Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:14:38 GMT
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Viewed:
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4737 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Brendan Powell Smith wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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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.
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Must they be mutually exclusive?
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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 of the mountains of scientific evidence in support of
it and in addition to that have had a personal religious revelation that
has convinced him beyond a doubt that nautral selection accounts for the
diversity of life on Earth.
But my point is that there is an extremely significant difference in these
two ways of coming to be convinced of something, and that we are obliged to
take other people’s beliefs seriously only to the extent that they are
based rationally on evidence.
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Really? At what point during a rational evaluation process do you decide
something? How can two scientists who evaluate the same evidence draw
different conclusions? Do you know for sure from where “ideas” that “pop into
your head” come? Here’s my point: though you fancy yourself a “rational”
person, you are just as irrational as anyone, but can’t/won’t admit it, because
that would be “unscientific”. I realize that that is an “ideal”, but you fail
to grasp your ideals much the same way I do mine. The very existence of the
universe is irrational, but that doesn’t bother you in the least. So I reject
your blind trust in rational thought because you only adhere to it when it is
convenient.
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So in your case, you are welcome to say that you are rationally convinced
that Jesus of Nazareth survived death, was in some way divine or
supernatural, or had the correct interpretation of the Jewish scriptures (or
any other proposition that must either be true or false). And I will be
quite interested to hear why you are rationally convinced of these things,
and interested to see if you can make a compelling rational case for others
to believe what you do. But to the extent that your beliefs are admittedly
dependent on personal revelation, I will dismiss them on those grounds, and I
believe that I am fully justified in doing so.
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You can do what you want. I judge people’s beliefs based on their actions. If
Mother Teresa believed that The Pink Elephant told her to live her life the way
she did, then I believe that lends credence to her beliefs. Nevermind
rationality; you can’t rationally prove or disprove her revelation anyway!
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You label this “intolerance”, and while that seems intended as a pejorative
aimed at making me look insensitive or unkind, I don’t think it is either.
If it is intolerance, it is simply intolerance for nonrationally-derived
beliefs in a rational discussion. And on my part, it’s really more on an
impatience than an intolerance, only because it seems to me that a rational
debate will be quite fruitless if people begin using nonrationally-derived
beliefs, especially if they are not recognized as such.
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Not so much in debates, but IRL. Christian researchers, for example, are
considered second-class scientists. The same can be said for any religious
academic.
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And it’s not really that I am intolerant of nonrationally-derived beliefs.
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Actually, that’s exactly what it is.
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I
realize people have them (I probably have some of my own that I haven’t even
realized I have),
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BINGO.
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and I am not against you or anyone else stating them. My
larger point in all of this was that it might be to your own benefit if you
realized that you cannot hope to rationally convince someone of your own
nonrationally-derived beliefs. And that the same is true of arguments
(whether religious, political, or what-have-you) that depend on
nonrationally-held beliefs in their premises.
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Here is the strategy from the playbook: Proclaim the Good News, and love God (by
loving others). Any “convincing” is not our responsibility; it is the job of
the Holy Spirit in the hearts of others. That’s it. Win over others by “loving
them up”. So, in theory, everybody will at some point be loving everybody else.
That’s the game plan, pure and simple.
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So for example, if someone posts to OT.debate to argue in favor of a certain
political position, they can expect to be taken seriously (and have the
possibility of rationally covincing others) only to the extent that their
arguments depend on rationally-derived beliefs. If, in defending that
political position, they ultimately fall back on a belief such as “This is
what God wants us to be like”, which was derived nonrationally, their whole
argument becomes nonrational and therefore not rationally convincing.
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Their beliefs, or ideas can be irrationally based, but they can rationally
argue any position they want. For example, say I believe abortion is wrong
because I believe God says it’s wrong. I can argue against abortion using a
myriad of rational arguments, but my positions aren’t negated because of the
genesis of my belief.
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And of course, it’s possible there could then be a rational debate about
whether or not the propostion “This is what God wants us to be like” is
supported by evidence or not. But to the extent that such a conviction
depends on personal revelation, it will not be rationally convincing to
others, nor will their political argument that depends on it.
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That is why I’d take the concrete approach. I rationally reject Islamo-fascist
doctrine because of the “fruit” it produces.
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Is it within the realm of possibility that you could be convinced
otherwise?
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How? Via torture? ;-)
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No, via a reevalutaion of the evidence or a new rational insight. The point
of asking is to suss out to what extent your beliefs on these matters are
rationally-derived, and to what extent they are held with a nonrational
certitude.
