Yes, that's probably what he meant. It's precisely the myth I was correcting.
The King James wasn't translated from the Latin text (called the Vulgate). It was translated from Greek manuscripts of the New Testament (the compilation is called the Textus Receptus) and from the Hebrew text of the Old Testament (called the Masoretic text). (Note: They also translated the Apocrypha--Jewish literature from between the Old and New Testaments--and those were translated from the Greek translation of the Hebrew (which is called the Septuagint), as you said.
Yes, Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic, at least most of the time. So when the Gospels record the words of Jesus, they are translations of his words. But the apostles spoke Greek, too, and that's what the letters of the New Testament were written in--and that's what the Gospels were written in. (Though I believe there's speculation--speculation, mind you--about an Aramaic original of Matthew.)
So no, the Bible does not come to use through a chain of translation from language to language. We have the Greek & Hebrew.
I'm heading home from work, and have only skimmed your post at the moment. But one thing caught my eye, and I want to ask you about it:
His accounts are all second-hand, and all of his writings appear (by all accounts) to be hundreds of years too late to have actually witnessed what he claims to be an expert on.
What on earth are you talking about?
I don't know of a single document of the NT that is thought to be written "hundreds of years" after Christ--even ignoring scholars who are also theological conservatives. Can you name any scholars who date Paul's letters the way you do? And if you do go there, you are no longer talking about "Paul"--you are talking about someone far later, writing under Paul's name.
By the way, your ideas about "the Romans" and "the Roman Empire's" influence on Christian canon runs into some, ah, rather significant historical problems when we look at the actual acceptance of the various books of the canon by Christians. Long before the early 300s, when Constantine ended Christian persecution and introduced any affiliation of Christianity with the Roman Empire--long before any central, unified power structure in Christianity existed, let alone had the un-persecuted freedom to try to exert control--the books of our NT canon were generally accepted by Christians.
You cannot explain the acceptance of Paul by any kind of theory involving the power of the Roman Empire; he is accepted as an apostle of Christ in the earliest records we possess. Nor does any theory you've presented explain why apostles who were close to Jesus and walked with him--like Peter--accepted this man who had previously been attempting to crush the Christian message; in your thinking, Paul went from trying to crush Christianity to trying to distort it, but you have not explained why you think that Peter went along with that distortion. Why did he accept Paul?
As for "Much of what he says runs deeply contrary to the simple Christian message of love, understanding, and forgiveness," I must admit to being a bit bewildered. I'm used to having discussions with people who regard Paul as radically overturning OT Law, and saying that Paul invented the idea of salvation by faith apart from works. The doctrine of forgiveness that he teaches is too antinomian for some people. I'm not even sure that Paul talks more about judgment than Christ does in the four gospels! And I don't know how you can read his loving, caring, pastoral interaction with the churches in his epistles, and come away with your perspective--read through the closing section of each letter, or read the overall tone of his writing to the very-messed-up church at Corinth.
You didn't read my post, did you? I said, "if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur." The telephone game is all about the message being passed on from one person to another person, in secret.
Imagine the telephone game where people aren't whispering--where every person in the room can hear every step of the transmission. That would cause the reliability of transmission to skyrocket, don't you think?
Of course, real-life oral transmission would be somewhere between regular Telephone Game and my modified version. There are lots of variables--how widely the story is told, how often, how important it is to the culture, whether they care about faithful transmission or regard it as flexible, etc. And smaller details will be more variable than larger details.
Well, Chief.. how about the Book of Judas? It's one of those tattered scrolls. So tell me.. are you tolerant of that discovery, or a hypocrite?
What kind of "intolerance" are you expecting from him?
It's a manuscript of a Gnostic gospel that we already knew about. Some writers from the early church mentioned that this composition had been written. It is historically quite interesting to now have the contents of that work.
You act as though you expect Christians to put our hands over our ears and shout "I can't hear you", just because this manuscript exists. As though its very existence should shatter the Christian worldview. As though "someone at some point in early history wrote some things about Jesus that differ from what the accepted NT canon says about Jesus" is somehow shocking or unexpected for a Christian.
To state it more clearly, I realize that there is a Biblical (Old Testament) basis for the position, but I highly doubt that Christ would have ever said that it was a sin.
