Wow. OK, this explains your other comment. I thought you were a fundie-type when I read your other comment--that's why I called you brother.
I'm curious. What on earth is this comment doing as a response to mine? You quoted the text, "This translational game of telephone that you're proposing is divorced from all history," as though you were replying to it. Did you just not have any better place to put your comment?
Well, add me to that list of people. The "morality of Jesus" doesn't exist, his teachings wasn't about morals or how to deal with other people, his teachings was about how you get absolution and go to heaven to dwell with the 4000 year old metaphor. You can't be a Christian without accepting the fact that the old Metaphor is real.
Careful about over-simplifying, brother. Jesus taught quite a lot about judgment and the need to repent and salvation through him, yes. But I don't think you can say his teachings weren't about morals and how to deal with other people. They weren't only about those things. Maybe you could argue that those things weren't the most important part of his teachings, though I hesitate to divide his teachings and rank them. But he did teach about that kind of thing quite a bit--what living in the kingdom of God means. The sermon on the mount. Etc.
Basically, he didn't simply talk about what he saves us from, or how to be saved. He talked about what he saves us for. The way you spoke in your post, someone could get the idea that Christianity is about a ticket to heaven. (Not that you said it is, I'm saying someone could easily get that impression.) Christianity is about being a follower of Christ, which implies both trusting in him, and genuinely seeking to have a transformed life, heart, and mind. It's being saved by grace through faith, not saved by works--because we're his workmanship, created in him for good works. It's the purpose for which he made us.
I'm back at my computer, so...I guess I'm going to respond after all.:)
JeanPaulBob said:
What I stepped in to talk about was the unreasonable, irrational mischaracterizations you committed in your first response to JonathanBoyd. You said that he was claiming no Christian ever persecuted anyone, which is ludicrous
Scrameustache said:
I do that on purpose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
Uh, either you misunderstood me, or you don't understand reductio ad absurdum. When I said "which is ludicrous", I was not saying that "no Christian ever persecuted anyone" is ludicrous. It is, but I was saying that your characterization was ludicrous. That was an example of one of the "unreasonable, irrational mischaracterizations" of which I was accusing you.
Exaggerating your opponent's arguments to make them look ridiculous is not reductio ad absurdum. Reductio ad absurdum is accepting your opponent's argument, and showing how it leads to something ridiculous. What I was accusing you of was strawman argumentation, basically.
I can't tell whether you misunderstood me the way I said, or misunderstand reductio ad absurdum. The fact that you also called it "proof by contradiction" implies that you do understand it... Maybe you took some abstract algebra or geometry. Or maybe you were just repeating the term because it was in the Wikipedia article, because I honestly can't imagine how you could think that "claiming no Christian ever persecuted anyone" is in any sense accepting JonathanBoyd's arguments and showing the absurd logical conclusion. That's just exaggeration. (Heh. "An argument is a series of propositions intended to establish a proposition, it's not just exaggeration!" "Yes it is." "No it isn't!")
I'm sorry...Politeness? Where did I request politeness? I requested balance, which is a matter of rationality and fair presentation of all the complexities of the situation. But then, all my words seem to be bouncing off your head before making it to your ears, so to speak.
I actually agree with you that in JonathanBoyd's comment about Galileo, he oversimplified it. It was not only political. That was a simplistic presentation on his part, even as your presentation is simplistic on the other side. He was opposed on religious grounds (though he would probably not have been tried for heresy if he hadn't publicly ridiculed the pope with his Dialogue book, and gone against the pope's instructions).
But you see, you were sitting by while he "raped" history on Galileo. You didn't say anything about Galileo; if you had, I would have recognized (at least some) validity to your objection. What I stepped in to talk about was the unreasonable, irrational mischaracterizations you committed in your first response to JonathanBoyd. You said that he was claiming no Christian ever persecuted anyone, which is ludicrous, and you said things about his comments on Copernicus and Leonardo that were simply unfair.
You are attempting to propagandize a one-sided view of the history of the relationship between science and religion, and you are reading every attempt to inject any balance as "raping" history.
I do not believe you are a troll, but your behavior will cause many to dismiss you as such.
I'm headed out for the evening. You can have the last word.
He used his own ignorance to support his position that Leonardo was not persecuted, and he pretended that Copernicus had not been denounced by religious authorities.
He did not claim that Leonardo was not persecuted. He said that he was unaware of Leonardo having problems. So it was perfectly appropriate for you to inform him. Nor did he pretend that Copernicus had not been denounced by religious authorities; he pointed out that his bishop encouraged him.
