Neanderthals

It's the same for them as dinosaurs I suppose.

Is it too much to ask to stop confusing Christians (about a couple of billion people) with American fundamentalists (some hundreds of thousands of people)?

Are you talking about Creationists or whatever you call them?

Yeah. I think you are lumping way too much of a broad spectrum of religious people all together.


BTW, I'm a Christian and I believe in evolution. What of the Neanderthals? Is this some kind of bait thread?

THIS is what I'm interested in. You rarely see those two statements in the same sentence (or maybe I just rarely see them given where I live). How do you work that out between the two? And honest injun - it's not a bait question or an ambush tactic. I'm genuinely curious.

So this thread is not about Bill Walton. Boo.

A lot of god-botherers that I know think that Evolution is part of Gods Plan. It's a pretty easy link to make when you think about it, and it's a good way for the Nutjobs to shift the argument a bit. When the mindless morons can suddenly say "But Evolution is part of the Almighty SkyLords DIVINE PLAN" they seem to think it's defanging your argument a bit. It doesn't but well thought out rational arguments are general not things you get from these people.

Well I can see that - rather than refute the argument just absorb it into your own and cite the "mysterious ways" cop-out, but I guess I'm more specifically curious as to how it ties into Genesis and the Garden of Eden? Genesis and evolution are BLATANTLY contradictory down to their core, to the point of leaving NOTHING to interpretation, so it just doesn't compute when someone says they're an evolutionist Christian. Maybe I'm taking "Christian" a bit too literally in billylove's case. I dunno, I just find it interesting.

So what's wrong with God being a greasy, hairy Unibrow? It's not like He invented Head and Shoulders.

That's funny, but fuck me if it doesn't make sense. Hell, who says God isn't himself a single-celled organism.

ETA: I myself haven't quite come to terms with who or what God is or isn't and I whole-heartedly believe in evolution, but I just find this stuff incredibly interesting when discussed properly.

Genesis was a good bedtime story. That's how I've always understood it, even when I was force fed it as a youngin'.

I think you may be lumping me in with those that think of the bible too literally. I feel most religious folk get caught up in the minutia and lose sight of the bigger picture.

Indeed! And I figured I was probably taking you a bit too literally.

I'm not sure if you guys count Catholics under Christian as we're clearly a bunch of pagans aching to give more money so they can put diamonds on the Pope's shoelaces, but if so the Vatican officially accepts evolution which means the largest body of Christians in the world believes in Darwin's theories. Even Darwin himself was a practicing Christian, and if he of all people could balance the two beliefs then it could hardly be considered fundamentally flawed thinking.

Indeed.

We're not all loonies when it comes to evolution. We are just loonies when it comes to other things, like believing in life after death, invisible sky fairies and all that.

Well to clarify, I never meant to accuse anyone of flawed thinking - basically, I'm surrounded by Bible Thumpers. Have been my entire life. You accept the bible word for word. Christianity and the bible explicitly go hand in hand. So when I hear someone say that that they subscribe to both I find it intriguing and wanna hear more. Maybe it's a testament to my needing to get the hell outta here, maybe it's just a testament to my needing to get a broader view and I'm trying to do the latter in this situation. Not at all trying to call anyone out or throw out any "Would that then be a sin then, father?" situations.

WE'RE NOT LETTING YOU OFF THAT EASY!

You wish.

In religion class, at my Catholic school, we were taught that much of the stories in the old testament are "allegorical stories that reveal religious truths" (I believe that was the exact wording, at least). I think a lot more Christians are very casual with their faith and don't put a lot of thought into it.

Which, in some ways, is almost MORE stupid. You believe that there's a God and that Jesus died for your sins and that there's a heaven and a hell, but you're not INTERESTED in it? If you honestly believe that to be true, how on Earth could you be CASUAL about it? It's your fucking eternal soul on the line, here, and a lot of people are just sort of "yeah, sure, I believe in God". Seems silly to me.

For the record, that last paragraph was me playing devil's advocate. I am an atheist.

Still, that's a great point. The so-called "casual-Christians" are almost more offensive (and destructive) than the hardcore literalsts.

