I try to mod up both sides of the argument, if well thought out. I enjoy seeing the debate, so even if I disagree with one side, my view is that it must be modded up, so it can be seen and scrutinized. And maybe they even make a good point. I think a lot of people do the same. I've said some fairly unpopular things here, and rarely get modded down much. I may or may not be wrong, but I think a lot of people are interested in encouraging reasoned discussion rather than killing it.
The African elephant will eat fermented amarula fruit. Drunk elephants are quite a problem as they are large and strong enough to do a lot of damage...
Indeed, I agree they do. I'd say prophecy is a much better example though. I tend to side with the view that that was not part of the original document. Although there is some debate, this seems to be the majority view and makes a lot of sense.
Lets look at numbers: Wikipedia lists the largest group is Catholicism. Around 1.2 Billion. If we make the incorrect assumption that those listed in "Modern protestants" are all adherents of the inerrancy idea, that is still under 300 million. And we have ignored quite a few groups. Perhaps it is rampant in America. But the world does not end at American borders. I saw some (I can't find them now...)stats that suggest that around 20% of Christians worldwide could be considered fundamentalist, so I will concede that 20% isn't fringe, but it is by no means majority nor historically the position of the older churches.
I know quite a number of modern protestants who cross that section out in their bibles. Since it is not considered part of the original text they consider it harmful.
Picking a version is not as simple as you portray. In general, it is agreed that the earlier versions are more accurate, or more correct. Also verses quoted by early church fathers are not normally disputed. There is some method in biblical scholarship. "Picking a version" is methodical and this is why Christians are normally interested in discovering older texts.
But digging around, I discovered that what I am talking about (for some unknown reason) is generally referred to "infallibility", while inerrancy holds that there is no errors full stop.
I am aware many people consider Christianity indefensible. I am also aware that there are a lot of extremely bad arguments on both sides. I have been down that road a lot of times before
I am talking about the mainstream here, not the smaller more recent groups. To repeat myself, the mainstream view amoung protestants is that the bible is inerrant in "the original documents" "on matters of faith and Christian conduct". Logically therefore if the original document did not contain Mark 16:9-20, it is not subject to the claim of inerrancy. It may make it easier to make cheap shots at christians to try and insist it does, but that is a cheap shot carrying no weight at all.
To say inerrancy has been a around for a while is misleading. Certainly in the very early church various versions were circulated including some stuff that was later concluded to be faked. The as a single book as it is today only dates back to the 4th century. Absolute biblical inerrancy(like what we see today that insists Mark 16:9-20 is inerrant) is an indefensible position and very few mainstream churches accept it. It is probably only about 200+ years old (before which this was not a critical question - it was never necessary to question the bible in that way as science did not directly contradict it's accounts).
Rather than repeat myself. The goalposts have been in the same place for a very long time. It was only recently some small groups moved them along in favour of absolute biblical inerrancy. I suggest you look at mainstream scholarship on Mark 16:9.
You may of course come to that conclusion. But it does not make the example any better. It is still a bad example.
That is a very minor view and historically recent viewpoint. The majority of Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, mainstream protestants, etc) reject that view completely. The bible is, by these groups at worst considered "inerrant in the original documents " "on matters of faith and christian conduct". It is generally understood by Christians the bible is divinely inspired but humanly written, and thus may contain errors on matters not of substance. More reasonable Christians than your average fundamentalists try to understand the bible in its historical, cultural and literary context.
It is not an "either or" situation and has not been for the past 2000 years (suggested reading, Jerome, Iraneious, Augustine, etc). In the Roman Catholic Church for example, the authority is the pope who claims a direct line of authority through Clement to Peter to Christ himself. Catholics are certainly the majority representatives. To ignore the reasonable middle ground is like one ignoring the real atheist point of view and setting up an argument against people who say "there are definitely no gods", a statement even most atheists will tell you is indefensible.
