Gah, I hate flowcharts. And I hate pathetic attempts to explain philosophy with a flowchart.
Most people, I’ll wager, have a pretty hazy relationship to spiritual beliefs. For example, there are Christians who don’t go to church, Jews who don’t believe in God, and agnostics who don’t really believe in God but also say they’re spiritual. If you know exactly what you believe in, then consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, this handy infographic, created by Cameron Blair of The Fellowship for Evangelism in the Arts, lays out an astonishingly wide array of religious thought into one deceptively simple flowchart.
Ugh. That thing is hideous — it’s another example of how religion makes ugly everything it touches.
It forces everything into simple binary choices: “deceptively simple” is right.
The entire right two-thirds of the graphic is dedicated entirely to Christian suppositions, asking questions that only matter to an evangelical Christian. The worldview of the ‘artist’ is all that’s explored here.
The left side does nothing but fuss over where the godless find meaning, as if that’s the most important thing we ever worry about. And then all it does is split everyone into categories…categories that are not mutually exclusive.
As long as we’re making flowcharts that are ugly, pointless, and simplistic, I thought I’d make my own, which is mine, which is far better than the one above.
| Does god exist? | → | NO | → Correct. Have a cookie. |
| ↓ | |||
| YES | |||
| ↓ | |||
| You’re a deluded moron. Goodbye. |
There. Done. Easy.
I can take a suggestion. Here’s a prettier version of my flowchart.
The “deluded morons” should get a cookie, too. It’ll keep them out of mischief for a few minutes.
Or, if you’re not feeling charitable enough to give them a cookie, add “Go pray to God for a cookie.” That would keep them occupied for a bit, too. No cookie, though.
What’s this obsession with meaning, anyway?
(No single box for me; I’m a John Moralesist: a nihilist agnostic apatheist atheist relativist humanist existentialist naturalist, amongst other things ;) )
Actually, I found this flowchart rather amusing. Apparently I am mostly relativist existentialist agnostic polytheist (for certain provisional definitions of “god”).
Also transhumanist, but that falls somewhere left from that inane “where do you find meaning?” question.
Does god exist? → NO → Correct. Have a cookie.
↓
YES
↓
You’re a deluded moron.
Give me your money.
Goodbye.
FIFY
You missed a step.
It takes a special kind of crazy to sit down and actually design something like that. :puke:
Thanks for the cookie, PZ. I love cookies for breakfast.
“Moron” is a bit harsh imo. However the entertainment value was high :)
I find my meaning in my sock drawer where I left it, right next to the dildo. I don’t see that on the chart.
Damn! I have cookies diabled.
That would have been funny if I could spell.
Disabled. Double damn.
Can’t you add a few more branches to the “no” option, allowing us to select a cookie?
Mmmm… oatmeal and raisin…
“Evangelism in the Arts”? Oh, I don’t think so. Plenty of goddism, no art.
myeck waters
“diabled” using “diablo” is actually pretty funny.
There is a set theory fail in the top right corner. If God does not exist independently of the world and is neither in everything or a superset of everything (both of which, apparently, make you a pantheist, in spite of their potentially contradictory natures), you’re asked “What is God’s relationship to the world?” – well, duh, the only remaining option is that God is a proper subset or element of the world. The bafflement of the makers of the chart over what is the most common conception of deities throughout human history – as beings of immense power which are, nevertheless, finite and bounded in their presences, perceptions and abilities – is rather telling.
I laughed my ass off at PZ’s chart.
To answer the question “Where do you find meaning” – I would have to answer “Cookie.”
(actually, God could also intersect with the world, so part of the world is God and part of God is the world – I’d go with the bafflement on that one)
So if you believe “God is involved in the world”, you are a theist, but if you also believe “God can[not] be known personally”, you are an agnostic.
ATTENTION!!! If you think you are religious but do not not believe god can be known personally (in the biblical sense?) You are an AGNOSTIC THEIST.
.
(Note: This is among the most garishly colored flowcharts I have ever seen.)
Surely you find meaning in a dictionary?
myeck waters says:
16 September 2011 at 7:57 am:
My web browser is programmed to not take cookies from strangers.
Where’s the line with all the theotards pointed at relativist? They’re all relativists. Every single one of them.
I love flowcharts. Especially absurd, shitty ones like this. They’re just so fun.
The linked flowchart is kind of amusing. There are a couple of infinite loops around Agnostic and Apatheist…so it wouldn’t appear that you can actually be one of those according to the chart. There are also 4 stopping points that apparently the creator of the chart couldn’t even figure out (darker blue).
Anyways…PZ, you should have someone pretty up your chart. I would recommend a change though. Instead of goodbye, say “Think hard about it (really)” and loop back to “Does god exist?”.
Ooooh! What kind of cookie? Chocolate chip? Is it warm from the oven? C’n I have a glass of milk with my cookie?
I tried following the flow-chart. PZ’s makes a lot more sense.
Oh, and I find meaning in cookies and milk. And yarn. In fact, a chunk of my paycheque went to meaningful yarn yesterday.
There’s lots of FAIL in this chart.
Believe in multiple gods? You’re lumped into POLYTHEIST whether your gods are the Hindu, Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, or the Justice League of America. Jewish or Muslim? You’re not even going to get a category, you’ll just wind up at a stupid question. Buddhists are mostly going to be labeled APATHEIST, completely discarding one of the richest philosophical traditions in history.
Besides the God question, the chart is all focused on finding meaning and salvation, but I would say that a more useful indicator of someone’s worldview is how they determine truth and how they derive their morals/ethics.
I’d go for misanthropic, (somewhat) hedonistic, nihilist, but there are SOME things I care about, like nature. So maybe not quite a nihilist. I’m more one of those ‘most people are kind of tiresome and annoying, and I can’t bloody stand human arrogance’ types. But eh, even with humanity I can be impressed by scientific and artistic achievements I suppose. Or the rare cases where you DO meet a genuinely good person, rather then another obnoxious spoiled little self-absorbed typical shit. Which is to be honest what my opinion of quite many people is. Still there’s a few good ones I guess… So I guess I can find SOME meaning even in humanity, much as I don’t like it on the whole. (And that’s coming from someone in their early thirties, actually as a teenager I was LESS cynical.)
Of course that flowchart doesn’t account for my views to well. Although I do get a cookie on the small flowchart I guess.
I’d say meaning is found in all those places mentioned and more. What does that make me?
Meenwhile, meaning is *not* found in the boogie man. Right?
I demand equal time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism! It is horribly under-represented in this flowchart!
Also, once again the chart passes over the obvious question that always arises in religious debates regarding the existence of God…
“Which god?”
Wait… a “naturalist” is an atheist or agnostic who thinks there is no meaning found in humanity? And there I thought it was just someone who studied nature, regardless of religion or world view.
And an atheist who doesn’t know if meaning is found in the world is an agnostic? (And stuck in an endlessly repeating loop… Mwahahaha!!!)
And a theist who thinks God can’t be known personally is an agnostic? WTF?
And people who believe in multiple gods just get shoved in a corner and not even allowed to find meaning in anything?
Yes, as noted above, theire is a lot of fail in that chart. (“Fractally wrong” would probably be most accurate).
“Naturalist”? These folks?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturism
So.. Christianism is the only monotheistic religion out there according to this guy?
Yay cookies! I will have a chocolate chip, a peanut butter, an oatmeal raisin, a shortbread, (I may give that one away) and lots of milk. Thanks.
Flow charts are not helpful, I find them just about useless.
Flow charts are not helpful, I find them just about useless.
Flow charts made some of the avionics troubleshooting in the USAF a little less eye-glazing, although they took up way too much paper. The other problem was that a flow chart would address or reduce down to a particular problem 8 in 10 times. The other two, we had to use old fashioned component troubleshooting, which was actually a blessing because it made us stay on top of our basic electronic knowledge.
So, in the end, they were mostly useful for my applications in the USAF.
As a software engineer and having seen and made flowcharts this one is bad in a lot of ways.
The first problem are the colors. A real flowchart attaches no meaning to the color at all. The colors in this flow chart evidently are inspired by ingesting some mind altering substance, having wild variations in both the foreground and background colors, as well as differences in the borders of the shapes.
Instead of color variation like this one does, a real flowchart uses differences in shapes to define different functions. The irony of this flowchart is that *absolutely none* of the standard flowchart shapes are present. Every shape is a box with rounded edges which is not in the set of shapes that Microsoft Viso has in it’s set of shapes for flowcharts.
Standard flowcharts use a diamond shape for decisions. Since there aren’t any diamond shapes here, is the twit who made this trying to tell us that no decisions are to be made here? We’re supposed to ask the questions in the boxes and then take ALL PATHs out of ALL THE BOXES, which I guess means everyone believes everything?
I wonder why the dashed arrow between the NO box and the AGNOSTIC box is dashed. It’s the arrow with dashes in on the diagram. Does this mean that if you take this path you have to do it very carefully?
This is just another example of someone using a sophisticated software tool without knowing what they’re doing. The final touch would have been to use Comic Sans for the font.
Okay, Blair, after we’ve selected “Atheist” where’s the “Eat babies Yes/No” and “Orgiastic hedonist Yes/No” selections on your flowchart?
How in the everloving hell does saying, “I don’t know” to “meaning is found in the world” end up at agnostic?
Also, most of the non-theist portion of the chart could be boiled down to a case-type branch on the single question “Meaning is found (Nowhere/Experience/Humanity/Nature/Individually/Elsewhere)?”
The chart thus seems unnecessarily convoluted. Of course, the only unusual aspect of that for religious thought is the unnecessary convolutions here are expressed as actual twists and turns….
Dammit, where’s my cookie?
Flowcharts can be good for laughs, or for the process for simplifying things for, say, computer coding or what not.
This one probably isn’t too bad as simplification, it’s the meaningless ends that are so noxious. Like “How do you know God?” if you don’t say that God is known through Jeebus–or actually, through unverifiable traditional accounts about Jeebus. I’m afraid that “How do you know God?” is still a sound and pressing question when you say that you know that God made himself known through Jesus, since even if he did what is claimed there, we have no useful access to that revelation.
“How are you saved?” is another end. Well, by a fireman or a lifeguard, I suppose.