How sad. And foolish, because neither of those things are up for debate. Evolution happens. Neanderthals existed. It's not a matter of opinion.

My theory is that they believe in a God who's not that bright, and as long as they say "yeah, sure, I believe in God" once in a while, God is convinced, and they'll be movin' on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky.

Give me a friggin' break.

I really don't get this whole "The Old Testament is a bunch of made up stories but the New Testament is true" angle.

When I was young my family were Jehovah's Witneness' and one of the Elders had a saying. "Faleso in uno Faleso in toto." Bad Latin aside what he was saying is that whets the point in believing in half of the bible but claiming the rest is a work of fiction?

Now I (and my folks) am no longer Witnesses and my own views are up in the air but I always thought that made sense. At no point in the bible does it say only believe the Jesus stuff Adam and Even never existed. If religion is based on faith and abiding by rules laid down in book - why is half the book fiction?

I understand the idea that they are parables but that is a pretty new idea, to me it’s almost like revisionist faith. Don’t like something in the bible ? Never mind we will say it’s a parable and you don’t really have to believe it.

And that in a nutshell is why I am no longer religious. (well that and the fact they tried to convince me the world would end on new years eve in the year 2000)

If by "new," you mean "pretty much integral to the whole concept of religion since the very beginnings of religious belief," yeah, then I guess it's kind of "new." Widespread religious literalism is more-or-less the result of the Enlightenment.

Wow man. I think you have some soul searching to do. If one can coin a phrase.


Damn Jacob, I knew you were anti religious, but I didn't realize it ran this deep.

You have to understand that a lot of my own knowledge on the matter comes from a religious group that have a different take on things so I didn’t know that. It was always presented to me that it was a more recent thing.

However I think my point is still vaild. Why take half of something as truth and half as fiction?

I agree on this, actually, although I think the word "fiction" might be selling non-literal belief short. Fiction doesn't have to be rooted in anything besides whim. I suspect the non-literal believer has faith that there's something there, but it's being expressed figuratively.

On the other hand, there are things in the Bible that have basis in reality (for instance, Pontius Pilate was a real person, David was at least arguably a real person, the exodus of the Jews very possibly happened in some fashion), so there's naturally going to be a literal/figurative divide somewhere.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but are you talking specifically about Genesis in the Old Testament?

I'll put it simply, the bible isn't a science book. You don't need to take the whole thing as fact. This is the reason why there are so many different denominations out there. It's because everyone has a different interpretation off of the same book. And it's also why there are different translations of supposedly the same text.

How is that? Maybe I'm understanding it wrong, but if the Enlightenment was pretty much the introduction of reason and critical thought, how would that make people more inclined to take the fantastical stories of the bible literally? Wouldn't it be the opposite?

That pretty much answers my question,

Thanks

Both, actually.

It wasn't so much the introduction of reason and critical thought (the Greeks had already done their part there); it was a paradigm shift in how we tended to think (and actually, I should clarify - it probably dates back a couple centuries before what we commonly consider the Enlightenment of the 18th Century). People were no longer content to simply have beliefs - they now felt obligated to have these beliefs conform to the rules of reason and objective truth that were becoming more and more accepted by the public-at-large. So you end up with wacked-out applications of logic to faith, like Pascal's Wager, and people who feel the need to prove the historicity of the great flood.

And with this, you get a few results -

• Some people balance this newfound emphasis on reason and empiricism with traditional concepts of faith (i.e., Adam and Eve didn't exist in a physical sense, but represent something). These people become less and less common, because man (yes, even post-Enlightenment man, who should know better) is prone to perceiving reality only in dualities.
  
• Some people reject religion on the grounds that faith doesn't hold up to rational scrutiny.
  
• Some people deny that anything outside of the fully rational is of any use, but simply can't let go of their religious beliefs. And when they can't justify these beliefs through the use of reason, they cling, nonetheless, attempting to use irrational arguments to justify a rational reading of religious faith. They're not sophisticated enough to find the balance that the first group finds, and they don't understand reason enough to reject God as irrational as the second group does. These are the folks who can't figure out how dinosaurs and neanderthals fit in.