I am talking about facts relating to the history of the bible, not the truth of the work itself. In general most Christians accept that the earlier versions more accurately represent the truth. If one is arguing without bias about the truth of the bible as a whole it is generally better to leave out controversial sections. For example, if you say Mark 16:9 onwards is untrue, and a Christian agrees, how have you advanced your argument? It is a completely useless line of argument unless you are arguing against the very specific and relatively small group that accept it without question. The truth of Mark 16:9 onwards is not relevant to the truth of the rest of the bible as it is almost certainly a later addition. Yes, I do know wikipedia is a bad source, but one can always follow the citations. I don't have time to educate you on this matter, but it will get you started.
This is well known. I am not arguing the point here(neither am I conceding it), I am pointing out the example is at best controversial and at worst misleading. Choose another. So, no I am not showing bias. I am pointing you towards generally accepted mainstream scholarly work. If you reject the mainstream view, that is your business not mine.
While I very much agree with you, at some point it becomes an arms race. There is no such thing as an unhackable system. But you can minimize risks... We have some clients who run a country wide network because their management "needs" the information at head office. While they go through a VPN, it isn't all that secure. Luckily we are a minor vendor and probably won't get dropped in it..
In practice most religions do claim to affect the natural world. Either through agents (people) or "acts of God" which are considered by nature unreproducible and unpredictable(except in the case of prophecy). So, prophecy could be subjected to the scientific method, but in the case of other miracles we are reduced to explaining the event after it happened. In which case, it is unsurprising that someone may come up with a naturalistic explanation. Whether you consider that explanation more likely is a matter of your worldview.
The Bible: Those who believe shall be able to do miracles, such as drink poison and not get hurt, or heal the sick (Mark 16:17). So if you follow Christ and you can't do those things, then......yeah, you've just falsified it.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that that passage was erroneously included in the bible(early manuscripts do not contain it and I don't believe the church fathers refer to it). Therefore it is possibly unwise for either side of any debate to base their arguments around it. It would be better to find another example.
I will have a a look, but my company is not a member of the OPC foundation, so the source code option is out for us. Hopefully in the future we can move to this, but the clients right now demand a windows solution.
I can vouch for the happier developers part... But lets be practical here, name a UA toolkit for Linux? Oh, and because most of industry is still on legacy OPC, it must support publishing via DCOM. You can't alienate 90% of your clients because you are an early adopter. I would be very seriously interested in seeing such a toolkit.
Actually, support at rockwell, will specify your windows version and service pack. Otherwise the software does not run. It isn't always a matter of incompetence on the engineer's side, but sometimes the vendor shoves stuff down your throat. And its all well and good to only work with vendors with decent support and security, but practically if you are a SI, your clients often specify what hardware and software you use. And the most secure systems sometimes lack functionality. We tend to select the latest software the vendor will support as much as we can, but that still leaves us running a lot of Server 2003 PCs.
Though most of the software I've seen in the field is minimum Windows 2000, Toshiba's PLC software looks like it was written for windows 3.10.
The company I work for is doing exactly that. Our new OPC server will support both. It is hoped that the monstrosity that is DCOM will eventually go the way of the dinosaur. We chose an OPC toolkit specifically because they had UA support (and possibly in the future WPF).
And now you're running 15 plants country wide and head office wants all the data on your shiny new SCADA system centrally available (for no other reason than they like to pretend they know what they're doing), so you're forced to run a VLAN. The problems here are mostly social, not technical.
Most SCADA's are still bound to COM. Easiest way to get DCOM working; disable *ALL* security. When you're commissioning a site, and the hardware is being finicky, the last thing you want to do is spend 9 hours debugging some obscure DCOM glitch specific to server 2003 service pack 1 (the only system some of this stuff runs on), so it isn't hard to see why most people have zero security.
Bring on the days of OPC UA, which makes security possible without having a hernia!
I was actually refering to the fact that you ignored my earlier point regarding:
With respect, you don't seem to make sense. In one sentence you want Jesus' minor utterances to be recorded and change the world, and later you complain that the evidence isn't enough and he was a minor apocolyptic preacher in which case his utterances wouldn't have changed the world. You can't logically make both arguments; you have to choose one.