I'm curious: Why? Other than personal incredulity.
Would you agree that people sometimes do need "moral education"? That something might not seem bad to me--because of mistaken assumptions or distorted sensibilities on my part? In that situation, wouldn't my own appeal that "I houghly doubt that Christ would have said that ___ was a sin" be as meaningful as your own?
(That said, I also want to say that I'm sickened by the hatred of homosexuals that some people spew forth. And I think there are major problems with people who think that gay people are the worst of all sinners--I mean, "boastful" and "disobedient to parents" are grouped with homosexuality in Romans 1!)
On Paul: I'm also curious--why do you think people like Peter & the other apostles didn't repudiate Paul's distortions, if that's what they were? Do you think that they did, but were silenced somehow?
Sorry, faith is synonymous with belief. In NT Greek, anyway, "faith" and "to believe" and "belief" all translate the same word group. The AC above was right in his reply, when he said "it is presumptuous of you to expect that the rest of us would automatically know what that means."
There really isn't anything rational in Christianity.
The power of your reasoning overwhelms me.
I'd like to see some solid premises and reason that applies to an act of blind faith.
Pop-culture assumptions aside, "faith" does not mean "acceptance of something as true without adequate evidence". I have faith in a modern airline's ability to give me a flight that will land safely. (I don't have faith that they'll get me there on time, mind you.) That faith is a trust in something I regard as reliable. My faith may be more or less well-grounded--the more that I've researched a given airline's reliability, the more well-grounded my faith will be.
Keep in mind that in the Bible, the disciples of Jesus are said to have "faith". The disciples, who were ostensibly first-hand witnesses of quite a lot. (And the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11 includes multiple Old Testament people who were first-hand witnesses of spectacular demonstrations of God. And you might check out the evidenciary-style appeals of the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Corinth, 1 Cor. 15.) In the worldview presented by the Bible, faith does not mean confidence that ignores evidence & reason.
Religious Texts do offer a good historical perspective if you read them with the fact that they have been translated many times, passed by word of mouth for a longer time.
Almost.
Religious texts have rarely been "translated many times", that I know of. That is, they haven't come down to us through a long sequence of translation from one language to another. (They may have been translated many times in the sense that Harry Potter has been translated many times, of course. The question is whether we still have manuscripts in the original language.)
The manuscripts have, however, often been copied many times, introducing textual variants. Such that if we have few manuscripts, we're less confident in the exact wording of the originals. (And if we only have a small number of manuscripts that were under the control of a central religious authority, then all bets are off.) But then if we have many manuscripts, we can become extremely confident in the original wording, through the wonderful world of textual criticism.
That does leave open the possibility of significant change during times of oral transmission. (Though there are limits there, too. Suppose that we only had orally-transmitted knowledge of the JFK assassination. We couldn't be too confident in some details of the events, but if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur.)
First, I'll expand a little bit on what I said before. Then I'll get to the heart of the matter. (Your last paragraph helped me see where you're coming from, and I want to address that.)
Part of what Jesus did was about how we out to live because, well, it's good. It's right. (There wasn't much of anything in his moral teaching that wasn't in the Old Testament, but he did a lot to chastise hypocrisy & mere external religious show.) How do you think it's supposed to work? Is he going to say, "OK, since I know you won't actually live in goodness, I'm not going to talk about what goodness is"?
But now to the heart of the matter. First, please read my reply to the GP--read what I said about the "good news".
The good news is that your acceptance before God is not based on that kind of reward system. That's what John 3:16 is about.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
The bar isn't lower than Jesus--the story of Christ is the story of God reaching down to people who consistently reject his way, taking their penalty on himself, and accepting them on the basis of trusting in him. It's about repentance: Saying--and meaning--"I don't want to do this anymore, I want your way." [1] It's about God stooping down below the bar to save us.
Christians have sometimes summarized all this in terms of "Law" and "Gospel/good news". The Law shows us how we ought to live--and it's good law--but that condemns us, because we won't live up to it. The good news is that because of what Christ did, we don't have to in order to be accepted. [2] (Paul talks in these terms in the book of Romans.)
[1] By the way, suppose someone actually thinks this way: "if you know you're not going to meet the minimum, you might as well be as evil and depraved as you feel like, because you're going to end up in hell anyway."
