Religions

True Scotsman said:

Let parents send their children to a school that teaches religious myths as science if that's what they want.

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I have a better idea.

Send them to a school that teaches the Bible as history.

Religious myths can take a hike.

True Scotsman said:

Methodist. Also went to a Baptist church once and a Presbyterian church for a few months. Our original Methodist church burned down and was never rebuilt. that was when I was very young.

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Was this in UK? Methodists are interesting, Baptists too -- not as heavy as Catholics and Anglicans though. So, you have indoctrination light. Chin up lad, you got a nice soft landing.

AV1611VET said:

I have a better idea.

Send them to a school that teaches the Bible as history.

Religious myths can take a hike.

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I'm fine with students being exposed to creationism, just not in science class. I'm not one of those atheists who bristle at every mention of gods in school. I don't think that it would be proper to teach the creation story as history since it is not history but myth. Why not teach the native American creation myth? It has just as much evidence backing it up, which is none. I'm fine with teaching Bible stories in a comparative religion class or in a literature class.

lewiscalledhimmaster said:

Was this in UK? Methodists are interesting, Baptists too -- not as heavy as Catholics and Anglicans though. So, you have indoctrination light. Chin up lad, you got a nice soft landing.

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No. It was in Virginia and in Colorado. It didn't take though and my mind is intact.

True Scotsman said:

I'm fine with students being exposed to creationism, just not in science class. I'm not one of those atheists who bristle at every mention of gods in school. I don't think that it would be proper to teach the creation story as history since it is not history but myth. Why not teach the native American creation myth? It has just as much evidence backing it up, which is none. I'm fine with teaching Bible stories in a comparative religion class or in a literature class.

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Do you see what you just did?

By calling the creation story a myth, you then opened the door to allowing real myths in.

That, to me, is propaganda at its best.

True Scotsman said:

For me, it is because I was taken to christian churches to be indoctrinated as a lad. I don't have much contact with any other religion. Never met a Muslim. I know of one Buddhist. Christians are the ones who come to my door along with Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses. I never get Hindus or Shinto priests at the door. Muslims are not allowed on my land. See, I'm at least polite to Christians and Jehovah's witnesses and Mormons. If a Muslim showed up I'd point to the road and tell them to get off my property and don't come back. Did you hear that it is suspected that the plane crash in the alps was a terrorist attack by the Muslim co pilot. And no, at least on my part, it doesn't mean that I 'think it's really true". I know it isn't and can prove it. There is no such thing as Satan and Evolution is a well evidenced and confirmed scientific theory. There's no Satan trying to get me to believe in evolution. Satan is imaginary just like gods and angels. If you have objective evidence that falsifies the TOE then I would like to hear it.

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How lovely. If only there were more people with your friendly, loving, sensible views.

I've seen no evidence that the co-pilot was Muslim.

AV1611VET said:

Do you see what you just did?

By calling the creation story a myth, you then opened the door to allowing real myths in.

That, to me, is propaganda at its best.

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I don't see how it could possibly qualify as anything else. Coyote the trickster has just as much credibility.

True Scotsman said:

I don't see how it could possibly qualify as anything else.

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That's because science is myopic, and the Bible exposes it as such.

True Scotsman said:

No. It was in Virginia and in Colorado. It didn't take though and my mind is intact.