Which I found disturbing, and is why I stopped the debate about the referral to Noah as fictional until I got an answer. But my point was not that Jesus thought Noah was fictional, but that Noah's existence was not relevant in Jesus' statements. So, no, you did not (as far as I can see) refute that.
I am not a Calvinist, and I don't believe they have the best representation of Christianity. The to answer why many scholars do and don't believe from a non Calvinistic point of view is an answer you won't like and are unlikely to accept. People have got themselves into a position where their framework leads to the conclusion that there is not God(or God is unlikely/unprovable). A lot of fundamental assumptions(and I have seen it argued that atheism makes no assumptions, but that is an entirely different debate) in the non-christian world view lead directly to these conclusions. As a Christian I reject those in favor of other assumptions which make more sense to me. Both sides claim they are correct. The question is how to tell. And that to me is a personal thing:
Christianity is about a continuing relationship with God, and yes, the events within that relationship can possibly be explained by things like coincidence, selective memory and so forth. But there comes a point where that just does not make sense any more. Either I am incredibly "lucky", incredibly selective in my memory of experiences or I actually have a relationship with God. While I don't expect you to trust my judgment in this matter, I must trust my own because if I reject it, I how can I trust my judgment in say, accepting your judgment?
From where I am standing issues only arise with my belief system if I view it from a different framework. And I see no valid reason from where I stand to do so, as it contradicts my personal experiences and my research into these matters. Sure, we can't be 100% sure Jesus existed or was crucified, let alone said and did what was attributed to him, but from my PoV, the balance tips in favour of them being at least fairly accurate, if incomplete. I won't within my framework discard the resurrection because within your framework, it is not possible. My assessment of the character of Mark, leads me to conclude he is likely a good witness, if imperfect. My assessment of the characters of Paul, Luke, and John support my conclusions. There is no atheist killer magic silver bullet, just like atheism has no religion killer magic bullet.
Many Christians have not examined these issues to the extent I have. This I consider unfortunate, but there are a great many christian thinkers who look into these things closely. Although it can take time, these things do eventually filter down (at least in Europe/Africa) to the common christian.
I will have a look at that link, but in all honesty will be very surprised if there is anything new there.
When one concentrates on Mark, and ignores Paul, John and even James, one loses a lot. The point is, taken in isolation these things can be dismissed. Taken together it is harder. There are good arguments for why John may have been an eyewitness account. A lot of these things are debatable. Don't forget there are more sources outside of the bible, like 1st Clement. In the letters of the early church fathers a lot of what is considered cannon is quoted. Analysis of motivations are also important in this sort of thing. I am aware of their critics, but the issue here, is their critics do make some assumptions that I simply do not accept as given.
You may think of my points as simply excuses, that is up to you. At the end of the day, Christian thinking does not operate within your framework of thinking. This may invalidate it, but only from your framework under the assumption that your framework is the correct one. I contest their are ways to judge who is correct, and these have been proposed from a number of sources ranging from Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas CS Lewis, and many other christian thinkers. Naturally and you reject these arguments(?) and down this road I suspect, lies nothing you or I have not heard before.
Christianity without the resurrection amounts to Deism, which while possibly internally valid is not a very useful point of view.
This sort of discussion is good, and dialogue is essential, but at this point I am afraid I must question your agenda and objectivity. With respect when someone points out what they perceive as an error in someone else's thinking, the second person has a number of options, namely to accept they were wrong and correct it, or defend that they made no error and explain why their argument makes sense (even if only from their point of view). Your excessive use of of links to infidels(a site I am familiar with) also tells me we are not actually covering any new ground. I do not have infinite time on my hands to continue this argument and if we are not going to cover anything new, I see little point. But nevertheless, thank you for your time.
Slashdot Mirror
I try to mod up both sides of the argument, if well thought out. I enjoy seeing the debate, so even if I disagree with one side, my view is that it must be modded up, so it can be seen and scrutinized. And maybe they even make a good point. I think a lot of people do the same. I've said some fairly unpopular things here, and rarely get modded down much. I may or may not be wrong, but I think a lot of people are interested in encouraging reasoned discussion rather than killing it.
