Believing

Newsweek has a decent article/discussion between pastor Rick Warren and athiest Sam Harris.

It read pretty much as you would expect . . . until the final paragraph, when the pastor is quoted:

"We're both betting. He's betting his life that he's right. I'm betting my life that Jesus was not a liar. When we die, if he's right, I've lost nothing. If I'm right, he's lost everything. I'm not willing to make that gamble."

This argument is so wrong that I want to scream.

The pastor is doing no more than walking up to the window and saying "let it ride . . . God to show."

Belief should be unconditional . . . regardless of the "payoff" or what might happen if you are wrong. If I believe something it's because I truly believe it . . . not because "Well, I guess I had better believe it, because the price to pay for not believing it is too steep."

If the pastor tells me I must believe today because the world is going to end tomorrow, I'm not going to be any more likely to believe just because I'm screwed if the world really does come to an end.

Horseshit argument.

 

Isn't it amazing how you can read my mind on virtually every subject, Pastor?
Obviously you and I are going to disagree on a few things. I accept that there is a God. You apparently don't. Does that not make it likely that we can look at a few facts and come to different conclusions?
I'm not trying to twist anything. I'm arguing that the site you posted is, and most of them are not even very good.
I don't claim to have all the answers. However, I have yet to hear anyone answer my question about the beginning of everything. I think a supreme being is a much better answer than any I have heard so far.
As for Jesus never existing, I will check out that site later, but you should know that almost every scholar agrees there was a man named Jesus of Nazareth. It's quite difficult to imagine how this could be almost universally accepted even by those who don't believe he is the messiah if it simply weren't true.
What it all comes down to is this -- I believe on thing and you believe another. I believe there are ways to reconcile any apparent discrepencies in my beliefs, and you believe their are ways to reconcile the ones in yours.
I promise you we'll know the truth at the end. I guess we all just better hope we were correct, huh?

 

I believe it was C. S. Lewis that made that argument the first time. It was a horseshit argument then as well.

Your mind or your post. You are the one the wrote that you wanted to change versions of the Bible. I didn't make that up.

There are facts and then there exists theories. The facts exist and are accepted as such. It is the theories that we disagree on. You seem to be perfectly happy to accept answers without evidence where I am not.

I gave you a link to an article written by a man that was a minister. He is a Bible scholar. He wrote about more than one instance of inconsistencies in the Bible. Now, if you use to use a different version, one translated more to your liking, aren't you being a bit disingenuous?

Shouldn't all versions be the same? Afterall, we are talking about the "word of God."

It has been answered. The answer is "There is not enough evidence to conclude what the cause is." Why do you need an answer?

Do you require an answer to how tissues are made? Do you require an answer as to how paper is made? Why do you absolutely need to know how the universe began? And why would you blindly accept an answer provided by people that would think that the wheelbarrow is the greatest invention of mankind?

I didn't state that the person was accurate in his premise. I stated that it is an interesting site. It has a lot of information and it provides a very convincing argument.

Um, no. My "beliefs" are as simple as "I don't know and won't decide to believe people that claim to know just because they say so." See, the discrepency is simply, I don't take "belief." I don't need to reconcile discrepencies since there are none. You are the one that needs to justify reading a book written by people that didn't even know what stars were.

It matters not to me. I don't need to hope I'm correct about anything. Nothing that is presented says that I should. And the sooner people stop killing each other over such nonesense the better.

 