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There's good reason for that, it had none of the punch that it's pioneers did. (Wesley & Spurgeon - a good beer) Maybe if you were born in the 1600s (I think) you'd have copped that 'goodly infection'* instead of the dried prunes juice of what it's become. Who was it said that 'God is dead' or better still, 'The church is burning' ?

~~~
* C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity.

florida2 said:

How lovely. If only there were more people with your friendly, loving, sensible views.

I've seen no evidence that the co-pilot was Muslim.

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Thanks.

It's all over the news. I'm withholding final judgement though. That's why I said it is suspected. Apparently he is a Muslim convert, like in so many recent incidents. He told his ex girlfriend that he was planning a heinous act that would be remembered. Apparently he and his family used to fly glider planes in the same area where the plane crashed. But, the media regularly gets things wrong. There are plenty of confirmed instances of Muslim terrorism, though. The Boston bombings, The guy on the plane who tried to light a bomb in his underwear. The Fort Hood shooting. The guy recently who beheaded a female coworker for refusing to convert. Honor killings here in the U.S. The recent video taped beheadings. The two guys who walked up to the British soldier last year and hacked at him with a machete until he died. The one who beheaded an elderly woman in her garden about the same time. The list goes on and on. I can't tell who is a radical and who is a peaceful Muslim.

AV1611VET said:

That's because science is myopic, and the Bible exposes it as such.

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Do you mean that science is objective and does not allow the arbitrary as evidence? It should be myopic in that respect. The Bible is a book of unfalsifiable claims. Science should dismiss it without consideration as everyone should.

lewiscalledhimmaster said:

There's good reason for that, it had none of the punch that it's pioneers did. (Wesley & Spurgeon - a good beer) Maybe if you were born in the 1600s (I think) you'd have copped that 'goodly infection'* instead of the dried prunes juice of what it's become. Who was it said that 'God is dead' or better still, 'The church is burning' ?

~~~
* C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity.

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I remember in Sunday school when I was about 10, my little mind was starting to make connections of logic and identifying contradictions and I asked a lot of uncomfortable questions. I was told to just have faith and stop asking so many questions. Maybe the preacher had a talk with my parents and that's why we stopped going to church. I don't know, they never told me why.

True Scotsman said:

I can't tell who is a radical and who is a peaceful Muslim.

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That's a sore spot with me.

Muslim acts being labeled "terrorist" or "radical" by the news media.

To me, a "radical" Muslim is one who helps a little old lady across the street, or plants flowers in his yard.

My idea of a fundamental Muslim is one who views us as the "Great Satan."

True Scotsman said:

Do you mean that science is objective and does not allow the arbitrary as evidence?

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The Bible is not a science book and doesn't need to be taught in science class.

True Scotsman said:

It should be myopic in that respect.

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In any respect, not just with respect to the Bible, science is myopic.

True Scotsman said:

The Bible is a book of unfalsifiable claims.

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Correct.

True Scotsman said:

Science should dismiss it without consideration as everyone should.

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And vice versa.

True Scotsman said:

I was told to just have faith and stop asking so many questions.

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You should have -- if you were disrupting the class.

Its interesting how you see radical and fundamentalist Muslims. To me they are both the same. Trying to install sharia law and referring to Non Muslims as kufaar (non believers)
Yet these are the minority. Some of the Muslim people I have met have been the most lovely people!

AV1611VET said:

Is this your version of verbal plenary inspiration?

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It's a satirical description of what I have often encountered in certain circles--including circles that I grew up in. I attended a conservative KJV-only Baptist school from K through 6th grade, and attended a non-denominational Fundamentalist church until I was 8, after which my family attended a Pentecostal-Evangelical church. I was exposed to many shades of Evangelical and Fundamentalist thought growing up. In the years since I have had many discussions and debates with fellow Christians from across the spectrum.

An observed trend that involves a general ignorance of the history of the Christian Church, including an ignorance of how the Bible came to be is quite common. With some on the one hand believing that God personally wrote everything in the Bible and the human writers were merely quills put to use by God and that the Bible was set in stone as soon as St. John of Patmos finished writing the Apocalypse. I have an uncle, a Baptist pastor, who is (or at least was at one time) under the belief that it was St. John of Patmos who compiled the Bible personally. And on the other end of the spectrum are those who believe the Bible was an arbitrary product produced by the imperial fiat of Constantine I or put together at the first Council of Nicea, or something else quite Dan Brownian in nature.

The reality is that the Bible didn't poof into existence, but neither did it come about by one man or even a group of men simply "deciding" the Bible. The Biblical Canon has been a process; the earliest witnesses of something we would call the New Testament Canon show up in the writings of some of the church fathers in the 2nd century, either explicitly (such as when St. Irenaeus compares the four gospels to the four cardinal directions) or implicitly through their quoting the material as authoritative. As such something of a proto-New Testament was in existence in the 2nd century, a nucleus that stood as a foundation through following years of continued dispute over other texts: namely the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the thirteen epistles of St. Paul.

