(October 4, 2013 at 12:31 pm)John V Wrote: Hi xpastor, how's things going? Got the cancer under control?Hello John, I'm fine, thanks. Prostate cancer appears to be completely gone, PSA readings of zero 3 years in a row. Unfortunately, the Friendly Atheist Forum is not doing too well, very little traffic.
I see you're as fond of telling your own story as ever.
Quote:My first question for them is which Bible do you mean? They of course assume it is the Protestant Bible with its 66 books. However, the Wikipedia article on the Biblical Canon lists 10 different Christian churches with different collections of books: Protestant, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Slavonic Orthodox, Georgian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Syriac Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Orthodox Tewahedo (Ethiopian), Assyrian Church of the East.Check out these charts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Canon...traditions
I'll go with all the books that are green across the board as my canon.
It's the same chart that was in the article I cited. In other words, you are giving each tradition a veto over all the others since by definition, a book is not green across the board if one of them voted against it. In effect, this means a Protestant veto since in the vast majority of cases they have cast the lone dissenting vote.
Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the Letter of Jeremiah are all endorsed by every non-Protestant church, as are the "additions" to Esther and Daniel, which are not accepted in the Protestant canon. Two others (Manasseh and Psalm 151) are blackballed only by the western tradition, Protestant and RC. Even where one tradition stands alone, as the Ethiopian does, in backing 4 additional chapters for Lamentations, how do you know that this ancient and isolated church has not preserved a text the others have missed.
Giving Protestants a blackball vote is not good enough. You need clear and principled criteria to determine what is the Word of God and what is not. Otherwise, why would anyone pay attention?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House