Yeah, if you think that way, you will go to hell--because it shows that you really don't care about goodness, love, God, etc. For that matter, if you're trying to be good enough to get just above "the bar"--well, that's the kind of religion that Jesus chewed out on multiple occasions.
[2] You might reply to that by saying, "If it's on the basis of faith, then we can sin all we want!" If so, careful there. Paul also talked about that in Romans 6--after discussing the amazing grace of God in saving sinners through faith, he addresses the thought, "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" Also, James talked about the kind of faith that saves--if you say that you have faith, but that faith doesn't motivate you to act, well... "I will show you my faith by my works." There's an empty, dead kind of faith--an opportunistic, "Sure, I'll believe, give me my ticket to heaven--just don't bother me to actually follow you."
I am, of course, not arguing that Jesus did not exist.
Eh? Then what on earth did you mean when you said the following?
But yes, the most important question to settle is whether a "Jesus" actually ever existed in the first place. There's not much evidence for that assertion outside the Bible.
Jesus taught the way we ought to be living. Are you saying that he should have set our sights lower?
He said that the greatest commandments were to love God with everything we are, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Are you saying that if he knew no one would successfully achieve it, that it changes how we ought to seek to live?
But yes, the most important question to settle is whether a "Jesus" actually ever existed in the first place. There's not much evidence for that assertion outside the Bible.
I've never understood the mindset that looks at the documents of the New Testament and pretends that they are not data.
I understand not accepting them as gospel truth. (Haha. I am so droll.) I understand questioning their claims. But we're talking about 27 ancient documents here--biographies, and letters written from early Christian leaders to other early Christians. This is data. You don't ignore it.
And that's not even bringing up the extrabiblical data, which others have pointed out already.
There are real challenges to Christian views--some that are honestly challenging. The "maybe Jesus never existed" theory is a joke.
I don't know about the numbers, but I do know that some Catholics really do go that far. But as I said, I was "setting aside Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox questions of the veneration of Mary."
If a religion is potentially good, but 90+% of the time smart and well-intentioned people screw it up, then it's a bad religion. So they can only say it's the people's fault so many times before it's not really the people's fault.
I'd say it's more like 100% of the time, smart and well-intentioned people screw it up. See my other comment.
But anyway, there's a couple odd things about how you're evaluating.
1.) The "effectiveness" of a religion for making people better isn't judged on whether people actually attain the ideals of the religion. It's judged by whether they're better than they would otherwise be. That complicates the analysis just a bit.
2.) First and foremost, shouldn't a religion be judged on whether or not it's true?
I guess if you see religion more as a tool of moral philosophy, then your comment makes sense. Otherwise, that's an odd place to start.
(Don't get me wrong--If Christianity is true, then the Spirit of God at work in Christians should be changing us. But "Does it work?" isn't the first question--and it can be a rather deceptive question. Unfortunately, there's nothing that guarantees that someone who's sitting in a church pew is going to be taking Christ seriously. And in fact, the church pew is exactly where you'll find hypocritical "white-washed tombs", as Jesus put it.)
Uh, I didn't say that the virgin birth isn't part of Christianity. I said that Mary's claim wasn't what caused people to become Christians. Not a primary cause, at the very least.
And if someone denied the virgin birth now, they would be excommunicated. Excommunication isn't a Spanish Inquisition thing.
Your critique of pharisaical religion is good, and there's certainly a lot of that around among professing Christians. But two cautions for you:
1.) Make sure you stay humble as you critique "Pharisees", or you'll be acting holier-than-thou. I think those tendencies are present in everyone. I hate that, and pray that God will be changing my heart. But it's important not to forget that it's there.
2.) When you say that "Christianity is about self-sacrifice, living as Christ lived, and loving as Christ loved," make sure you maintain the difference between (1) walking in the Spirit, being transformed to be more like Christ, and (2) the good news. If you walk up to someone and tell them, "Look at Jesus! Live like he lived!", then you haven't given them good news. Because, as you said, we can't measure up to that standard.
The life of a Christian is about what you said. But the gospel is forgiveness, salvation, adoption, and the receipt of the Holy Spirit--by faith, not by working to be like Christ.
It has been two thousand years since some girl claimed that she got knocked up by a burning bush rather then her boyfriend and millions of people worship her as a virgin.
