(January 25, 2015 at 5:49 am)jesus_wept Wrote: I quite admire these people because they at least have the faith to stand by their beliefs.I suppose, but you're talking about a book that is very open to interpretation and for which there is a reasonable case to be made that Paul wasn't telling them to go jumping off of metaphorical cliffs so that god could hand them wings. It might even be taken as an analogy, Paul telling them not to fear circumstances that might seem deadly because god was on their side.
It could still run into some issues, notably the problem of what to think when bad things happen to good people, but once you've started down the personal interpretation road, lots of things become possible.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
