Why the "There are so many interpretations of the Bible" claim is confused

[Nay_Sayer]

This is intended as a continuation of the discussion between me and Godschild. 

It turned out to be a huge post...GIANT argument! Made hide tags... sorry for spam, if you got caught by initial giant post. It got away from me!

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Yeah... I get what you think. I really did used to think like you. And then I woke up. I have not failed to grasp the concept of what you call  a "free gift", except it is not free. It's ludicrous to me that you cannot understand that if there is a threat accompanying a "free gift", then it's not free. You're just playing word-games by calling it "justice" and "a gift".

It is neither of those things. It is "obey me in life, or suffer in an afterlife". More accurately, it's "I am a priest and this is how I think our society should be. Um, because... Joe My Hired Thug says so. Not persuasive enough? Um.. okay, because... GOD says so!" In other words, the threats and rewards are placed after we die so they can't be falsified, but the conditions are placed in this  life, so they can have coercive social effect. It's a sick con-game.

You know what happens at death? God is no longer hidden, according to your story. There's finally real proof. So what this concept is really saying is, "We have the One True Religion™, and all the others are false! Accept the OTR and reject the others, OR ELSE! If you don't accept our faith without proof--after all, we have none to offer you--then it will be too late when you finally get proof!"  Again, you can justify that with word-games all day, but in the end it's the biggest trolly of horse hockey pucks in the history of mankind. And it's blatantly obvious to anyone who pays attention and looks with honesty. You see it plain as day when you look at Imams in Saudi Arabia, convincing their masses to be Muslim OR ELSE... but you won't look with true honesty at your own equivalence.


Awwwwww.... that's adorable!  You think there was a real garden, with a magical tree that had a real fruit which, when eaten, one's "eyes were opened", after a talking serpent (coulditbe coulditbe coulditbe....Saaaaa-tan?) convinced a frail-minded woman to do it, and she convinced her vag-whipped or mentally vacuous (perhaps because he hadn't yet "opened his eyes" by eating Knowledge Fruit?) husband to do the same?

You're trying to have the best of both worlds, rhetorically, by claiming we are born with sin-stain already on us from Adam/Eve, requiring salvation... but then claiming, no, it's a constant act we must avoid doing at all times.

No one has ever given me a satisfactory answer for why  we must "just accept the gift" of blood-sacrifice on our behalf. The closest I've seen is C.S. Lewis' fictional concept of "The Deep Magic", in the death of Aslan.

You keep saying "all I have to do is accept", except that's a bald-faced lie, isn't it? There's a host of other "accessories" that accompany this "free gift" of salvation, mainly to do with obeying the rules written down by priests in the name of God, called sins by believers and bullshit by everyone else.


Yeah, you should stop using the word free. Seriously, man. You can say it thirty more times, and it will still be a lie.

FREE means that it has no strings or conditions attached. FREE means I can take or leave it. FREE means that it is given without precondition or repercussion.

EXTORTION is when you tell me I have a debt I otherwise don't know about, that a really powerful guy says I owe him, because he says so, and if I don't follow a set of preconditions necessary, that powerful guy is going to torture me for not accepting the preconditions for "payment of the debt I owe him". That's a dogdamned Mafia shakedown!

Even if I grant your premise that it was somehow magically necessary for an innocent god-man to be murdered in my place for something a distant ancestor of mine did, permanently corrupting the human species, it is only a free gift if it works regardless of whether I submit to the authority of the deity who otherwise will murder me. Christ's blood could have paid for all, period. Instead, we get a bizarre Mafia con-game.


Well that was very nice of the Israelites to realize that they were The Chosen People, through whom their Messiah would come to free Israel, and thereby free all mankind.

While it's refreshing to see you explain God's limitations regarding the laws of the universe (sin is more powerful than God? He just can't help what the rules of sin are? Wow.), it should be child's play for you to extrapolate from that why I find this being you worship more than a little bit ludicrous, and obviously a human creation that falls far short of any worthiness for praise/worship/submission.