Fantastic. Thanks for the clarification!

I know what you mean. In theory, I can kind of respect hardcore religious fanatics more for at least taking their beliefs as seriously as their nature demands (eternal damnation/paradise should kinda trump everything all the time). But in person, they're just so much more obnoxious.

Re: "casual Christians are more destructive"

A PARABLE

Bob and Bill both work at the same office. Bob's a nice guy, always friendly and polite. Everyone likes him, and you can always depend on him. When the working day is over, Bob cruises the furry message boards and is an active and well-loved member of this mystifying community. He never really talks about it with his co-workers, and is relatively happy in both lives.

Bill insists that he must wear at least his fox ears to work. If someone questions this, or perhaps tells him he looks silly, Bill will fly off the handle and tell you you're a stupid norm.

I don't know how a parable should end, so fuck you, apostles.

Seriously, what's wrong with the religion forum and these bait threads, is that they are by default designed to draw out the loonies. But when no loonies come forward and instead we get people who have some religious faith and yet are pefectly reasonable, trying to explain that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, they are treated like the loonies would be treated.

I think that all sides of the religious debate would benefit from taking a Bible as Literature class. The reason that you have things like doublets--two accounts of the same story, the most famous example is found in the two accounts of creation--different views of and names for the Deity and the like is that the Hebrew Bible is the result of the convergence of several different Jewish traditions under Josiah. The evidence for this is that, when you come to one of points in the Hebrew Bible where things seem to be disjointed narratively and then look at the original Hebrew, the Hebrew that precedes the disjointedness is a different form of Hebrew than the one that succeeds it. If you take apart the whole thing and line up the different pieces of the "literary quilt" that is the Hebrew Bible with the swaths of text that have the same form of Hebrew, you get complete and fluid--and slightly different--storylines.

The commonly held view is that Josiah--who is presented as one of the "good kings" of the kingdom and a great religious reformer in the canon--combined the traditions to unify the different tribal sects of the country and push through his radically liberal social reforms--Israel provides one of the earliest examples in the Near East of providing equal and fair treatment of citizens under the law--and rally support for his aims at expansion. When the traditions diverged significantly, Josiah's editors and redactors presented both instances--often side by side, as in Genesis--in order to let the public draw their own conclusions.

Speaking of Genesis, it's really, really obvious that the authors intended the text to be taking figuratively. For example, the dimensions of Noah's Ark in the "Priestley class" version corresponds with the dimensions of the Temple and their account of the flood includes more than "two of each kind" with the obvious eye toward having a greater number of "clean" animals for sacrifice once the ship lands. Nimrod bears a striking similarity to a Near Eastern sun-god and he lives exactly 365 years (obviously as many years as there are days in the solar calendar). Then, there are the troubling remnants of a possible polytheistic tradition in nascent Judaism such as the language that kind of implies God is part of a pantheon--"you shall have no other gods before me"--and the acknowledgment of the pagan religions in Genesis (the gods and heroes of other religions are presented as being the result of angels falling to earth and mating with human women). Also, almost all the laws-- mostly those found in the Deuteronomist's tradition-- follow the legal language of treaties in the Near East at the time. ("I shall show favor to those who love me and punish x numbers of generations of those who hate me" is a common formulation in these treaties.)

In order to be a devout Christian, I think all you really need to do is do the following: 1) Hold the belief that God exists, created the universe, and is actively involved with the universe, and that Jesus of Nazareth is a historical figure and that historical figure was God Incarnate. 2) Follow the teachings of Christ, which can be largely read as a midrash on the Hebrew Bible. This basically entails leading a life of non-violence, having universal regard for your fellow human beings, living a life of service, and being able to forgive others for the wrongs they do to you and accept the forgiveness of God and others for the wrongs you do to them.

Honest question: I know it's one book, but the two halves are intended for two different sets of people (and I think Jesus even says something along the lines of 'to hell with those damn commandments'), so I guess I'm asking, does being a good Jew or a good Christian mean weighing both parts with equal measure?

The New Testament is supposed to supersede the Old Testament. If you are a Christian and the two texts conflict each other, you must go with the new one. And that's a theological reason why those anti-gay, generally hateful fundamentalists have no justification for their actions.

