? We slip into a moral equivalence pretty quickly. I say we use our intellect to forever search for TRUTH which is absolute, which I would then define as “God”.

You are comparing apples and orbs. There are no “facts” (verifiable by science) in religion.

Religions makes all sorts of fact claims that should (at least in principle) be verifiable by science. The Bible is full of such “facts”, and whenever it seems like science might possibly back-up something from the Bible (The Flood, The Resurrection, etc), religious beleievers are the first to trumpet such support for their beliefs. Of course, when science inconveniently fails to support other religious “facts”, believers fall back on the platitude that science has nothing to say about religion.

I disagree. Arguments or ideas should be judged based on their merits, not their origins. Anything other is simply intolerance.

So we both have intolerance, yours comes in once you’ve heard what someone’s beliefs are, mine comes in when I’ve heard how they arrived at those beliefs.

Let’s be clear-- I’m not intolerant of any belief UNTIL I see immoral behavior because of it.

Imagine you are driving down a road and a bystander flags you down and says to you “the bridge ahead is out”. Are you not curious as to how this person arrived at this knowledge? If you asked, “How do you know that?” and he replied “Blorgar the invisible unicorn revealed this to me when I was five years old” would that not affect how you judge his proposition about the bridge being out? On the other hand, if his reply was “I heard the news bulletin on AM 640, and just inspected it myself,” I have to imagine that too would affect how you judge his proposition that the bridge is out.

Either way he could be lying, and so it wouldn’t really help you know for sure if the bridge was indeed out or not. You would have to go to the bridge and see for yourself, and then judge the bystander’s response.

State your position and argue its merits. Change, retain, tweak as needed.

But what are its merits? Doesn’t the merit of a proposition depend on its supporting evidence and explanatory power? And if it is discovered that it is simply believed in blindly with no evidence, or especially if it is in contrast to a mountain of evidence, doesn’t that make the proposition meritless?

As far as science is concerned, matter cannot simply appear (Conservation of energy) There is a mountain of evidence to support this proposition, and yet you cannot bring yourself to admit that the universe COULDN’T have started on its own. Instead you say “I don’t know”. I think we DO know this-- that it couldn’t have started on its own! You say “I don’t know” because you WON’T say “Something beyond science started it”.

On my reading of The Gospels, Jesus doesn’t seem to have expected gentile followers at all.

Careful lumping them all together. Each has its own unique perspective.

Yes, that’s an artful way of acknowledging that they don’t agree with each other in important respects and portray Jesus quite differently. Which Jesus is the real Jesus? A sythesis? Just one of the four? Paul’s vastly different Jesus? How can we know? If you want certainty of belief, I can only imagine blind faith does the trick here.

Say you and I got together and met Dave! After, we compared notes about his personality. You found him to be “super”, and I found him to be “supercilious”. Who is correct? Which is the real Dave!?

No. All Christians believe this, more or less. These are matters of faith, not fact, as an “earth is flat” statement would be.

I’m not sure I see your distinction. That “Jesus is the final revelation of God’s nature” is presumably either true or false, just as “The Earth is flat” is true or false.

Rational arguments could be made in support of or against either proposition. If a tremendous amount of evidence could be produced to support the idea that Jesus of Nazareth never actually existed, this would rationally undercut the proposition that Jesus is the final revelation of God’s nature, just as a termendous amount of evidence has been shown to undercut the proposition that the Earth is flat.

Okay, that is about the ONLY rational argument I can think of, but so what is your point-- that there is a tremendous amount of evidence that Jesus never existed? Barring that, the argument is mute;-)

Either proposition can be believed in on blind faith in spite of any and all evidence to the contrary, but in either case the matter should be in principle fair game for scientific inquiry.

what you do expect people to learn from reading the Brick Testament? That Judaism/Christianity are, after all, silly? That Christians and Jews are going to suddenly stop believing in their faiths because of it? That doesn’t seem like a very realistic expectation.

I expect that a fair amount of people will find it amusing to peruse and will come away with an increased knowledge of the content of the Bible that they would not otherwise get unless they read the Bible for themselves. I hope to change what I see as some very widely-held misconceptions of the Bible’s content which stems from the fact that most people never read it for themselves and only ever learn about the 5-10% of the Bible that is ever quoted in church or pop culture.