No later than the time the Muratorian Fragment was written 1 John and 1 Peter were are also not under any dispute. What remained in dispute were those writings known as Antilegomena, literally "disputed writings" which consisted of 2 & 3 John, 2 Peter, James, Jude, Hebrews, and the Apocalypse of St. John (book of the Revelation); other members of this group of disputed texts included 1 Clement, the epistle of Barnabas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Didache.

In many cases disagreements on these were regional, the Western churches generally regarded the Apocalypse of John as canonical Scripture and read it in their churches, this going back at least to St. Justin who is adamant about it's importance, and likewise other Western theologians such as St. Irenaeus regard it very important; in the Eastern churches its status was less certain and was not universally accepted as Scripture in the Eastern churches until the 8th century, largely due to the influence of St. John of Damascus.

Other cases of regionalism can be seen in the Syriac Peshitta and the Armenian Bible, the Armenian Bible including as canonical III Corinthians, which most other churches regarded as spurious--and in fairness is no longer accepted as canonical by the Armenian Church. An extreme form of regionalism is in the Ethiopian Canon which accepts a diverse number of texts which are were never accepted elsewhere in Christendom, such as Jubilees and Enoch.

Figuring out the exact boundaries of of the Biblical Canon has been an ongoing conversation and process in Christianity. The Bible didn't suddenly pop into existence, and it wasn't put together in situ by any emperor, bishop, or group of bishops; but has instead grown organically through a developing--and not always completely uniform--general consensus among believing Christians over the course of the last two millennia.

-CryptoLutheran

ViaCrucis said:

I attended a conservative KJV-only Baptist school from K through 6th grade, and attended a non-denominational Fundamentalist church until I was 8, after which my family attended a Pentecostal-Evangelical church. I was exposed to many shades of Evangelical and Fundamentalist thought growing up.

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Wow -- that explains a lot.

ViaCrucis said:

In the years since I have had many discussions and debates with fellow Christians from across the spectrum.

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And so your word choice for creatio ex nihilo & creatio ex materia is "poof"?

Is that what you got from these discussions?

Do you [flippantly] refer to miracles as "magic" as well?

If so, I submit you have created a mental barrier that you can't penetrate.

ViaCrucis said:

An observed trend that involves a general ignorance of the history of the Christian Church, including an ignorance of how the Bible came to be is quite common. With some on the one hand believing that God personally wrote everything in the Bible and the human writers were merely quills put to use by God and that the Bible was set in stone as soon as St. John of Patmos finished writing the Apocalypse. I have an uncle, a Baptist pastor, who is (or at least was at one time) under the belief that it was St. John of Patmos who compiled the Bible personally. And on the other end of the spectrum are those who believe the Bible was an arbitrary product produced by the imperial fiat of Constantine I or put together at the first Council of Nicea, or something else quite Dan Brownian in nature.

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All I asked about was verbal plenary inspiration, because somewhere along the line, you picked up this verbage:

The idea that the Bible is some sort of magical tome written by the divine hand of God and set aloft down to earth on pillowy clouds is what one usually seems to imagine if one only hears what modern Fundamentalism says;

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If you got that from discussing the Bible with other Christians, I'd stay out of that alley, if I were you.

ViaCrucis said:

The reality is that the Bible didn't poof into existence,

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I don't know who told you that, or where you got it, but I don't care either.

The fact that you talk like that turns me off.

ViaCrucis said:

The Biblical Canon has been a process; the earliest witnesses of something we would call the New Testament Canon show up in the writings of some of the church fathers in the 2nd century, either explicitly (such as when St. Irenaeus compares the four gospels to the four cardinal directions) or implicitly through their quoting the material as authoritative. As such something of a proto-New Testament was in existence in the 2nd century, a nucleus that stood as a foundation through following years of continued dispute over other texts: namely the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the thirteen epistles of St. Paul.

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The books of the Bible were already authorized by the first century.

Any council held to create a cannon was (or should have been) to simply weed out the unauthorized from the authorized.

Sift the wheat from the tares, so to speak.

I like to use this example:

Suppose you were put in a room, stacked full of money, and told to separate the legal tender from the counterfeit.

Could you do it?

It would be simple:

One dollar bill goes here.
Two dollar bill goes here.
Three dollar bill goes there.
Four dollar bill goes there.
Five dollar bill goes here.
Six dollar bill goes there.
etc.

