Will Obama say "So help me God" ?

[construct]

I think when and if Obama says "so help me God" he should be talking to whatever God he believes is his creator and source of guidance. I don't have a prob if he believes that is Christ. If it were up to me Obama would be putting his hand on a compilation of all the world's religious texts as a good gesture of unity not the Bible.

I would prefer that he merely raise his hand and keep the other at his side. After all, I am a secularist, but I'm not going to get all upset. If he takes the Bible seriously, and I have no reason to doubt that, perhaps swearing on the Bible will impress more heavily the seriousness of his responsibilities.

 

[bankside]

Kulindahr,
I'm not sure about the idea that doubts about biblical illogic and relevance can be waived away by reclassifying it as a "royal chronicle."

"Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain," booms the Great Voice of Oz. Yet when the curtain is peeled back we see Rameses recounting the Battle of Kadesh into the microphone.

Moreover I don't think discovering god is fundamentally a problem of coming to a consensus about an expansive world view that would somehow make it possible. Santa Claus is at once a cultural construct and an imaginary friend.

Construct,
I'm not sure Ayn Rand ever argued that language could correspond exactly with reality - I remember her writing about "intersubjectivity" where in her sense of the word, people came to a mutual agreement in their understanding, which approximated reality more and more closely.

It becomes a "limits" question and kind of an elegant way to understand the power of words to contain meaning.

 

[sixthson]

"Allah Akbar!"

 

[Kulindahr]

I am sorry but I don't share your trust in the fidelity and objectivity of written history, especially in reference to the formation of the Bible. I have seen how much of current "records" are written and maintained to know history is only as objective as the people writing it. It is clear you are really invested in the Bible being "organic" and "true" but to people who don't have that investment the very idea that the Bible is the pure word of God is absurd.
Even if the churches in this grassroot movement "agreed" parts were trustworthy it doesn't mean they were and it doesn't mean they were written from the direct word of God. From what you have described the Bible, at best, can only be considered an interpretation of God. I would argue an intrepertation for people too weak or otherwise uninterested in developing their own direct interpretation. Don't worry kids, just read the good book.

Well, if the history of the canon isn't certain, then we have no real clue what any of the ancient Greeks said, from Homer to Xenophon, or for that matter what Julius Caesar said or did -- what we know of them has less historical certainty than what we know of the canon.

Your final statement is sort of like saying that people who read science texts are too weak to do their own thinking.

The thing about the Bible is that what it presents is just what would be expected if God tried to communicate with people: some acceptance, but lots of stubborn resistance and mutilation of the message to serve human purposes -- and if God really showed up, we'd kill Him.

 

[Kulindahr]

For heuristic purposes, I'm not making a distinction between the Greek and Latin Fathers. I'm grouping all those as influenced by the Platonic thought from which the "omnis" derive.

As for my limitation of what I'm calling the Hebrew notion, I agree that God is portrayed as capable of doing the things he decides not to do as well as the things he actually does. I guess that's what you meant.

I'm looking at the languages, and there's a distinct difference between the Greek 'pantokrator' and the Latin 'omnipotent' -- not least that one says who someone is, while the second is an impersonal descriptor.

As to the Hebrew, yeah, that's kind of what I meant. Incipiently, there's the notion of whatever power there is being God's power, which verges on the Greek concept.

 

[Kulindahr]

Kulindahr,
I'm not sure about the idea that doubts about biblical illogic and relevance can be waived away by reclassifying it as a "royal chronicle."

There's no "reclassification" involved. Once the literary genre of "royal chronicle" was discovered in Babylonian and other ancient near eastern literature, what Genesis 1 really was became rather obvious. That immediately destroyed the long-held presumption that it was meant literally (which anyone should have been able to figure out anyway, by comparing ch.1 with ch. 2).

"Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain," booms the Great Voice of Oz. Yet when the curtain is peeled back we see Rameses recounting the Battle of Kadesh into the microphone.

LOL -- what an image. Brings back memories of translating bad Hebrew from photo-images of messages scrawled on broken bits of pottery found in smashed Hebrew outposts involved in the invasion by Sennacherib.

Moreover I don't think discovering god is fundamentally a problem of coming to a consensus about an expansive world view that would somehow make it possible. Santa Claus is at once a cultural construct and an imaginary friend.

I don't follow your thought there; I can't see where it corresponds to the discussion here. Am I reading this too soon after waking up?

Construct,
I'm not sure Ayn Rand ever argued that language could correspond exactly with reality - I remember her writing about "intersubjectivity" where in her sense of the word, people came to a mutual agreement in their understanding, which approximated reality more and more closely.

