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

[GrandizerII]

Making things up along the way is a sign of lack of intellectual integrity.

So says the intellectually challenged Irrational atheist who knows nothing about God or Satan. Until you can argue from knowledge of scriptures you should stay home.

GC

GC

Listen to yourself talk.

[Edwardo Piet]

Oooh "Intellectually challenged Atheist" Godchild is getting nasty!

Why hate on Dawkers? Being used by Satan? Please... he's a highly moral human being.

[Esquilax]

Why hate on Dawkers? Being used by Satan? Please... he's a highly moral human being.

But he disagrees with GC on his religious beliefs, which is the same thing as being an avatar of the devil. You're either with him, or a living column of pure evil.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

As I pointed out in the other thread, to which you replied, a God which punishes nonbelievers with eternal torture...

God doesn't torture, He sentence's you to an eternal punishment you have chosen, you actually choose the punishment you will suffer by how you lived your life here. Just as a murder chooses his punishment by breaking the law to a certain degree, the judge sentences him to that choice. You break God's law and seek not forgiveness you without a doubt will serve the eternal punishment you chose and made for your self.  

Horse shit. There is no need for an eternal punishment. It would be just as simple to withhold an eternal reward, and just let me die like an animal if I have not elevated my soul to heaven-worthiness via "The Way" taught by Jesus of Nazareth, called the Annointed One (Messiah).

It is a LIE to claim that we "choose for ourselves" to commit the crime, because even your theology acknowledges that we are born into a "sin nature" and that we cannot help but to violate those laws. So we're not talking about a choice to sin or not sin, that would equate to a choice to break the law or not break the law in your example. It's a red herring.

What you're talking about is a person who walks up to me out of the blue and says I and everyone else on earth owe him money, because we're on his turf and broke the rules of behavior required on his turf, and if I don't pay the money (which of course is in an amount I'll never be able to pay) or otherwise "choose to" become his loyal servant, he'll torture me.

That is a psychopathic monster.

In your example, God is not the Judge, he's the Legislature that makes the rules in the first place. Calling him the Judge is to pretend he is just obeying rules that he didn't create, which Are Just The Way It Is™, and he's helpless to do anything but enforce them as-written.  

 is not one whom a rational and honorable person would choose to worship. If your God is what you claim, then he is a monster and I thank Dawkins for his work in showing what a monstrous claim is being made by the Christian sects.

So you believe I'm not rational or honorable, you judge me without even getting to know me, you do so without a absolute standard, though you take Dawkins as absolute authority, a man without any absolute standards.
You call God a monster, why, because He wants you to live a purposeful life, one that He knows will make you joyful. You call Him this because you would rather live in sinfulness ie. rebel against Him. God offers you an eternal life, Dawkins offers you an eternal punishment, your choice, to follow a fallible man or an omniscient loving God.

I did not say that. I said that a rational and honorable person would not choose to worship such a monster. I think that you have simply not given it a genuine enough level of thought to realize what a monster this being you worship really is, and that if you did, you would reject the entire concept as contrary to basic human decency and innate morality (except for sociopaths and psychopaths, of course).

And I also didn't say I follow Dawkins. Why do you fundies always think we revere Dawkins like some sort of atheist deity? That's just fucking wwweeeiiirrrddd. I like a lot of what Dawkins has to say, and I'm grateful for the work he does, but that's also true of Tori Amos and Emma Watson! I certainly don't take any of them as authorities. You clearly don't understand how atheism works at all.

And now you're just LYING about the reason I called God a monster, even though I have described it to you as specifically and in detail as one could possibly detail. I have clearly explained that I find your god-concept to be morally repugnant. I would no sooner follow it than a White Supremacist ideology, no matter how happy they claimed they wanted me to be by accepting their views. They, and you, have views about the nature of humanity and about what constitutes moral action, that I find repugnant. Since I said it several times before and you apparently didn't grasp my meaning, I'll define it here:

re·pug·nant
rəˈpəɡnənt/

adjective

1.
extremely distasteful; unacceptable.

synonyms: abhorrent, revolting, repulsive, repellent, disgusting, offensive, objectionable, cringeworthy, vile, foul, nasty, loathsome, sickening, nauseating, hateful, detestable, execrable, abominable, monstrous, appalling, insufferable, intolerable, unacceptable, contemptible, unsavory, unpalatable; More

2.
in conflict with; incompatible with.

synonyms: incompatible with, in conflict with, contrary to, at variance with, inconsistent with

I prefer to think of it in terms of Thomas Jefferson's admonishment to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787:

"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."