Glen Davidson
I think a better title for the chart would be “What Pigeonhole Shall I Put You In?”
Apparently I’m an existentialist. WTF?
Oh, and bonus flowchart fail: there’s an infinite loop if you don’t know if “There is Meaning Found In the World”. Awesome.
Years ago in the IRC debate rooms I used to post a link to a “Belief” test on belief.net. (It appears to still be there, but now they make you register in order to take it.) There was a series of questions on what you believed about God: at the end, it would give you a list of percentages showing how closely you matched which religion or worldview. The test generated a lot of interesting discussions.
For one thing, it was pretty accurate — in general. Liberal Protestants would come out with liberal Protestant listed as most similar; Catholics were Catholic, Mormons were Mormons, Muslims were Muslims, and so forth.
However, it also generated some surprises — or clues for new religions to look in to. One Mennonite was positively disgusted that he came off something like 97% Jehovah’s Witness. Someone else said she was definitely going to buy some books on Theravada Buddhism. One of my friends was relieved to find out that she could classify herself as a “neo-pagan” instead of “New Age,” if she wanted.
The biggest controversy was over atheism. The nitwits who made up the test split humanism off from atheism. We discovered that if you answered ANY of the ethics questions as something other than “don’t care” then it marked you down on atheism and up on ‘humanism.’ They either equated atheism with nihilism — or with strict dictionary atheism.
We atheists thought this was unfair. It would be like having your “Catholic” score go down every time your “Christian” score went up. Sloppy, and a bit insulting.
I wonder if they ever bothered to fix it?
Oh, yes. One interesting result of this “Belief” test was that a lot of Christians were apparently rather shaken by being confronted by the incredible list of choices on how one could think about “God.” Seems many of them had thought the faith world very simple, and many of them hadn’t really thought much on how they thought about God. The variety of views shocked them. They thought it was Christian vs. atheism vs. maybe something else.
Some of them refused to finish the test, telling me they felt it was an instrument of Satan designed to get them to doubt. That hadn’t occurred to me. So I put it on a pop-up and posted it at every opportunity.
Really?
The worst offense of the chart is just one of design. The colours make it a terrible mess. In traditional flowcharts, answers to questions are placed next to outgoing lines rather than placed in separate boxes. The reason is that the answer is associated with the question, rather than being a separate node or operation.
Listen, flowchart fool, people, and especially their beliefs and behaviors, do not fit neatly into dichotomous categories. And while I’m at it, pointing out the obvious, there is no such thing as the unitary self. And the sky is blue.
Now I’m off to do something more useful than attempting to figure out whether I’m an apathetic pantheistic deist weekwacking maniac.
I’m still stuck on the first box.
It’s not fair that I have to choose between “no” and “don’t care”.
Where’s the home for apathetic atheists?
Awesome; I love cookies.
Where’s my cookie ?
Clearly, as no cookie was dispensed, the cookie (like the cake) must be a lie.
Why is polytheism a dead end, but monotheism has all these branches?
I guess certain emperors just have a better wardrobe…
I’ve designed a fairly decent flowchart for troubleshooting my PBX at work. But it’s a lot easier if you just understand how the damn thing works. It’s a bit tangled, but with the complexity of the PBX, there really isn’t any way to simplify it. It pretty much exists in the event that my co-worker and myself both get hit by a garbage truck.
To be 100% honest, it really only had one use – by creating the chart, I pretty much burned everything there is to know about the thing into memory. Pretty sure it’ll just live as an abandoned Viso file on a network share never to be opened…
#34, @ VegeBrain – agree with you and was about to post the same.
I think this info/chart would do much better as a non-deterministic finite state machine (NDFSM). Since knowledge and belief are in flux, anyway, I’d much prefer to represent this in a fashion that allows the person following the NDFSM to change labels/states from time to time.
For example, atheist (when born) to religious to agnostic to atheist over time.
Using an NDFSM also frees those poor agnostics from their infinite loop.
Plus, in the end, we all get to transition to the “dead” state, which following the theme of this chart could be labeled “What do you think happens next?”.
May I have a scone, please?
Because once it has been determined that you believe the wrong thing, he stops caring.
So a person can’t find meaning in both nature AND humanity?
Certainly not the only problem with this chart but that annoys me in especially.
I think it scores a 9/10 on the messed up worldview chart.
@sastra: Beliefnet.com has the Belief-o-matic, and prompts for name and e-mail, but doesn’t validate it. Just use anything for the address, then it lets you get started… I’m gonna try it ’cause I’m curious.
My Belief-o-matic results:
I think the reason for the lower Nontheist (why not “atheist”?) was that for some of the questions, like “Should homosexuality be condemned by your desired faith” (or something like that) I said No rather than Not Applicable.
Reminds me of the employment form that asks, “How much did you steal from your former employer last year?” Thieves assume that *everyone* steals, so they’ll actually put in a figure, just understate the amount. Non-thieves will say, “Nothing.”
The author of the chart is telling us more about him than about religion.
Meaning is found in the world
a) Yes b) No c)Don’t know d) Don’t care
First, you have to get at this question through atheist, apatheist, or agnostic (which is rather retarded, it’s assuming that no one who believes in a God has explicit meaning in their lives). Secondly, if you choose a) Yes, you end up at Humanist, Existentialist, Naturalist, Relativist, and Where do you find meaning?. Objection-All but the last are NOT EXCLUSIVE! And the last is asinine. You can find meaning in humanity, experience, nature, and believe that people find their own! And thirdly….
I wanna cookie.
Could be, rick020200. I answered Not Applicable to most of those, and ended up with:
1. Secular Humanism (100%)
2. Nontheist (87%)
3. Unitarian Universalism (87%)
I find Mr. Blair’s flowchart boring, but PZ’s is T-shirt material.
Most useful flowchart ever (also obligatory).
that can’t be true, can it? Even if it were accurate that all thieves think everyone is a thief (and I have some anecdotal doubts about this, too), they’d know quite well that the only correct answer to such a question is “nothing” (because not only does everyone steal, but everyone lies, too)?
According to the first flow chart, I’m an Relativist Existentialist Humanist, according to the second I get a cookie. I like the second more.
The theist side is heavily slanted towards Christianity. More than 1 god gets only one choice, yet in the one God category there’s room for asking about Jesus’ salvation? Bah!
Okay, PZ, where’s my cookie? You have two choices, send me a Leica M7 rangefinder body or a cookie.
Poopyhead! :-Thorn;
I agree.
Reminds me of the US visa forms where you’re asked if you’ve done drugs or committed assorted other crimes. I don’t think anybody answers those questions in the affirmative.
You check your Phayngula Labs beta test Transporter? Given that the Pulletette Patrol baked the cookies, it may look like a bad experiment. Tasty though.
The cookie is at the store, being an atheist means not being a lazy fuck! ;)
Hey, that makes sense. What in the fuck does “meaning” mean, after all?
*snigger*
ROTFL!
*sigh* <span lang=”cz”>Ach jo.</span>
One more thing that’s bothering me (then I’ll shut up, I promise) is that there’s a point that doesn’t flow logically. Take the final few steps in the Christian theism section:
“God made himself known in the world through the man Jesus Christ” -> Yes -> “Salvation is found only through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” -> No -> “How are you saved?”
It just does not logically follow. That one is saved isn’t introduced at all until that second last criteria, so the negative question is a loaded one – who assumes that one is being saved at all?
And also taking a step back, there’s another problem:
“God can be known personally” -> Yes -> “God made himself known in the world through the man Jesus Christ” -> No -> “Then how do you know God?”
Even most Christians argue that they know God through personal experience, and I’m going to bet it’s rare to find someone who thinks that God is only known through Jesus Christ.
If one is going to go to the effort of making a logical progression, surely the first step is getting the logic right.
I want a T-shirt with PZ’s second flowchart on it.
Everyone knows this is what you do to cookies.
If I believed in a god, I’d suspend belief for a free cookie.
Although I’m probably just saying that because I don’t care.
Wait. Is it an internet cookie?
1. Secular Humanism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (82%)
3. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (77%)
#3 W.T.everloving.Fuckk. did I do????
I dislike your flowchart. (Unappreciated ASCI frowny face to follow: :(
It requires one to get their own cookie. Hmm. I suppose imaginary sky daddies don’t get you a cookie either, unless you count that crappy cardboardy tasting thing the catholics hand out. Those eventually get stuffed in a pocket and tossed in the garbage. I guess it is better we get our own cookies – it makes it much harder to complain about how it tastes.
Really weird feature of the beliefnet survey, which identified me as
Secular Humanism (100%), Unitarian Universalism (94%), Nontheist (77%). When you click on the description for “Nontheist”, it links to the Secular Humanism description.
Which sort of captures the whole silliness of the exercise. Good to know that I’m only 10% Catholic, though.
I hate when people insert letters into their acronyms that shouldn’t be there, especially when it’s detrimental to the accuracy of the name. Case in point, Fellowship for Evangelism in the Arts ought to be FEA, the Spanish word for “ugly.”
The ugliest chart I’ve ever seen was this one about the American military situation in Afghanistan (at least, I think that’s what it’s about).
lol!
_ _ _
A comment from the link:
Indeed.
[OT]
Ah, what the hey. I don’t normally indulge in internet memes, but I don’t have rules, either.
They can be useful in the appropriate settings. When someone greatly oversimplifies/mischaracterizes a situation in order to reduce it to a flow chart, yeah, it’s not helpful (like here).
_ _ _
My results from the test:
I think some of the questions were problematic (though it’t not as bad as the flow chart).
Yeah, that’s stupid.
Where’s my cookie?
The ugliest chart I’ve ever seen
HOLY CRAP!
I want to frame that as a piece of artwork and call it:
“Afghanistan”
then hang it in the local fucking museum!
my partner actually does charts as part of her job, and it was like watching a kid in a candy store as she tore that thing apart!
outstanding bit of nonsense!
thanks muchly
… do you have the original full document link that chart was taken from?
I’d love to see the explanation of it in text.
This works primarily as a diagram of its creator’s misconceptions.
win.
I don’t have the original document, but here’s a news article about the chart.
Bonus points: it was a slide for a PowerPoint presentation.
Doing some Google searching it appears the original PowerPoint presentation is available here. Ugghhh… it’s even worse than you’d think.