Again, the problem is simplistic, one-sided views of history. The GP did not claim that the church never did anything to oppose science. The GP pointed out ways in which the church has promoted science, contradicting the idea that science and religion don't mix. They have mixed poorly at various times, but that is not remotely the same thing. That is the balance you seem to be lacking.
Your question is entirely fair. You're asking about textual transmission & textual criticism, and how confident we can be that the manuscripts we have are faithful copies. It's a valid question. But it's not what I was referring to, nor what the GP was talking about.
I said that the manuscripts we have are not the results of a translational telephone game. That is, they were not translated from language to language. They are the results of generations of copies of manuscripts. I wasn't addressing transmission problems, of which there are some. There are some textual variants that we're not sure about. But very few, most of them small or insignificant. And we do not have the major questions about translational faithfulness, as the GP was saying.
We can evaluate the textual issues by things like: Comparing the lineages of manuscripts that we do possess, studying how variants creep in, examining the scribal copying techniques, and comparing the comparatively late Masoretic text with the much earlier Greek translation. (Even a translation will tell you whether the Hebrew manuscript they were using contained a phrase that's in question.)
And what's more, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950's was a tremendous check on the Masoretic text. They're dated to various times between 200BC and 100AD, and let us see what kind of textual corruption occurred. So the 9th & 10th century manuscripts actually aren't the earliest Hebrew we possess; sorry I didn't mention the Dead Sea Scrolls before.
This is why modern translations include footnotes about textual variants.
First, I'll say that I do not agree with the grandparent. I don't believe genuine Christianity requires being a young earther. On the contrary, some of my favorite Christian teachers & scholars are old earthers. I don't even believe that being a genuine Christian requires believing in inerrancy.
I'll reply to your second sentence first.
I'm tired of the extremists from both sides telling me I can't accept the morality of Jesus without accepting every insane 4000-year-old metaphor given by people who had no word to literally explain what happened even if they knew.
I doubt that anyone has told you you can't accept the morality of Jesus without being a young-earther. I'm guessing they told you that you can't be a Christian without being a young-earther, and this was your way of saying, that's what Christianity is. The moral teachings of Jesus.
You can accept (i.e. agree with) the moral teachings of anyone, without believing anything else about them. You can accept the moral teachings of the Gospels without believing that Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. That doesn't mean that you are a Christian, in any historically meaningful sense of the term. If you define "Christian" as trying to follow the moral teachings of Jesus then you're probably a "Christian"--but that does not mean that your definition is historically valid, or that you have the power to redefine the term. Historically, "Christian" denotes more than moral teachings--it includes beliefs about the nature of God, who Jesus was (his divinity and being the Jewish messiah), his death and resurrection, and salvation through him.
You didn't say anything about your beliefs. If you simply appreciate Jesus as a moral teacher, then no, I would not call you a Christian. Words mean things, and "Christian" simply does not mean that.
But please note that if I say you are not a Christian, I am definitely not saying anything about whether you're a good person or not. (Well, actually, I'd say you're a sinner--to that extent, you're not a good person. But so am I.) It would be better to say it this way: If I say I'm a Christian and you're not, that doesn't mean I think I'm a better person than you. You might be more consistently loving than I am, for instance. I have no idea. The point is, "Christian" is not a comment about someone's decency, or how well they follow the Sermon on the Mount. (C.S. Lewis talks about this issue in Mere Christianity; you can read that if you want a better idea of where I'm coming from with this.)
The writers of the bible claimed to be inspired by God, but no part of the Bible actually constitutes God's word, not even when Jesus speaks, as our minds rarely remember quotes exactly, and not a single book of the Bible was written by Jesus.
If you're just saying you don't believe the Bible actually is the word of God, well, OK. But you seem to be saying that the Bible doesn't even claim to constitute God's word in any part. That is incorrect. Much of the writings of the prophets, for instance, claim to be messages from God. (One of them--and I'm sorry, but I can't remember which at the moment--even has a section that's supposed to be actual dictation.) In Matthew 22:31, Jesus said about a quote from Exodus, "have you not read what was said to you by God?" So Matthew portrays Jesus as believing that the Jews did indeed have the words of God. And Peter did not simply say that the prophets were "inspired" (assuming that the distinction you're making between inspiration and "God's word" is valid). In 2 Peter 1:21, he said, "men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."
So at the very least, the NT view is that the OT definitely does constitute the word of God. The issue of the nature of NT inspiration is broader.
If I read one more "no christian ever persucuted anyone evar" post, it'll be the millionth too many.
I imagine the quality of your discussions with Christians would improve if you didn't engage in this sort of flaming mischaracterization. The GP did not say that no Christian ever persecuted anyone. He didn't even say that Copernicus was never objected to on religious grounds; he said that Copernicus' bishop encouraged him to spread his research. In other words, the GP provided a bit of balance to the discussion, providing a more complete view--something you seem determined to prevent.
