10 questions for intelligent Christians

[Kulindahr]

Fundamentalism & literalism are based on the idea of applying the scientific method to the Bible. But there's a problem...The Bible was not written by God. And, spirituality does not often follow rational thought.

As with Maadison Avenue, that's what they want you to believe. They might, sadly, even believe it themselves.
In reality, they're no more scientific than a guy who wrote down daily temperatures, from outside his house and from inside, never bothering to note that one of his thermometers was in Fahrenheit and the other in Celsius.

Applying scientific method to anything, not merely the Bible, requires asking first of all what sort of units the data is in. For the Bible, that means discovering the types of literature: without knowing the type of literature, one can't possibly get the meaning, any more than a scientist would find useful temperature data which showed how much thermal energy was put into several different solutions before boiling was achieved, unless he knew the beginning temperatures and the contents of the solutions.

Applying the scientific method to the Bible actually pulls the rug from under the literalists, because one discovers very quickly that a good number of things can't possibly mean what those folks have been saying -- perhaps the most blatant example being the treating of the Apocalypse as though it were written like some divine train schedule, which makes Christians look truly silly (especially to those who know that it uses a special sort of imagery, and employs numerology).

 

[Kulindahr]

Does anyone find it extremely odd that this so called God came down and spoke to whomever during a time when mankind and civilization were...to be blunt...STUPID? I mean come on, how hard would it be to convince a group of ignorant and uneducated people to believe that I am the son of God and he spoke these words to me for you to follow. Jesus was not the only person during his time claiming to be the son of God, there were many according to historians.

Two thousand years later today, we have speakers filling huge stadiums where people walk up on stage to be healed...they can now see, walk, or whatever shit the speaker claims to heal. We are a far much advanced society and far more educated. So my question again is...if this type of brainwashing and huge following can happen today, just think how fucking easy it would have been 2000 years ago.

If a religion was started today out of scratch, how many people do you think will actually follow?

I have and will always continue to assert that as civilizations advance and grow, more and more people will doubt a God and question religion(s) in general.

One quite striking thing about Jesus is that He didn't go around claiming to be the Son of God. Occasions are recorded when others started saying that about Him, and He told them not to say such things. That's an immense contrast with the others, who openly announced it.

As for healing -- I have witnessed healing, but never at one of the spectacles you mention. Always it's been a case of God bestowing the healing when it wasn't requested -- dramatically or otherwise -- but when the person was just going about living as a good Christian. I'll agree that there's brainwashing going on, though, and it's found in people who view God not as a real person, but as a magician to be conjured by. God will heal one person, and a thousand will come clamoring to have their turn, ten thousand will demand their 'right' to be healed as others were. In their midst will be some for whom psychosomatic influence is sufficient, these are seen as more miracles, and the cycle feeds on itself.

I don't know that it would have been easier two thousand years ago. Two things are important: first, that human nature hasn't changed one bit; second, that people were more on guard against miracles back then.
There's a tendency to judge the New Testament times from the perspective of the Roman lower classes, but that doesn't work. The New Testament was planted and grew among a very special society, one suspicious of outsiders, and even more suspicious of claims to miracles. God, to the great majority of Jews at the time, stayed quiet, hanging about in the Temple; He certainly didn't go around tossing miracles about! Therein is one of the reasons Jesus was accused of doing miracles by the power of the Devil -- the understanding of God was of quite a passive sort of being, not given to healing the blind here, restoring the leg of the lame there.

 

[Kulindahr]

I agree with everything you have said here except where it comes to miracles. I believe that God performs miracles every day, but that we are simply sometimes inured to them.

Existence itself is miracle enough!

There's no reason we should be here -- not us in particular, not the human race in general. Yet here we are.....

 

[Kulindahr]

1. God is not a genie

That should be printed on every bit of US currency.

Ah, unintended dangers: many people think that the government is one.