OK, test first:
Umm … that’s strange enough it suggests the authors interpreted some questions rather differently from how I did.
Flowchart:
Hmm … no, it’s not found, it’s created, let’s see …
Excuse me?!
Ah, I see, if you want to get there, the route is:
Meh.
the original PowerPoint presentation is available here.
AWESOME.
I am so going to figure out a way to make that some sort of art commentary on the entire US/Afghan mess.
I just went straight to:
Meh.
Dear PZ (and commentators),
I’m pleased that this flowchart that I created has started a conversation about worldviews (which is one of the main purposes of this chart). But simply writing off the chart because you think it is “ugly”, “hideous” and “pathetic” or calling people who believe in God a “moron” or “stupid” is not the way to conduct an intelligent conversation. This is the sort of response I would expect from someone who is not very well educated. So unless a more gracious and intelligent line of argument can be put forward I can’t really comment any further.
Dear Cameron, I’m pleased that we have such power over you that you really cannot comment any further unless we allow you to do so by lowering our standards.
Cameron Blair
Your not commenting further on a thread that is one-week-dead is pretty impressive.
Cameron:
Tsk. I expect what you actually mean is that you have no argument whatsoever for your beliefs, so you’re taking refuge in the worn and lame “I don’t like your tone” defense.
Your flowchart is not art, it is ugly and it’s deeply flawed. Those things are all relevant, Cupcake. The fact that you don’t like that is irrelevant.
Thanks so much for stopping by to flounce, be sure to stick the landing.
Dear Cameron,
There are plenty of intelligent responses to the flow chart in the comments. Comment #68 by me, for example, is a look at the logic of the flowchart if one follows the Christian path. Doesn’t that count?
Kel:
Of course not, Kel. If one is going to be a Tone Troll, rule one is ignore all substance, look, there’s a cussword, and over there – someone was mean!
My apologies Kel. My comment was directed mostly to the author of the blog who has unfortunately set the tone for much of the following comments. Ridiculing someone or their work doesn’t make you right. You are one of the few exceptions among the commentators…well almost (see comment # 66).
In response to your comment at #68 – According to the Bible my logic as far as the Christian worldview is sound. The only way we can rightly know God is through the man Jesus Christ who came as the Saviour of the world. I would question your claim that “most” Christians don’t know God this way but even if you were correct then I would respectfully suggest that most Christians are not reading their Bibles properly.
As I suggested in response to similar comments on another blog that picked up my chart if you have problem with any of the questions/statements on the flowchart or if you have a problem with the answers/endpoints then it maybe because you haven’t fully considered or understood the worldview you have taken or it’s implications.
Well, #66 was meant to be a joke – as indicated by the ;)
My #68 had nothing to do with the Christian worldview, merely the logic of what was presented. Though I must say, I’m a little confused if that’s meant to be the Christian worldview, then why the need for almost half a chart to determine that? At that point, it seems less like a worldview flowchart and instead trying to argue for the internal logic of Christianity.
To be honest, I find the idea of a worldview silly. It only works in the most trivial sense – that each of us have our own perspectives on how we view the world, but in terms of commitment it’s not really a choice. It’s not like I decided “I’m going to be a humanist” and took on the values and affirmations of humanism. Rather what makes me a humanist is the experience of life and learning about the world.
My greatest concern with any sort of belief system is that it’s a parasite on the human condition; hijacking what it means to be human, then wrapping it in some internal logic and dogma more to the detriment of others. Right now I’m reading James Sire’s The Universe Next Door: A Worldview Catalogue and it bothers me that his complaint about nihilists is that they don’t live like nihilists. That they see meaning in their own actions even though they accept existence is meaningless. In other words – they’re acting human, but the nihilist worldview is at odds with that! I think right there sums up the absurdity of trying to find some overarching system as the grounding of thought.
Any attempt to do that is inevitably doomed to fail as all it does is try to rationalise beliefs that are inherent within. Morality is a perfect example of this; evidence from neuroscience strongly points to different ethical modes of thought as being different regions of neural activity. Case in point, one can change how we view actions by disrupting the brain region associated with our theory of mind using magnets. Our theory of mind makes us consider the intentions of others, and without we become more focused on the outcomes. Yet the question is often raised of how we could be good without God, or whether one can have a notion of good without God. At that point, we’re taking the veneer of a worldview and giving it the credit for evolved mental processes.
I’m all for people being aware of the implications of what they believe. But at the end of the day, I really doubt whether the notion of a worldview is a useful one. It doesn’t really capture how it is we form or hold our beliefs, and too often exceeds the reach of what can be explained without regard to human nature.
/$0.02
Kel, Thanks for the your 2 cents worth.
Again I would suggest that the reason you haven’t understood the logic of the section that concerns the Christian worldview is because you haven’t this worldview. There are people in the world who call themselves Christian who believe that Jesus Christ is the way that they know God. Like most if not all religions the purpose of knowing “God” is that we might be “saved” from the present imperfect existence. It doesn’t matter whether you call it Paradise, Heaven or Nirvana that is the end goal. Christianity is no different. Except that in Christianity there are different views about how you are saved by knowing Jesus. For Catholics salvation is found not simply by having faith in Jesus but by doing good works. But this is how the Bible speaks about salvation. The Bible says that we are saved by faith in Jesus alone and not by good works. Hence the last statement in the worldview.
At this point I must admit what is already obvious to most people who see this chart that it is biased towards Christianity and that is because I am a Christian who is seeking to start conversations with people about their worldview and about the Christian worldview and it merits. I don’t believe that worldviews are ‘silly’ because we all have a view of the world whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not. I have put this chart (not art) together because (in contradiction to Postmodern thinking) I believe that there is such a thing as an overarching system that is “the truth”. And that truth says that we as humans are not a random collection of atoms thinking and acting in blind obedience to our DNA or neurological impulses but spiritual creatures who are made for a purpose and who have a choice and a will. Sadly we choose to exercise that will and make the choice to reject God and do evil.
Sorry missing a few words in that last response but I think you will get my meaning!
I don’t think there’s any question of that.
Cameron:
“we”? Please don’t include me with those who share your conceit.
(I no more reject your god-construct than I reject Peter Pan)
Cameron:
Since you seek conversation, I put this to you:
If you consider your deity to be an omniscient Creator, does it not logically follow that it knew before* Creation what every possible outcome would be for its entire duration; specifically, which humans would reject it?
—
* Of if you wish to be sophistic, at the time of Creation. It matters not to the question.
Didn’t I acknowledge that earlier? “It only works in the most trivial sense – that each of us have our own perspectives on how we view the world”. My problem was to the extent in which worldview as a concept is a valid means to look at how we form and hold beliefs, and to what extent those beliefs can be described in an overarching system of thought.
But that’s an additional problem – what makes one worldview any more true than any other? Why is whatever brand of Christianity you subscribe to more valid than other brands of Christianity, or of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Neopaganism, deism, naturalism, or any other -ism one could collect as a system of thought?
Take your example above. How do you know that we’re spiritual beings? My “worldview” says that we are purely physical beings, made of DNA and built through genetic, epigenetic, environmental, and experiential processes. That I is indistinguishable from the neurons. But why is my view wrong, in your eyes, and yours in mine? Who really has, as you put it, “the truth”? The notion of a worldview here becomes pretty silly, as the truth of such matters is really independent of any worldview we try to fit it in.
Descartes said that man is mind and machine, yet modern scientific inquiry has shown that there is no separate realms. Experiment after experiment, observation after observation, the case that the mind is the brain is overwhelmingly empirically supported. As I said above, you can change someone’s moral decision making with a magnet. You can induce out of body experience with magnets, induce religious experience with drugs like LSD. You can damage the brain and lose particular aspects of consciousness. etc.
Yet how do you approach that, given you have “the truth” that we are spiritual? That you have “the truth” that we are made for a purpose? That you have “the truth” that we make the choice to reject God? Because if you really care about “the truth”, then surely you recognise that the subjective nature of worldviews is not a sufficient ground to base it off.
And there’s where I see the problem. The worldview you hold and the worldview I hold are very different. Yet it’s not that we had radically different starting points – some genetic, environmental, and cultural variants – but both of our worldviews have been earned through learning, experience, reason, and factors beyond our conscious control. I didn’t start out as an atheist, nor did you start out as a Christian. That I am an atheist and you’re a Christian represent outgrowths of our development, culture, and experience. We can intellectualise it to an extent, but really much of it is rationalisation rather than being rational. To get to something we can call “the truth”, it’s more a question of how we can know rather than what we believe.
So… in order to believe it, Kel first needs to believe it?
That’s circular logic.
That’s an insult. Apologize. You’ve been a lot ruder than anyone who has used the word moron.
Not that it matters, but the Bible contradicts itself a lot on this point. You’re in for a surprise.
Made for a purpose?
Like machines?
And then you add free will back in, on top of that?
Aaah fuck! </a> failure!
Cameron Blair (#99):
Careful here. Are you suggesting that one has to share the Christian worldview in order to evaluate it? If so, then you face the practical problem that prior commitment to a set of beliefs can make it harder to evaluate them accurately – you open yourself up to all manner of cognitive biases such that you risk selectively picking out only evidence that supports your view and overlooking or ignoring evidence that does not. Furthermore, you are effectively admitting that you don’t have any arguments that would convince a neutral third-party of the reasonableness of your worldview.
Additionally, you could also be read as implying that different worldviews have their own logic, their own standards of reasonableness, evidence and epistemic justification. And what’s more, these standards do not overlap between different worldviews, such that different worldviews are truly incommensurate. I think you’ll find this extreme kind of relativism rather hard to defend.
Tell me, how would you respond to a Muslim who rejected your criticisms of a piece of Muslim apologetics on the grounds that you didn’t understand it because you weren’t a Muslim? Would you consider this a fair point?
Firstly, as David Marjanović point out, the bible is not consistent on this point, and secondly, if it were true, then this would be good grounds for rejecting the bible as a source of moral wisdom. Any system that values ideological commitment over concrete attempts to improve the lives of others isn’t just morally corrupt, it misses the entire point of morality in the first place.
Yet the way you talk about “worldviews” as if they were epistemically self-contained is itself very postmodern.
Dear me. A strawman and a false dichotomy in a single sentence. Where to begin?