No one is going to walk into a store and try to buy something with an eight dollar bill.

Put simply:

The council wasn't held to create an authorized cannon of books; the council was held to create a cannon of the authorized books.

AV1611VET said:

The books of the Bible were already authorized by the first century.

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There was no "Bible" in the 1st century. The closest thing to a Bible in the first century would have been the Septuagint; something Christians used extensively as most of the New Testament quotations of the Old are often taken verbatim from the Septuagint.

However Jewish opinion in the 1st century was quite diverse, perhaps you are familiar with the disagreements between the Sadducees and the Pharisees; the Sadducees accepting only the five books of the Torah; while the Pharisees accepted the Torah, the Prophets, and the Psalms.

With the fall of the Temple in the year 70 Sadduceeism died off, it was Pharisaism that survived. But there was no clear boundaries for the Jewish Canon, debates in Judaism over books like Daniel were going on independently of debates in Christianity over the nature of what is and isn't canonical.

The Torah and Prophets were probably pretty well established in the Pharisaical tradition, as was the position of the Psalms--what remained was that category now known as the Writings, and as such the basis of the Jewish Tanakh and its three-fold division of Torah, Prophets, and Writings. In 1st and later century Judaism the book of Daniel, as an example, wasn't among the Prophets, but among the Writings.

Christians certainly did receive their scriptural tradition from Judaism, but the boundaries are imprecise. For example among those texts that in Judaism are considered "the Writings" Christian writers regularly refer and quote from the Psalms, which were indeed well established as scripture in the period, but simultaneously we find some texts simply are never quoted or referred to, books whose status were indeed nebulous, such as Esther or the Song of Songs.

In Judaism the Greek textual tradition of the Septuagint was ultimately rejected, and a leading defining factor was the text having a known Hebrew original; which in antiquity meant Judaism excluding works such as Sirach and 1 & 2 Maccabees. Though it is now believed that many of these works did have a Hebrew or Aramaic original prior to being translated into Greek vis-a-vis the Septuagint.

So, as it stands, no there was nothing emphatically established by the end of the first century; there was instead a rough idea, a nucleus of scripture that was read and received within the nascent communities of the Church. It is in this context that 2 Peter refers to the writings of Paul being read as scripture in the churches. This is the burgeoning of a distinctively Christian scriptural tradition running independently and in parallel with the still developing Jewish scriptural tradition.

It is in that context which a canonical nucleus comes about; but remains a continued point of disagreement among Christians for hundred years. The conversation was chiefly friendly in antiquity, Christian leaders expressing that some accept X and while others accept Y, that everyone accepts Z, and so on. This can be seen throughout the writings produced throughout antiquity and into the medieval period. Local councils which did engage in which books were to be read in churches in their diocese such as the Councils of Laodicea and Carthage were not in complete agreement with one another--and we shouldn't expect they had to be given that they were local synods dealing with local issues of church practice.

The point remains that the Bible, as we understand it, is a liturgical document arising out of an evolving consensus. There was no prophet, no apostle, no angel, or anything of that nature which placed a stamp or seal on a collection of scriptures as the definitive biblical canon. It was instead a complex, organic process that could often be quite messy. There is no divinely ordained Canon, the Canon is a product of the Church and part of the Church's tradition. The issue of faith is that these texts, received into and by the Church and placed into a biblical canon are divinely inspired--it is a position of faith that says yes, they are. There exists no divine record of what is and is not to be canonical, that process occurred within the day-in and day-out life of the Church over many hundreds of years. And it is why, to this day, there is no universal agreement as to what is and is not canonical Scripture--namely the disagreement over the Deuterocanonical texts: Tobit, Judith, 1 & 2 Maccabees (& 3 Maccabees), the 151st Psalm, Baruch, etc.

-CryptoLutheran

AV1611VET said:

The council wasn't held to create an authorized cannon of books; the council was held to create a cannon of the authorized books.

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As I said in the post to which you are responding, there was no council that created the Canon. That never happened.

The closest are several local councils such as those held in Carthage and Laodicea; but these councils only dealt with what should be read in the churches of these dioceses and played only an incidental role in the overarching story of the Canon.

-CryptoLutheran