You didn't respond to what I had written, so why make a false show of quoting from me? In
Message 145 I wrote (emphasis added):
DWise1 writes:
Even his citing the Bible for support is problematic. As Thomas Paine correctly pointed out, a document derives its authority from one of two qualities: the validity of its contents and its authorship. Euclid's Geometry is just as valid and valuable regardless of whether Euclid had actually written it,
but the books of the Bible depend entirely upon their authorship so if they were not truly written by their purported authors then they lose their validity.
Phat and several other people do believe in the claims about the authorship of the Bible and so they seek support in it, but many others do not believe those authorship claims and so appeals to the Bible for support are meaningless. For that matter {ABE: better wording would have been "in that case"}, quoting from the Bible just amounts to baseless and bare assertions. In the topic that spawned this one, Phat even went so far as to make ludicrous pronouncements about what atheists think and believe all based on false assertions in the Bible. And of course there's the additional wrinkle that Phat and other Bible-believers are depending on their
interpretations of assertions gleaned from the Bible and from other non-biblical aspects of their theology.
Rather then futilely seeking support for his opinions, he needs to present an actual case for those opinions so that they can stand or fall because of their own validity.
So, after having been informed in clear terms that "responding" to a non-believer simply by quoting the Bible (AKA,
trying to bludgeon him with your Bible) is a meaningless and useless waste of bandwidth, because those verses you quoted are just bare assertions based on hearsay and having no real meaning.
Let me try to explain to you what I wrote:
Even his citing the Bible for support is problematic.
This is the thesis of the paragraph. You are making a mistake by citing the Bible to support your bigotry for the same reason that an SA brown-shirt would be mistaken to cite
Der Strmer to support his. I then proceed to explain why your entire approach is problematic.
As Thomas Paine correctly pointed out, a document derives its authority from one of two qualities: the validity of its contents and its authorship.
OK, perhaps it would have been more clear to have written, "the validity of its contents
or its authorship." Nonetheless, the meaning of this sentence should be clear. Do you dispute this statement? If so, then please give specific reasons why.
Euclid's Geometry is just as valid and valuable regardless of whether Euclid had actually written it, ...
That also should be quite clear. Do you dispute this statement? Again, if so, then please give specific reasons why.
..., but the books of the Bible depend entirely upon their authorship so if they were not truly written by their purported authors then they lose their validity.
That also should be quite clear. I suspect that you do dispute this statement, so I'll develop this idea further.
First, we have the general case of the effect of the authenticity of authorship on any document. An autobiography that was not written by that person would be a fraud and hence could not be trusted. The same goes for a diary or a logbook or one's memoirs or a confession or the like. In each of those cases, the document is only of value if it was truly written by the person it purports to be written by. If it was not written by that person, then it is a fraud and is worthless, except as evidence leading to the arrest and conviction of the hoaxter.
Do you disagree with that? Again, specific reasoning if you do.
The same would apply to teachings of a famous personage, that their initial value would depend on whether they are indeed the teachings of that famous person or not. But here we also encounter the criterion of the validity of the contents which applies to such works as Euclid's "Geometry" or Newton's "Philosophi Naturalis Principia Mathematica". If the teachings can be shown
objectively to have intrinsic validity and value, then it does not truly matter who had written them. But if that test cannot be performed, as is most often the case with religious teachings, then such teachings end up depending on the authenticity of their purported authorship.
Of course, there is a lot of gray-area in that, such as with histories which need corroboration from other sources. Even anonymous religious teachings could be deemed to have intrinsic value, though that would depend on whether they supported one's own religious beliefs or appeared to refute others' religious beliefs, so that test could hardly be considered objective.
Do you disagree with that? Again, please be specific if you do.
Now, when we address the question of the authenticity of the authorship of the books of the Bible, let us first chase the obvious rabbit. The books of the Bible were written by Man, questions of divine inspiration aside (we'll get to that below).
