Shall we flatter ourselves and say we managed to be the exception?
Kind of, yes. I don’t know of any way to confirm something unless it’s confirmed scientifically, and I try not to believe anything until it’s confirmed.
Shall we flatter ourselves and say we managed to be the exception?
I would have to ask what the person means when they ask me “how do you determine whether Christianity is true?” It’s not even a meaningful question otherwise. I know what I think of when I think of Christianity, but there are people who have other views, so that’s the first thing we would have to nail down. What exactly about Christianity are we evaluating?
So help me out, Philo. Are you saying we can’t parse Christianity into individual, testable claims, and instead we must spend decades in pursuit of total understanding of the Bible as it was originally intended as well as consult the work of a dozen philosophers on the subject before we can even begin to evaluate Christianity as a whole for “truth” content?
... but even after all of this, I think any of us can still come up short in having a fuller understanding of the Bible. This makes handling the Bible a somewhat precarious endeavor because from our position today, we often have a difficult time knowing for sure whether or not we're correctly parsing and evaluating the biblical contents, especially where something like the book of Revelation comes into view. [And I'll just admit up front on my part, I don't claim to understand all that is in the book of Revelation, let alone in all other parts of the Bible...]
See, that just strikes me as terribly convenient for something that looks so patently absurd on the surface. I don’t think we grant any other mythology such mystique that we can’t immediately categorize its stories of talking reptiles, people rising from the dead, and transfigurations as fiction. If we’re going to go to all this effort of understanding it on a deeper level, shouldn’t we have some sign that it’s going to lead us to truth? I don’t doubt that there are worthwhile concepts to be found in the Bible, but the fact that they’re in there with obvious nonsense doesn’t make me hopeful that the Bible as a whole is inspired by some ultimate source of truth.Something kind of like that ...
No, I think that for any of us to even attempt to understand the bible will take hard work, and it's something most of us will probably never master in this lifetime (even though some of my fellow Christians seem to claim that they have mastered it, as have some atheists, too). And here's the upshot to this, gaara: even if we can understand and verify the bible to some high degree of accuracy, this in itself doesn't by any necessity mean that we can just casually jump over Lessing's Ditch. Matt Dillahunty, for instance, has recently said [when he publicly (and oh so politely) eschewed the Christian beliefs of his own parents over a birthday card] that essentially nothing could move him to worship the God of the Bible, even if the Bible was shown to be true .................... or something to that effect.
Sure, some of it has been tested. Other, metaphorical content and claims of singular miracles aren’t as testable from our position.
Convenient? No, I can assure you that Christianity is terribly inconvenient in all ways possible.
The granting of mystique to stories will depend upon which culture and place (and maybe type of formal education) one has lived in and has been conditioned within to think in certain ways about certain stories. Besides, the stories produced through other mythoi weren't written by ancient Jews, and according to some basic notions evident in the study of comparative Historiography, one people's written cultural works can't just be thrown beside those of another people and cited as being essentially "the same."
NO, not necessarily.
That's up to you to decide as you .... do the work. If we're only willing to passively listen to atheists as they pan the Bible, then we probably shouldn't expect anything to jump out at us.
How so?
Yes, and those land mines are such that they often are either ignored or not even noticed by many Christians (or Jews).
As for the issue of the hiddenness of God, I rather think Pascal said what needed to be said on this, even if his is not the last word on this issue:
It doesn't matter so much that I may disagree; no, what matters is whether or not you're willing to explore additional geographical fixtures of the conceptual philosophical landscape of Christianity. If you're not willing, then any good reason for me to continue in dialogue here with you would begin to quickly dry up.
I know that Matt's view of God has more to do with God's supposed deficiencies of moral character; and that alone would fit some of the notions about human epistemic situatedness expressed in the Bible. However, my reference to Lessing's Ditch as Kierkegaard referred to it is for the purpose of implying that EVEN IF Matt were to come to a place where the Bible could be demonstrated as historically true, that in itself would not be enough for Matt to base an 'eternal decision' upon and thereby subjectively have a change of heart and make the Leap of Faith toward Christ. Matt's additional grievance with God's moral qualities just enforces this existential situation.
Yes, and I mentioned earlier that the exceptions to that rule are the handful of assumptions we make pragmatically to function. The laws of logic are among them.
But that's just the thing. The cynic in me just wants to take one look at the creation myth, miracles, and psychedelic imagery in the Bible and dismiss it as... well, poetic myth. There's more to the Bible than just those things, but saying it's more complicated to investigate the dubious claims found therein than it would be to investigate the same claims if they'd come from somewhere else just seems to be a convenient way to shrug off valid criticism as "surface-level" or "simplistic." The romantic in me wants to believe there's whole new dimensions of the Bible I need to explore before giving a final verdict on its truth-value, so maybe I'll see reasons to believe that forthcoming in this thread.Convenient? No, I can assure you that Christianity is terribly inconvenient in all ways possible.
I guess my point is to ask why we should grant mystique to the writings of ancient Jews in particular? Mystique has its place, but surely not in evaluating concrete truth-claims?
You don't think so? If not, isn't it completely arbitrary to dedicate so much time and attention to one specific holy book that doesn't stand out as likely to be true?
I cringe at atheist Bible readings, they're always so condescending and self-congratulatory. Why read it at all if you're not going to give it a chance? I've read through the Bible before, and it's clear there are major cultural barriers between the authors and me. There is comfort and wisdom to be found throughout, but nothing that jumps out as something that must have been inspired by the creator of the universe. But this is where we need to be very careful, because if we're told "it's in there, you just have to keep looking" then eventually, whether it's really in there or not, we're going to find "it."
I feel horribly cynical saying this, but in response to Pascal I'd say his argument is identical to that of the Emperor's treacherous tailors who sent him out with no clothes. It attempts to quiet criticism by suggesting that there's something wrong with the critic rather than the subject being examined. I don't know if that's ever appropriate.
I would love to, but if I'm required to shed all skepticism, cynicism, and critical thinking in doing so I don't think it's possible for me. I cannot reach a psychological state of belief if I can't see how it fares against criticism.
Glad we agree, however a couple of questions arise. Did these transcendentals exist before human beings existed? If no, how did they come into being? I am fishing for how we justify for what would seem to be eternal transcendentals. Why would they seem eternal, because of the nature of them? By nature I mean the unchanging nature of these transcendentals whereas human beings change from the time of conception until death.