That's got to be one of the silliest critiques of Christianity that I've read. Even setting aside Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox questions of the veneration of Mary.
People don't believe in Jesus because of Mary's claim that God made her pregnant. People believe in Jesus because of claims about his miracles & resurrection.
If you're going to give the pseudoskeptic's treatment to the virgin birth, you're doing it all wrong. You should be doubting whether Mary ever claimed such a thing--you should be speculating that early Christians made up the story.
But I realize that wouldn't make as effective an approach to junk rhetoric.
Hmm... I guess you could throw in some half-informed claims about "mistranslation" of Isaiah 7:14, while you're at it.
If we're talking about unsolicited, persistent proselytizing, I agree entirely. If you don't want to hear about it, you don't want to hear about it. People should respect that.
Other than that, I can understand how you might feel irritated by an unsolicited invitation to talk about religion--or anything else, from political messages to invitations to sign petitions--but I don't think it would be reasonable to call people unpleasant for asking. Not if they're respectful about it.
If I'm perfectly pleasant and do proselytize--that is, discuss questions of religion with people who disagree seeking to persuade them--can I still avoid the nutjob label?
If not, do I get to call atheists who argue for atheism "nutjobs"?
Hmm... For that matter, either way, do I get to call an unpleasant atheist a nutjob?
Huh? Are you talking about the Usenet quotes? If so, those aren't "evidence", those are random people on Usenet repeating the myth.
Or are you talking about the material after this line?
These all sound individually quite confident and authoritative. But how do we find out if they are true? The answer must be to assemble all the primary data; any documents issued by the council, and any ancient accounts of its proceedings.
If so, exactly which of those quotes says that Nicaea had something to do with determining the canon of the Bible?
(Just in case you're unclear on "canon": The council did issue "canons". They were statements/declarations. But "canon" just means "rule". Those canons were not the listing of the books of the Bible.)
Nicaea had nothing to do with whether or not Jesus was divine or merely human. I saw that claim in The Da Vinci Code, but it was just a silly error.
Nicaea did have to do with the sense in which Jesus was divine--was he a created being of similar "substance" to the Father (but distinct from the Father), or was he an uncreated being of the same "substance"?
Nicaea also didn't have to do with the relationship between his humanity and his divinity--that was the Council of Chalcedon.
Clarifications on councils in general:
If a council issued a statement on something, doesn't mean that it was a new belief, or a newly-settled belief. It may have been the universal belief of Christians back to the apostles. There may have been no camps on the matter. The early council statements often were the first time that Christians gathered to articulate a belief for the first time, or to clarify an articulation. But that doesn't mean there were two kinds of Christians up until the council met, and the other was suppressed afterward. (Even with the Arian controversy at Nicaea, there weren't any Arians around until the teacher Arius showed up. IIRC. I could be wrong on that.) In other words, sometimes these "other camps" showed up late, and were just being shot down. (i.e. Christianity already had definition on that point, just not articulated at a council.)
So, don't blithely assume that there were all these camps that you're talking about, just from the fact that a council met and talked about a question. If you do want to say that there were these camps, don't say it unless you actually know--who were they, and why do you think they existed? And why do you think that they are part of original Christianity? Was it a group of people who came along after Christianity already existed, and changed a belief? (Compare: If I start a new religion where Jesus was actually a woman, it wouldn't be right to include my novelty in your list of Christian camps. And if I start a new "Muslim" religion where Mohammed was not the final prophet of God, it wouldn't be Islam.)
Clarifications on Jesus' humanity:
To my knowledge, that Jesus was divine--not a mere human--is possibly the least controversial of all theological questions within Christianity, stretching back to the earliest Christians. No letters were written denying it. No branches of Christianity were excommunicated over it. No council ever met to settle that question. It never came up. I think the camp you're talking about is a total fiction; I know that it wasn't even the kind of "heresy" that the Early Church Fathers spent time denying. There just wasn't a controversy. The controversy far more often went the other way--the Gnostics (a la the gnostic gospels) tended to deny that Jesus was a human at all, saying that he was a spirit being who appeared to have flesh, or something like that.
Christians had to defend the idea that he really was a man, not that he really was divine.