Do you disagree with that? Again, please be specific if you do. And, again,
at this point we are not yet talking about the effects of divine inspiration or intervention; that will come later so save that kind of objection until later.
Immediately, we encounter the problem of the
pseudepigrapha, works that are falsely attributed to someone else. This was a common practice in ancient times and even after. It was further confused by the library systems of the time (as James Burke has described it) in which a document's labeling could indicate the author, or that it had to do with that person, or almost anything. The many Gospels were attributed to apostles and other followers of Jesus, but that doesn't mean that they were actually written by those persons.
This is a factor that confuses matters here, but how important is the authenticity of human authorship when it comes to the Bible? With the epistles it would matter more, but when it really comes down to brass tacks, does authentic authorship really matter? The validity of the books of the New Testament was decided by a human committee to be canon. And even if that weren't the case, the question of the actual human authors of the books of the Bible isn't really that important. Well, at least not to most. I imagine that there could be some Christians who make specific authentic human authorship an article of faith, but that's their own problem.
Rather, what is important to many Christians and especially to fundamentalist/evangelical/conservative/etc Christians, is the
Divine Authorship of the Bible. I do know that over the decades I've encountered and heard countless fundamentalists making the uncompromising either-or proclamation that either the Bible is the inerrant
Word of God or it's complete rubbish and they made it completely clear that their complete faith depended on the outcome of that "dilemma". This Divine Authorship can be believed and understood over a spectrum depending on individual and congregational/denominational interpretations of what that's supposed to mean, but it does appear to be part of most Christian denominations' doctrine -- I would be hard-pressed to come up with any contrary examples, except perhaps Unitarian-Universalist Christians (yes, we were also surprised to learn that they exist). You appear to lean in the direction of that fundamentalist stance, whether from near or from afar, while I lean away in the direction of that stance being based on a false dilemma, but that is another discussion.
Do you disagree with me strongly on any major points yet? I do not expect that you would, outside of a few minor quibbles. Unless you're one of the unfortunates hung up on authentic human authorship, in which case I'm afraid that's your own problem that you'll have to work out for yourself.
Now we get to a point where you might disagree.
The conclusion I draw from the above is that the Bible is of the class of document which derives its validity and value from its purported authorship and not from its contents. You might disagree with me and claim that its content is all valid and valuable, but then that content is religious teachings which just happen to coincide with your own beliefs and hence you would
subjectively assess them to be valid -- actually, you are caught in a very tight circular-reasoning loop there, since your beliefs are based on doctrine which is based on the Bible which supports your beliefs which are based on doctrine with is based on the Bible ... etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Yours is not an objective assessment.
Furthermore, the fundamentalist stance agrees with me, since that stance depends solidly on the Divine Authorship of the Bible. Yes, they believe the contents are valid and valuable,
but only because of the Divine Authorship of the Bible! According to these berChristians, authorship is the test, not actual content.
So, I believe that I've made a case for my conclusion. If you disagree, then please build a valid and objective case for that disagreement.
Since the question of the validity of the Bible and hence of its contents hinges on the question of Divine Authorship and the question of Divine Authorship hinges on whether one believes in your god or not, that leads us to the next statement:
Phat and several other people do believe in the claims about the authorship of the Bible and so they seek support in it, but many others do not believe those authorship claims and so appeals to the Bible for support are meaningless.
To remove possible ambiguity, let me add to that, "are meaningless
to them.", which was what I meant.
One slippery term I would rather avoid here is "belief in God", because that is so many-varied and nebulous. And also because believers will read into it all kinds of extraneous doctrinal points that they believe should apply but which other believers would not -- I have personally witnessed that heinous trick being used in court to support outright religious discrimination.
But my compelling reason for wanting to avoid it here is because it has no real bearing on the statement in question. What does have bearing on the statement is whether one believes in the Divine Authorship of the Bible, a belief which may be dependent on one believing in the existence of a Christian god of suitable denomination,
but which is not shared by all believers in a Christian god. So the statement does not depend on belief in a Christian god, but rather in the Bible having been authored by one's Christian god.