Science has been both opposed and promoted by religious people, on religious grounds.
5) Am I the only one that finds it odd that a bunch of nutballs who don't even bother to read their own holy book swear that the it is the literal word God even though it was originally written in Aramaic, translated in to Hebrew, then to Latin, then to Greek, and the back to Latin, and then to English? And that's a best case scenario for most of the books of the "Bible".
Wow. I'm not sure I've ever seen a more fundamentally ignorant statement on Slashdot. This translational game of telephone that you're proposing is divorced from all history. Textual transmission is nothing like what you're suggesting. Our English translations are not obtained from Latin texts; they are obtained from the original languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic).
The Old Testament:
Originally written in Hebrew, except for three or four small sections written in Aramaic. The main Hebrew manuscripts we have now is called the Masoretic text, compiled by the Masoretes in the 9th & 10th centuries. It's a Hebrew manuscript, and does not come from any translational lineage. We also have the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament written before the time of Jesus.
The New Testament:
Originally written in Greek. We have that Greek. (We have many manuscripts copied at different times, some dating back to the second century.) We also have the early Latin translation called the Vulgate, but the Greek manuscripts we have did not come from the Vulgate. We have both. We also have some other early translations (e.g. into coptic/Egyptian language).
Now, there are some who think that the NT was originally in Aramaic. This is highly unlikely for much of the NT, written as letters to Greek Christians throughout the Roman empire. It may be more reasonable for the Gospels, and some of the letters written to primarily Jewish Christians. Hey, Luke's gospel account starts out with a statement that he'd sought out many witnesses as his research, and it's entirely likely that some of that was Aramaic.
So even granting Aramaic primacy for all the NT, the chain for the NT is Aramaic-->Greek. We have that Greek. For the OT, it's just Hebrew (with a little bit written in Aramaic). We have that, too. For both, we also have various later translations, but those translations are not part of the lineage that we have now. For instance, there is no Latin in the lineage of our OT manuscripts at all--that was a ridiculous error. (I.e., our Greek manuscripts are copied from earlier Greek manuscripts, back to the originals.) The English translations are from the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, with no lineage of translation except possibly Aramaic-->Greek.
A fetus may be human, but it is not a person. I would argue that a baby shouldn't be considered to be a person until its behaviour differentiates itself from animals.
Ah, so you go down the route of Peter Singer. (Well, that aspect of his views, anyway.)
While I think your view is as repugnant and vile as every historical denial of any group of human beings' personhood, I would say that it's a more rationally-defensible position than saying that personhood starts at birth.
This is a significant part of the debate over the source of stem cells, and is more than a mere straw-man argument as far as I can tell.
It seems to me you haven't been paying a great deal of attention to the debate, then. In your references to those left-over embryos, you seem to be entirely unaware of the term snowflake children and the accompanying dimension of the discussion--one that makes your accusation of straw-man argumentation rather empty.
After all, the usual argument is that if something can develop into a human then it should be considered to be a human even before it develops into a human.
Ah, no.
The argument is that it can develop into a baby, and that it already is a human.
I.e., an oak acorn is not a tree, but it is an oak. An blastocyst/embryo is not a baby, but it is a human. A baby is not a toddler, but it is a human. A toddler is not a teenager, but it is a human. A teenager is not an adult, but it is a human (though barely, in come cases ^_^).
Actually, I recently wrote a paper on quantum teleportation, and I was surprised to find that teleporting a human being with current telecom equipment would take longer than the age of the universe.
Oh, I dunno. Six thousand years doesn't seem like that long to me.
am, I was not responding to an argument about how Adam and Eve could have fallen. brezel said, "if he gave us a free will he cannot punish us for our decisions." He was not talking about what you're talking about! I asked him to explain why he thinks that little syllogism follows.
My example about choosing to rape was not supposed to be a parallel to Adam and Eve, or to how the Fall could happen; it was an example to probe the bizarre reasoning that if God gave us freedom, he can't blame us for abusing that freedom. The question you're talking about--how the Fall could happen if mankind was perfect--wasn't in view. (If that's what brezel was getting at in his last sentence, I didn't see it. If it was, my reply was mis-aimed. Honestly, I can barely make sense out of that sentence.)
Now, to respond to your question/argument:
- "...God created man in His image (i.e. perfect)."
- "God gave us free will which is part of the "in his image" deal"
If we have free will, and we are perfect, then all our choices will be perfect. Is the decision to rape someone perfect? I don't think so, so that is a red herring.