1.) You seem to have missed the irony of my comment. I said that if the King James Bible was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it's good enough for me. I was gently teasing King James Only advocates--the people who believe that the KJV itself was inspired.
2.) Unless King James was involved with the actual translation process--directing how he wanted the translation to end up, pressuring people, etc.--then it is a huge mental leap to significantly distrust the translation's accuracy. I think you'll have a great deal of difficulty finding good scholarship that says it was a poor translation effort. (We have better stuff now, due to more manuscripts and more awareness of some details of Greek & Hebrew, but that doesn't detract from the accomplishment of the KJV.)
Dude, what on earth are you talking about? There was no text compiled during the council of Nicaea. Nicaea had positively nothing to do with the canon of Scripture, and they compiled nothing. Go down to the External Links section of that wikipedia page, and read the link discussing that myth.
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Yes, that's probably what he meant. It's precisely the myth I was correcting.
The King James wasn't translated from the Latin text (called the Vulgate). It was translated from Greek manuscripts of the New Testament (the compilation is called the Textus Receptus) and from the Hebrew text of the Old Testament (called the Masoretic text). (Note: They also translated the Apocrypha--Jewish literature from between the Old and New Testaments--and those were translated from the Greek translation of the Hebrew (which is called the Septuagint), as you said.
Yes, Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic, at least most of the time. So when the Gospels record the words of Jesus, they are translations of his words. But the apostles spoke Greek, too, and that's what the letters of the New Testament were written in--and that's what the Gospels were written in. (Though I believe there's speculation--speculation, mind you--about an Aramaic original of Matthew.)
So no, the Bible does not come to use through a chain of translation from language to language. We have the Greek & Hebrew.
What on earth are you talking about?
I don't know of a single document of the NT that is thought to be written "hundreds of years" after Christ--even ignoring scholars who are also theological conservatives. Can you name any scholars who date Paul's letters the way you do? And if you do go there, you are no longer talking about "Paul"--you are talking about someone far later, writing under Paul's name.
By the way, your ideas about "the Romans" and "the Roman Empire's" influence on Christian canon runs into some, ah, rather significant historical problems when we look at the actual acceptance of the various books of the canon by Christians. Long before the early 300s, when Constantine ended Christian persecution and introduced any affiliation of Christianity with the Roman Empire--long before any central, unified power structure in Christianity existed, let alone had the un-persecuted freedom to try to exert control--the books of our NT canon were generally accepted by Christians.
You cannot explain the acceptance of Paul by any kind of theory involving the power of the Roman Empire; he is accepted as an apostle of Christ in the earliest records we possess. Nor does any theory you've presented explain why apostles who were close to Jesus and walked with him--like Peter--accepted this man who had previously been attempting to crush the Christian message; in your thinking, Paul went from trying to crush Christianity to trying to distort it, but you have not explained why you think that Peter went along with that distortion. Why did he accept Paul?
As for "Much of what he says runs deeply contrary to the simple Christian message of love, understanding, and forgiveness," I must admit to being a bit bewildered. I'm used to having discussions with people who regard Paul as radically overturning OT Law, and saying that Paul invented the idea of salvation by faith apart from works. The doctrine of forgiveness that he teaches is too antinomian for some people. I'm not even sure that Paul talks more about judgment than Christ does in the four gospels! And I don't know how you can read his loving, caring, pastoral interaction with the churches in his epistles, and come away with your perspective--read through the closing section of each letter, or read the overall tone of his writing to the very-messed-up church at Corinth.
You didn't read my post, did you? I said, "if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur." The telephone game is all about the message being passed on from one person to another person, in secret.
Imagine the telephone game where people aren't whispering--where every person in the room can hear every step of the transmission. That would cause the reliability of transmission to skyrocket, don't you think?
Of course, real-life oral transmission would be somewhere between regular Telephone Game and my modified version. There are lots of variables--how widely the story is told, how often, how important it is to the culture, whether they care about faithful transmission or regard it as flexible, etc. And smaller details will be more variable than larger details.
What kind of "intolerance" are you expecting from him?
It's a manuscript of a Gnostic gospel that we already knew about. Some writers from the early church mentioned that this composition had been written. It is historically quite interesting to now have the contents of that work.