It was Pascal, not C.S. Lewis, who first made that argument. I agree it's a bit silly.
I also agree that we shouldn't kill each other in the name of war. Jesus was a man of peace, as am I. It's those who have twisted it that have caused the wars and the backlash against Christianity.
Finally, no, all versions of the Bible aren't the same. I believe the original text was perfect. However, there have been different translations of that by imperfect people over time.
I believe the New International Version of the best translation we have (in English) today. It was done using the earlier texts we can find and, I believe, it was done without an agenda (unlike the King James Version).
Is it perfect? I don't know. Obviously I hope it is.
However, all the major translations agree that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose again and said we could get to Heaven through Him. That's the most important part.
And I forgot to mention earlier, you said Jesus was not around at the time of Genesis. He was not in physical form, true, but he is a part of God. He claimed to be "The Alpha and The Omega." He was there at the beginning, before the earth was formed.
There are no discrepencies in an athiestic belief system? Then why does science change all the time? Perhaps there are things we simply haven't figured out yet, but you can't tell me there aren't things we don't know (for example, what preceeded the Big Bang, and some gaps in the evolutionary record).
The scientific community used to know that rotten meat spontaneous generated maggots, or that the sun revolved around the earth, or that traveling faster than 60 miles per hour would rip the skin off your flesh, etc.
What we know in society changes all the time. I'm comfortable with that. You apparently are to, but you can't tell me you don't ever question anything that you "know."

 

I think you are way off in your time frame on the gospels. Mark was the earliest written and, from what I remember of theology class, it was written at the earliest in 60-70 AD. So it's possible Mark was still alive when Jesus was preaching. Matthew and Luke then used Mark as the source for their gospels but changed the tone of their gospels for different groups of christians and other outside audiences. That's why their are similarities among those three gospels but vast differences as well.

John was written the latest, I believe, and heavily influenced by Greek tradition - hence "logos" to describe Christ.

Maybe I have some of the exact details wrong, it's been a few years since I've had a theo class on contextual bible study but the main point is pretty much correct - few if any of the gospel writers knew Jesus. Most of them were born decades after his death.

 

Yes, yes. My mistake.

But such things will continue to occur for all time as long as people continue to believe in that which cannot be proven; in particular life after death.

Interestingly enough, the site I provided on Jesus does demonstrate the agendas of those writing the book.

Why? Why hope that rules setup centuries prior should still be enforced today? Why not hope for something better?

[quot]However, all the major translations agree that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose again and said we could get to Heaven through Him. That's the most important part.
And I forgot to mention earlier, you said Jesus was not around at the time of Genesis. He was not in physical form, true, but he is a part of God. He claimed to be "The Alpha and The Omega." He was there at the beginning, before the earth was formed.
[/quote]

Symantecs. You can't declare someone born and then say they were around prior to that.

There are not legitimate gaps in evolution. It's all there. As to the Big Bang... you keep insisting on this. I don't understand why you care. Seriously, what is wrong with not knowing? I don't know how my transmission knows to switch gears automatically, but I'm not going to declare that some mysterious ghost created it.

As more and more information about our society is discovered, we learn knew things. However, much of the scientific community that you are quoting here are the ones that decided everything that they couldn't figure out was the work of God.

I question that which is uncertain. I question theories and ideas. I do not question that which cannot be known and try to assign a quantitative property to it.

It is a fall back option. For anything that you don't know now, you just apply the god characteristic to. Then in the future, you'll adjust it so that it is man-made or some chemcial element and people will pick some other aspect to a god characterstic.

 

No, you're incorrect. There is some question about when the gospels were written, but scholars are coming to the conclusions I have listed. They are starting to believe they were written earlier than was previously though, and I believe what I posted is the general consensus on their authorship.

 

