Why Are Christians Afraid To Doubt?

What does that have to do with what I said?Have you actually read 1 Cor?Edited by jar, : No reason given.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

The Magnificat is a remembering of the promises of God to Israel and to Abraham. This 'message' of God is proven to have been preserved up to the time of the NT and even in our time.

Ok, so Catholicism has one Bible, one set of beliefs. Does that make this faith true? I can't promise you no war-fare unless I take away your right to think for yourself. A million people freely thinkng about a million stupid things proves nothing. You may want it to, but it doesn't. All it is proving is that we can still think up nonsense in spite of whatever is revealed. There is not static for everyone. No, only some god you are dreaming up. Why would I want God to make things so obvious? Don't you know I already believe that you must seek in order to find? You just want a quick fix perhpas. Maybe I didn't mis speak. Maybe you mis listened. All will not = not all will. I dodn't say 'none will'. So people can choose to believe? So you have proof that things are false which pertain to God?

dupe postEdited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Of course, the much more likely explanation is that the author of the Magnificat had access to a Bible.

???On what planet is that even true? Oh, right. I keep forgetting - everybody makes the exact same claim of getting the straight dope direct from God, but you're the only one for whom that claim is actually true. Everybody else is either lying or mistaken. I'm not saying that you do want that. But you don't get to make two contradictory claims simultaneously. You don't get to claim that God has preserved his message eternally for your personal reception, and then wonder why anybody would suspect God of preserving his messages when that's clearly the boring outcome.It doesn't make any sense. If you don't want God to make things so obvious, then stop telling me that God has taken steps to make things so obvious. I don't even believe in God. I can only take your word on what you believe he's doing, so when you talk out of both sides of your mouth as you're doing now, it only makes you look more ridiculous. No, it doesn't. If you meant the latter, it's not the same as the former. "All will not" means "none will." "Not all will" means "some won't." (You'd think they never teach grammar or predicate logic these days.) Did you go back and read the post I was talking about? Allow me to link to it: Message 259I mean, I assumed you had read it; you replied to it, after all. Go back and read more closely, this time, and follow the link to the Asch conformity experiments. Learn something about why people would believe in something they can see with their own eyes isn't true.

I never said *I* am anything. I never even said that this straight 'dope' is observable to anyone. It is a belief. We believe that God is still working in humanity. We believe that those things which are necessary for salvation are still being revealed. You can't make that go away, no matter how many examples of confusion you invoke. My personal reception? OK. Go talk to GIA about that. Things are obviously NOT obvious to you, which are to me and to others. You still can't prove that your pessimism has anything to do with reality. If there is a message it is preserved. Your confusion doesn't make it go away, the world's confusion doesn't make it go away. That is what preservation is, isn't it? I don't know, do they?Who in their right grammatical mind would say 'all will not' when a nice simple word like 'none' exists?All (children) will not play ball today.Not all (children) will play ball today.If you think this is a fair substitute for;No children will play ball today.well, it isn't. Sure. But that has nothing to do with Christianity.

Duh.The point is that if there was no meaning in the words of the Bible for the Israelites, they would have stopped reading it. It wasn't called a Bible anyway.

If no one knows God's "true" message, then you can't exactly claim that it's been preserved, now can you? Anastasia, it's not my pessimism that says that there's 11,000 Christian denominations worldwide; that's a fact. It's not my pessimism that says that there's 2 dozen different translations of the Bible, that's also a fact.These are facts, not pessimism. They appear to be facts you're not even willing to face. You're just putting your fingers in your ears. If it's confused, then it's not preserved, now is it? Why are you asking me? You're the one who wrote it. If you don't know what your own writing means, I'm not the one to ask. I can't imagine why you're having such difficulty reading statements in plain English. Take it from an English major, if you must - "All (children) will not play ball today" is synonymous with "No children will play ball today", and means something very different than "Not all (children) will play ball today."Your relentless contrarianism is becoming ridiculous. Now you're disputing statements in plain English? You're really starting to look silly. I don't see anything in the research that says that it didn't apply to Christianity, and I'm not prepared to accept that just on your say-so. Why should I believe you? Again, this is just more of your relentless, ridiculous contrarianism. Whatever I say, you're convinced it must be wrong.

If there is a God, and if He has a message, it stands to reason that the almighty God would be able to preserve the message. All I am asking for you to do is prove to me beyond any doubt that there is no message...regardless of whether you can see it. Just prove that too many choices = nothing. Luckily, I read with my eyes. I also find the many different sects quite fascinating, but the numbers still have nothing to do with the probability. The only thing they do is make it harder to find one message. They don't make it disappear. Contrarianism?
I don't know. I only know is that I can say 'all is not lost' and also 'all is not saved' and that most people will understand this even if it is not good grammar. It never has seemed to me that 'all is not lost' means that everything is intact. Well, you said people can believe things that they see with their own eyes and know to be false. This does not apply to Christianity. If it does, I don't 'see' anything that I know to be false.