Firstly, no-one here thinks we are “random collections of atoms”. We are actually quite specific collections of atoms arranged by regular and predictable natural processes – there’s very little random about it at all.
Secondly, no-one here thinks that we act in blind obedience to our DNA. Few if any of us are genetic determinists. We’re regular readers of a blog by a developmental biologist, for god’s sake. Even the least sciency of us understand about phenotypic plasticity and environmental influences.
Thirdly, no-one here (I hope) would make the mistake of saying that we act blindly in obedience to our neurological impulses, because this implies that we are something separate from our neurology – which we ain’t.
Additionally, I have no idea what “spiritual creatures who are made for a purpose and who have a choice and a will” is supposed to signify, and why it is meant to be the preferable option. What exactly are “spiritual” and “will” supposed to mean in this context? And frankly, unless one is a die-hard authoritarian with a mental age of four, who cares if we’re made for a purpose? The only purposes that matter are the ones we create and share ourselves as responsible moral agents.
If I need to believe in Christianity in order to see its merits, then which Christianity ought I to believe in? In other words, what makes your Christianity right and others wrong? I can quote James Sire on knowing God through the universe: “God’s existence and his nature as Creator and powerful sustainer of the universe are revealed in God’s prime “handiwork,” his universe. As we contemplate the magnitude of this – its orderliness and its beauty – we can learn much about God.” Indeed, when believing sceptics were polled about why they believed in God, the most common response was the design and/or beauty of the universe.
William Lane Craig, when he debates, makes a lot out of knowing God personally – through being witness to the holy spirit. That if you believe in God then God will reveal Himself to you, and that’s how you can know Christianity is true. This position is similar to William James’ in the early 20th century where he argued that religious experience is how one can know the truth of God.
The problem highlighted is not one of ontology, but one of epistemology. How do we know that any form of Christianity is valid? How do we know that God exists? How do we know that through belief in Jesus one is saved? How do we know the bible is accurate? Simply believing doesn’t make things true, and to hold it as true irrespective of evidence makes one a Fideist. To take that irrational leap of faith puts you beyond the realms of “the truth” and into what one merely prefers. The focus on the worldview itself is unhelpful because describing what you believe and finding some internal consistency isn’t sufficient to make any sort of knowledge claim. And if you desire to deal with “the truth”, then what good is exploring one’s own worldview instead of what justifications there are for it?
Or it could be that the chart is an ugly piece of self-satisfied bilge that mainly demonstrates your ignorance of what other people believe. Did you consider that possibility?
John M, thanks for your comments. How is acknowledging our evil conceited? Is not thinking we are good when the history of the world shows otherwise conceited?
In answer to your question; yes it does logically follow that God knew before Creation what every possible outcome would be for its entire duration; specifically, which humans would reject it.
David, thanks also for your comment. I am certainly not saying that in order to believe it, Kel first needs to believe it? I am respectfully suggesting that the reason people disagree with the logic or the conclusions of a particular worldview in the flowchart is often because they haven’t understood what the worldview is really about. I never said that you had to believe a worldview in order to believe (or understand) it. That is putting words into my mouth. In this worldview chart I have tried to capture what each of the these worldviews are about according to their definitions and according to people who profess that view. What would be an insult worth an apology is not even bothering to try and understand another persons view of the world and to simply write them and their worldview off because it is not yours and you don’t like it.
As for the contradictions in the Bible…I could probably make any text sacred or not sound contradictory (if it were not already) by plucking verses out their context. Reading the Bible in context means reading sections of the Bible in light of the rest of the Bible and in light of it’s historical context and its various genres. When you read the bible as a whole you see that it is telling a story about the world from beginning to end. As far as the question of salvation the bible is consistent in saying that salvation is by faith alone and that judgement is by works (and we mustn’t confuse those two ideas). In the Old Testament the Israelites were first saved by trusting in God who rescued them from Egypt and then they were given the law by Moses to obey. They were thrown out of the land that God promised to them (before they did anything good or bad) because they didn’t obey God in response to what he had already done in saving them. It is the same in the New Testament – we are saved by faith in Jesus death on the cross (and promised a place in heaven before we had done anything good or bad) and now that we are saved we are called to obey God. If we do not obey God then we will be judged according to what we have done. The problem is that Bible says again and again that we have not fully obeyed God and so we all deserved to be judged and not saved.
As for free will, again David you have put words in my mouth. I never said we have free will. I believe that we have a will that is independent of God but it is certainly not free. Does this make us into machines? No because machines don’t have an independent will. What our non-free will means is that we are finite contingent creatures bounded, amongst other things, by time and space.
Cameron, first, let me note that conceit has more than one sense (see senses #2 and #3 in my link).
(See? You’ve already learnt something! :) )
Right. On to the meaty bit:
Perhaps you’d now care to address a couple of questions engendered from the ineluctable implications of your answer:
1) If you believe those who reject God are condemned (or alternatively, that only those who do not reject God are saved), what possible purpose is there in creating people (such as I) who were fated to reject God aeons before they were born, other than pointless cruelty?
2) In what sense do people have choice, other than as a personal illusion, given that whatever “choices” they make were already fated aeons before they were born?
Sorry Kel I accidently skipped over your comment. A simple answer to your comment is that I believe the Bible is the truth not simply because it says so but also because of the evidence. Not only does the Bible have an internal coherency and consistency virtually unmatched by any ancient document that covers so much time in so many different genres by so many different authors but is also has great textual and extra-biblical evidence that supports it’s claims as being historically truthful and reliable.
John. Thanks for the questions. I will endeavour to answer those good questions and the other comments people have made but unfortunately I have to go away for a few days (I’m actually going to the funeral of my grandfather). I will return. Sorry!
No worries, Cameron.
Honest engagement is creditable.
—
I’ll leave you with a Nietzsche quote:
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
I don’t think you’ve read my #68 properly, your particular brand of Christian theism isn’t the only brand of Christian theism, let alone theism, out there. I don’t particularly care what your particular worldview is, but if you’re trying to put it into a flowchart then it does help to get the progression of thought right. Muslims believe in a personal God, yet don’t believe that God made himself known through Jesus Christ. Many Christians include private revelation or natural theology as ways God reveals Himself. CS Lewis argued that God revealed himself to the Jewish people over 1000 years before Christ. Meanwhile many believe that God was the divine author of the bible.
And there are plenty of Christians who argue that they are saved on works rather than faith, or that an all-loving God (as God is traditionally ascribed to be) excludes Hell and thus God will extend his grace to all people irrespective of beliefs. William Lane Craig, in his defence of the order of genocide by God of the Canaanites believed that divine grace would extend to infants and toddlers – neither of which could possibly have faith in Jesus Christ. Meanwhile some Calvinists argue that God chooses who is saved or damned irrespective of what they believe.
That I don’t see things your way doesn’t mean that you get a free pass logically. I’ve cited Christian beliefs and believers who embody the problems with the logic. But, hey, it’s not my belief. I have a cookie. :D
For being opposed to postmodernism, it’s odd that you put “the truth” in scare-quotes, then go on to vomit up some evidenceless bullshit about the nature of human existence. You care about coming up with ways of supporting your nonsense, not the truth.
Also, it is art, just not done well.
This is presumptuous, don’t you think? Unless you’ve explained something about it that we didn’t understand, what reason do we have to think you know this? *looks* No, you haven’t explained anything, much less anything I didn’t know. This fits right in with the rest of your bullshit epistemology: you just know we don’t get it, because if we did, we’d believe. Utterly free of content, leaving only pure, unadulterated bullshit.
Surely, we mustn’t do that.
So salvation isn’t a part of the sky dictator’s moral judgments? Isn’t the myth about “original sin” involved somehow (you know, the one with the talking snake), in which case it is a matter of being good or evil? If someone isn’t saved, how is the sky dictator not responsible for allowing evil to occur while busying itself with its “judgments”?
If that isn’t the premise (not the truth in any case), then what is there to be saved from, if not from evil? Why does this “salvation” (having nothing to do with morality) occur via “faith” (believing in things without evidence), and what is salvation if it isn’t what the ordinary word means?
Whatever your answer, how do you know any of this?
So you get conflate moral judgment and salvation, just not us. Tsk, tsk. You should listen to yourself. (Actually, no, reverse that: you should stop listening to yourself.)
Stunning piece of logic, that, especially after a few beers.
Note that a machine is (1) finite, (2) contingent, (3) created by people, and (4) bounded, amongst other things, by time and space [redundant, considering the others].
That’s a neat trick: AFAIK there is no other ancient document that “covers so much time in so many different genres by so many different authors”, so despite the fact that the Bible is absolutely stuffed with internal contradictions, your statement is actually an understatement if anything, because you don’t need the “virtually”.
Pity. You had to go and spoil it. The Bible is also stuffed with historical and scientific howlers. It gets the age of the Earth wrong by a factor of nearly a million, for a start. Here are some more.
What a coincidence, I believe the Bible is not the truth not simply because it says so but also because of the evidence. Not only does the Bible have fantastical accounts that defy common sense, science, other historical records, and even itself, but it fits precisely in with the mythic storytelling of the region with no external factual basis.
A few examples to back this up. The account of events in Genesis is almost identical to the Babylonian creation myth – and is contradicted by all we know in physics and biology. There is no geological evidence for a global flood, and all the geological evidence suggests that the earth is billions of years old. The ruins of Canaan show no sign of being destroyed, but have found to be abandoned hundreds of years before the biblical account suggests. Moses and Egyptian sages turn staves into snakes. There is no archaeological or historical evidence supporting Exodus. Jonah spent 3 days in the belly of a giant fish. Matthew and Luke place the birth of Christ in two different periods of history – neither of which they could have witnessed. The gospel accounts were written several decades later in a different language, and the eyewitnesses were all illiterate. The only historical account outside bible that talks of a historical Jesus was modified in the 4th century. Accounts like the massacre of the innocents have no historical evidence. Jesus said he’d return before the generation he was speaking to dies. The story of Jesus follows a similar pattern found in the mythologies of many cultures known as the monomyth (or the hero’s journey).
And so on…
It’s not pointless from God’s point of view. It’s quite obvious from the Bible that torturing people is how he gets his jollies – he’s a psychopathic sexual sadist, like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy, but without their excuse of an abusive childhood.
