Religion or Science - How do they compare?

"Lean not unto your own understanding" is good advice to fallen humanity so prone to error, when we have God who is omniscient and willing to guide us to the truth: "In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths."Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This story is very common these days. I don't understand how anyone could ever have considered himself to be a Christian without knowing at least what is IN the Bible from hearing sermons on it. Perhaps the fault is in those churches that don't preach the Bible?

When I was becoming a Christian in my mid-to-late forties in the late eighties, entirely from reading books about religion, I found the doctrine of the Fall/original sin to be the most amazingly illuminating thing I'd ever heard. It explains just about everything about our current condition, our propensity to sin, to disobey all God's laws, and our lack of communication with God, it explains war and violence and murder, just about everything. Nothing makes sense without it.We are magnificent creatures, I've always felt that, and that "science" is so determined to demote and degrade us there has to be something wrong with science. Something I felt long before I was a Christian. But we are also broken creatures. Biblical doctrine explains that we were meant for a high destiny but that disobedience of our Creator cut us off from that high destiny. That fits what I always felt about human beings better than I could ever have thought it. And then on top of that I find out that God has given us a way to recover our high destiny out of love for us, and it reduces me to tears of gratitude. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm talking about the practice of preaching the Bible through, that some preachers do, usually taking a book and working through it over a long period of time, in some cases years. They preach on only one segment for a sermon or may even take a series of Sundays on that one segment and it may be just a few verses. If you hear this kind of preaching you will note that they often refer to various commentaries they've been studying about the passage, discussing where they agree and disagree, which avoids the effect you are expecting of just getting a personal opinion. It also involves many excursions into other parts of the Bible that are related to the particular topic of the moment. This method of preaching is becoming a more common practice as there is a Reformed movement going on that has been going on a few decades now, that promotes this approach to sermons. You do learn a lot of Bible this way.There is another approach that is just as good I think, which is to take a topic, say original sin or anything you like, and preach on all the texts that apply to that topic in various ways, quoting them all and discussing them all and making use of commentaries as well.As of course you know, up until the printing press people didn't have Bibles of their own so they couldn't read them, they had to listen to them preached in church, and since the Roman Church forbade the Bible to be read in the people's languages they really couldn't get a lot out of it at all and instead lived a life of pagan superstition that had nothing to do with Christianity. In the earliest days the people also had to rely on the preacher as their source of knowledge of the Bible. Before the Bible was compiled as a single book the leaders of the churches read the separate writings, the gospels, the letters of the apostles and so on. There have also always been those down the centuries who did preach and teach the Bible accurately as well.Of course we should all read the Bible for ourselves. I was responding to the fact that Paboss apparently didn't know the Bible although he considered himself a strong Christian, so when he sat down to read it he discovered all these things about it that offended him. So I figure he wasn't getting much preaching on it either.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Instead of pontificating from your position of knowing nothing, why don't you find out how it works. Pick a topic or a Bible book and go listen through a series of preachings on it at Sermon Audio.In the process of preaching through a book many other passages from other parts of the Bible are also quoted and discussed as they apply to the same issues under discussion. Yes you do learn a lot of Bible this way. But your only exposure to the Bible in church isn't just the sermon, if good hymns are chosen they also teach the Bible, and there are Bible study classes and all sorts of other sources of knowledge.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Lots of preachers discuss the supposed contradictions.ABE: Here's a page of sermons on the topic of Contradictions at Sermon Audio. Not all are about supposed contradictions within the Bible but obviously some are. I haven't listened to any of them, I'm just showing you that it's not an ignored topic. If I were to pick one to listen to first I'd pick R. C. Sproul or James White. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

They would most likely show how they aren't contradictions. I added an edit to Message 48 to refer you to Sermon Audio for talks on the subject.

Sometimes a sermon has a transcript attached to it, and there are also books on the subject.

I've been looking through the Sermon Audio list and haven't found one I particularly like yet. I would listen to unknowns myself but wouldn't want to recommend them to others unless I became more familiar with them. There's one preacher there who has a series on the contradictions in the Bible I may listen to but haven't yet, too much else on my mind.The Judas death stories are difficult but with most such questions of fact it's usually a matter of one writer having part of the story and the other writer a different part. Living people don't just fall down in a field and burst open, so that probably happened after Judas was already dead and his body bloated and decayed, probably when his body fell from whatever he hanged himself on. Who bought the field is a question too, but it was bought with Judas' money so that even if the priests made the literal transaction one could say Judas bought it. Or Judas bought it before dying there and the priests made use of it for a burial ground later. Who knows. But it's really not terribly important and probably not even really a contradiction if we had all the details.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I probably wouldn't agree with Sproul about that since you want a comment, and I've found I don't agree with him about other things. But I haven't had time to go through the list and find one I would agree with.I'm not interested enough in the Judas story to try to figure out the details.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I appreciate being able to explain all those things in terms of fallenness. I'm not sure exactly why you object to it."Science" at least the evolutionary "sciences," has pointedly seemed to enjoy demoting us. You think it's just objectively assessing the world, I don't, I think that's a sort of reverse romance about science, the kind of sciences that try to define us anyway, and that it has had a demoralizing effect on the world. There are objective sciences but not the ones that define us. You think they are defining reality, I do not.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

All this defense of humanity against the idea of original sin actually makes a virtue out of a deficient condition. Oddly perhaps, to my mind original sin, our basic depravity, exalts humanity by implying that we are meant to be so much better than we are. So you think we are perfection itself? Seems to me the flaws really ought to be obvious. In any case what we originally were meant to be shines through this doctrine, with lost abilities that are hard to imagine since we take our broken condition as the standard, abilities I expect to have restored to believers at the resurrection, mental abilities, moral abilities, physical abilities, and most of it things we can't even imagine. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Just not those flaws attributed to the Fall, OK, with no hope of correction of those particular flaws as I was describing. OK. I was trying to get something across about the implications of original sin but oh well.

This completely misses the point. Personal flaws are not the point, I'm talking about a basically flawed human nature shared by all of us.

Oh wow, more semantic nitpicking. Fine, confuse the whole issue as usual.