This is no different than Dawkins. This president took advantage of his female slaves and fell in love with the godless French thinking. So I say again follow a fallible man or the God who wants you to spend an eternal life of great joy with Him, again your choice will give you either an eternal punishment you choice and the eternal torment you choose by your life without God and his forgiveness, or a joyful eternal life with God.

GC

Another word for "the godless French thinking" is The Enlightenment, which informed most of the Founding Fathers, which Jefferson being chief among them. And whether or not he "took advantage of" his slave Sally (most say they were in love but could not be together openly because of the racist culture of the time), his morals are irrelevant since I don't follow Jefferson as a moral guide, either. I do like his concept of "if there is a god, the following is more likely to be true than what the Christians are claiming about god", so I quoted it.

You seem awfully enamored with the idea of follow-the-leader... an interesting psychological edge to your tendency to seek out (and define people by) "who is obedient to whom".  I'd be willing to bet you have some BDSM tendencies in your sexual desires... not that there's anything wrong with that, just that I'm seeing a pattern that's highly suggestive.

No matter how many times you try to repackage the idea as a "free" choice, it can never be a free choice when I have already had the fault before I was born, and the choice is made over threat of torture. Your god is based on a concept developed when people still thought tyranny and slavery and genocide were a-okay... and you just haven't been able to massage the God 2.0 (aka Jesus) version enough to fully get rid of the fact that you worship a violent Blood God.

So again, I'll make it as clear as I can. I follow no one but my own conscience and my strong sense of feeling for my fellow human beings. I reason each thing out for myself, though I like to listen to many ideas before I make up my mind, and remain willing to change my mind if I come across better information. I have a strong sense of what is moral and honorable behavior...

and your God-concept fails at it in every imaginable way.

If I am to be tortured for the "free choice", then it is not a free choice, it's an extortion attempt. And I will gladly suffer that psychopath's "consequences" rather than sell out all of my brain and all of my morals to subjugate myself to such a repugnant idea of a higher power. The fact that you feel the need to lie and misrepresent all that I think and believe, and to put spray paint all over the big pile of feces that is your unchangeable dogmatic concept of power-hierarchy, with required submissiveness and unquestioning obedience to Proper Authority (ha!) and a moral code that is the most disgusting thing this side of ISIS, while not being proof against the concept, definitely does not make me any more inclined to give up my honor and lower myself and surrender both my morals and my intellect for a book written by people who didn't know what genes were or that the sun could not stop in the sky because it does not travel across the sky.

[Edwardo Piet]

TheRocketsurgeon is getting passionate again! It's only a game man! Oh wait this isn't the mafia thread....

[Redbeard The Pink]

Ambiguities and varied interpretations don't bother me -- it comes with the written word.

The big problem with the bible are the internal contradictions and flat-out errors written therein.

Another problem is the lack of any evidence for its major claims.

In short, the problem isn't interpretation, it's that the bible is horseshit.

This to be a bit more robust approach to criticizing the Bible. Level 2. Kudos.

That being said, very few claims of contradictions and errors actually hold up under scrutiny. 

Many skeptics study the issue just enough to support their conclusions and then ignore everything else. Then they blow the apparent discrepancy totally out of proportion.

But on the flipside, are the inerrantists who hold the Bible to be the literal, physical, magical word of God. Can't have two more ignorant groups of people go at it than these two.

How about contradictions to reality? Forget contradictions inside the text (of which there are many, and no, they don't all fall apart under scrutiny), I'm talking about contradictions about what's possible in the material world. The Flood Story (one of my favorite examples) is scientifically impossible for a wide range of reasons. This means that most of the story (significantly more than is noted in the text) has to have been done with magic, or it's a complex metaphor for something, or the people writing the text just didn't have a complete understanding of the technical implications of a global flood. That last one is really unlikely if the story came from an omniscient author (even through a proxy), but it's a really likely explanation of why the story and the reality of the situation are so different.

[RoadRunner79]

---

Well if you are interested in discussing why this is incorrect, I am happy to do so.  And if you think that my interpretation is incorrect, then let's discuss it from the source and not others interpretations.   However it seems that we Christians are at a loss, because you can pick any poor interpretation that fits your agenda, and then argue against that. 

I think I speak for most of the others here- though of course they're free to join in and correct me if they so wish- when I say that we try to argue from the words that are actually in the bible, without having to deal with the arcane eisegesis of those already committed to making the text fit with their own lives. Without adequate justification or knowledge of the original authorial intent, the only thing we can safely presume to be a part of scriptural teachings are the words within the bible, which express unambiguously that disbelief in Jesus is an unforgivable sin that will keep us out of heaven. The problem comes from christians like you who are more than happy to swoop down and disagree, without giving any form of justification that might show you to be right; were essentially left with no reason to believe you, while also being scoffed at about how poor our knowledge of the bible is.