It becomes a "limits" question and kind of an elegant way to understand the power of words to contain meaning.

Newtonian method!
Applied to epistemology -- kool!

 

[construct]

Construct,
I'm not sure Ayn Rand ever argued that language could correspond exactly with reality - I remember her writing about "intersubjectivity" where in her sense of the word, people came to a mutual agreement in their understanding, which approximated reality more and more closely.

It becomes a "limits" question and kind of an elegant way to understand the power of words to contain meaning.

It's entirely possible that my understanding of Rand is somewhat simplistic. It's largely mediated through her disciple Leonard Piekoff. If I understand you correctly, Rand does not assert that meaning inheres in the words themselves. If that is the foundation, I certainly agree.

But there is still the epistemological problem of connecting reality and knowledge and the linguistic problem of the relationships between language and both. Those are the nodes of my real disagreement with Rand and my readiness to write Objectivism off as just one more variation on Realism.

 

[hotatlboi]

The thing about the Bible is that what it presents is just what would be expected if God tried to communicate with people

That's entirely a matter of opinion, it isn't fact in any sense (even though you have that tendency to label your opinions as facts).

And I completely disagree with that opinion of yours. In fact that's the biggest reason I reject the Bible, I don't find it at all what would be expected if God (or any perfect and infinite being for that matter) tried to communicate with people.

It's your opinion of how God would likely choose to communicate that enables you to find the Bible credible (since it matches what you expect). That's fine, but you need to realize that this is just your opinion and other people have other interpretations. The Bible doesn't match what I would expect from a being of God's knowledge, so that's why I reject it.

 

[construct]

That's entirely a matter of opinion, it isn't fact in any sense (even though you have that tendency to label your opinions as facts).

And I completely disagree with that opinion of yours. In fact that's the biggest reason I reject the Bible, I don't find it at all what would be expected if God (or any perfect and infinite being for that matter) tried to communicate with people.

It's your opinion of how God would likely choose to communicate that enables you to find the Bible credible (since it matches what you expect). That's fine, but you need to realize that this is just your opinion and other people have other interpretations. The Bible doesn't match what I would expect from a being of God's knowledge, so that's why I reject it.

Who said that God was perfect and infinite? Oh, that's right! Christians. How silly of me!

But the imperfect and limited God of the Bible would probably give us something rather like the Bible. That doesn't at all settle the issue of whether the Bible is credible. That's still up for discussion. We're still in agreement that the Bible is not credible.

 

[hotatlboi]

Who said that God was perfect and infinite? Oh, that's right! Christians. How silly of me!

Ok, a being of the power described in the Bible. And more important than power to my argument is a being of complete holiness (which the Bible explicitly claims for God). I don't find the Bible indicative of that kind of being either. I find the morality that mankind has achieved through humanistic social evolution to be superior to that espoused by "God" in the Bible.

But the imperfect and limited God of the Bible would probably give us something rather like the Bible.

I disagree there too. I find the Bible far to contradictory to even go that far. For example the God of the OT is VERY different from Jesus/the God of the NT, yet Jesus explicitly claims the God of the OT (Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, etc) as his father. He had to if he were to be taken seriously as the fulfillment of the OT prophecies, but what he taught was nothing like the God we saw before. And I don't buy the "well times were just different" argument for that either. That's another cop out to explain away the grave inconsistencies.

Oh and, if the God of the Bible was imperfect then what good is he? I thought that was the whole basis of the salvation doctrine, Jesus had never sinned, he was perfect, so that is why he could be the substitute for all sin.

 

[construct]

Ok, a being of the power described in the Bible. And more important than power to my argument is a being of complete holiness (which the Bible explicitly claims for God). I don't find the Bible indicative of that kind of being either. I find the morality that mankind has achieved through humanistic social evolution to be superior to that espoused by "God" in the Bible.

Holiness is not really a moral category in the Bible. Holiness is nothing more than "other"ness. It is the infinite qualitative distinction. Holiness later took on a moral cloak, but at base it's not there. Paul says, "Come ye out and be ye separate [i.e. holy] and touch not the unclean thing and you will be the children of God." This is not the language of morality. It is ceremonial language.

I disagree there too. I find the Bible far to contradictory to even go that far. For example the God of the OT is VERY different from Jesus/the God of the NT, yet Jesus explicitly claims the God of the OT (Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, etc) as his father. He had to if he were to be taken seriously as the fulfillment of the OT prophecies, but what he taught was nothing like the God we saw before. And I don't buy the "well times were just different" argument for that either. That's another cop out to explain away the grave inconsistencies.