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Anything is possible I suppose. But again, faith isn’t really subject to
rational scutiny (except in action) so I can’t really imagine a scenario.
<snip>
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OK, then let me restate. I see no more reason to posit the existence of a
Creator than I do Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Christian God. It
would seem the onus is not on me to disprove the existence of any
hypothetical supernatural being someone might conjure up.
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But the onus is on you to rationally explain how a universe suddenly just came
into being.
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Except one explanation provides meaning and purpose, the other provides
meaninglessness and hopelessness.
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I do not see how the positing of a Creator (or Creators--can’t see why
there’s any better reason to think there’d be only one rather than many, but
I’ll stick with the singular for now) provides any objective meaning or
purpose to my life, all life, or the universe itself. Even if we assume for
a moment that there is a Creator, and that this Creator had in mind a certain
purpose for humankind, that does not seem to logically or even morally compel
us to accept that as our own purpose. For instance, it’s pretty easy to
imagine a malevolent Creator whose puprose in creating humankind was to watch
us struggle and suffer for his own amusement. Even if this was the Creator’s
purpose, it doesn’t follow that this must be my purpose in life, nor even
that I am obliged to respect that Creator’s purpose.
It’s also easy to imagine a Creator who had no purpose for creating the
universe and was not even aware that life would result, much less sentient
lifeforms. In that case you have a Creator, and yet no purpose. And so it
would fall on me to come up with my own purpose in such a created universe.
And of course, the point must be made that even if you think the lack of a
Creator means that life is meaningless and hopeless, that makes it all of 0%
more likely that a Creator exists than that one does not. Wishful thinking
does not increase the likelihood of the existence of supernatural beings.
I’ve seen you raise the spectre of “hopelessness” in the absence of a Creator
(or absence of belief in a Creator) on OT.debate before, but I must imagine
that by now you have had dealings with enough atheists who are not wallowing
in hopelessness to convince you that life without such a belief is not doomed
to crushing depression. Personally, I feel comforted by the knowledge that
even if there is a Creator, there is no particular reason my purpose in
life should need to align with whatever purpose (or lack of purpose) that
Creator had for creating the universe.
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If that works for you, then I believe you can thank God for being thoughtful
enough to let you “do your thing”. For others, however, they may need hope to
get through life. I do, and it makes all the difference in the world. But I
can’t really compare because I was raised in a Christian home, but I find
testimonies of adults who were agnostics or atheists that became Christians very
compelling. It betters their lives. YMMV
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But how is “I don’t know” MORE rational than “non-rational” Creator
explanations? It is a simple equivocation.
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Equivocation? Hardly. If two people happen upon a closet whose door has
been hermetically sealed, who is more rational, the person who admits “I do
not know what is in that closet” or the person who says, “I am certain there
is an enormous elephant in that closet.” Obviously, the person who claims
knowledge of what is in the closet is being irrational, and the more the
person claims to know about the elephant, the more irrational their beliefs
become. In the absence of evidence about what is in the closet, the only
rational response is to admit the lack of knowledge.
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What about the giant poop on the floor in front of the closet? (that is the
first time I’ve compared the Bible to a pile of elephant poop-- perhaps you find
this analogy particularily convincing;-)
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Yes, this is what seems so dangerous to me about religious faith.
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It simply is not fair to make moral equivalencies, unless you think it fair
that I lump you in with Stalin....
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I did not mean to lump you in with religious terrorists, and I would not
expect you to lump me in with Stalin. And yet, the fact remains, it is
either true or false that blind faith in religious dogma was a significant
contributing factor to the 9/11 hijackers taking the actions they did.
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Specious and a non sequitur to boot! It says NOTHING about blind religious
faith any more than Stalin’s atheism predicts the actions of other atheists. At
the very least I can hold up millions of people with blind faith in religious
dogma that are doing a lot of good in the world as well!
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And
it is either true or false that a culture that encourages blind faith in
religious dogma thereby raises the odds of religious terrorism.
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That’s patently false! ALL religous faith is “blind faith in religious
dogma”, so you’d have to consider every culture to calculate your odds.
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Is there a
way for me to suggest these are both true without being accused of moral
equivalence? I may be incorrect, and I’m quite sure we could have a rational
debate on these matters, but not if you simply accuse me of moral equivalence
and drop the subject.
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Again, I look at outcomes. Judge the religious faiths based on what their
followers do; things will clear up quickly.