This is a flat out lie.
The bible is an incoherent mishmash that routinely contradicts itself everywhere.
The same stories are often told 2 to 4 different times in the OT and they are all different. It starts with the creation myths which makes no sense and are wrong but there are two mutually contradictory ones within the first few pages.
It’s an obvious book of fiction with obvious political agendas.
KG, good pickup.
I hereby amend ‘pointless’ to ‘needless’.
Perhaps it doesn’t have a choice in the matter. (I can’t exactly say I have any reason to assume otherwise.) Maybe it was abused as a child, or was bullied at school, or it’s being held at gunpoint, or it has some sort of head injury from a freak knitting accident.
CR, shsssh. You’re messing-up my approach.
(I’ve got omnipotence and omnibenevolence waiting in the wings; their entrance is not yet necessary)
To get back to my earlier point, is that you believe it sufficient to say that it is “the truth” – as opposed to saying that it is “your truth”? In terms of looking at the evidential claims of Christianity, it’s something that can be done through science, historical inquiry, archaeology, textual criticism, comparative mythology, etc. At that point, we don’t need to talk about worldviews, merely the factual accuracy of particular claims. If, for example, God created the world as it says in Genesis, then surely that would exclude any worldview that didn’t have the moon as a light in the sky, or day and night on earth before there was a sun. Or perhaps, as modern science has ascertained, that the earth formed around the sun some 4.58 billion years ago, that means any worldview that doesn’t have such an account should be excluded on the basis of evidence. Likewise, any worldview that doesn’t have us as evolved creatures can be thrown out on the basis of the overwhelming evidence for evolution.
That’s the whole point of evidence, while one can interpret evidence in line with a particular modality of thought (for instance, God could have created the earth to have the appearance of age – though that leads to questions about the deceptive nature of a supposedly omnibenevolent being), but that the evidences should be apparent no matter what approach. We should be compelled, if the accounts of Jesus as sufficiently backed by evidence, to believe that Jesus was the son of God. If the case is not sufficient, then we shouldn’t.
(I have given omnipresence a little break; it shall not be required)
Perhaps neither was God’s. Omnipotent or not, how could it do anything “outside” of time? Alternatively, how could creation have occurred if an infinite time had passed before it happened? If something takes an infinite time to occur, then it never occurs.
Cameron Blair:
No.
What evidence?
Hi. Sorry for the lengthy absence. Just wondering there is still any interest in continuing the conversation.
Cameron, sure.
John,
Sorry for the slow answer to your questions at 111. This is a difficult question to answer because it is very a emotive question and because as finite creatures we are very limited in our understanding of the plans and purposes of an infinite God. So I don’t want to give you the short simple answer which is more likely to be misheard.
The Bible says that God has given us all life and has created a good, beautiful and abundant world for us to live in. This life that he has given us in this good world was meant to be lived in relationship with God as our Creator and Ruler. The fact is that we have chosen to reject him as Creator and Ruler of our lives. This is a real choice that we have all made as creatures created with a will and we are therefore responsible for the consequences of that choice. But God is justifiably grieved about this and angry with us (like I would be grieved and angry if one of my children rejected me as their father despite all I had done for them). This grief and anger that God feels is because he loves all that he has created – especially us. But because he is a just God, God can’t let us live in rejection of him and so he will hold us to account for our choices. But as you obviously know the Bible also states that God is in complete and absolute control of everything such that our decision to reject him came as no surprise to him.
Since we have all chosen to reject God it is a great kindness of him to have in his sovereignty chosen anyone to be saved. Now we don’t really know exactly who God has chosen until the last day. Perhaps he has chosen you John! Thankfully God is in absolute control of everything and is therefore able to use evil to bring about good. The prime example of this is the death of Jesus which God used to bring about the salvation of many who have rejected him.
I hope this answers your questions.
Cameron,
Well, it’s a response, but I cannot see how said response answers either question.
—
The questions, again:
1) If you believe those who reject God are condemned (or alternatively, that only those who do not reject God are saved), what possible purpose is there in creating people (such as I) who were fated to reject God aeons before they were born, other than pointless cruelty?
2) In what sense do people have choice, other than as a personal illusion, given that whatever “choices” they make were already fated aeons before they were born?
—
Perhaps you could try this format for your answers:
1. God created people who were fated to reject God aeons before they were born because ________.
2. People have a choice, though whatever “choices” they make were already fated aeons before they were born, because ________.
(What fills in those blanks?)
John,
Please read the following answers in the context of my earlier response…
The Bible quite circumspect about the answer to the first question but I think the answer to the first question is;
1. God created people who were fated to reject God aeons before they were born because he is God and he can do as he pleases.
As for the second question;
2. People have a choice, though whatever “choices” they make were already fated aeons before they were born, because they are creatures with a will who are morally responsible.
OK, Cameron.
1. You’re essentially saying you have no idea of whether there was any purpose to it, no?
(Is that so very hard to admit?)
2. “choices”, indeed.
So, I could not possibly have chosen other than as I did*, yet I am held morally responsible for it?
(Nasty view, that)
There’s your first problem. You care what the Bible says. Think for yourself. Let me interject with another question: why would something which is supposed to be written by a deity, or at least “divinely-inspired,” be so incredibly bad at explaining anything useful?
Sure, not that it matters, but the Bible does sort of imply that here and there. If one is a deity, nothing one does has to actually be good or make any sense. Might makes right. If this “God” fellow were real, I would spit in its face. Fortunately for me, it isn’t and doesn’t have a face, so that saves me some time.
That’s just an assertion. Isn’t having a will* the same as having a choice? If so, then this is circular. Your claim looks like this: they have a choice because they have a choice.
You don’t even pretend to notice there’s a conflict between being “fated” to do something and having a choice. It’s just there in the sentence because that’s what John wrote for you.
*Free will is a different story, of course, but that’s another issue and isn’t necessarily your claim.
John,
I am more than happy to admit when I don’t know the answer to something hence my initial comments about finite people understanding the plans and purposes of an infinite God. However Paul in Romans 9:22-24 suggests that God’s purpose in being patient with those “prepared for destruction” is to show his wrath and make his power known so that those who are being saved might know the glory of his mercy to them.
In response to the issue of choice, we are unable choose God of our own accord because we all naturally choose to reject God. The only way we can choose to accept God is if God wills it to be. The fact is that God has willed it be. This is not nasty it’s called mercy because without God’s choosing of some us would all be lost in our rejection of him.
Now you might say that is not fair. Who can resist God’s will? Paul’s answer earlier in Romans 9:20 is “who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?
CR,
I am very much aware that these two statements appear contradictory. They are what scholars have called an antinomy – that is two contradictory statements that are in themselves both reasonable. The solution is not to reject one or the other (or both) just because they seem to be contradictory. Instead if you think about it for a moment you might concede that they are both reasonable. If we don’t have real choice in life and we are therefore not morally responsible (ie. if God is not judge) then we can have no sense of justice. If that is true then mass murderer or serial rapist has got away with what they have done and there is nothing we can do about it. And if there is God in absolute control of the world (ie. God is not King) then we can have no hope of escaping the evil that is in the world most particularly death.
These two statements of the Bible – human responsibility and divine sovereignty have for centuries given our society it’s sense of justice and hope – two very useful concepts wouldn’t you agree?
Last sentence of second last paragraph should read “And if there is no God in absolute control of the world (ie. God is not King) then we can have no hope of escaping the evil that is in the world most particularly death.” Whoops. Sorry!
I’m happy to continue.
Cameron:
1. Well, if you don’t know, you can’t instruct us. :)
2. Your problem is the positing of an “infinite” deity; infinities bring paradoxes, when one applies a modicum of reasoning.
This purported suggestion is credible, why?
You have no basis for this assertion; it appears ex culo.
1. God clearly failed with me, then — if it willed it to be, it has failed. If it didn’t, it’s a bit of a prick, no?
(What does that tell you?)
2. But that’s not what I called nasty; what I called nasty is the conceit that someone can be held morally responsible for what one cannot but do!
Any reasonable person would.
There is no such thing; there is nothing to resist, other than the nastiness of the deluded (such as you).
(Thus, the Inquisition)
Such babblings; I worry about what Paul purportedly wrote about as much as I worry about who will be eaten first when the Elder Gods rise.
(Not that much)
John,
If the Inquisition is what you think of when you think of Christianity and that such behaviour has put you off Christianity then I’m very sorry to hear that. The Roman Catholic Inquisitions were totally evil and completely unchristian. They do not represent in any way the behaviour that the Bible calls Christians to have.
Kel,
Glad that your happy to continue. I’ll have to go back and look at your comments again before responding further.
Cameron:
You are seeking excuses for me — please don’t — they’re neither wanted nor welcome (nor appropriate, for that matter).
(Christianity fails at the very first epistemic hurdle, nevermind its inherent contradictions.
The Inquisition was but a symptom of a memetic disease; or, rather, I should say is — you mob are still causing real harm)
Whoops. Sorry!
Hoping something to be true does in no way make it so.
oy
1)the bible is actually thoroughly inconsistent; not only does it contradict itself whenever it switches from a J/E-text to a P-text, it’s also written in multiple languages (sometimes switching languages halfway through a chapter), and features a multitude of distinguishable and often contradictory voices. What’s consistent is its translation and each churches selective reading of it (and even then not always)
2)textual and extra-biblical evidence actually contradicts virtually all of the bible narratives.
incoherent word games. if the will is independent (of what, btw?), then it is also free of that very same thing.
this is incoherent. you’ve already admitted that god knew this would happen beforehand. he’s got no right to be “grieved” by something he knew would happen if he created the world the way he did.
you know what happens to fathers who decide to use torture to punish their children for rejecting them?
well, you’ve certainly got one part right here: that paragraph really does sound like the sort of thing an abused child would say if they’d internalized their abuse. So I guess god is like an abusive parent, after all.
conclusion: your god is worse than merely an abusive parent: he’s a parent who got children for the specific purpose of abusing them. and you worship such a monster?
no, that’s logically impossible. either people have choices, or their behavior has been predetermined; not both.
like I said: abusive.
oh it’s nasty alright, since god also chose to make us despite knowing we’d reject him. Making someone do something, and then being forgiving if they apologize to the person who made you do it is not “merciful”; it’s abuse and the worst sort of victim-blaming.