What people do with that increased knowledge is up to them. I do hope it will prompt some people to reevaluate their beliefs, since that is almost always a good thing, especially in light of increased knowledge. I hope it will cause people to question whether I am wildly distorting the Bible, and prompt them to read the Bible for themsleves.

I would like people to read The Brick Testament and think to themselves, “Would the God I believe in really do that? Is this really how my religion portrays God? Why would Jesus say a thing like that? Does this really align with my sense of what is good and kind and merciful?”

But no, I do not realistically expect it to make a lot of non-believers out of believers. Religious faith has a resilient hold on the human mind.

What it really is is mockery.

Is it? Imagine it’s mid-2004 and you’ve moved into a solidly liberal town in a Blue State. It sort of blows your mind that there are so many rabid John Kerry supporters all around you. But since they seem so convinced that he’s got all the answers, you decide to read over copies of all the campaign speeches he’s given over the past year. But as you do this, you are more shocked than ever by what you are reading. You knew Kerry was a little off even before you started reading, but you had no idea! It turns out that Kerry has been a longtime supporter of genocide! Although he calls himself merciful, he has regularly treated those he supposedly loves with all manner of malevolence, even to the point of tortuing to death women and children! And even in the more recent Kerry speeches where many Democrats have said he’s “toned down the violence” and become a “kindler, gentler Kerry”, you find that he supports the eternal torture of anyone who holds the wrong religious beliefs!

And your feeling after reading these speeches, is that you can’t believe people are supporting this guy! Do they not know what’s in these speeches? Why do they keep campaigning for him and referring to him as compassionate and kind? If they only knew! But since you realize that most people won’t bother to read these long, dry speeches on their own, you have an idea! Take all the disturbing parts of Kerry’s speeches (which turns out to be something like 90% of the content) and illustrate it with LEGO on a website. Present it in a fashion that does not openly mock Kerry, for that might turn Kerry-supporters away before they’ve even read the first speech excerpt.

So the question is, in this situation, would such a website be mocking Kerry and his supporters? I’m not sure I know the answer, and I’m not sure I’d say whether The Brick Testament does or doesn’t “mock” the Bible, Christianity, and Judaism. I usually don’t think of it as mocking because it simply presents excerpt from the Bible I think many people would find as shocking as I do if they only knew about them.

And if you don’t think so, try (if you dare) creating a “Brick Koran” in the same vein as The Brick Testament. It would be perceived as mockery to the point that I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if some mullah somewhere put out a fatwa calling for your execution. Jeez, it’s chilling just to type it....

Oh, I don’t doubt that a Brick Koran would stand a decent chance of getting me killed or causing casualties somewhere else in the globe if word of it became sensationalized in Muslim countries. But does hypersensitivity and the threat of violnce = moral right?

Of course not.

When a deranged person is holding a gun in your face, it probably not advisiable to do anything that might even stand the slightest chance of being perceived as mockery because you will get killed. But this certainly does not put the derranged person in the moral right, nor does it mean that your perceived mockery would be taken by a sensible person as true mockery.

We live in a day and age where it may simply be too dangerous for anyone to create a Brick Koran, but surely the blame for that lies on religious believers willing to kill for their dogma rather than the artist scared for his life and the lives of others.

So you are back-handedly complimenting Christianity while mocking their beliefs, knowing that you are safe from retribution.

Not ignore them, but not to lose sight of their purpose in the first place. Boiled down: to love God is to love one another.

But surely, if you have ever read the OT you would know that you’d need to “boil away” the 99.9% of it that flatly contradicts this “interpretation”.

Shrug. It’s not an issue of validity via voluminosity. Remember, the OT is an ongoing story of the relationship between The People of God and Yahweh. The understanding of Yahweh goes through profound changes from Genesis to, say, Ecclesiates, for example. There isn’t one set understanding at all.