Sure, I suppose so. Since he clearly didn't preserve anything, I guess you just single-handedly disproved the existence of God. Congratulations! If it's so hard that it's impossible, then indeed, they did make it disappear. Just like the Ark disappears into the Office of Naval Intelligence at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.Allowing it to be all but impossible to recover the original message is not what I would expect from a God who was supposed to be making efforts to preserve the message. That's what I would expect from a message that was mutating through transmission, like a game of Telephone. In other words the proliferation of competing messages supports my view. Well, take your fingers out of those, too. Because you say it doesn't? Let me lay it out for you - I don't believe you. In fact it seems obvious that it does apply; that the central claims of Christianity are accepted by many simply because everyone they know accepts them - indeed, proclaims them with great vigor. Anybody can see that the basic historic claims of Christianity, supported by no contemporary accounts, are ludicrous on their face. Water to wine? Coming back from the dead? Traveling around inside whales? They're as ridiculous as asserting that all three of those lines are the same length. Neither did the people in the example. That's the important thing to keep in mind. When, after the trial, they were asked why they made such an obviously incorrect answer, they blamed their vision. They were certain that they had "seen" what everybody else said they were seeing, even though it was impossible for them to have done so. The consensus view actually determined what they remembered seeing. So, of course you wouldn't "see" anything you knew to be false. You've been conditioned to see it as true.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Either way, the premise that we can rely on answers because we used logic to obtain them is clearly falsified. Knowledge obtained in this way is very much subject to error."Logic is not a tool which can guarantee perfect results". Would that be a better way to put it?And lest we think logic is perfect, where did we get it? Was the source subject to error?

I wouldn't say that it's subject to error; it's more accurate to say that it doesn't mean anything, because logic is only valid in so far as its axioms are.What's definitely subject to error is intuition. Surely you must recognize this? For instance, apply your intuition here:and tell me which of these two tables is the longest, and which is the widest.Then get out a ruler and measure them.It's impossible to look at these tables and not perceive that the leftmost is the longest and the rightmost is the widest, but if you measure them you'll see that they have the exact same dimensions.This is just one instance where intuition fails (or can be tricked.) Certainly our intuition is as good as heuristic learning would allow, but intuition is very limited and biased to personal experience. When logic or observation or experimentation suggest conclusions that we find contrary to intuition, we should be very cautious about rejecting them on that basis. Our intuition is often a poor guide indeed. Or as Sam Harris says:

quote:

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We now know a fair amount about how bad our intuitions can be--with respect to causality, probability, logical dependence, and a wide range of other parameters that determine our commonsense (and erroneous) view of the world. Spend a little time thinking about the Monty Hall problem, and once you understand it, witness how difficult it is to explain to someone who has never thought about it before. Even profoundly simple situations can confound us.

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Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris blog on the Bible, Islam, Jesus, Religion, Faith, and Death - BeliefnetI'm with you on logic, CTD. It's not of unlimited value, and I certainly wouldn't set logic above conclusions drawn empirically from observation of the real world. But as a basic sanity check against failures of intuition, it can't be denied.But ultimately, scientific inquiry into the condition of the universe is the best tool we have for truth-gathering. Certainly not intuition. Certainly not making things up because they make us feel good. I know a number of mathematicians who would inform you that the rules of logic were not invented, but rather discovered. (I think the idea that right ideas sit out there somewhere in Platospace waiting to be discovered is somewhat ridiculous, myself.) Logic is a language, like any other, only with a much stricter grammar.

There is that other possibility that you are wrong. There is that possibility that the words of God are living right under your nose. It's hard for you. It's not like a game of Telephone. It is like many. Actually, the more players playing simultaneous games, the more chance there will be that one team does get the message right. Unless, of course, it is proven that no game of telephone could ever be 'won'. Don't worry about where my fingers are. I don't believe you either, so there. I am sticking my tongue out at you, too. Anyway, water to wine...that would sound to anyone living a few centuries ago much more plausible than would evolution of species and a big bang, complete with life forming from non-life. Much more plausible than landing on the moon. What is the big deal about making water into another liquid? What is so ridiculous about being swallowed by a whale? There are much stranger things that happen every day. Yeah yeah. There is just one problem. You can't see the lines at all. You have no idea if they are long or short. You have no idea who is right or wrong. There is no one alive right now who can 'see' the lines at all. You are guessing. You have to wait until you are dead for the answer, sorry.Anyway, I only started this thing because I think it is fair to defend the poor folks who feel that the Bible is the Word of God from your pessimism. The Bible is a tool for the Living Tradition. If you doubt preservation of some message, take it up with the entire body of Abrahamic faiths.

Since they can't be discerned, they clearly weren't preserved. You're right. It's more like a game of Pyramid telephone, where the original speaker whispers to two people, and each of those two whisper to two others, and so on.Tell me - have you ever played any game of telephone where the message at the end was the same one you started with? Isn't that the point of the game, that it never works out that way?You're telling me that God made it so that it did; but clearly he didn't, because at the bottom of the pyramid (where we are) we've got thousands of different messages. If he had preserved his message, it would have been preserved in every telling. Therefore everyone at the bottom of the pyramid would have recieved the same message, because God preserved it at every step.That clearly didn't happen. I doubt it. Even at that time, people knew they could change animals and plants by selective breeding. And that's all evolution is - the recognition that the same force is at work in the natural world, too.But water to wine? Wine is made from grapes, not from water. Everybody knows that. (I guess you have to water the grapes but you know what I mean.) No, there's not. People don't change water into wine, and people don't ride around in whales. Those things don't happen. Well, here's an idea. Instead of calling me names, why don't you try defending those folks by providing evidence that they're correct? That's usually how we do things around here. Not that it hasn't been fun, telling you what words mean in plain English and showing you line drawings.