Submit has been made automatic on slashdot. Didn't you not@^%#&&@* NO CARRIER
Its a guess, but I think I know where your keyboard was imported from...
The African elephant will eat fermented amarula fruit. Drunk elephants are quite a problem as they are large and strong enough to do a lot of damage...
None claimed recently I have to admit. Or rather none claimed that are specific enough to make any sense testing.
Indeed, I agree they do. I'd say prophecy is a much better example though. I tend to side with the view that that was not part of the original document. Although there is some debate, this seems to be the majority view and makes a lot of sense.
Lets look at numbers: Wikipedia lists the largest group is Catholicism. Around 1.2 Billion. If we make the incorrect assumption that those listed in "Modern protestants" are all adherents of the inerrancy idea, that is still under 300 million. And we have ignored quite a few groups. Perhaps it is rampant in America. But the world does not end at American borders. I saw some (I can't find them now...)stats that suggest that around 20% of Christians worldwide could be considered fundamentalist, so I will concede that 20% isn't fringe, but it is by no means majority nor historically the position of the older churches.
I know quite a number of modern protestants who cross that section out in their bibles. Since it is not considered part of the original text they consider it harmful.
Picking a version is not as simple as you portray. In general, it is agreed that the earlier versions are more accurate, or more correct. Also verses quoted by early church fathers are not normally disputed. There is some method in biblical scholarship. "Picking a version" is methodical and this is why Christians are normally interested in discovering older texts.
But digging around, I discovered that what I am talking about (for some unknown reason) is generally referred to "infallibility", while inerrancy holds that there is no errors full stop.
I am aware many people consider Christianity indefensible. I am also aware that there are a lot of extremely bad arguments on both sides. I have been down that road a lot of times before
I am talking about the mainstream here, not the smaller more recent groups. To repeat myself, the mainstream view amoung protestants is that the bible is inerrant in "the original documents" "on matters of faith and Christian conduct". Logically therefore if the original document did not contain Mark 16:9-20, it is not subject to the claim of inerrancy. It may make it easier to make cheap shots at christians to try and insist it does, but that is a cheap shot carrying no weight at all.
To say inerrancy has been a around for a while is misleading. Certainly in the very early church various versions were circulated including some stuff that was later concluded to be faked. The as a single book as it is today only dates back to the 4th century. Absolute biblical inerrancy(like what we see today that insists Mark 16:9-20 is inerrant) is an indefensible position and very few mainstream churches accept it. It is probably only about 200+ years old (before which this was not a critical question - it was never necessary to question the bible in that way as science did not directly contradict it's accounts).
Rather than repeat myself. The goalposts have been in the same place for a very long time. It was only recently some small groups moved them along in favour of absolute biblical inerrancy. I suggest you look at mainstream scholarship on Mark 16:9.
You may of course come to that conclusion. But it does not make the example any better. It is still a bad example.
That is a very minor view and historically recent viewpoint. The majority of Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, mainstream protestants, etc) reject that view completely. The bible is, by these groups at worst considered "inerrant in the original documents " "on matters of faith and christian conduct". It is generally understood by Christians the bible is divinely inspired but humanly written, and thus may contain errors on matters not of substance. More reasonable Christians than your average fundamentalists try to understand the bible in its historical, cultural and literary context.
It is not an "either or" situation and has not been for the past 2000 years (suggested reading, Jerome, Iraneious, Augustine, etc). In the Roman Catholic Church for example, the authority is the pope who claims a direct line of authority through Clement to Peter to Christ himself. Catholics are certainly the majority representatives. To ignore the reasonable middle ground is like one ignoring the real atheist point of view and setting up an argument against people who say "there are definitely no gods", a statement even most atheists will tell you is indefensible.