Of course the Bible is contradictory. Kuli had to explain to me a contradiction I proposed from the sixth century prophets. (He didn't convince me, but he had to explain it.) There were even some shifts in discursive fields over the time the Bible was being written. The writers sometimes end up writing past each other. I guess I see a much greater continuity between the Old and New Testaments than you do, but it's not because there are no inconsistencies.

If you're wanting to describe the biblical god, you have to try to forget everything you thought you knew about God and start fresh. Or perhaps you need to analyze what you "know" about God and discount against it.

And ultimately, you know, truth is not measured by non-contradiction. Is there really such a thing as truth anyway? Pilate asked Jesus, "What is truth?" Unfortunately, he didn't wait around for an answer.

 

[hotatlboi]

And ultimately, you know, truth is not measured by non-contradiction.

I would agree with this but not the negation of it. Untruth can be measured by contradiction imo and that's more what I'm referring to in regards to the Bible.

But yes, for truth you need much more than non-contradiction though. You can have that and still have nonsense.

 

[construct]

I would agree with this but not the negation of it. Untruth can be measured by contradiction imo and that's more what I'm referring to in regards to the Bible.

For truth you need much more than non-contradiction though. You can have that and still have nonsense.

I suppose it's the subsequent questions that are the burden of that paragraph. The denial of absolute truth is pretty close to the foundation of my philosophical outlook. Contradictions are resolved by probabilities rather than by exclusions.

There are, of course, situations where seemingly contradictory statements are deployed in different discursive fields. In those cases, there is no possibility of real contradiction because they are not in contact with each other.

My denial of absolute truth is related to my assertion of the fragmented character of knowledge.

 

[hotatlboi]

well whether absolute truth exists or not is really a larger question than I was trying to get at. I'll go with "truth as we can best currently know it" for the purposes of this discussion.

 

[Kulindahr]

That's entirely a matter of opinion, it isn't fact in any sense (even though you have that tendency to label your opinions as facts).

And I completely disagree with that opinion of yours. In fact that's the biggest reason I reject the Bible, I don't find it at all what would be expected if God (or any perfect and infinite being for that matter) tried to communicate with people.

It's your opinion of how God would likely choose to communicate that enables you to find the Bible credible (since it matches what you expect). That's fine, but you need to realize that this is just your opinion and other people have other interpretations. The Bible doesn't match what I would expect from a being of God's knowledge, so that's why I reject it.

In terms of a search for truth, you're doing things entirely backwards: instead of looking for what's out there, you're setting up a pre-established definition and comparing things to that.

My approach was to ask what it would look like if there were a God and He tried to communicate with us. The only offering out there that resembles the world we see is the Bible. That narrows it down to Judaism and Christianity; Islam is really just a Christian heresy.

 

[Kulindahr]

Ok, a being of the power described in the Bible. And more important than power to my argument is a being of complete holiness (which the Bible explicitly claims for God). I don't find the Bible indicative of that kind of being either. I find the morality that mankind has achieved through humanistic social evolution to be superior to that espoused by "God" in the Bible.

Humanistic morality hasn't even come close to what's in the Bible! In fact, every ideal of humanistic morality can be found in the Bible. Humanistic morality also gave us "lifeboat ethics", which says that humans who are a burden to society can be tossed away to improve the lot of the rest.

I disagree there too. I find the Bible far to contradictory to even go that far. For example the God of the OT is VERY different from Jesus/the God of the NT, yet Jesus explicitly claims the God of the OT (Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, etc) as his father. He had to if he were to be taken seriously as the fulfillment of the OT prophecies, but what he taught was nothing like the God we saw before. And I don't buy the "well times were just different" argument for that either. That's another cop out to explain away the grave inconsistencies.

What Bible are you reading? You sound like a Marcionite, an early heretic whose reading comprehension was very low.
The God of the Old Testament and New are the same. The only new thing Jesus taught was to love not just your neighbor as yourself, but more than yourself. That's why He said, "A new commandment I give you" when He introduced that: it was the only new thing He had to say.
All the rest is found in the Torah and the Prophets.

You're great at dismissing the results of research as cop-outs. Times were different, so God spoke differently. It's becoming very plain that you don't have a clue what the Old Testament is even about. You not only decide what things are going to be before you set out, as you've plainly stated, you set up a straw version of what the Bible is in order to justify your a priori opinions.
Two fallacies in there.

Oh and, if the God of the Bible was imperfect then what good is he? I thought that was the whole basis of the salvation doctrine, Jesus had never sinned, he was perfect, so that is why he could be the substitute for all sin.