“might makes right” is immoral authoritarian bullshit; if that’s your gods reasoning, he’s less moral than most people.
you suck at logic (also, Kant was a master at mental masturbation, and also sucked at logic). It’s a basic law of logic that “A” and “not A” cannot be true at the same time; if you ever arrive at a situation where that happens, it means either your premises are wrong, or your conclusions do not follow from the premises.
indeed it did, which is why historically, the human sense of justice was barbaric and backwards. still is, in those parts of the world where religion dictates ethics and morality.
no, we can’t escape death. so what?
besides, just because it would be nice or good or convenient for something to be true doesn’t actually make it true. reality doesn’t work that way.
No True Scotsman
They were run by Xains. You must accept and deal with that. Trying to say they are unXian when they clearly are is lying. If you lie about that, what else will you lie about…
John, If I have said something inappropriate I apologise.But I have had so many conversations where people have unfairly rejected the message of Christianity because of the unchristian behaviour of it’s supposed messengers. To illustrate what I mean, if a local theatre company did a terrible job of performing Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet you wouldn’t blame Shakespeare would you?
Rev. DBC, So you don’t think there is evil in the world nor want it to be deal with or escape it?
Jadehawk, Changing languages does not make the something contradictory. So what some of are the specific inconsistencies and contradictions you say are in the bible? It is the Bible that says that God has given you life and continues to sustain your life and gives you the opportunity to live forever free from sickness, pain and death and you call that child abuse?
Nerd of Redhead, Jesus tells his disciples to love their enemies. He does not say to torture and kill them. So anyone who commits such evils against their enemies is not a true follower of Christ. That’s the truth.
Cameron,
1. Not in my case; as I’ve intimated, I find Christianity intellectually nonsensical (and indeed perverse) on its own merits.
(That it warps people’s psyches is evidence of this)
2. I suppose not, but that’s an inappropriate comparison, since Shakespeare was an actual author whilst Christianity has an imaginary deity (it is a clearly a human construct).
John, so would it be fair to say that you think there is nothing good in Christian doctrine nor in it’s outworking in society – that it only has done and continues to do only harm to individuals and society as a whole?
Cameron, of course not.
I don’t deny it has done some good things, such as charity and education (whether that outweighs the harm it has also done, overall, is a disputable matter).
Nor do I deny it has comforted some people some of the time.
Nor do I deny that some very good people have been Christian.
Nor do I deny that Christianity has utility — it’s a powerful force for social cohesion and control.
But that’s all beside the point; even were it all peachy and good and happy and oh-so-very useful, this would not entail that its theological claims are true. A useful fantasy is still a fantasy, and one could strip away all the theological rubbish without one whit changing people’s behaviour (i.e. cultural Christianity).
(argumentum ad consequentiam is fallacious)
First define “evil”
Second, this has exactly zero bearing on the truth claims being made by religion. Whether there is “evil” in the world or not says nothing to whether someone promising you everlasting life to escape said “evil” has any truth in their claims.
none.
Rev. BDC:
“Fucking over other people for your own gain.” It’s not a very precise definition, but it works for me.
Of course, that definition doesn’t fit with CB’s definition of evil. Obviously, by my definition, death itself is not evil. It’s just a thing. Also by my definition, though you can’t escape evil in the world, you can work to reduce it, by making it more difficult for people to fuck over others for their own gain.
A-fuckin’-men.
Cameron Blair:
I wouldn’t blame Shakespeare for their acting ability, but I would blame Shakespeare for writing an inane play with unlikeable protagonists and a dreary ending. The first time I read it, I was hoping they’d both die.
But it’s a false equivalence, anyway. While acting is a skill that can be learned to some degree, there is also a certain amount of innate talent required. The Bible is supposed to teach morality, at least according to its adherents. And in that respect, the Bible isn’t as much like Romeo and Juliet as it is Spiderman: The Musical, or Grease.
Cameron, further to your #147, I here quote a very recent comment from another blog by Stonyground that’s of relevance:
Cameron: “But I have had so many conversations where people have unfairly rejected the message of Christianity because of the unchristian behaviour of it’s supposed messengers.”
Cameron, didn’t Jesus himself say we should judge a tree by its fruits? If you apply that standard and look at Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and the majority of those who call themselves xtian, how do you think xtianity fares?
More to the point, though, I rejected xtianity because it describes a world that in my experience doesn’t exist.
John. I’ll gave a read. Thanks.
Ray/Dilbert. Yes Jesus did say something to that effect but his point is that judgement will come upon those who produce bad fruit. In other words people may claim to be Christian but if don’t produce the fruit that is in keeping with the Christian faith they will be treated as if they were not a believer. I’m not from the states so I dont know those people you cited nor what they have done. Not everyone who claims to be Christian is actually Christian hence my comment about not judging Christianity by it’s members. See for instance http://www.outreachmedia.org.au/posterArchive/november2009.php
Cameron,
Thank you.
—
[meta]
You made a typo and your browser is remembering it (your UID shows as ‘Caneron’).
I really should stop posting via my iPhone!
@Cameron Brown, and those replying to his babblings.
My ‘Why I am an Atheist’ contribution is pending, but the gist of it is, religions are immoral. This discussion gives too much evidence for that idea.
It starts with Brown’s ‘world view’, which is simply the arrogance of faith — “I decided to believe this, therefore it is The Certain Universal Truth.” His “worldview” is derived from this presupposition, and seeks nothing more than to justify his presupposed Truth, and to gain personal satisfaction by persuading others (or, for many faithies, imposing it on others).
He’s learned well how to deal with the Gnu Accommodationists around here — even though ‘Christianity’ is a meaningless term (except as a fuzzy set name whose membership is by self-identification), the GAs leap to use it along with Brown. Then Brown jumps in with the standard disclaimer, ‘not every self-identified christian is a True Christian. The Gnu Accommodationists give the xtian control of the terms of discourse, and the xtian scores, as usual.
My own innate morality, years ago, taught me that the arrogance of faith is immoral, where the humility of science not only is moral, but it works. Part of the humility of science is the requirement that terms are defined when in use: justifying faith seems to require terms to be sufficiently meaningless that the faithy can change the terms of discourse without notice.
The arrogance of faith allows the faithy to declaim that his idiosyncratic beliefs are The One True Christianity, that his idiosyncratic reinterpretation of the cherries he’s picked from some rewrite of some arbitrary text (as long as it’s published with the title “Holy Bible”) is the One True Bible.
Granted, faithy chew-toys like Brown last longer if the horde accommodates the faithy’s arrogance. YMMV, but I don’t find such accommodationism to be honest or productive. It seems much more honest to refer properly to Brown’s christianity (or your, or his, or her), to christianities (for the fuzzy set), to his bible (or to the text of a particular rewrite), and to his gods (the gods of his personal christianity).
[meta]
Si hablas Español, escúchame: Congratulations on reaching level 2.
(Keep at it, O puppy — you may yet achieve understanding that Cameron is no ordinary chew-toy)
@John Morales
I wouldn’t doubt your mastery of Español, and I’ve seen your mastery of English over the years that I’ve been lurking. However, I suggest you carefully reread my ‘nym. My Spanish is best described as … well, let’s just not bother describing it. But “
Si hablas Español, escúchame:” is not a valid espol construct. (And why were the code tags ineffective around the quoted matter?);-}
[OT]
se habla espol, my knowledge of Spanish is at the level of an 11 y.o. in 1972. So, sure, it’s probably bastardised. ;)
—
As far as Careron goes, he’s engaging.
(May not seem much to you, but it’s uncommon enough.
(If I err on the side of charity, so be it — I’ll cop that))
Thanks for erring on the side of charity John. I appreciate it.
@Cameron Blair
I apologize for getting your name wrong. I was working from memory, and didn’t bother to check it out, this time. I was wrong.
As to calling you out, and other purveyors of various christianities, I find nothing that I would apologize for. I find charity for the immorality of religion to be as unappealing as the immorality itself. John’s MMV, of course, but at least he shows the humility of reason.
se habla espol, apology accepted. So you think that loving your neighbour as yourself immoral then?
@Cameron Blair
Ah, I just love the smell of a ripe non sequitur in the morning. (Well, actually, I don’t, but it was a fun tease.)
No, that rule-of-thumb is a part of my innate morality. It seems to hold as well this century as it did in the centuries before the ‘New Testament’ was crafted.
To bad that it’s missing from the practice of so many of the christianities. Perhaps those christianities interpret ‘neighbour’ as it appears in the 9th(?) commandment of the bible text, so that in their bibles it means ‘fellow tribesman.’ That would account for the hatefulness they seem to show towards non-members of their particular christianity.
se habla espol,
The saying ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ comes from the Old Testament in about 1250 BC (Leviticus 19:18) and not in the New Testament with Jesus.
When asked “who is my neighbour?”‘ Jesus told a parable that basically said that your neighbour is your enemy (Luke 10). You are right to say that people have (sadly) got that wrong
As far as this being innate…The same Jesus who exemplified this moral teaching also said that it is unloving behaviour that is innate to us (Mark 7). It is because we cannot keep commands such as this that he came to die (Mark 10:45) so that we might be forgiven.
@Cameron Blair
Oh. So it did come from (in the Jewish tradition, at least) the time when ‘neighbour’ meant ‘fellow tribesman’, since their encampments were tribe-oriented.
In other words, your version of the Yeshua bar Yosef (sp?) myth has it that your fellow tribesman who is not your enemy is not your neighbour: so he doesn’t count for ‘love thy neighbour’ purposes. Or maybe he is, for Leviticus reasons. Or maybe not, because the Yeshua myth is supposed to have fulfilled the OT laws and rendered them null. Or maybe so, because some of the Levitical law still stands, sometimes, fulfillment notwithstanding. And where does this leave those of us who are neither fellow tribesmen nor enemies? I guess it all depends on which of the “inerrant word-of-god” rewrites you subscribe to.
My innate morality insists that my love is to extend to all; your exceptions for non-enemy/non-fellow-tribesmen just don’t apply.
I’m not the one with the arrogance to say whether they have got it right or got it wrong. I just point out the consequence of the internal contradictions of the bibles and the christianities.