I am talking about facts relating to the history of the bible, not the truth of the work itself. In general most Christians accept that the earlier versions more accurately represent the truth. If one is arguing without bias about the truth of the bible as a whole it is generally better to leave out controversial sections. For example, if you say Mark 16:9 onwards is untrue, and a Christian agrees, how have you advanced your argument? It is a completely useless line of argument unless you are arguing against the very specific and relatively small group that accept it without question. The truth of Mark 16:9 onwards is not relevant to the truth of the rest of the bible as it is almost certainly a later addition. Yes, I do know wikipedia is a bad source, but one can always follow the citations. I don't have time to educate you on this matter, but it will get you started.
This is well known. I am not arguing the point here(neither am I conceding it), I am pointing out the example is at best controversial and at worst misleading. Choose another. So, no I am not showing bias. I am pointing you towards generally accepted mainstream scholarly work. If you reject the mainstream view, that is your business not mine.
Convenience is not relevant to fact. To bring it up is to show bias.
While I very much agree with you, at some point it becomes an arms race. There is no such thing as an unhackable system. But you can minimize risks... We have some clients who run a country wide network because their management "needs" the information at head office. While they go through a VPN, it isn't all that secure. Luckily we are a minor vendor and probably won't get dropped in it..
In practice most religions do claim to affect the natural world. Either through agents (people) or "acts of God" which are considered by nature unreproducible and unpredictable(except in the case of prophecy). So, prophecy could be subjected to the scientific method, but in the case of other miracles we are reduced to explaining the event after it happened. In which case, it is unsurprising that someone may come up with a naturalistic explanation. Whether you consider that explanation more likely is a matter of your worldview.
The Bible: Those who believe shall be able to do miracles, such as drink poison and not get hurt, or heal the sick (Mark 16:17). So if you follow Christ and you can't do those things, then......yeah, you've just falsified it.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that that passage was erroneously included in the bible(early manuscripts do not contain it and I don't believe the church fathers refer to it). Therefore it is possibly unwise for either side of any debate to base their arguments around it. It would be better to find another example.
I will have a a look, but my company is not a member of the OPC foundation, so the source code option is out for us. Hopefully in the future we can move to this, but the clients right now demand a windows solution.
I can vouch for the happier developers part... But lets be practical here, name a UA toolkit for Linux? Oh, and because most of industry is still on legacy OPC, it must support publishing via DCOM. You can't alienate 90% of your clients because you are an early adopter. I would be very seriously interested in seeing such a toolkit.
Actually, support at rockwell, will specify your windows version and service pack. Otherwise the software does not run. It isn't always a matter of incompetence on the engineer's side, but sometimes the vendor shoves stuff down your throat. And its all well and good to only work with vendors with decent support and security, but practically if you are a SI, your clients often specify what hardware and software you use. And the most secure systems sometimes lack functionality. We tend to select the latest software the vendor will support as much as we can, but that still leaves us running a lot of Server 2003 PCs.
Though most of the software I've seen in the field is minimum Windows 2000, Toshiba's PLC software looks like it was written for windows 3.10.
Practically speaking, I honestly don't see much of the industry moving off windows. Sure it is technically better, but try persuading management.
UA, however will give you added security on windows, which is at least a start.
The company I work for is doing exactly that. Our new OPC server will support both. It is hoped that the monstrosity that is DCOM will eventually go the way of the dinosaur. We chose an OPC toolkit specifically because they had UA support (and possibly in the future WPF).
And now you're running 15 plants country wide and head office wants all the data on your shiny new SCADA system centrally available (for no other reason than they like to pretend they know what they're doing), so you're forced to run a VLAN. The problems here are mostly social, not technical.
Most SCADA's are still bound to COM. Easiest way to get DCOM working; disable *ALL* security. When you're commissioning a site, and the hardware is being finicky, the last thing you want to do is spend 9 hours debugging some obscure DCOM glitch specific to server 2003 service pack 1 (the only system some of this stuff runs on), so it isn't hard to see why most people have zero security.
Bring on the days of OPC UA, which makes security possible without having a hernia!
they copied from Xerox.
I see what you did there...