I very strongly disagree. On my reading, Yahweh is portrayed has having a very consistent character from page one of Genesis right up to last sentence of the last page of Malachi (where he speaks, as ever, of the “curse of destruction” awaiting those who do not keep the Law of Moses).

If there are a few occasional descriptions of Yahweh that posit him not really wanting animal saccrfices despite his making good on countless threats to bring down all sort of pain upon his Chosen People for not following the Law of Moses to the letter, I think it is far more logical to see these as what they are: aberrations from the norm that fly in the face of everything else in the OT.

To paint these few scattered passages as the endpoint of an “evolution” in understanding God’s nature seems like special pleading in the extreme.

There is also the obvious fact that nowhere in the OT or even in the NT is it suggested that the OT is not to be taken literally when it says that “Yahweh said this” or “Yahweh wants that”. The OT purports to tell you exactly what God has said and done, and what his nature is. If Jesus wanted people to believe otherwise, presumably he would have made a point of explaining this huge misunderstanding about the OT, but instead says nothing of the sort, and says that the Law of Moses will be valid until the end of heaven and Earth.

Well, at the very least, the subject is debatable. And one could say that one’s personal understanding could be the result of a “revelation”. How else would you describe it?

Maybe we’re using the word revelation differently here. There’s the secular meaning of revelation, kind of like “aha! now I see the logic!” and then there’s the religious sense of revelation, kind of like “I am now convinced beyond any doubt of this proposition, and no evidnce to the contrary could convince me otherwise.” I think there’s a very significant difference, I had thought you were claiming to ultimately base your belief in Jesus (and his being the son of God, and his “correct interpretation” of the OT, etc) on a religious sort of revelation. But now I’m wondering if that’s not the case.

But it also has a basis in reason.

It would be something like me criticizing someone who pays their taxes to the US government but looks for every last possible loophole to pay far less than their fair share.

hehe Like this?

I heard U2 was trying to get themselves “third world country” status so they can benefit from the very debt relief plan Bono is pushing.

This exemplifies to me how the Law can be twisted by our understanding to produce behavior that is contrary to the intentions of the Law in the first place.

And the obvious question in that case is why on earth a good god would have given The Law of Moses in the first place, and then wait 1,500 years to correct this supposed “misinterpreteation” of The Law which stemmed from taking what it said at face value. And of course why God would brutally punish his own people for failure to comply to the minutia of The Law--or allow his Chosen People to write holy scriptures claiming that was the case.

How could anyone, especially Jesus/God, criticize the Jews for not understanding the “true intentions of The Law” when those true intentions were not made clear, when they were seemingly given every indication that minutia was exactly what God cared about, and were scared to death to break from rote following of that minutia since God was contsantly taking the harshest vengeance on anyone who was so bold?

You seem to imagine some sort of evil trickster God at work here. And that, I would argue, would actually be in keeping with the OT’s portrayal of Yahweh. but I get the sense you don’t see your God in quite that way.

Now John is an interesting Gospel. We haven’t even begun to talk about the writer’s POV as it affects his presentation of Jesus’ story. I wouldn’t have pegged you as a literalist, Brendan. Or do you prefer to simply skewer literalists’ interpretations?

What did I say that gave you the impression I am a literalist? And what would you contrast with being a literalist? Was it my reading of Jesus as being obsessed with an imminent end-of-times apocolypse and judgment? I see no reason at all to take Jesus as meaning any of that figuratively. Belief in an imminent end-of-times apocolypse was fairly widespread among Jews in Jesus’s time, and from all my reading on the subject, I find no indication that any of these believers were only thinking of a “figurative” apocalypse. If Jesus was speaking figuratively, he would have had to make this abundantly clear if he did not want to be misunderstood.

Or was it something else I said? :) I, of course, do not take the Bible to be lietral truth, but I am quite capable of putting myself in that mindset, saying to myself, “OK, let’s imagine just for a moment that the Bible is literally true...” and reasoning from there. In fact, that is the mindset I use when illustrating The Brick Testament.

In has been my observation that religious people tend to retreat to “figurative interpretation” of scripture when the face-value meaning of scripture is untennable for them whether it’s because it conflicts with the science-based views of the world, because it contrasts with their (non-Biblically based) moral intuitions, because it would otherwise contradict a different and more cherished part of scripture, or because they can’t make any other sense of it (and they desperately want to believe it makes sense).