It's only one book by Christian standards and, even that status is probably somewhat questionable.

Being a good Jew definitely doesn't involve the New Testament - it's not even a consideration, since Judaism is based on the Tanakh (which is basically , though not exactly, the Old Testament) and the Talmud (which is essentially commentary on the Tanakh).

I think most Christians put a far heavier emphasis on the New Testament, because the belief is that Jesus basically changed the whole game. But it's still important, since Jesus was a Jew, and his beliefs obviously originate with the OT, to some degree.

Of course, if you're a literalist with a bone to pick, it's nice to have both at your disposal when you try to make some ridiculous point about homosexuality or what-have-you. I do wonder if literalists put the same weight on the New Testament as other Christians do, because if the whole damn thing is to be taken literally, it's all equally true, right?

Jews don't read the New Testament.

edit - Dammit, Dave...

whoa, whoa, whoa...back the fuck up. Everyone knows he was a Christian. Duh.

Yeah, and the New Testament doesn't give us any of those fun, but outdated laws on hygiene and meats.

That's just because Jesus really, really wanted some bacon.

Can you blame him?

Well, can you blame him? That stuff is tasty.

Edit: damn, Mastro!

Bacon. Bringing people together*

*Orthodox Jews and Muslims excluded.

If you have a real interest in this topic, I highly recommend reading Rabbi Jacob Neusner's A Rabbi Talks to Jesus and Pope Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth back to back. Benedict spends a lot of time responding to Neusner's points, which makes it one of the most interesting exchanges between a Jewish and Christian thinker in quite some time. Neusner basically points out that, if taken as a branch of Judaism proper, the teachings of Christ fail on their own terms. Benedict picks it up and concedes that the Gospels are inherently Christological texts that transform, rather than conform to, the Jewish thought of his day and then makes his own case that Christ's message is worth the change.

To go straight to your questions, Evangelical Christians seem to follow the Billy Graham concept that the entire Bible is the story of Jesus. The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible features the Pre-Incarnation Christ as part of the Godhead and its messianic prophecy is viewed as "looking forward to" the Incarnation. The story of John the Baptist is viewed as being the story of the last prophet of post-Exile Judaism and the end of that tradition, the rest of the Gospels deal with--as Dave put it--the "game changer" that is the Incarnate Christ, and the rest of the New Testament looks "back" to the Incarnate Christ (this is the part of the analysis that most easily breaks down, as the New Testament also looks forward to the Second Coming).

The more traditional view in the Western church is that the Old Testament represents the Law and the New Testament represents the Gospel. In this view, the former section serves to raise us to a standard we can't possibly meet and introduce us to an angry God and the New Testament shows us the Grace of Christ.

I find the traditional view to be a very intellectually dishonest reading of the canon--there are religious laws in the New Testament and I'd argue that Christ and Paul actually radicalize the already high standard Judaism sets for its followers and then universalize it, which sets a much higher standard for all of humanity than Judaism does--and kind of anti-semitic.

The Evangelical reading would be interesting if 1) they didn't read the entire narrative literally and hold it to be inerrant in factual matters and 2) they actually wrestled withe conflicts that arise when you entertain the concept that Christ existed prior to the Incarnation. For instance, they believe the moral law is absolute and inalterable forever. However, God in the Old Testament is presented as favoring war and genocide and Jesus Christ preaches non-violence. This kind of discrepancy invites questions such as the Euthyphro dilemma, whether what is right and wrong can change over time, and the like, which are the kind of trains of thought they avoid at all costs. They also seem quite willing to pick up secular biblical scholarship when it suits them. A good example would be when they want to ignore Christ's message against capital punishment without having to abandon all their other positions by saying that the passage was added at a later date. Of course, entertaining that sort of scholarship outside of those kinds of isntances is considered heretical.

My own view is that the New Testament is a commentary on and a revising of the Old Testament. That is, that Christ and his followers serve as the final redactors and editors of the entire canon and present us with a fundamentally new faith that is dedicated to a radical concept of love and non-violence that calls for the follower to love and serve all others, including his enemies.