Construct is dabbling in the same thing that you're doing, namely introducing an outside concept and imposing it on the Bible, instead of asking what the Bible's definition is. That's a problem with the "imperfect" concept here.
"Limited" is, in a way, accurate. Some of the ancient rabbis discuss that issue (it's been too long for me to recall anything substantive about their discussions; about all I remember is the realization that some of those guys were very, very brilliant).
"Perfect" is, these days, a poor translation of the Greek, anyway; we've filled the word with too much Latin/Western philosophical baggage. "Complete" is better, especially when considered against the Hebrew concepts of shalom, generally translated as "peace" (one of the more inadequate renditions of a word across language barriers, but without a paragraph of discussion, there's not much else to do with it); "wholeness" is part of the concept, with a touch of "wellness", and of nu-ach, "rest", which again has a deeper, richer flavor than any English word we have. But "complete" doesn't quite cut it, either; the word has a touch of Aristotle's "final cause", of the aiming toward a goal, but in this case indicating that it has been reached, and that the goal is nothing more or less than the fulfillment of all the inbuilt potential and possibility of the creature/person.
As to salvation doctrine, what you're giving is the legal substitution model, which isn't the only one the Bible has, though it is prominent, and a favorite in the West where legal concepts run deep in the generally shared worldview. Applied to Jesus in this case, the word "perfect", referencing above, means fulfilling all his potential, without flaw or lack. Doing that both fulfills and breaks the 'Law', because it satisfies all its demands yet rises above it. And yes, if Jesus didn't have that completeness, there is no salvation under that model.

 

[Kulindahr]

Holiness is not really a moral category in the Bible. Holiness is nothing more than "other"ness. It is the infinite qualitative distinction. Holiness later took on a moral cloak, but at base it's not there. Paul says, "Come ye out and be ye separate [i.e. holy] and touch not the unclean thing and you will be the children of God." This is not the language of morality. It is ceremonial language.

That's a distinction not even many Christian pastors comprehend; if you don't study and grasp the original languages, it's easy to lose. Instead, we get the Latin/Western legalism that views holiness as crossing every t and dotting every i, having all your ducks in a row, and such.
"Set apart" is a good translation when applied to people; "otherness" is an excellent one for when it's applied to God.
It is, though, much more than ceremonial language; it gets into the ontological, addressing the very being of the entity to which it is applied. To an extent, in the Old Testament set of writings it foreshadows the New Testament call for repentance, which calls not just for the simplistic admission of having sinned, but for a surrender of one's current being and reception of a new (to make use of a Greek philosophical term) essence.

Of course the Bible is contradictory. Kuli had to explain to me a contradiction I proposed from the sixth century prophets. (He didn't convince me, but he had to explain it.) There were even some shifts in discursive fields over the time the Bible was being written. The writers sometimes end up writing past each other. I guess I see a much greater continuity between the Old and New Testaments than you do, but it's not because there are no inconsistencies.

You'll have to remind me of the proposed contradiction to which you refer; I'm not recalling it.
"Writing past each other" -- yeah, in a way, and that arises from different worldviews along with changing covenants. This is one reason I'm not comfortable with the designation "Old Testament", which means old covenant, because there's quite a collection of covenants there, and they move from a primitive tit-for-tat relationship to one of changed lives, from jumping through hoops for God (to put it crassly) to going with the flow of His Spirit and becoming like Him.
The continuity between the Old and New Testaments has been described as "seamless" (my memory is saying G. K. Chesterton, but another mental voice isn't so sure). It's a flow, from more "primitive" to more "developed" (evolutionary terms arguably inappropriate), a development of concepts starting with what the culture understood and building a new conceptual framework over the generations.

If you're wanting to describe the biblical god, you have to try to forget everything you thought you knew about God and start fresh. Or perhaps you need to analyze what you "know" about God and discount against it.

Whoa -- been reading the early Fathers? You practically paraphrase the opening of a letter from a rather off-beat (but very honest) apologist to a 'heathen' philosopher friend, with your first sentence above!
But it's true. You especially have to forget all the stuff the fundies and 'evangelicals' say; by being closer than most views, they're also more dangerous because the errors are harder to see -- it's a case of something Lewis presented, that the enemy of the perfect or best is not the utterly flawed and worst, but the almost-perfect, the not-quite best. Our society's worldview on the topic of God wraps together ancient Semitic, Greek, and Latin philosophy with Biblical concepts, resulting in a rather mushy and somewhat nebulous idea that doesn't stand close examination (i.e. it's internally inconsistent).

And ultimately, you know, truth is not measured by non-contradiction. Is there really such a thing as truth anyway? Pilate asked Jesus, "What is truth?" Unfortunately, he didn't wait around for an answer.