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Likewise, you are welcome to make a rational argument that Stalin’s atheism
was a significant contributing factor to his atrocities. I think you would
have a much more difficult time making a convincing argument along those
lines than I would about the 9/11 hijackers and religious dogma, but go right
ahead. And while I would disagree with the idea that a hypothetical Stalin
who had nonrational religious certitude instead of atheism would have
therefore been less morally atrocious, I will not take offense to your
attempting to make such an argument.
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I merely raise Stalin to counter your argument.
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If atheism actually leads people to moral atrocities, I want to know! Show
me the evidence. Make the argument.
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I believe that atheism can lead to wonky moral compasses (but not from
ignorance) But let’s save that one for another time:-p
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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.
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But AUTHORITY is what it all boils down to. Do you have the authority to
make claims? Do I?
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I would say that nobody has the “authority” to make proclaimations that are
instantly taken as truths without any rational support. Not you, not I, and
certainly not any 2,000 year old religious text.
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We slip into a moral equivalence pretty quickly.
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What? What are you referring to here? Am I understanding your use of the
term “moral equivalence” incorrectly? Above I thought you were saying that I
was suggesting you were the moral equivalent of a terrorist, and I sought to
clarify that. But maybe it’s me who is misunderstanding what you mean by
“moral equivalence”.
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Sorry, didn’t mean to use that one again-- I wanted “relative morality”. So if
you say “this is right” and I say “this is right”, then who is right? Without
an authority, we BOTH are, and neither of us are-- lost in a sea of relative
morality.
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I say we use our intellect to forever search for TRUTH which
is absolute, which I would then define as “God”.
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I’m not sure we can ever really attain absolute truths using our intellect
(if by intellect you mean rationality).
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I convinced we don’t!
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Some people may be very discomforted
by that notion, but I think it just takes a little getting used to.
Certainly there are a great many things where we’ve gotten to the point where
we’d might as well act as if we had absolute knowledge. But it’s useful
to remember that we actually don’t, and that even things we seem quite sure
of today could be revised by increased knowledge and insight tomorrow.
Anyone whose belief in God is ultimately nonrationally derived seems to be
abandoning rather than embracing the intellect.
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This statement makes no sense. Belief in God is by definition irrational.
Anyone who beleives that there is a rational explanation for the origin of the
universe abandons their rational intellect as well.
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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.
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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.
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OK, yes, I suppose this was a poor example, because you could go to the
brigde and verify either bystander’s report. But it’s very, very hard for me
to believe that the fact that one bystander told you that his information
about the bridge came from the personal revelation of Blorgar the invisible
unicorn when he was five years old would not make you far, far more
skeptical of his claim.
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Yes, because his claims were definitely verifiable.
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Here is perhaps a clearer example. Your doctor informs you that you should
really eat 16 oranges a day. Now, that a lot of oranges even if you really
like oranges, but if the benefits were worth it, you just might consideer it.
You ask the doctor why you should eat 16 oranges a day, and are expecting he
might tell you that there’s excellent evidence to suggest that eating 16
oranges a day will almost certainly prevent you from getting any sort of
cancer or heart disease. But instead he tells you that you should eat 16
oranges a day because every day you fail to do so, 100 invisible unicorns
suffer a horrible death. It is therefore only morally right for you to eat
16 oranges a day. When you ask how he came to this belief, he explains that
he is absolutely certain of it because of a personal revelation. It rings
true to him logically, but he’s certain of it because of an unexplainable
personal revelation.
How do you evaluate his claim? There’s no bridge to drive up to and verify.
You simply cannot know if those 100 invisible unicorns are really suffering
horrible deaths or not because they’re invisible. You can’t know unless
you yourself have such a personal revelation. Can you evaluate the merit of
his belief “on its own”? What would that even mean?
When it comes right down to it: do you start eating 16 ornages a day? If
not, why not? Does it have anything to do with the fact that his belief came
from a personal revelation? Does it have to do with the fact that his belief
posits the existence of things (the unicorns) you don’t have any good
rational reasons to believe exist?
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First, I’d evaluate HIM. Does he follow his own advice? In the end probably
not, because there is probably a definite health risk there. And in the end, I
really don’t care much about invisible unicorns, because they have nothing to do
with me.
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If he further tried to convince you to vote in the next election for a
candidate who wanted to pass a law to madate that kids in school be forced to
eat 16 oranges day, how would you evaluate such an argument?
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Again, health concerns.
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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.
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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!?
