(July 17, 2015 at 12:44 pm)Esquilax Wrote:(July 16, 2015 at 8:06 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: You've been misinformed by a very poor teacher.
See, Randy? This is exactly what I was talking about in my last post: your situational awareness of other christian beliefs vanishes completely when you're talking to an atheist. You were presented with an interpretation of the biblical narrative that didn't line up with your own, and instead of considering that, hey, there are thousands of denominations of christianity, and millions more personal interpretations besides, maybe this one is just one you don't personally subscribe to, instead you just dismiss it as wrong, and impugn the character of whoever told the poster that. Your specific christian beliefs are just "What Christians Believe," and if anyone presents a view of christianity that deviates from that, then it can just be dismissed out of hand, and so can the person posting it. All that work reading through books on christianity is utterly wasted, because the things learned within isn't Randy's specific beliefs, and so the conversation is simply dropped.
"No, you're just wrong."
It happens so often, and in part I don't blame you because what was said didn't align with what you believe, so you shouldn't be expected to defend it. But I absolutely do blame you for shutting down the conversation instead of explaining your take on the subject matter, and for assuming that what was presented was just "misinformation," rather than a separate interpretation of events, because it didn't align with what you already believe. You just got through telling me that the fact that christian interpretations conflict is no excuse not to engage with them all equally, there's simply no way to square that with you dismissing a view of christianity that doesn't align with yours out of hand.
As I just explained to Rhonda in my previous post, sola scriptura is a false doctrine of Protestant men. It is a heresy unknown to Christians for 1,500 years.
If you want to narrow the scope of your study, start with the scriptures and the writings of the Early Church Fathers. This is Catholicism pure and simple.
