How can Christians not admit Christianity is all a pile of garbage when ...?

[coffeeveritas]

Pleased to meet you too Coffee.
Don't worry, I knew what they meant. I wanted you to explain how The Bible gave us insight into either.
Imagination is great when it comes to works of creativity, however, it is no measuring device for what is. You said that The Bible could be used to understand the metaphysical and the epistemological but I fail to see how that is the case. I would agree that The Bible should be kept around for insight into the workings of mythology or the primitive mindset but I can't see any other use for it. Any morale message it presents is quickly contradicted by itself and the contradictions far outweigh the morale messages. As for insights on the metaphysical it provides only severely biased interpretations, none of which can be seriously considered to have any philosophical value. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, how we define what knowledge is. The Bible makes no attempts to establish what knowledge is preferring instead to replace it entirely with belief. That is not a mind-set that cares for truth or justification.

I think you need to seriously consider if that is a good thing for anyone to learn. If we are to use imagination for the scale of how valuable the Bible is then we should not look at it as anything other than a work of great creativity, a work of art but a myth nonetheless. To use imagination to weigh up philisophical, logical, moral or factual value would be a gross error of judgement.

Hmm. . . That's still not the definition of "imagination" that I'm thinking of. I'll have to find a good article on post-post modernity to link you to.

As far as the metaphysical goes, are you aware of an account that is not severely biased? Of course the Bible is a biased account, all accounts are biased. I was saying there was a way to encounter the bias in the Bible through your own bias and come up with a more informed bias.
As for the moral, I believe I addressed that in an earlier post on this thread.
As for the epistemology, that has been a part of theology since the beginning. Of course you probably wouldn't like the writings of Justin Martyr, since his is a very Christian epistemology. Nevertheless, modern writers such as Rob Bell would say that "all truth is God's truth," or translated out of religious language, "there are truths present in the world which all share a common truth-source." Once again, probably not one you would like all that much, but it does show that people have used Scripture as a jumping off point for epistemological reflection. I'm going to guess you would disagree with most of it, but it can lead to some beneficial ideas.

Even after all of this you might argue that it is harmful. There are all kinds of evils in the world caused by people using Scripture to justify their own twisted self-righteousness. That's true, that's basically my entire childhood. The institutionalized church is the most evil, damaging thing I have ever encountered. There are also people like Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. who used Scripture to shape their imaginations and did some truly great things with it. There are people today doing the same things. I would say the Bible can be beneficial, not that it is always beneficial. I'm just thinking about what's possible, but if you are not comfortable with the Bible, that's fine too, don't worry about it.

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So even if you have subsumed your morality into your very being, you still got it from someone else.

How can you be so sure of that?

For me personally it may very well be that I got my morals from my mother. I most certainly didn't get them from my dad.

Of, they could have simply been my own personal choices too. In fact, I actually did make a conscious choice that I wanted to be a "good person" quite early in my life. I actually made that choice quite consciously. Almost like you'd chose what career you might want to go into.

Well the idea that you get everything from someone is pretty common in psychology and philosophy now-a-days. All thoughts are based on data, where would you be getting this totally autonomous data apart from your senses?

As for making a decision to be a good person, you would have to have a definition of what you thought a good person is, which brings me to . . .

However, when it came to defining what is meant by a "good person", I don't feel that I needed to look to anyone else for guidance on that. On the contrary I intuitively knew that to be a "good person" simply boils down to "Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you". I didn't even get that idea from anywhere. From my perspective it's just the obvious thing.

In defining what you "intuitively" knew to be good you quoted Luke 6:31 straight out of the Bible. The "golden rule," as it is called, was popularized by Christianity in western culture and so most people would use it as their definition of what a "good" person is, while some other cultures have concepts of being a "good" person that are based on communal identity and honor. The fact that you used the golden rule as your definition of "good" shows that you are operating out of a subsumed idea.

After all, if the core philosophy truly is based on "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", then why would you need to look to someone else for a model on that? You should be able to know immediately what is "good" or "bad", etc., based entirely on how you would like to be treated by other people.

There would be no need for any outside role model or influence at all.

I agree that Luke 6:31 provides a great moral insight on how to empathize with others in your morality. However, how you "like" to be treated is a somewhat subjective standard, and the treatment you like may actually offend some people. Also, people with various psychological issues may have strange ideas about what constitutes "good" treatment, so there is some thinking to be done here.