I understand why that makes sense to you; the reason I don't agree is the meaning you're assigning to the word "perfect". It's not a meaning relevant to what the Bible says about the creation of man.
First, the Bible nowhere (that I know of) says that mankind was created "perfect". It says in Genesis 1 that they were made in God's image, but it nowhere unpacks that as implying any sense of the word "perfection". (The person you quoted was wrong--or at least imprecise.) They had not sinned, and they had no inherent bent toward sin/pride/malice/selfishness/etc, but that does not imply an inability to sin. I'm not aware of any biblical teaching about man's nature before the Fall that would justify your premise.
If you think I'm wrong, please, tell me where you get it in the Bible.
Second, neither the Hebrew ("tamin") nor the Greek ("telios") words we translate "perfect" mean quite what you seem to be meaning by "perfect". Neither is an abstract concept of being ideal, some lofty, pervasive "perfection", in the sense of being unable to go bad. Both are sometimes translated "complete", or "full". Tamin is also translated "without blemish" and "upright". But even though Adam and Eve are not described as "perfect", we can say they had no sin or inherent predilection toward sin.
Just reading this as ancient Hebrew literature, I see no justification for your apparent belief that the Bible presents an understanding of man's initial state as being "perfect" in the sense of unable to sin. Nor do I see anything in the Hebrew concept of perfection that would imply that if God made mankind without blemish, this implies they couldn't be led astray into a perverted, sinful desire.
Or, they consciously, deliberately, knowingly rejected the one command given to them. They turned their back on God's authority; they turned their back on the sufficiency of God's provision, in a prideful, selfish grasping at the one thing God had warned them against. They decided they didn't want what God gave them...and so they got their way.
if he gave us a free will he cannot punish us for our decisions. (= kick us out of paradise). do you religious guys actually ever think something through?
Eh? This is bizarre. I really can't see what you think that follows. Could you present your argument, instead of simply asserting your conclusion?
I.e., if I have a free will, and I choose to rape a woman...Exactly how does my free will lessen my responsibility? Usually people argue that if we don't have free will, we shouldn't be punished for our choices. (Maybe put down like a rabid dog, or isolated from the rest of society, or (if possible) rehabilitated till we're safe, but not punished.)
OK, I see the jkorz has already replied, but I'm going to do so as well...but hopefully less inflammatory.
Well the whole thing about God being perfect, but making humans flawed, blaming humans for being flawed, and then punishing someone else to make up for those flaws.....that seems a tad silly as well.
Yes, that chain of four ideas does seem rather silly. What religion are you referring to? Christians don't believe God made humans sinful. He made us capable of making moral choices, but we're not punished for being able to sin--we're punished for sin.
Nor do Christians believe that God punished "someone else". Jesus was God incarnate. God taking on the punishment for the evil we choose is rather different than God "punishing someone else to make up for those flaws".
I agree with you, but wasn't it Jerry Falwell that picketed Matthew Shepherd's funeral?
Absolutely not.
The people who picket funerals are the "Westboro Baptist Church", headed by Fred Phelps. He is beyond the pale, and should no more be associated with the American religious right in general than Stalin should be associated with socialist politics.
Seriously, check out the "religious beliefs" section of his Wikipedia article. He seems to be simply filled with hate, and uses a veneer of religion as the excuse. He believes salvation and damnation are obtained by aligned with or opposing him. His children who have left his church consider him a cult leader, and say that his actual religious beliefs are virtually non-existent.
Yes, Falwell said some stupid things--things that frustrated, embarrassed, and angered me as a theologically-conservative Christian. But please, do not associate Phelps' actions with anyone other than Fred Phelps.
If you think you have even the vaguest conception of how the universe works, then you are inherently wrong, because Human's can't conceive of how the universe works by any means.
I'm sure glad we have you to explain that aspect of how the universe works!
it's the interpretation of it that quickly gets into the whole area of "philosophy
I agree with this. Physics is only about creating a model for how the universe works: you put numbers in, you get numbers out. What happens when we aren't looking (putting numbers in but not looking at the numbers coming out) has no real relevance and is unverifiable.
My, what an interestingly unverifiable, interpretive philosophical claim you make.
Figuring out what happens "when we aren't looking" is not inherently beyond the reach of empirical testing, however much it may seem so at first glance. We can test any theory that has observable consequences, regardless of whether we can observe every step of everything that the theory says is happening. If different theories of what happens when we aren't looking make different predictions about what we can observe when we do look, then we can test them.
AFAICS, that's precisely what the abstract claims.
Your first question would be so much more convincing--check that, it would have the bare minimum of validity--if it demonstrated any awareness of the Supreme Court's rationale in ending the recount, along with some indication of why that rationale was wrong.