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To make an even closer parallel situation, let’s imagine that four books are
written about Dave!’s life, but even the first book is not written until 40
years after Dave! has died, and the other three over the course of the next
20 years. The books have authors’ names attached to them, but it later turns
out these books were not written by the authors they are attributed to, and
the first copies of them were published anonymously. Literay analysis
provides extremely strong evidence that two of the books were largely based
on the earliest book with additional material added, and the fourth may have
depended on the first as well. The books all make outrageous claims about
Dave!, including that he worked miracles and survived death. It is also
clear that the authors of the books were members of a religious cult
surrounding Dave! and more interested in promoting their own varying
theological takes on Dave! than accurate historical reporting. In addition,
nothing of Dave!’s own writings exist (sadly the LUGNET OT.debate archives
were destroyed in the Great War of 2038) and outside these books there are no
other contemporary reliable indepedent sources to verify that Dave! even
existed. There are several other books about Dave! written soon after the
four, and these ones everyone dismisses as completely unreliable.
So in that case, what can we really know about Dave!? Should any of these
books be considered reliable? What about where they contradict each other?
Given the circumstances, it would seem we would have to approach these books
with extreme caution and skepticism, especially inasmuch as they make claims
of supernatural events having taken place.
Of course I’ve taken your hypothetical about Dave! and twisted it into a
analogy to highlight the historical unreliablity of the gospels. But that’s
not what we were talking about. I believe your point was more along the
lines of “why should we expect four accounts of Jesus’s life to match up
exactly?”
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But notice that your analogy to the parallel Gospel accounts sounds like a vast
conspiracy (right wing, no doubt!;-)
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And that’s a fair question, especially if you don’t believe Jesus to be
divine and in some way God on Earth. But if we allow for a moment that Jesus
was God on Earth, the scenario is quite different. Then all sorts of
questions are raised. Like: Why the hell didn’t Jesus just write stuff down
himself? Does he like ambiguity? Did he intend for people to derive a
hundred different meanings from the same ambiguous and contradictory set of
scriptures? What kind of diety would do something like that?
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A Diety about whom you know little to nothing. Yeah, it didn’t go down like
YOU’D have done it-- does that negate it for you?
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So, anyhow, it depends on which mindset you bring to the gospels. If you
come to them without assuming the divinity of Jesus, it is not at all
surprising that they widely differ considering the circumstances under which
they were written, and you come away viewing them as not-very-relibale
historical documents. If you come to them assuming Jesus’s divinity, you
come away wondering why the heck Jesus/God would have left his major source
of communication to the entire world for the next 2,000+ years in such a
state.
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And yet, 2,000 years later there are still 100’s of Millions of His followers!
I know that that’s not evidence of truth in and of itself (hi, Dave!) but it
gives one pause. What the heck ELSE has survived 2,000 years, and why not?
Just a little food for thought. (Passover has been celebrated for over 4,000
years!)
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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.
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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;-)
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My point was to counter your claim that “There are no ‘facts’ (verifiable by
science) in religion” which I think is outrageously false. The holy books of
any and every religion are full of ‘facts’ about things that happened (or
didn’t happen) and describe how the world works (or doesn’t). You must have
some extremely narrow view of religion if you are holding to this claim.
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But you need to understand that historians from 2,000 years ago were not like
those of today. There is a LOT of contextualizing that needs to take place to
legitimately consider Bible as historical record. This is Religion 101.
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What it really is is mockery.
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Is it? Imagine it’s mid-2004 and you’ve moved into a solidly liberal town
in a Blue State. -snip-
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.
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I was a little disappointed to see that you did not comment on my
hypothetical John Kerry scenario.
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Okay I apologize; really it was only because time considerations!
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I am honestly curious to know if you would
find such a website, under those circumstances, mocking?
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More along the lines of a “Smoking Gun” web site (although the LEGO aspect
seriously errodes your credibility)
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I may have taken
too much liberty in suggesting that you would be motivated to make such a
website even under those circumstances, and if that’s the case, just imagine
someone else made the site instead of you. What do you conclude? Is it
mocking Kerry and his supporters?
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Again, it is the LEGO aspect that ruins you. Your critique would be taken much
more seriously if you’d not chosen LEGO for your medium. Even cartoons would be
taken more seriously, because that form actually has some credibility.
Obviously, the whack job Islamists would still want to kill you, but nothing
will change that (except their demise).
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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.
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So you are back-handedly complimenting Christianity while mocking their
beliefs, knowing that you are safe from retribution.
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If “not so insane and brutal as to likely kill an artist for an artwork
perceived as a mockery” is something you want to take as a compliment, then
yes, I suppose. (Though as I explained at length in my last post, I do not
know if mockery is really the right term.)