IOW, via a Boolean truth table, we have two Boolean variables: Belief in God, and Belief in Divine Authorship
There are four possible combinations:
A = believes in God and believes in Divine Authorship
B = believes in God and does not believe in Divine Authorship
C = does not believe in God and believes in Divine Authorship (not very likely)
D = does not believe in God and does not believe in Divine Authorship
Of the four possibilities, A, B, and D are known to exist, while C makes not sense and most likely does not exist outside of some really fringe type. That both A and B exist demonstrates that "belief in God" is not a factor to be considered, since it makes no difference.
However, the existence of the B group also demonstrates that my statement is not completely true, because my statement had excluded them. True, using those Bible verses to support your position would not be very compelling to them, but at the same time Bible verses would not be meaningless to them. Inspiration can still be drawn from a religious text regardless of what one believes about Divine Authorship. For that matter, even non-believers can appreciate parts of a culture's accumulated wisdom. Such as that Pharisee teaching known as the Golden Rule.
Rather, my statement was directly addressing two groups, A and D, one believers who seek support in the Bible for their bigotry because they believe in Divine Authorship, and the other being non-believers who naturally do not believe in Divine Authorship and for whom such appeals for support are meaningless. I cannot speak for Group C, if any such even exist.
For that matter {ABE: better wording would have been "in that case"}, quoting from the Bible just amounts to baseless and bare assertions {ABE: "to non-believers"}.
The additions by edit should remove any ambiguity from that statement. It should be quite clear and I cannot see how you could disagree with that simple and obvious fact.
Again, as before, if you do disagree, then provide a well-reasoned response.
In the topic that spawned this one, Phat even went so far as to make ludicrous pronouncements about what atheists think and believe all based on false assertions in the Bible. And of course there's the additional wrinkle that Phat and other Bible-believers are depending on their interpretations of assertions gleaned from the Bible and from other non-biblical aspects of their theology.
You have your invisible friends; I do not share them. However, I served 35 years defending your right to have your invisible friends and my right to not have others inflict their invisible friends on me nor on others. That's religious liberty.
Your invisible friends' lies about non-believers incite virulent discrimination and even threats of physical violence against non-believers. And at best, highly offensive proselytizing by Christians who insist they know all about what non-believers think and believe and all the while it is so painfully obvious that those ignorant deluded fools have absolutely no clue of the truth and refuse to even begin to listen to the truth. Sound like somebody we all know here, Phat?
You may have your invisible friends. You may even believe their lies if you want. Just keep their lies to yourself.
These days people don't even hate Jesus. They simply deny that He exists.
Disregarding the whole "historic Jesus" question, a person who existed in the past and has died can indeed be said to no longer exist.
But then isn't your whole argument that "we actually know God exists but we hate him". And since Christians tend to make Jesus into God, then your argument all along has been that we hate Jesus. So now you're changing your story? A little consistency and intellectual honesty, please!
First you speak truth...Father God exists...
Ah! So you admit that you believe in Zeus!
Because Pater Dias, the Father of Gods and Men, is Zeus! (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus_Pater) Since you believe that Zeus exists, why do you deny Him? Why do you hate Him so? You know that He exists; you just admitted it!
As I explicitly told you, you are making the same kind of ridiculous pronouncements about non-believers in your own particular god. Which you chose to avoid addressing!
God is not a product of your imagination.
No, not of my imagination, since I don't believe in the gods, but rather of your own invention. Not only does Man create the gods, but also each individual believer creates his own version of "God". Even if some supernatural being were to exist that would be powerful enough to be considered as being "God", you would
still have to invent your own imperfect version of it.
The truth is that your ideas and understanding of "God" are wrong, no different than with everybody else. You need to question those ideas in order to try to correct them. It's when you believe most strongly that you have it right that you actually have it the most wrong.
quote:
"God is not what you imagine, or what you think you understand. For if you understand, you have failed."
-- Augustine of Hippo
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