To my "IANAL" understanding, parents are certainly legally responsible to care and provide for their children, but children's responsibilities to their parents are somewhat...less than symmetrical.
Hmm. An amusing image just occurred to me, of parents suing their children for adversely affecting their financial well-being and causing stress and emotional turmoil...By the very fact of their existence.
It would be funnier if it were a bit further from being believable, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. OK, this explains your other comment. I thought you were a fundie-type when I read your other comment--that's why I called you brother.
I'm curious. What on earth is this comment doing as a response to mine? You quoted the text, "This translational game of telephone that you're proposing is divorced from all history," as though you were replying to it. Did you just not have any better place to put your comment?
Well, add me to that list of people. The "morality of Jesus" doesn't exist, his teachings wasn't about morals or how to deal with other people, his teachings was about how you get absolution and go to heaven to dwell with the 4000 year old metaphor. You can't be a Christian without accepting the fact that the old Metaphor is real.
Careful about over-simplifying, brother. Jesus taught quite a lot about judgment and the need to repent and salvation through him, yes. But I don't think you can say his teachings weren't about morals and how to deal with other people. They weren't only about those things. Maybe you could argue that those things weren't the most important part of his teachings, though I hesitate to divide his teachings and rank them. But he did teach about that kind of thing quite a bit--what living in the kingdom of God means. The sermon on the mount. Etc.
Basically, he didn't simply talk about what he saves us from, or how to be saved. He talked about what he saves us for. The way you spoke in your post, someone could get the idea that Christianity is about a ticket to heaven. (Not that you said it is, I'm saying someone could easily get that impression.) Christianity is about being a follower of Christ, which implies both trusting in him, and genuinely seeking to have a transformed life, heart, and mind. It's being saved by grace through faith, not saved by works--because we're his workmanship, created in him for good works. It's the purpose for which he made us.
I'm back at my computer, so...I guess I'm going to respond after all. :)
JeanPaulBob said:
What I stepped in to talk about was the unreasonable, irrational mischaracterizations you committed in your first response to JonathanBoyd. You said that he was claiming no Christian ever persecuted anyone, which is ludicrous
Scrameustache said:
I do that on purpose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
Uh, either you misunderstood me, or you don't understand reductio ad absurdum. When I said "which is ludicrous", I was not saying that "no Christian ever persecuted anyone" is ludicrous. It is, but I was saying that your characterization was ludicrous. That was an example of one of the "unreasonable, irrational mischaracterizations" of which I was accusing you.
Exaggerating your opponent's arguments to make them look ridiculous is not reductio ad absurdum. Reductio ad absurdum is accepting your opponent's argument, and showing how it leads to something ridiculous. What I was accusing you of was strawman argumentation, basically.
I can't tell whether you misunderstood me the way I said, or misunderstand reductio ad absurdum. The fact that you also called it "proof by contradiction" implies that you do understand it... Maybe you took some abstract algebra or geometry. Or maybe you were just repeating the term because it was in the Wikipedia article, because I honestly can't imagine how you could think that "claiming no Christian ever persecuted anyone" is in any sense accepting JonathanBoyd's arguments and showing the absurd logical conclusion. That's just exaggeration. (Heh. "An argument is a series of propositions intended to establish a proposition, it's not just exaggeration!" "Yes it is." "No it isn't!")
I'm sorry...Politeness? Where did I request politeness? I requested balance, which is a matter of rationality and fair presentation of all the complexities of the situation. But then, all my words seem to be bouncing off your head before making it to your ears, so to speak.
I actually agree with you that in JonathanBoyd's comment about Galileo, he oversimplified it. It was not only political. That was a simplistic presentation on his part, even as your presentation is simplistic on the other side. He was opposed on religious grounds (though he would probably not have been tried for heresy if he hadn't publicly ridiculed the pope with his Dialogue book, and gone against the pope's instructions).
But you see, you were sitting by while he "raped" history on Galileo. You didn't say anything about Galileo; if you had, I would have recognized (at least some) validity to your objection. What I stepped in to talk about was the unreasonable, irrational mischaracterizations you committed in your first response to JonathanBoyd. You said that he was claiming no Christian ever persecuted anyone, which is ludicrous, and you said things about his comments on Copernicus and Leonardo that were simply unfair.
You are attempting to propagandize a one-sided view of the history of the relationship between science and religion, and you are reading every attempt to inject any balance as "raping" history.
I do not believe you are a troll, but your behavior will cause many to dismiss you as such.
I'm headed out for the evening. You can have the last word.