You act as though you expect Christians to put our hands over our ears and shout "I can't hear you", just because this manuscript exists. As though its very existence should shatter the Christian worldview. As though "someone at some point in early history wrote some things about Jesus that differ from what the accepted NT canon says about Jesus" is somehow shocking or unexpected for a Christian.
I'm curious: Why? Other than personal incredulity.
Would you agree that people sometimes do need "moral education"? That something might not seem bad to me--because of mistaken assumptions or distorted sensibilities on my part? In that situation, wouldn't my own appeal that "I houghly doubt that Christ would have said that ___ was a sin" be as meaningful as your own?
(That said, I also want to say that I'm sickened by the hatred of homosexuals that some people spew forth. And I think there are major problems with people who think that gay people are the worst of all sinners--I mean, "boastful" and "disobedient to parents" are grouped with homosexuality in Romans 1!)
On Paul: I'm also curious--why do you think people like Peter & the other apostles didn't repudiate Paul's distortions, if that's what they were? Do you think that they did, but were silenced somehow?
Sorry, faith is synonymous with belief. In NT Greek, anyway, "faith" and "to believe" and "belief" all translate the same word group. The AC above was right in his reply, when he said "it is presumptuous of you to expect that the rest of us would automatically know what that means."
The power of your reasoning overwhelms me.
Pop-culture assumptions aside, "faith" does not mean "acceptance of something as true without adequate evidence". I have faith in a modern airline's ability to give me a flight that will land safely. (I don't have faith that they'll get me there on time, mind you.) That faith is a trust in something I regard as reliable. My faith may be more or less well-grounded--the more that I've researched a given airline's reliability, the more well-grounded my faith will be.
Keep in mind that in the Bible, the disciples of Jesus are said to have "faith". The disciples, who were ostensibly first-hand witnesses of quite a lot. (And the Faith Hall of Fame in Hebrews 11 includes multiple Old Testament people who were first-hand witnesses of spectacular demonstrations of God. And you might check out the evidenciary-style appeals of the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Corinth, 1 Cor. 15.) In the worldview presented by the Bible, faith does not mean confidence that ignores evidence & reason.
Almost.
Religious texts have rarely been "translated many times", that I know of. That is, they haven't come down to us through a long sequence of translation from one language to another. (They may have been translated many times in the sense that Harry Potter has been translated many times, of course. The question is whether we still have manuscripts in the original language.)
The manuscripts have, however, often been copied many times, introducing textual variants. Such that if we have few manuscripts, we're less confident in the exact wording of the originals. (And if we only have a small number of manuscripts that were under the control of a central religious authority, then all bets are off.) But then if we have many manuscripts, we can become extremely confident in the original wording, through the wonderful world of textual criticism.
That does leave open the possibility of significant change during times of oral transmission. (Though there are limits there, too. Suppose that we only had orally-transmitted knowledge of the JFK assassination. We couldn't be too confident in some details of the events, but if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur.)
Part of what Jesus did was about how we out to live because, well, it's good. It's right. (There wasn't much of anything in his moral teaching that wasn't in the Old Testament, but he did a lot to chastise hypocrisy & mere external religious show.) How do you think it's supposed to work? Is he going to say, "OK, since I know you won't actually live in goodness, I'm not going to talk about what goodness is"?
But now to the heart of the matter. First, please read my reply to the GP--read what I said about the "good news".
The good news is that your acceptance before God is not based on that kind of reward system. That's what John 3:16 is about.
The bar isn't lower than Jesus--the story of Christ is the story of God reaching down to people who consistently reject his way, taking their penalty on himself, and accepting them on the basis of trusting in him. It's about repentance: Saying--and meaning--"I don't want to do this anymore, I want your way." [1] It's about God stooping down below the bar to save us.
Christians have sometimes summarized all this in terms of "Law" and "Gospel/good news". The Law shows us how we ought to live--and it's good law--but that condemns us, because we won't live up to it. The good news is that because of what Christ did, we don't have to in order to be accepted. [2] (Paul talks in these terms in the book of Romans.)
[1] By the way, suppose someone actually thinks this way: "if you know you're not going to meet the minimum, you might as well be as evil and depraved as you feel like, because you're going to end up in hell anyway."
Yeah, if you think that way, you will go to hell--because it shows that you really don't care about goodness, love, God, etc. For that matter, if you're trying to be good enough to get just above "the bar"--well, that's the kind of religion that Jesus chewed out on multiple occasions.