So, the fact that I find an innate morality (as do many others) is to be condemned, because some unknown writer (perhaps as early as ca 50-150 CE) decided to include a denial in his version of the Yeshua myth? Am I accused, in your arrogance of faith, of lying or just being mistaken? What does your idiosyncratic bible have to say?
*checks for a response*
Cameron:
A particularly nasty bit, that whole business of atonement via blood sacrifice by proxy, no less than it is stupid to imagine it is the god sacrificing its son to itself (or, even more stupidly, sacrificing itself to itself, in the Trinitarian version).
Bah.
Sorry Kel…getting there…
John. Laying down your life out of love for someone else is not a nasty act but a noble one.
se habla espol,
The bible elsewhere calls both Jews and Christians to love everyone and not just their own tribe/people etc.
Saying that Jesus is a myth is to reject numerous writers and historians both ancient and modern, Christian and non-Christian (Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus, Josephus, Eusebius, Kenyon, Judge etc. etc.) who have looked at the evidence and concluded that Jesus is a real historical figure.
Cameron, your Morton’s Demon is keeping you from apprehending what I actually wrote.
What part of atonement by proxy* is unclear to you?
What part of blood sacrifice** is unclear to you?
—
* Punishing a third party to atone for the transgressions of a second party.
** Slaying a creature to please deities.
(Here is some of your odious iconography)
The problem with this is that there’s a difference between a historical figure and a biblical one. It’s easy to conflate the two, leaving qualities and events normally consigned to mythology (for example, being born of a virgin is common among many mythological figures) and a charismatic apocalyptic preacher at the root of Christianity. So when one talks about Jesus as a historical figure, it’s not necessarily meaning that he was born of a virgin, healed the sick, raised the dead, was raised from the dead, etc. Though many do conflate the two, there’s not much in the way of evidence to support any of it.
When people talk about Jesus as myth, it doesn’t have to mean that Jesus was pure invention. There’s very little in the historical record to attest to it either way. But there are elements of the Jesus story that parallel mythology, so to take Jesus as pure history while all other accounts (many of which were circulating in that area of the world) as mythology would take quite a stretch of credulity. And that’s the problem. Historically speaking, there’s very little in the way of evidence outside of the gospels to speak of. And the stuff in the gospel, as I said above, has many parallels in other mythology – not to mention sits alongside the claims of other claimed messiahs like Apollonius Of Tyana who was claimed to have healed the sick and raise the dead.
This is why it’s so important to try to establish what is meant by a historical Jesus. That there are pure mythical elements in the gospel accounts of Jesus is good reason to doubt that a biblical Jesus existed. But that doesn’t exclude any notion of a historical Jesus – just that a Jesus who was born of a virgin and resurrected from the dead (again, something found in mythology) isn’t necessarily the same thing as a Charismatic cult leader at the genesis of Christianity.
“Jesus Christ” practically means “Messiah Messiah.” Compared to that, Captain America and Doctor Evil are downright believable as character names.
I disagree with your assesment. A=A. Something we recognize as a distinct unit has inherent characteristics to it that define it and that a lack of which define as not-it. There is so much to the character of Jesus Christ that is impossible, unsubstantiated, and ahistorical that removing all of those elements removes everything that makes the character Jesus.
It’s like saying “I have a story about superman…cept he isn’t from Krypton, doesn’t get super powers from the yellow sun, doesn’t fight Lex Luthor, and is less of a hero and more of a child molester and tax fraud…but his name is still Clark Kent.”
Likewise the L Ron Hubbard of Scientology mythology never existed, it was an alter ego character created by L Ron Hubbard based and exaggerated off of his own biography.
——————————————————
Two things
A) Forgiven from Whom?
B) Forgiveness really doesn’t make anything better now does it? Instead of saying “God bless you” to the dying man when he sneezes on him, Jesus could have, you know, cured him.
@Consciousness Razor
Cap is a bad example…in story his name was designed for the propaganda value.
Exactly! I thought that made it a good example, but maybe to be precise, I should’ve said it’s no more believable.
Ing,
Jesus not only forgave people for their sins against God but he also healed them of their sickness and disease as well (Mark 2). Forgiveness will have little or no meaning for you if you don’t acknowledge that you need it.
@Cameron Blair
You fail at reading.
What good would forgiveness do?
This is where it’s so important to be careful in language, and why I’m trying to distinguish between a historical Jesus and a biblical one. We can get lost in semantics and find ourselves distorting what we mean to others. When we say “Jesus is a myth”, most people hear that Jesus was the pure fabrication of Paul; mythical in the sense that we consider Hercules mythical. Meanwhile there’s at least some account for a historical figure, so to keep the claim of myth would require going to painstaking lengths to quantify exactly what it’s meant.
Normally, we don’t see a problem with an imperfect description of a historical figure, where embellishments or fictions are something distinct from the question of historicity. It’s much better, at least in my mind, to distinguish between a fictional character and fictional accounts attributed to a character. For instance, Uri Geller most definitely existed, though Uri Geller who could bend spoons using psychokinesis is a fiction upon a real character. The myth was about Uri Geller, not essential to Uri Geller.
Citation needed.
Citation needed.
Citation needed. No, Mark 2 is not a citation. It’s a fucking story.
From a non-existent being? No, that wouldn’t mean anything. People forgive each other for doing bad things. However, they don’t forgive each other for having palsy, or whatever was wrong with the characters in the fucking story in Mark chapter two. Do you know why they don’t forgive each other for that sort of thing? Because it’s not their fucking fault for being sick. It wasn’t caused by their sins, or their parents’ sins, or by a non-existent devil or a non-existent deity. Science has come a long way in a few thousand years. Try to fucking learn something from it.
Sounds like a good proof against God. God is traditionally described as omnibenevolent, but to pin forgiveness on such an arbitrary factor is contradictory. God is either not omnibenevolent, or the account of salvation through belief in the atonement is wrong.
Another argument, from a slightly different direction: God is either not omnipotent, or there was no need for any “salvation” whatsoever. (If something was necessary external to a god’s will, then not everything bends to its will, thus in that regard it is impotent. Addendum for apologists: if “God works in mysterious ways,” then it is incapable of rendering itself comprehensible, thus in that regard it is impotent.)
If there were a god which was omnipotent and even slightly benevolent toward living organisms, it could’ve created any number of worlds more amenable than this one to a happy and peaceful existence. If there were an omnipotent god, the entire universe could be habitable and pleasant, with no conflict, suffering or death of any kind. It could’ve made it extremely easy to believe in its existence and actually communicated coherently to us whatever information would be beneficial. Though, if all this were the case, it wouldn’t need to tell us how to prevent or cure diseases (as it also doesn’t do in the Bible), because it wouldn’t have created any diseases in the first place. If somehow that also means we’d have to worship it or whatever less-than-benevolent or unsavory acts the god might demand of its puppets, then perhaps that would be a mark against it. Still, I’d say that would be a more benevolent deity than the one under consideration, because it’s clearly not the case that the world I’ve described is like ours. That “reality” stuff just never seems to go away, however your stupid “worldview” might be.
Kel,
In separating the historical and the biblical Jesus you are rejecting the majority of scholarship which recognises that the biblical accounts of Jesus are presented as historical accounts. It is only the minority fringe of scholarship that divorces the two. Now I’m not saying that the truth is determined by the majority – the truth is not a democracy. Respectable historiography says that a historical account is valid unless it can be proved otherwise. The fact is there is a sheer mountain of textual evidence (which includes around 24,000 ancient biblical manuscripts) to support the historical reliability of the New Testament which includes eye-witness testimonies from hundreds of people who saw what Jesus did and said from his virgin birth to his resurrection from the dead.
Ing,
Yes I am a failure in many things but most especially in living the way God has created me to. That is why for me forgiveness is so good because it means that I no longer face his judgement for my failure.
John,
I find it very ironic indeed that you would say that I have a ‘demon’ that is stopping me from seeing the evidence to the contrary. Very ironic.
It seems though that our discussion may now be going around in circles and has therefore reached the end of it’s usefulness. So I’d like to thank you for the discussion, I have really enjoyed it and you have given me much to think about. See you later.
Cameron:
You would find it even more ironic from my perspective; it’s derived from a figure of speech that (as you’ll know if you’ve followed my reference) is derived from an expression by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell as part of a thought experiment, and which in turn is derived from the Christian conceit that madness and sickness are caused by demons* — themselves imaginary entities, but necessary to assuage the cognitive dissonance between the asserted attributes of their purported deity and the reality of existence.
—
It was a pleasure.
May your intellectual honesty overcome your timidity.
(If your belief is true, you have nothing to lose by honestly investigating it; rather the opposite)
—
* Surely I need quote your Babble to illustrate these points; the NT suffices as a source.
Mark 1:1 begins “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God;” You can hardly say that’s how a historical account starts. If the majority of scholars think that’s a historical account, then the majority of scholars are idiots.
Though I don’t think that’s where the majority of scholarship is at. From what I understand, the majority account puts no eyewitnesses as authors of the gospels. The gospels were written, at the earliest, some 35-65 years after Jesus’ supposed death, with Mark being the earliest account written ~70CE with Matthew and Luke both using Mark as a source, and using another source called Q. John, being the most theologically elaborate gospel was written last, and may have had multiple authors. And since the books were written in Greek, it’s safe to say that none of the authors were any of the disciples.
Wait, you think that the authors of the gospels witnessed the virgin birth? Did Mary have a hymen patrol squad in the early days, making sure that she really did give birth? But let’s take one aspect of the birth story that should show it invalid. Matthew puts Jesus’ birth in the time of King Herod (died 4BCE) while Luke references the Census of Quirinius (6-7CE). Now that’s a decade discrepancy (and there’s no record of Herod’s massacre of the innocents outside of the bible, a story lifted straight from Exodus), so what else are we to conclude that at least one of them is wrong? Most likely, both are cases of trying to write Jesus into history.
[erratum]
* … I need not quote …
Though honestly, Cameron, I really think that your worldview is getting in the way of giving an objective and dispassionate assessment of the historical validity of the new testament. As I said above, claims to virgin birth are common in mythology, as were claims of people with supernatural powers such as healing the sick and raising the dead. That such claims get written down doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily true. That your religion makes the same claims as others, yet is the one true one, is really pushing credulity.