He used his own ignorance to support his position that Leonardo was not persecuted, and he pretended that Copernicus had not been denounced by religious authorities.
He did not claim that Leonardo was not persecuted. He said that he was unaware of Leonardo having problems. So it was perfectly appropriate for you to inform him. Nor did he pretend that Copernicus had not been denounced by religious authorities; he pointed out that his bishop encouraged him.
Again, the problem is simplistic, one-sided views of history. The GP did not claim that the church never did anything to oppose science. The GP pointed out ways in which the church has promoted science, contradicting the idea that science and religion don't mix. They have mixed poorly at various times, but that is not remotely the same thing. That is the balance you seem to be lacking.
Your question is entirely fair. You're asking about textual transmission & textual criticism, and how confident we can be that the manuscripts we have are faithful copies. It's a valid question. But it's not what I was referring to, nor what the GP was talking about.
I said that the manuscripts we have are not the results of a translational telephone game. That is, they were not translated from language to language. They are the results of generations of copies of manuscripts. I wasn't addressing transmission problems, of which there are some. There are some textual variants that we're not sure about. But very few, most of them small or insignificant. And we do not have the major questions about translational faithfulness, as the GP was saying.
We can evaluate the textual issues by things like: Comparing the lineages of manuscripts that we do possess, studying how variants creep in, examining the scribal copying techniques, and comparing the comparatively late Masoretic text with the much earlier Greek translation. (Even a translation will tell you whether the Hebrew manuscript they were using contained a phrase that's in question.)
And what's more, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950's was a tremendous check on the Masoretic text. They're dated to various times between 200BC and 100AD, and let us see what kind of textual corruption occurred. So the 9th & 10th century manuscripts actually aren't the earliest Hebrew we possess; sorry I didn't mention the Dead Sea Scrolls before.
This is why modern translations include footnotes about textual variants.
First, I'll say that I do not agree with the grandparent. I don't believe genuine Christianity requires being a young earther. On the contrary, some of my favorite Christian teachers & scholars are old earthers. I don't even believe that being a genuine Christian requires believing in inerrancy.
I'll reply to your second sentence first.
I'm tired of the extremists from both sides telling me I can't accept the morality of Jesus without accepting every insane 4000-year-old metaphor given by people who had no word to literally explain what happened even if they knew.
I doubt that anyone has told you you can't accept the morality of Jesus without being a young-earther. I'm guessing they told you that you can't be a Christian without being a young-earther, and this was your way of saying, that's what Christianity is. The moral teachings of Jesus.
You can accept (i.e. agree with) the moral teachings of anyone, without believing anything else about them. You can accept the moral teachings of the Gospels without believing that Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. That doesn't mean that you are a Christian, in any historically meaningful sense of the term. If you define "Christian" as trying to follow the moral teachings of Jesus then you're probably a "Christian"--but that does not mean that your definition is historically valid, or that you have the power to redefine the term. Historically, "Christian" denotes more than moral teachings--it includes beliefs about the nature of God, who Jesus was (his divinity and being the Jewish messiah), his death and resurrection, and salvation through him.
You didn't say anything about your beliefs. If you simply appreciate Jesus as a moral teacher, then no, I would not call you a Christian. Words mean things, and "Christian" simply does not mean that.
But please note that if I say you are not a Christian, I am definitely not saying anything about whether you're a good person or not. (Well, actually, I'd say you're a sinner--to that extent, you're not a good person. But so am I.) It would be better to say it this way: If I say I'm a Christian and you're not, that doesn't mean I think I'm a better person than you. You might be more consistently loving than I am, for instance. I have no idea. The point is, "Christian" is not a comment about someone's decency, or how well they follow the Sermon on the Mount. (C.S. Lewis talks about this issue in Mere Christianity; you can read that if you want a better idea of where I'm coming from with this.)
The writers of the bible claimed to be inspired by God, but no part of the Bible actually constitutes God's word, not even when Jesus speaks, as our minds rarely remember quotes exactly, and not a single book of the Bible was written by Jesus.
If you're just saying you don't believe the Bible actually is the word of God, well, OK. But you seem to be saying that the Bible doesn't even claim to constitute God's word in any part. That is incorrect. Much of the writings of the prophets, for instance, claim to be messages from God. (One of them--and I'm sorry, but I can't remember which at the moment--even has a section that's supposed to be actual dictation.) In Matthew 22:31, Jesus said about a quote from Exodus, "have you not read what was said to you by God?" So Matthew portrays Jesus as believing that the Jews did indeed have the words of God. And Peter did not simply say that the prophets were "inspired" (assuming that the distinction you're making between inspiration and "God's word" is valid). In 2 Peter 1:21, he said, "men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."