 

Am I aloud to do that with evolution?   I can argue against "the goo deciding to get up and walk into the zoo". and how silly that is!   And I don't see others prefacing their posts with "my interpretation" or citing which interpretation they are referring to.  So I find your post a bit dis-ingenuous.  However this is just my interpretation.

I'm not asking that we have these discussions where anyone just picks whatever definition they like and run with it, that'd be ridiculous. All I ask is that you a: relinquish the presupposition that what you think the scriptures say is the only legitimate reading of them, and that b: where our interpretations diverge, we all support our ideas with a little more evidence than nothing at all. It's no accident, you'll find, that every interpretation of the bible you see in this thread from atheists has a little more meat on them bones than just "you're wrong though," which was all you saw fit to contribute in the post I initially quoted, or "I'm right though," which is all your fellow theist GC ever posts. Explain why you think the way you do and there's absolutely no issue; just saying that you're right and we're wrong is effectively the same as saying nothing at all. What you think is less important than why you think it.

---

Ok... I don't have any problem supporting my position (and I think anyone who has studied theology would agree with me).  However I'm not interested in explaining, just to have someone dismiss what I say and jumping to another topic, or simply claiming it's all a fairy tale anyway, or just saying that is only my interpretation.  I'm not going to put in the effort to inform someone who doesn't really care or is willing to check out what I say, and go back to making the same ignorant argument next week.

There are verses in scripture, which say or allude to those who do not believe facing the consequences of the second death.  And this is correct.  However; it is incorrect to say that they are sent to hell, for simply not believing.  (I would also point out here, that it is not just an intellectual acknowledgement of belief).  Scripture states a number of times, that the judgement and the reason why hell is deserved, is because of sin.  Jesus lowered himself and became man, and gave up His life;  because of this very problem.  He came to save us from the penalty of sin.  Saying that people are going to hell; because they don't believe in Jesus is similar to saying that a person died, because they refused treatment for illness.  This may be accurate, but if the person then goes on to blame the doctor, because they didn't give them a choice to their liking, or to imply that it was the refusal that killed them, is just silly.

[Homeless Nutter]

Ok... I don't have any problem supporting my position (and I think anyone who has studied theology would agree with me).  [...]

Oh, a theology scholar, are you? Great - maybe you'll be able to give an example of ONE thing that theology has accomplished, or discovered in the past 500 years? Hmmm? No? I didn't think so.

Anyone with minimal education can name scores of scientific achievements/discoveries, made in the last century alone - from discovery of black holes and pulsars, to the mapping of DNA. And yet theology seems content on regurgitating the same tired old nonsense they did in the Dark Ages. Why is that?

Studying theology is a fool's errand. As Robert A. Heinlein once said: "Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there."

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Ok... I don't have any problem supporting my position (and I think anyone who has studied theology would agree with me).  However I'm not interested in explaining, just to have someone dismiss what I say and jumping to another topic, or simply claiming it's all a fairy tale anyway, or just saying that is only my interpretation.  I'm not going to put in the effort to inform someone who doesn't really care or is willing to check out what I say, and go back to making the same ignorant argument next week.

There are verses in scripture, which say or allude to those who do not believe facing the consequences of the second death.  And this is correct.  However; it is incorrect to say that they are sent to hell, for simply not believing.  (I would also point out here, that it is not just an intellectual acknowledgement of belief).  Scripture states a number of times, that the judgement and the reason why hell is deserved, is because of sin.  Jesus lowered himself and became man, and gave up His life;  because of this very problem.  He came to save us from the penalty of sin.  Saying that people are going to hell; because they don't believe in Jesus is similar to saying that a person died, because they refused treatment for illness.  This may be accurate, but if the person then goes on to blame the doctor, because they didn't give them a choice to their liking, or to imply that it was the refusal that killed them, is just silly.

When the doctor infected me with the disease, before I was born, and made the cure but asks me to "voluntarily" pay for it... then yes I am justified in blaming the doctor for my death.

[Edwardo Piet]

I have often wondered whether, if there is a God, he's not completely pissed at the Christians for claiming to speak for him, and making him look like an ignorant, semi-competent, petulant, and tyrannical psychopath.

Well if it's the God of the Bible they'd be right. It's the Christian "moderates" that would be less close the truth. The fundies would get it right.

Unless you mean there's a deist "God" who's embarrassed by human attempts at writing books and guessing "his(/her/its)" nature? In which case I guess he just sits back because deist gods just like to watch anyhow, voyeuristic pervs