Right!
It stands to reason that concepts from (to use a mathematical illustration) a world of more dimensions than we experience are going to appear to conflict, when in fact they don't -- for example, two lines in 3-space can be nowhere near each other, never intersecting, but when translated to 2-space, there they are with a point in common. So a description by a being from 3-space will explain that these lines share nothing, but a being in 2-space will look and say, "Like frak they don't! They intersect!"

BTW, I'm not including paradoxes in this; those are another matter, though also to be expected. Indeed, in some contexts, the word Paul uses for "mystery" demands/includes the concept of paradox.

 

[Kulindahr]

There are, of course, situations where seemingly contradictory statements are deployed in different discursive fields. In those cases, there is no possibility of real contradiction because they are not in contact with each other.

Heh -- there's my two lines in 3-space illustration, and I hadn't even read this yet!

 

[Kulindahr]

Absolutely. People who go to doctors and take what they say without questioning are weak IMO. People who take scientific theory as absolute truth without questioning are weak IMO. People who read the Bible and take it as absolute truth without questioning are weak IMO. And yes I agree that written history of the Greeks, Egypt and China should also be questioned for accuracy and should always be read with the idea that it may not represent history as it really happened.

LOL
My doctors get frustrated with me; I insist they explain every last thing they're doing, including how the medications they prescribe work.
I love frustrated authority.

Your second sentence is where scientism comes in: people take science as an absolute truth, regarding scientists as some sort of priesthood to whom revelation is given. There's one reason where I delight in astrophysics; new discoveries often result in tossing out a model that's old and distinguished... and a month old. Following a history of astrophysics is a great way to show the limitations of science.

There are many old works we have no more than one copy of, and that generations after the fact. I recall once when a paper doing textual criticism of Plato was read, and Platonic philosophers got very irate at even the suggestion that what we have might not be Plato's actual words. OTOH, for the New Testament we have thousands of copies (of individual books; there are only three complete ones I can think of), many from the generation right after the authors', which means that many people who saw the events were still around to correct any errors.

With respect to "absolute truth": construct's introduction of Pilate's question is quite fitting here, because with scripture you first have to address whether we're dealing with propositional truth, which would make every teaching in the Bible equal in truth and value, or developmental truth, which means God started with small truths and worked up to bigger ones. The former position is commonly held, but it's false, and leads to all sorts of contradictions, which can be entertaining to those who see them, watching those who don't (sorry, but from one perspective I find the Phelps clan great entertainment, because they don't see their failure to grasp the Bible, and do so many ridiculous things as a result).

 

[bankside]

LOL
My doctors get frustrated with me; I insist they explain every last thing they're doing, including how the medications they prescribe work.
I love frustrated authority.

Your second sentence is where scientism comes in: people take science as an absolute truth, regarding scientists as some sort of priesthood to whom revelation is given.

I take it you dismiss revelation out of hand then?

There's one reason where I delight in astrophysics; new discoveries often result in tossing out a model that's old and distinguished... and a month old. Following a history of astrophysics is a great way to show the limitations of science.

On the contrary. In 500 years, scientists in general and astrophysicists in particular will be celebrating the enduring value of science, and its ability to discard, reinvent, and thus learn. Looking back at current models, they will not have to reach for literary interpretations and discursive frameworks, and ontological paradigms. Instead they will just say "Boy they sure got that wrong didn't they?" and "Yes, but Hawking was good for his time. My first-year professor showed where he made a few basic errors that would have rendered his theories valid if he had caught them." and then "Oh yes of course!" and then they'll get on with their lives.

BTW, I think lines get to exist in two space or three space but not both simultaneously unless there are a few provisos and codicils thrown in regarding what constitutes the meaning of "to intersect". Afraid there's no contradiction there either.

edit: and while i'm on a roll, if indignant atheists are debating straw-men of christendom, filled with the worst kind of implausible nonsense, i'd like it to be acknowledged that these straw-men are set up most frequently by some of the most prominent vocal self-proclaimed christians going.

Any number of fire-and-brimstone preachers have attracted vast numbers of credulous people to their congregations. If we must first ask "What does Christianity mean?" before deciding whether we accept it or not, then what the self-professed Christians define it to be is of great consequence. What the "mean Christian" believes, speaking statistically of course, is of great consequence.

While there may be subtle arguments, and even good arguments in favour of Christianity (which I'm always interested to hear), we're entitled to also address common arguments in favour of Christianity.

In large measure, Christianity is what Christians say it is. Often that is not a pleasant concept. I must insist on the point that if there are straw christians to be found, their genesis is more frequently from self-professed Christians than from disgruntled argumentative atheists.