So at the very least, the NT view is that the OT definitely does constitute the word of God. The issue of the nature of NT inspiration is broader.
If I read one more "no christian ever persucuted anyone evar" post, it'll be the millionth too many.
I imagine the quality of your discussions with Christians would improve if you didn't engage in this sort of flaming mischaracterization. The GP did not say that no Christian ever persecuted anyone. He didn't even say that Copernicus was never objected to on religious grounds; he said that Copernicus' bishop encouraged him to spread his research. In other words, the GP provided a bit of balance to the discussion, providing a more complete view--something you seem determined to prevent.
Science has been both opposed and promoted by religious people, on religious grounds.
5) Am I the only one that finds it odd that a bunch of nutballs who don't even bother to read their own holy book swear that the it is the literal word God even though it was originally written in Aramaic, translated in to Hebrew, then to Latin, then to Greek, and the back to Latin, and then to English? And that's a best case scenario for most of the books of the "Bible".
Wow. I'm not sure I've ever seen a more fundamentally ignorant statement on Slashdot. This translational game of telephone that you're proposing is divorced from all history. Textual transmission is nothing like what you're suggesting. Our English translations are not obtained from Latin texts; they are obtained from the original languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic).
The Old Testament:
Originally written in Hebrew, except for three or four small sections written in Aramaic. The main Hebrew manuscripts we have now is called the Masoretic text, compiled by the Masoretes in the 9th & 10th centuries. It's a Hebrew manuscript, and does not come from any translational lineage. We also have the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament written before the time of Jesus.
The New Testament:
Originally written in Greek. We have that Greek. (We have many manuscripts copied at different times, some dating back to the second century.) We also have the early Latin translation called the Vulgate, but the Greek manuscripts we have did not come from the Vulgate. We have both. We also have some other early translations (e.g. into coptic/Egyptian language).
Now, there are some who think that the NT was originally in Aramaic. This is highly unlikely for much of the NT, written as letters to Greek Christians throughout the Roman empire. It may be more reasonable for the Gospels, and some of the letters written to primarily Jewish Christians. Hey, Luke's gospel account starts out with a statement that he'd sought out many witnesses as his research, and it's entirely likely that some of that was Aramaic.
So even granting Aramaic primacy for all the NT, the chain for the NT is Aramaic-->Greek. We have that Greek. For the OT, it's just Hebrew (with a little bit written in Aramaic). We have that, too. For both, we also have various later translations, but those translations are not part of the lineage that we have now. For instance, there is no Latin in the lineage of our OT manuscripts at all--that was a ridiculous error. (I.e., our Greek manuscripts are copied from earlier Greek manuscripts, back to the originals.) The English translations are from the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, with no lineage of translation except possibly Aramaic-->Greek.
A fetus may be human, but it is not a person. I would argue that a baby shouldn't be considered to be a person until its behaviour differentiates itself from animals.
Ah, so you go down the route of Peter Singer. (Well, that aspect of his views, anyway.)
While I think your view is as repugnant and vile as every historical denial of any group of human beings' personhood, I would say that it's a more rationally-defensible position than saying that personhood starts at birth.
This is a significant part of the debate over the source of stem cells, and is more than a mere straw-man argument as far as I can tell.
It seems to me you haven't been paying a great deal of attention to the debate, then. In your references to those left-over embryos, you seem to be entirely unaware of the term snowflake children and the accompanying dimension of the discussion--one that makes your accusation of straw-man argumentation rather empty.
No no. Strong embryonic recapitulation has been discredited.
After all, the usual argument is that if something can develop into a human then it should be considered to be a human even before it develops into a human.
Ah, no.
The argument is that it can develop into a baby, and that it already is a human.
I.e., an oak acorn is not a tree, but it is an oak. An blastocyst/embryo is not a baby, but it is a human. A baby is not a toddler, but it is a human. A toddler is not a teenager, but it is a human. A teenager is not an adult, but it is a human (though barely, in come cases ^_^).
Actually, I recently wrote a paper on quantum teleportation, and I was surprised to find that teleporting a human being with current telecom equipment would take longer than the age of the universe.
Oh, I dunno. Six thousand years doesn't seem like that long to me.
My example about choosing to rape was not supposed to be a parallel to Adam and Eve, or to how the Fall could happen; it was an example to probe the bizarre reasoning that if God gave us freedom, he can't blame us for abusing that freedom. The question you're talking about--how the Fall could happen if mankind was perfect--wasn't in view. (If that's what brezel was getting at in his last sentence, I didn't see it. If it was, my reply was mis-aimed. Honestly, I can barely make sense out of that sentence.)