To you perhaps. I think it makes perfect sense. I brought the Law into the world, and I can take it out! (apologizes to Bill Cosby)

So it was important to God for the Jews to follow all that minutia, and it was morally correct to murder homosexuals and anyone who worked on the Sabbath, but later on it wasn’t important to God for people to obey any minutia, and it was not morally correct to murder homosexuals and people who worked on the Sabbath. And this God is unchanging you say? Unchangingly capricious, perhaps?

Well, second-guessing God as a sort of Monday Morning Messiah is fine and all, but it isn’t really a valid argument to the contrary.

I’m not sure why it isn’t valid. If you are positing a certain strong motivation for Jesus’s behavior, but I point out that Jesus acted nothing like you would expect him to if that was truly his strong motivation, that would seem to count against your argument unless you posit additional mitigating factors.

Monday Morning Quarterbacking is generally thought of as useless because you can’t go back in time and change what your team did. But if on Sunday night, your team consistently took deliberate actions that made no sense given their presumed desire to win the game (such as gingerly handing the other team the ball, or running into their own endzone and waiting to be sacked for a saftey), Monday Morning Quarterbacking might be very useful for determining whether or not your team actually had any desire to win the game.

Well, yes. He is beyond proof, so He may as well not exist if you prefer.

I am not sure what sense to make of the phrase “beyond proof”? Does it mean something more than “not provable”?

Yes. Or, if you will, outside the peruse of science.

I sometimes see people throw around phrases like “beyond this” or “beyond that” when it comes to describing God, but just as often these phrases seem to have no discernable meaning, and thus are indistinguishable from gibberish.

But can change really not be in the nature of something that is perfect? What about a perfect sunset? Isn’t change a part of any sunset? The sun changes position, the clouds change colors. Perfect!

It seems more likely to me that the ability to change would be a necessary part of the nature of something like God. Isn’t a God who has the ability to change more perfect than the God who lacks that ability?

But a perfect God cannot by definition lack anything.

So a perfect God does not lack maliciousness? Does not lack mortality?

Eschew anthropomorphism:-)

I would retort: eschew non-sense. Just because you can string words together like “a perfect God does not lack anything” does not mean that actually means something coherent. I know you want your God to be “beyond” all of these things becasue you think that makes him sound grander, but I think you wander into the realm of non-sense if you take this idea too far.

Well, let’s be honest-- the concept of an omniscient God is non-sense in that we aren’t able to make sense of it with our finite intellects.

“Perfection” is one of those terms that is really beyond definition and relegated to abject subjectivism. “Art” is another of these terms. Trying to wrap our minds around the concept of a Creator is as well.

So if you agree that perfect is a subjective term, clearly it does no good to describe God as being perfect becasue “perfect” in this sense has no clear meaning.

I don’t disagree that “art” is difficult to define, but then again, nobody is trying to use art in their definition of God.

My point is that, like “art”, God is not only undefinable, but also unknowable. We can’t even imagine or ever hope to remotely understand.

And finally, I don’t think it’s all that difficult to imagine a creator of our universe, be it a god, a set of gods, a super-intelligent race of aliens, or an unguided process of natural selection on a multi-universe scale.

Really.

But it’s much harder to wrap my mind around why a creator needs to be posited in the first place (in the lack of any evidence of one), or how that would possibly “solve” the riddle of why something was created rather than nothing.

The purpose isn’t to solve the riddle of life, but to give meaning and purpose to it.

JOHN

Message has 1 Reply:

		Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
(...) No, they need not be mutually exclusive, but I don't see that that is more than a trivial point to make. I suppose someone could, for instance, be rationally convinced that nautral selection accounts for the diversity of life on Earth because (...) (18 years ago, 22-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:

		Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
(...) To say that it "rings true to you" almost makes it sound like you are evaluating it based on evidence and logic, rationally determining it to be the best explanatory theory. But this is quite different than saying that you are absolutely sure (...) (18 years ago, 19-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)

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