People believing that which cannot be proven doesn't lead to war. People demanding that others believe what they believe leads to war. That is quite a difference.
There is nothing inherent in my believe in Jesus that leads me to want to kill those who disagree. It is fanatics of any type who are the problem, and that includes fanatic atheists, so don't blame me for all the fighting.
I'm saying I hope the NIV is correct because I believe in it. If it's wrong, I've got some incorrect beliefs. Obviously that makes a difference, but I see no problem in hoping I'm correct.
It's the same as my hoping that cell phones don't cause brain cancer. The facts are the facts. I just hope I understand them correctly.
I took a college course on evolution and creation taught by a non-believing scientist. I said before I believe in evolution (I don't agree with those who try to tell God how and he and cannot do things like create animals). However, there are gaps in the record. There are explanations why there would be, but we don't have a complete evolutionary record. If we did, we would be able to trace the entire history of the world (or at least the history of life on the planet). That would be a huge breakthrough, but we aren't there yet.
My Big Bang argument is important, at least to me, because it gets to the heart of the matter when people say science, evolution, time, whatever can explain it all. It can't, at least not yet. Maybe someday it will, but it hasn't yet. Until we can scientifically prove there is/was no God, I find the possibility of a God the more likely of those scenarios.
And as I said before, what we know always changes. There are things we as a society are certain about that are probably wrong. That's just the way knowledge works. You know people 1,000 years from now (if there are people then) will laugh at some of what science claims today, just like we do about those before us.
Finally, how can you have a problem with Jesus being around before he was born? If he was the son of God and one-third of the trinity, doesn't it make sense that his soul is older than his body?
If you want to claim there was no Jesus or whatever, that's fine, but how can you say, "If there was a Jesus and he was God, he still couldn't be that old."

 

So you are arguing for the Augustinian hypothesis as opposed to Markian priority?

I tend to lean toward the text-based arguement for Markian priority and the Q document myself, but I certainly won't discount Augustus' historically-reasoned arguments.

 

First, remember that "Q" is a hypothesis. We don't know if it existed or not.
Next, I'll use an argument from Craig L. Blomberg, Ph.D., a New Testament scholar from Denver Seminary.
He states Acts doesn't explain what happens to Paul at the end because it is finished before he is, so it was finished no later than A.D. 62.
Acts was the second of Luke's three works, so Luke is earlier than that. Luke quotes Mark, so Mark is even earlier.
Blomberg says, "If you allow maybe a year for each of those, you end up with Mark written no later than about A.D. 60, maybe even the late 50s. If Jesus was put to death in A.D. 30 or 33, we're talking about a maximum gap of thirty years or so."
If that is the case, there would still be plenty of people around who had seen Jesus, heard him preach, etc. They would have been vocal about any problems in the record, wouldn't they?

 

ADO, man you need to put some breaks in your paragraphs. This stuff just bleeds together.

Not exactly. The existence of moderates makes for the justification of the fanaticals. It makes legitimate the argument of "You believe in something so fantastically improbable why can't I?" Call it the slippery slope if you like.

I had this conversation with an acquaintance that is anthropologist traveling around the world. He said that he gets angry every time this topic comes up. According to him the only reason that people keep stating that there are holes in evolution is because they have a religious reason for doing so.

It is only important to you because it is an out clause in any conversation. Instead of justifying your beliefs in the rational sense, you go to the extreme. You state that we need to know what brokered the beginning of life as if it is something that absolutely needs to be known. In doing so, you assign a qualitative being as that which started it all. You assign it a name and then give it certain properties.

The problem is that you seem to think that things that cannot be explained with the current technology need explanation. Science hasn't broken down the gene that determines eye color yet, so that gets explained away with a simple, "God determines that."

The sooner people learn that they don't need an explanation the better off we are.

No, science doesn't change. The technology we have at our disposal to learn new things about the world changes. And as things change we learn more.

When people thought drilling a hole into someone's skull to release the evil spirits was a good idea of epileptics, it wasn't science. That was the technology at the time (which was heavily influenced by religion) presenting forward the best option for resolving the problem.

Just like when people believed that dancing in a certain pattern brought about rain. The most advanced of the people thought this was the best method. They had no technology present to explain to them weather patterns, climate shifts, the Earth's rotation, etc.

Logically, the two cannot co-exist. You cannot have the god in the OT hanging with his son and delivering hellfire and brimstone only to follow it up with saying, "I'm going to start your life over on earth so that you can die. I think I'll calm down then."

It wouldn't make sense to have any of that. You are suddenly applying human traits to some being that you claim isn't such.

As to Jesus existing... I make no such claim either way. I just found that website incredibly interesting to read. There is a lot there for the author to make a legitimate claim.

 

The problem with education is that people think they are smarter than they are. Faith is a big part of religion. Fuck what you heard. Learn to believe.