Now, to respond to your question/argument: I understand why that makes sense to you; the reason I don't agree is the meaning you're assigning to the word "perfect". It's not a meaning relevant to what the Bible says about the creation of man.
First, the Bible nowhere (that I know of) says that mankind was created "perfect". It says in Genesis 1 that they were made in God's image, but it nowhere unpacks that as implying any sense of the word "perfection". (The person you quoted was wrong--or at least imprecise.) They had not sinned, and they had no inherent bent toward sin/pride/malice/selfishness/etc, but that does not imply an inability to sin. I'm not aware of any biblical teaching about man's nature before the Fall that would justify your premise.
If you think I'm wrong, please, tell me where you get it in the Bible.
Second, neither the Hebrew ("tamin") nor the Greek ("telios") words we translate "perfect" mean quite what you seem to be meaning by "perfect". Neither is an abstract concept of being ideal, some lofty, pervasive "perfection", in the sense of being unable to go bad. Both are sometimes translated "complete", or "full". Tamin is also translated "without blemish" and "upright". But even though Adam and Eve are not described as "perfect", we can say they had no sin or inherent predilection toward sin.
Just reading this as ancient Hebrew literature, I see no justification for your apparent belief that the Bible presents an understanding of man's initial state as being "perfect" in the sense of unable to sin. Nor do I see anything in the Hebrew concept of perfection that would imply that if God made mankind without blemish, this implies they couldn't be led astray into a perverted, sinful desire.
Or, they consciously, deliberately, knowingly rejected the one command given to them. They turned their back on God's authority; they turned their back on the sufficiency of God's provision, in a prideful, selfish grasping at the one thing God had warned them against. They decided they didn't want what God gave them...and so they got their way.
if he gave us a free will he cannot punish us for our decisions. (= kick us out of paradise). do you religious guys actually ever think something through?
Eh? This is bizarre. I really can't see what you think that follows. Could you present your argument, instead of simply asserting your conclusion?
I.e., if I have a free will, and I choose to rape a woman...Exactly how does my free will lessen my responsibility? Usually people argue that if we don't have free will, we shouldn't be punished for our choices. (Maybe put down like a rabid dog, or isolated from the rest of society, or (if possible) rehabilitated till we're safe, but not punished.)
Yes, that chain of four ideas does seem rather silly. What religion are you referring to? Christians don't believe God made humans sinful. He made us capable of making moral choices, but we're not punished for being able to sin--we're punished for sin.
Nor do Christians believe that God punished "someone else". Jesus was God incarnate. God taking on the punishment for the evil we choose is rather different than God "punishing someone else to make up for those flaws".
So...What religion were you talking about, again?
I agree with you, but wasn't it Jerry Falwell that picketed Matthew Shepherd's funeral?
Absolutely not.
The people who picket funerals are the "Westboro Baptist Church", headed by Fred Phelps. He is beyond the pale, and should no more be associated with the American religious right in general than Stalin should be associated with socialist politics.
Seriously, check out the "religious beliefs" section of his Wikipedia article. He seems to be simply filled with hate, and uses a veneer of religion as the excuse. He believes salvation and damnation are obtained by aligned with or opposing him. His children who have left his church consider him a cult leader, and say that his actual religious beliefs are virtually non-existent.
Yes, Falwell said some stupid things--things that frustrated, embarrassed, and angered me as a theologically-conservative Christian. But please, do not associate Phelps' actions with anyone other than Fred Phelps.
If you think you have even the vaguest conception of how the universe works, then you are inherently wrong, because Human's can't conceive of how the universe works by any means.
I'm sure glad we have you to explain that aspect of how the universe works!
Figuring out what happens "when we aren't looking" is not inherently beyond the reach of empirical testing, however much it may seem so at first glance. We can test any theory that has observable consequences, regardless of whether we can observe every step of everything that the theory says is happening. If different theories of what happens when we aren't looking make different predictions about what we can observe when we do look, then we can test them.
AFAICS, that's precisely what the abstract claims.
Your first question would be so much more convincing--check that, it would have the bare minimum of validity--if it demonstrated any awareness of the Supreme Court's rationale in ending the recount, along with some indication of why that rationale was wrong.
To my "IANAL" understanding, parents are certainly legally responsible to care and provide for their children, but children's responsibilities to their parents are somewhat...less than symmetrical.
Hmm. An amusing image just occurred to me, of parents suing their children for adversely affecting their financial well-being and causing stress and emotional turmoil...By the very fact of their existence.
It would be funnier if it were a bit further from being believable, though.
He said intelligent designer.
Premarital sex isn't adultery. People weren't stoned for it. IIRC, the penalty was a fine, and getting married.