[2] You might reply to that by saying, "If it's on the basis of faith, then we can sin all we want!" If so, careful there. Paul also talked about that in Romans 6--after discussing the amazing grace of God in saving sinners through faith, he addresses the thought, "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?" Also, James talked about the kind of faith that saves--if you say that you have faith, but that faith doesn't motivate you to act, well... "I will show you my faith by my works." There's an empty, dead kind of faith--an opportunistic, "Sure, I'll believe, give me my ticket to heaven--just don't bother me to actually follow you."
Eh? Then what on earth did you mean when you said the following?
Jesus taught the way we ought to be living. Are you saying that he should have set our sights lower?
He said that the greatest commandments were to love God with everything we are, and love our neighbors as ourselves. Are you saying that if he knew no one would successfully achieve it, that it changes how we ought to seek to live?
I've never understood the mindset that looks at the documents of the New Testament and pretends that they are not data.
I understand not accepting them as gospel truth. (Haha. I am so droll.) I understand questioning their claims. But we're talking about 27 ancient documents here--biographies, and letters written from early Christian leaders to other early Christians. This is data. You don't ignore it.
And that's not even bringing up the extrabiblical data, which others have pointed out already.
There are real challenges to Christian views--some that are honestly challenging. The "maybe Jesus never existed" theory is a joke.
I don't know about the numbers, but I do know that some Catholics really do go that far. But as I said, I was "setting aside Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox questions of the veneration of Mary."
I'd say it's more like 100% of the time, smart and well-intentioned people screw it up. See my other comment.
But anyway, there's a couple odd things about how you're evaluating.
1.) The "effectiveness" of a religion for making people better isn't judged on whether people actually attain the ideals of the religion. It's judged by whether they're better than they would otherwise be. That complicates the analysis just a bit.
2.) First and foremost, shouldn't a religion be judged on whether or not it's true?
I guess if you see religion more as a tool of moral philosophy, then your comment makes sense. Otherwise, that's an odd place to start.
(Don't get me wrong--If Christianity is true, then the Spirit of God at work in Christians should be changing us. But "Does it work?" isn't the first question--and it can be a rather deceptive question. Unfortunately, there's nothing that guarantees that someone who's sitting in a church pew is going to be taking Christ seriously. And in fact, the church pew is exactly where you'll find hypocritical "white-washed tombs", as Jesus put it.)
Uh, dude? I know that the FSM is a work of rhetorical genius. But that genius doesn't rub off on your own posts just by invoking his name.
Uh, I didn't say that the virgin birth isn't part of Christianity. I said that Mary's claim wasn't what caused people to become Christians. Not a primary cause, at the very least.
And if someone denied the virgin birth now, they would be excommunicated. Excommunication isn't a Spanish Inquisition thing.
Your critique of pharisaical religion is good, and there's certainly a lot of that around among professing Christians. But two cautions for you:
1.) Make sure you stay humble as you critique "Pharisees", or you'll be acting holier-than-thou. I think those tendencies are present in everyone. I hate that, and pray that God will be changing my heart. But it's important not to forget that it's there.
2.) When you say that "Christianity is about self-sacrifice, living as Christ lived, and loving as Christ loved," make sure you maintain the difference between (1) walking in the Spirit, being transformed to be more like Christ, and (2) the good news. If you walk up to someone and tell them, "Look at Jesus! Live like he lived!", then you haven't given them good news. Because, as you said, we can't measure up to that standard.
The life of a Christian is about what you said. But the gospel is forgiveness, salvation, adoption, and the receipt of the Holy Spirit--by faith, not by working to be like Christ.
That's got to be one of the silliest critiques of Christianity that I've read. Even setting aside Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox questions of the veneration of Mary.
People don't believe in Jesus because of Mary's claim that God made her pregnant. People believe in Jesus because of claims about his miracles & resurrection.
If you're going to give the pseudoskeptic's treatment to the virgin birth, you're doing it all wrong. You should be doubting whether Mary ever claimed such a thing--you should be speculating that early Christians made up the story.
But I realize that wouldn't make as effective an approach to junk rhetoric.