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It is. It’s created from a children’s toy. It’s making light of a religion
(that is not your own). You may not intend it, but that’s the way it is taken.
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And “safe from retribution” is certainly not guaranteed. While the few
Christians I’ve heard from who would apparently take delight in harm coming
to me are patient enough to allow God himself to give me my comeuppance by
way of eternal torture in hell after I die of natural causes,
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Okay, that’s funny! “That BPS, he’ll get his!” :-D
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I realize I do
run some small risk of being harassed, harmed, or even killed by someone
willing to murder for the sake of religious dogma.
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You run a greater risk of being run over by an atheist as he changes the radio
station to METAL 105!
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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.
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Well, tone down your characterization of “revelation” and they are close. But
revelations are “ahas” of faith questions, not factoids.
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But it also has a basis in reason.
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So as I said above, I will listen interestedly for as long as you want to
explain how your religious beliefs have a “basis in reason”, but as soon as
you bring in the nonrational (especially as a shortcut to certainty of
belief), your arguments become nonconvincing.
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I am not sure what sense to make of the phrase “beyond proof”? Does it
mean something more than “not provable”?
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Yes. Or, if you will, outside the peruse of science.
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Ah, like the invisible unicorns. Got it.
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Or like what happened the instant BEFORE the Big Bang.
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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.
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I’m not sure I follow. I didn’t think omniscience was generally thought of
as a logical contradiction in and of itself. I feel like I can conceieve
of an omniscient being. The logical contradictions between God’s
oft-attributed attributes usually don’t come into play until you’ve added at
least one more omni-something.
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Take Omnipotent alone for example. Can God creat a stone he can’t lift?
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But I feel like there is a fundemental mistake being made here. If you
define God in such a way that the definition is internally inconsistent, it
does not follow that you have posited a God that our puny finite minds
cannot ever fully conceive of. It follows that such a God could not exist.
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I can posit an omniscient, omnipotent God and have no idea how that can
logically be. Heck, we live in a universe that can’t logically be, and it
certainly exists...
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In just the same way, if I define a hoohoo as a married bachelor, it does
not follow that hoohoos exist, we just can’t conceive of them. If follows
that a hoohoo could not possibly exist because the definition is
inconsistent.
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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.
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If something is utterly undefinable, utterly unknowable, and can’t ever
possibly be even remotely understood, it would necessarily be an utter waste
of time to give it any thought because what possible relevance could such a
thing have to human affairs? And yet this does not seem to be the way most
people think of God. It doesn’t even seem to be the attitude you adopt
toward God most of the time.
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That is the whole God must reveal Himself to us. Yeah, that process has been
interesting, but it is what it is. And the Judeo-Christian experience could
be only one of many.
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Why just the other day you were saying that God is perfect. You seem to know
something about an utterly unknowable entity.
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That’s revealed through the Bible. And reasonable to assume, I might add.
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Neat trick. And the day
before that you were explaining how God is not concerned with the minutia of
worship, but is concerned with how people treat each other. That’s quite a
bit of knowledge about an utterly unknowable entity.
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Again, that’s revealed through the Bible.
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Looking over your
posts, so seem quite adept at defining, knowing, and understanding this
undefinable, unknowable, non-understandable God of yours. So you’ll excuse
me if I don’t understand what’s going on here.
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Here is what is going on. By ourselves, we cannot find God. God must reveal
Himself to us for us to find Him.
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The purpose isn’t to solve the riddle of life, but to give meaning and
purpose to it.
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And this meaning and purpose will be supplied by means of an undefinable,
unknowable, non-understandable God?
As stated above, I seem to do just fine imbuing my own life with meaning and
purpose even if it is necessarily, from an objective standpoint, meaningless.
Even if your God did exist, I do not see how that provides an objective
meaning or purpose to my life, all life, or the universe.
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One day you might. Do you think that you would you live your life differently
if you were convinced that the God of the universe cared personally about you?
JOHN
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Message has 4 Replies:
 | | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| Hi John, I've taken the liberty of only responding to those points which relate to what I believe to be your misunderstanding of science. Here is an (URL) article> on the scientific method for further reading. (...) This occurs in much the same way (...) (18 years ago, 23-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
| | | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| (...) Well, I think the issue is that the Bible gets treated differently than most other written works. I find that your (John's) particular take on Christianity is something closer to "inspired from the Bible" rather than "based on the Bible". The (...) (18 years ago, 23-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| (...) 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)
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