If you truly recognize that the things God commanded in the Old Testament (and I agree that Jesus accepted the OT as valid law, still), like genocide and slavery, and yet continue to think that it is not just humans using a God-concept to justify their own prejudices and greed by giving it divine cover, but actually are  the properties of your deity, then yes, I suppose I am calling you irrational and dishonorable. I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt and suggest that you simply had not truly considered the implications of a being that behaves the way the petty, petulant, vengeful, murderous psychopath in the OT does.


Not what it says. Read again. Humans have innate morality, except for psychopaths and sociopaths.

As for "fifty years ago", mankind's morality has improved remarkably, in that period of time. We've granted rights to racial minorities, women, prisoners, and other groups that were simply ignored or openly trampled, before. The fact that you see these advances as "depraved" is a big part of the reason I consider myself more moral than the system you promote, than the God you worship.


You don't look very well, or very clearly, then. I don't think I've ever seen Dawkins mentioned in anything like a worshipful or inerrantist context. Most of us think he has some great ideas, some terrible ideas, and a lot of ideas that are worth thinking about. But in the idea, the thinking process and decision to accept or reject the ideas of others, even "The Holy Prophet Dawkins, Peace Be Upon Him", are our own. (That prophet reference was sarcasm, in case it's not obvious in print-form.)

I mean, seriously, I've been an open atheist for 17 years, and an active science-studying (including reading Dawkins' The Selfish Gene  very early-on) agnostic for 22 years. Are you really  trying to sit there and tell me that you know better than I do how people in this community view Dawkins?

To be honest, I found much of what The God Delusion  argued to be poor counter-apologetics, and thought that Dawkins should stick to science, though much of what was in there was indeed thought-provoking. When/if I do encounter an atheist who is simply parroting the arguments, especially erroneous ones, of any known writer, I'll encourage them to consider their errors and formulate better arguments on their own, even if I never wind up agreeing with their conclusions. What I can't understand is why it's so important for Christians to imagine Dawkins as some kind of atheist messiah, when we see him in no such light-- though many of us do admire him, as we admired Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov and Robert Ingersoll, and so on.


God commands the murder of nonbelievers (Deuteronomy 13:7-19, Deuteronomy 17:2-5, Exodus 22:19), adulterers (Leviticus 20:10), slutty daughters (Leviticus 21:9 and Deuteronomy 22:20-21), heretics (Deuteronomy 13:1-5, Deuteronomy 18:20-22, Zechariah 13:3), blasphemers (Leviticus 24:10-16), apostates (Ezekiel 9:1-7), and everyone in the National Football League (Exodus 31:12-15). He specifically endorses inheritable, permanent-property racial-based slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46) and extreme violence to support slavery (Exodus 21:20-21), as well as sexual slavery of rape victims once they become damaged goods (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). During their genocidal rampage against their fellow Semites in the region, God approves of or even commands the murder of males, and sexual slavery of females, in entire cities and nations across the region (Numbers 31:7-18, Deuteronomy 20:10-14, Judges 5:28-31, Zechariah 14:1-2, et cetera) ...

I almost listed more genocide, but realized it would take up most of my morning to even start to list the places where The LORD commands the people of Israel (directly, mostly, but sometimes via the God-appointed priests/kings/judges) to slaughter their neighbors for various kinds of "wickedness", which mainly seems to constitute being on the piece of land the Israelites thought was theirs. There's no need to go on listing all the other reasons, like the misogyny, homophobia, anti-free-speech, and other positions are absolutely against every concept of basic human decency and morality that I consider sacred. You cannot just excuse them as "well that's just the culture of the time", because you are the one trying to assert the position that God makes commandments which are necessary for people and nations to follow, lest the be "sinful",  meaning God can command them not to do things that are plainly obvious as immoral, today, like slavery.