Hmm... I guess you could throw in some half-informed claims about "mistranslation" of Isaiah 7:14, while you're at it.
If we're talking about unsolicited, persistent proselytizing, I agree entirely. If you don't want to hear about it, you don't want to hear about it. People should respect that.
Other than that, I can understand how you might feel irritated by an unsolicited invitation to talk about religion--or anything else, from political messages to invitations to sign petitions--but I don't think it would be reasonable to call people unpleasant for asking. Not if they're respectful about it.
If I'm perfectly pleasant and do proselytize--that is, discuss questions of religion with people who disagree seeking to persuade them--can I still avoid the nutjob label?
If not, do I get to call atheists who argue for atheism "nutjobs"?
Hmm... For that matter, either way, do I get to call an unpleasant atheist a nutjob?
Or are you talking about the material after this line?
If so, exactly which of those quotes says that Nicaea had something to do with determining the canon of the Bible?
(Just in case you're unclear on "canon": The council did issue "canons". They were statements/declarations. But "canon" just means "rule". Those canons were not the listing of the books of the Bible.)
Clarifications on Nicaea:
Nicaea had nothing to do with whether or not Jesus was divine or merely human. I saw that claim in The Da Vinci Code, but it was just a silly error.
Nicaea did have to do with the sense in which Jesus was divine--was he a created being of similar "substance" to the Father (but distinct from the Father), or was he an uncreated being of the same "substance"?
Nicaea also didn't have to do with the relationship between his humanity and his divinity--that was the Council of Chalcedon.
Clarifications on councils in general:
If a council issued a statement on something, doesn't mean that it was a new belief, or a newly-settled belief. It may have been the universal belief of Christians back to the apostles. There may have been no camps on the matter. The early council statements often were the first time that Christians gathered to articulate a belief for the first time, or to clarify an articulation. But that doesn't mean there were two kinds of Christians up until the council met, and the other was suppressed afterward. (Even with the Arian controversy at Nicaea, there weren't any Arians around until the teacher Arius showed up. IIRC. I could be wrong on that.) In other words, sometimes these "other camps" showed up late, and were just being shot down. (i.e. Christianity already had definition on that point, just not articulated at a council.)
So, don't blithely assume that there were all these camps that you're talking about, just from the fact that a council met and talked about a question. If you do want to say that there were these camps, don't say it unless you actually know--who were they, and why do you think they existed? And why do you think that they are part of original Christianity? Was it a group of people who came along after Christianity already existed, and changed a belief? (Compare: If I start a new religion where Jesus was actually a woman, it wouldn't be right to include my novelty in your list of Christian camps. And if I start a new "Muslim" religion where Mohammed was not the final prophet of God, it wouldn't be Islam.)
Clarifications on Jesus' humanity:
To my knowledge, that Jesus was divine--not a mere human--is possibly the least controversial of all theological questions within Christianity, stretching back to the earliest Christians. No letters were written denying it. No branches of Christianity were excommunicated over it. No council ever met to settle that question. It never came up. I think the camp you're talking about is a total fiction; I know that it wasn't even the kind of "heresy" that the Early Church Fathers spent time denying. There just wasn't a controversy. The controversy far more often went the other way--the Gnostics (a la the gnostic gospels) tended to deny that Jesus was a human at all, saying that he was a spirit being who appeared to have flesh, or something like that.
Christians had to defend the idea that he really was a man, not that he really was divine.
Uh, two problems.
1.) You seem to have missed the irony of my comment. I said that if the King James Bible was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it's good enough for me. I was gently teasing King James Only advocates--the people who believe that the KJV itself was inspired.
2.) Unless King James was involved with the actual translation process--directing how he wanted the translation to end up, pressuring people, etc.--then it is a huge mental leap to significantly distrust the translation's accuracy. I think you'll have a great deal of difficulty finding good scholarship that says it was a poor translation effort. (We have better stuff now, due to more manuscripts and more awareness of some details of Greek & Hebrew, but that doesn't detract from the accomplishment of the KJV.)
Nicaea had nothing to do with the canon of the Bible.
Dude, what on earth are you talking about? There was no text compiled during the council of Nicaea. Nicaea had positively nothing to do with the canon of Scripture, and they compiled nothing. Go down to the External Links section of that wikipedia page, and read the link discussing that myth.