Now if you want to keep believing that Jesus really was God-incarnate, that’s your business. But what you’re claiming about the historical nature of the gospels requires ignoring all the impossibilities and implausible accounts, and the theological tarnish that comes with true belief. There are plenty of people today who will attest to John Edward communicating with a dead loved one passing on messages from beyond, or witnessing supernatural powers of Uri Geller such as mind-reading and psychokinesis. But do all those eyewitnesses to psychics and mind-readers mean that we should accept psychics and mind-readers? Or do we perhaps think that honest people can be mistaken, and that people have the capacity to believe in extraordinary things? Cults spring up around the world, with charismatic leaders getting people to believe all sorts of extraordinary things. Heck, there are even Mormon apologists. As far as it goes, Mormonism should be the easiest religion to disprove – the man who started it was a convicted fraud, and what he proposed was so absurd that it can be disproved scarcely lifting a finger. Yet it now has over 14 million members. Clearly true belief isn’t a good marker for truth.
*gate slams shut*
Thank you, JM, for that link.
So spending a bad weekend (a day and a half of it, anyway) in a cave in Jerusalem, while a horde of Holy Zombies is wandering the town, is a Noble Act?
As usual, it depends on which reinterpretation of which selections of which rewrites of which old-and-unavailable texts you wish to include in your idiosyncratic bible.
Since I have a life, I’m not an expert on all of these historians and “historians”. I would point out that more than one of the sources have been shown to be fraudulent and/or irrelevant. The usual Josephus (IIRC) reference, form example, is irrelevant: it only seems to mention the existence of some christianities, which has nothing to do with the Yeshua myth itself.
Isn’t Tacitus the one where the mention of the Yeshua myth is known to have been inserted by an RCC copyist?
There’s precious little mention of the evidence that should be present, but isn’t, like witnesses to the Holy Zombie invasion of Jerusalem, reported only in one of Yeshua-myth versions. But, since your idiosyncratic bible has no internal contradictions nor conflicts with reality, this version of the Yeshua myth, and this alleged occurrence, must be objectively true, right?
Harken back to my apology for misstating your name. In my innate morality (which you choose to deny, without any evidence at all), getting a name wrong when correctness is reasonable is a transgression against you and against anyone else reading the material. Offering my apology to you acknowledged that I had wronged you (albeit in a minor way). Doing so in public extended (by implication) the acknowledgement to J Random Reader. In both cases, it was a request for forgiveness for a wrong that I had done.
I didn’t ask PZ for forgiveness, though. He may be the god around here (in some views) but he wasn’t specifically wronged and so he doesn’t have the authority to forgive the wrong.
Yes, as a human being, I sometimes have a need to seek forgiveness. But the only person who has the authority to grant such a boon is one whom I have actually wronged.
Nor do I have authority or need to ask forgiveness for a wrong that I have not participated in nor knowingly benefited from. Regardless of your idiosyncratic bible, I find that one of the few good moral principles in the bible texts is the one in the Eden myths: don’t judge (eat the fruit of the tree) based on a imaging of an absolute morality (of Good and Evil). Should I ever catch myself so judging, it would be a serious transgression, for which I must make amends and seek forgiveness.
But I wasn’t there at the time: I could neither have participated in A&E’s transgressions (‘alleged’ omitted arguendo), nor could I have done anything to affect them. I have, indeed, worked to avoid the same transgressions. I have not benefited by these transgressions: according to most, if not all, bibles, my life has been degraded by your gods’ actions in response to the alleged offense.
Yet, despite being the victim of your gods’ immorality, I’m the one expected to seek forgiveness. I would entertain and consider an apology from any of your gods for the offense they have caused to humanity — but only after they’ve shown a willingness to repair all the lives they have damaged. (damage to any man is damage to me, so I have authority to accept such an apology and demand such reparation, but only on my personal behalf. These gods would need to offer similar apologies to all humans.) I might grant them such a boon, with respect to my personal life, but I can make no promise of acceptance and forgiveness, nor of the willingness of any other person to participate. Of course, my offer depends on facts not in evidence, like the existence of such critters as your gods, or the gods of any other christianities.
I never did get this whole forgiveness malarky.
If all of mankind is breaking the rules; rather than nail the fruit of your loins to a dead tree, wouldn’t it make more sense to, you know, just change the rules?
It’s not like he needs a two thirds majority or anything.
Hey, this a triune god we’re talking about here. Maybe the divine constitution requires unanimity for a rule change, but only a 2/3 majority for a vicarious atonement? Or maybe the Father and the Holy Ghost just ganged up on the Son? Tough luck on the Son, but that’s the way the holy cracker crumbles.
KG
The Supermajority theory of christianity?
Big Daddy & Spooky murdered the The Kid for control of Universe Inc?
Cameron Blair,
Nonsense. Accounts which are not corroborated by independent sources are always regarded with scepticism, particularly if they come from obviously partisan writers. Accounts which include supernatural events are never accepted as accurate about those events, outside religious subcultures. (This is not an a priori rejection; simply, no such accounts exist that are sufficient to establish the truth of claims of supernatural events.)
This is such an absurd claim that it’s difficult to take you seriously. The fact that there are many copies of a text does not establish the text’s reliable transmission when only fragments exist for well over a century after its supposed dates of composition, let alone its accuracy as a historical account. Nor does the fact that a text makes a claim, unsupported by independent sources, that there were hundreds of eyewitnesses to an event, establish even the probability that there were such eyewitnesses, let alone that the account given in the text is an accurate account of the allegedly witnessed events. The gospels are full of contradictions and absurdities, and no historian would take them seriously as an accurate account of events if they were not religiously committed to that view.
Strategically Shaved Monkey@193,
Well, it makes much more sense than Cameron Blair’s version!
Never heard that about Tacitus, but I have heard that about Josephus.
From Bart Ehrman’s Jesus, Interrupted:
In addition to pagan sources of the first century, we have non- Christian Jewish sources, though not nearly as many. But there is one, and only one, that does mention Jesus. This is the famous Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, who around 90 CE wrote a twenty-volume history of the Jewish people from the time of Adam and Eve down to his own day. In this lengthy book he does not talk about Jesus at great length, but he does refer to him twice. In one reference he simply identifies a man named James as “the brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah” (Antiquities of the Jews, 20.9.1).
The other reference is more extensive, but it is also problematic. In it Josephus seems to confess that he himself is a Christian, but we know from his other works that he was not (he wrote an autobiography, among other things). Scholars have long known that Josephus’s writings were not copied by Jews throughout the Middle Ages, since he was (probably rightly) considered a traitor to the Jewish cause in the disastrous war with Rome in which Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE. His writings were copied instead by Christians. And at the point where Josephus discusses Jesus, it appears that a Christian scribe made a few choice insertions, in order to clarify who Jesus really was. I have placed the sections possibly inserted by the scribe in brackets:
“At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man [if indeed one should call him a man, for] he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. [He was the Messiah.] And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. [For he appeared to them on the third day, living again, just as the divine prophets had spoken of these and countless other wondrous things about him.] And up until this very day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out.” (Antiquities 18.3.3)
How much of Josephus is trustworthy, I don’t know. It does seem to indicate something about there being a historical Jesus, and an independent source for aspects of the gospel accounts. As Ehrman points out before discussing the accounts of Pliny and Tacitus:
What do Greek and Roman sources have to say about Jesus? Or to make the question more pointed: if Jesus lived and died in the first century (death around 30 CE), what do the Greek and Roman sources from his own day through the end of the century (say, the year 100) have to say about him? The answer is breathtaking. They have absolutely nothing to say about him. He is never discussed, challenged, attacked, maligned, or talked about in any way in any surviving pagan source of the period. There are no birth records, accounts of his trial and death, reflections on his significance, or disputes about his teachings. In fact, his name is never mentioned once in any pagan source. And we have a lot of Greek and Roman sources from the period: religious scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, natural scientists; we have thousands of private letters; we have inscriptions placed on buildings in public places. In no first-century Greek or Roman (pagan) source is Jesus mentioned.
Historians, at least credible and honest ones, have a saying that if there is only one account of an event happening then it did not happen. If there are two accounts then it may have happened, but probably did not and if there are three or more it may have happened.
To finish off my #196…
The point with the other quote was that yes, there’s a few mentions of Jesus, but there’s also a huge silence among other possible sources of the day. If Jesus really was God walking on this earth and the gospels were true accounts, why is there so little in the way of external sources of verification?
For example, Matthew 27:51-54 “And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.”
So there was an earthquake in which saints came back to life and walked on the earth, and no-one thinks to even mention that in a private letter? Seriously?
Thanks for that excerpt, Kel. Something to add to my reading list. Is it a good read?
Julian:
Yes, it is.
Kel, thank you for cleaning up the mess my memory problem left wrt Tacitus and Josephus.
Don’t know about the rest of the book, I’ve only read the chapter on the historical Jesus. And that seemed pretty good, he’s a very clear writer.
I’m not sure who says that, except religious apologists looking to accept accounts of the miraculous without question. Archaeology/history doesn’t work that way, where a reconstruction on the past is done on the best understanding of how the world works. Looking at Ancient Egypt, for example
Multiple copies of the same manuscript doesn’t make the contents of the manuscript any more plausible.
I’m pretty sure there’s not eyewitness testimonies from hundreds of people. There’s a reference that an event was witnessed by over 500 people, but that it only one account. Secondly, none of the authors in the bible were there to witness any of it. They’re at best 2nd hand accounts, all written decades after the fact – and borrowing from one another. No-one who wrote witnessed Jesus’ birth.
And even if there were direct eyewitnesses, is that really enough to establish accounts of the miraculous? There are plenty of people out there now, including some medical practioners, who will attest to the power of homoeopathy – despite it having no active ingredient and consistently failing double blind peer review. There are people now who are convinced that they have witnessed psychics, or even have psychic powers themselves – despite no evidence of psychic powers existing. There are plenty of people who will attest to seeing Uri Geller bending spoons and reading minds with using psychokinetic powers – despite no real evidence that those are the methods he uses. There are plenty of people now who will attest to ‘mediums’ like John Edward and Sylvia Brown who have contacted their deceased relatives – despite no hard evidence this has taken place. In other words, are you going to accept any account based on multiple eyewitness testimony no matter how implausible the claim is?