An example of such a passage might be: "O people of Israel, as you were slaves whom I freed from the land of Egypt, thou shalt posess no slaves among thy people, nor compel involuntary service of any kind, nor tolerate the presence of slavery anywhere in the land which I have given for you, for its practice is an abomination in my sight. Thus saith the LORD." - Surgeononomy 10:15.


That's hilarious. You just wrote all White Supremacists off as irrational because you don't agree with their ideologies. And yet, I know from personal experience in dealing with them for almost a decade, they all have a long and detailed list of their reasons for believing as they do, no less consistent and no less complex than your own philosophies. Indeed, one of their favorite expressions is that they don't hate, they just think the races should be separate and that they are fighting for the purity of the white race. They consider themselves just as rational as you do. Of course, I think both groups are just as nuts as you think the other one is.

It's also funny because you talk about being "freed from hate" (as the Supremacists do), and yet all I hear from either group is a torrent of hatred. When I became an atheist, one of the most freeing elements was that I discovered I had no reason to hate and judge any person of a good-hearted nature... no more hating "sinners" or wondering who did and didn't qualify for various classifications, none of that. You people talk about love, but I accept people as they are, as long as they are not seeking to harm their fellow human beings (against the will of the others), and that is real love for your fellow man.


You clearly have never met actual White Supremacists in person. I happen to agree with your analysis of their position, but what you don't realize is I can't really tell an effective difference in their reasoning/beliefs and yours, except that they consider race-mixing to be a sin (they agree with most everything else that you call "sin", and many if not most of them are Christians, too).




Don't you get it? You just confirmed exactly what I was saying!


I like how you think this is an insult to me. Improving our morality is a good thing, not something I should be ashamed of!

I find your "unchanging Justice" to be the least just concept humans have ever concocted. By every measurable standard, our morality has improved since the times of Moses and David and Jesus. And to the degree our society has improved, pretty much everyone but you would agree that we're better off now than we were when it was okay to own slaves, or when it was okay to suppress and segregate black people, when you could beat your wife for disobeying you, when rape victims could be "put on trial" for their sexual habits when they tried to bring their rapist to justice, and a list that could fill a book! (And has.) The idea that we hit upon a concept of righteousness in the year _____ and should never deviate from it is the stuff of theocracy... lunacy.


Probably. I have little doubt that there are things we will discover in the future that will make some of our ideas today seem quaint. But I don't think we're entirely wrong, either. That's the whole point of trying to constantly figure out the truth, or to recognize where we have fallen short in our conception of justice, equality, and decency, and repair those ideas. People of the future will not fault those who tried to make the world better, and who nevertheless failed to get it all right... they will fault people like you, who stuck to their guns even in the face of the suffering a wrongheaded idea causes.

I don't "equate the physical and the spiritual". Quite the opposite. The physical is real. The spiritual is crap you make up, or rather swallow up, since others come up with most of those concepts for you to believe.

I don't lack the "spiritual knowledge" (I also used to use that term on nonbelievers... except we preferred the term "lacks the spiritual discernment"), I simply don't agree with you. I have learned quite a few things since the days when I thought as you do.

Annnnnnnnd we're back to the "self-interest" argument. What part of all my protestations on behalf of others who are not like me (my primary complaint against religion usually being that it suppresses groups who are not like them!), and trying to extend a concept of human value that doesn't require conformity, strikes you as "self-interest"? I know the psychological defense-mechanism that causes you to misstate why I do and think the things I do, since it protects you from having to wonder if I might actually be right. As long as you can call me angry, or self-interested, or just another religion, etc, then you don't have to face the consequences of potentially concluding that I may have in fact been totally reasonable and thus might have a valid position.

Since your religion teaches that your faith-tradition is the only possible reasonable position, it causes cognitive dissonance in your brain, and you must stretch for ways to protect yourself from it. It's okay. I forgive you.

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 I've read through your counter arguments and need some time to answer you and that want be possible this weekend, I'll get to it Monday, have a great weekend.

GC

I'm betting that translates into briefly skim.