On Apr 11, 2006, at 2:22 PM, Charlie Bell wrote:
On 11/04/2006, at 6:33 PM, Nick Arnett wrote:
He also seems to fail to recognize the difference between
irrational and
non-rational beliefs. And this statement, " Religious moderation
is just a
cherry-picking of scripture, ultimately," is ridiculous. It
implies that
fundamentalism is the only *complete* form of Christianity.
Nonsense,
really.
So how do you decide which parts of scripture to follow and which
not? The whole bible? Just the NT? Just Jesus' teachings, and
ignore Paul's commentary?
...
Faith in a deity/deities/force/whatever is one thing. It's highly
personal. But faith in a book is something else, and that's where
the argument starts - if the book says one thing, but a follower
disagrees and does something else, where's the value in the book?
One view -- a minority view in Christianity -- is that the Bible is
a human product, not a divine one. The Bible records certain people's
wrestling with who God might be and how they might relate to God. The
value in such a book (which is definitely NOT to be worshiped, but
can still be taken very seriously) is that it lets us know what our
spiritual forbears thought and believed, which might inform our
understanding of God and our relationship to God. It also contains
some historically-factual events.
It has been said "The Bible is true, and some of it actually
happened." Problems arise when our (modern, Western) ideas of the
equality of "truth" and "factuality" are layered on top of writings
that didn't originate in the same understanding of truth and factuality.
Unfortunately, that's all I have time for right now, but I do hold
that there is value in the book, and it is not that it was handed
down from deity.
Dave
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