I was actually refering to the fact that you ignored my earlier point regarding :
With respect, you don't seem to make sense. In one sentence you want Jesus' minor utterances to be recorded and change the world, and later you complain that the evidence isn't enough and he was a minor apocolyptic preacher in which case his utterances wouldn't have changed the world. You can't logically make both arguments; you have to choose one.
Which I found disturbing, and is why I stopped the debate about the referral to Noah as fictional until I got an answer. But my point was not that Jesus thought Noah was fictional, but that Noah's existence was not relevant in Jesus' statements. So, no, you did not (as far as I can see) refute that.
I am not a Calvinist, and I don't believe they have the best representation of Christianity. The to answer why many scholars do and don't believe from a non Calvinistic point of view is an answer you won't like and are unlikely to accept. People have got themselves into a position where their framework leads to the conclusion that there is not God(or God is unlikely/unprovable). A lot of fundamental assumptions(and I have seen it argued that atheism makes no assumptions, but that is an entirely different debate) in the non-christian world view lead directly to these conclusions. As a Christian I reject those in favor of other assumptions which make more sense to me. Both sides claim they are correct. The question is how to tell. And that to me is a personal thing:
Christianity is about a continuing relationship with God, and yes, the events within that relationship can possibly be explained by things like coincidence, selective memory and so forth. But there comes a point where that just does not make sense any more. Either I am incredibly "lucky", incredibly selective in my memory of experiences or I actually have a relationship with God. While I don't expect you to trust my judgment in this matter, I must trust my own because if I reject it, I how can I trust my judgment in say, accepting your judgment?
From where I am standing issues only arise with my belief system if I view it from a different framework. And I see no valid reason from where I stand to do so, as it contradicts my personal experiences and my research into these matters. Sure, we can't be 100% sure Jesus existed or was crucified, let alone said and did what was attributed to him, but from my PoV, the balance tips in favour of them being at least fairly accurate, if incomplete. I won't within my framework discard the resurrection because within your framework, it is not possible. My assessment of the character of Mark, leads me to conclude he is likely a good witness, if imperfect. My assessment of the characters of Paul, Luke, and John support my conclusions. There is no atheist killer magic silver bullet, just like atheism has no religion killer magic bullet.
Many Christians have not examined these issues to the extent I have. This I consider unfortunate, but there are a great many christian thinkers who look into these things closely. Although it can take time, these things do eventually filter down (at least in Europe/Africa) to the common christian.
I will have a look at that link, but in all honesty will be very surprised if there is anything new there.
When one concentrates on Mark, and ignores Paul, John and even James, one loses a lot. The point is, taken in isolation these things can be dismissed. Taken together it is harder. There are good arguments for why John may have been an eyewitness account. A lot of these things are debatable. Don't forget there are more sources outside of the bible, like 1st Clement. In the letters of the early church fathers a lot of what is considered cannon is quoted. Analysis of motivations are also important in this sort of thing. I am aware of their critics, but the issue here, is their critics do make some assumptions that I simply do not accept as given.
You may think of my points as simply excuses, that is up to you. At the end of the day, Christian thinking does not operate within your framework of thinking. This may invalidate it, but only from your framework under the assumption that your framework is the correct one. I contest their are ways to judge who is correct, and these have been proposed from a number of sources ranging from Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas CS Lewis, and many other christian thinkers. Naturally and you reject these arguments(?) and down this road I suspect, lies nothing you or I have not heard before.
Christianity without the resurrection amounts to Deism, which while possibly internally valid is not a very useful point of view.
This sort of discussion is good, and dialogue is essential, but at this point I am afraid I must question your agenda and objectivity. With respect when someone points out what they perceive as an error in someone else's thinking, the second person has a number of options, namely to accept they were wrong and correct it, or defend that they made no error and explain why their argument makes sense (even if only from their point of view). Your excessive use of of links to infidels(a site I am familiar with) also tells me we are not actually covering any new ground. I do not have infinite time on my hands to continue this argument and if we are not going to cover anything new, I see little point. But nevertheless, thank you for your time.