How do I deal with the belief that maybe... Just maybe... God exists and I'm...

[Neo-Scholastic]

Yes, I think everyone here accepts the fact that the words we have attributed to Jesus were written by someone else. People who have studied the subject even a little bit are perfectly fine with the fact that the Jesus we read about may well differ significantly from the one who really existed. The writers were making the points they wanted to make. Plus we know that they interpolated elements of traditional biography which are used to indicate a character's significance. 

But when anyone says "In the Symposium, Socrates says....." it is acceptable to discuss the statement and what is intended by it. We can debate the meaning of the text without specifying every time that this Socrates is at least partly fictional. Debates about just how accurately Plato depicts the character of Socrates are interesting from a historical perspective, but not important when working on the philosophy. 

I'm sure you're right that certain literalists or sola scriptura types will insist on everything in the Bible being an accurate transcript, but I don't think anyone like that is posting here. And it doesn't affect the point that was being made.

The historical evidence is that the Jesus of history is not the Christ of faith that people believe in.

So what? The colors of lines on a road map do not match the actual greys of asphalt and concrete. Are you saying no one should "believe in" maps because they do not look like satellite photos?

If your reason for not trusting Scripture is because it does not satify modern expectations for bios and science text books...then you truly misunderstand the purpose of Scripture, which is to glorify God and guide us in our relationship with Him. To that end, Scripture is true and useful. But if you are the kind of person who gets all hung up on a talking snake then you probably are not interested in the spirtual significance of what you are reading anyway.

[Angrboda]

The historical evidence is that the Jesus of history is not the Christ of faith that people believe in.

So what? The colors of lines on a road map do not match the actual greys of asphalt and concrete. Are you saying no one should "believe in" maps because they do not look like satellite photos?

If your reason for not trusting Scripture is because it does not satify modern expectations for bios and science text books...then you truly misunderstand the purpose of Scripture, which is to glorify God and guide us in our relationship with Him. To that end, Scripture is true and useful. But if you are the kind of person who gets all hung up on a talking snake then you probably are not interested in the spirtual significance of what you are reading anyway.

Are you God?

[Jehanne]

The historical evidence is that the Jesus of history is not the Christ of faith that people believe in.

So what? The colors of lines on a road map do not match the actual greys of asphalt and concrete. Are you saying no one should "believe in" maps because they do not look like satellite photos?

If your reason for not trusting Scripture is because it does not satify modern expectations for bios and science text books...then you truly misunderstand the purpose of Scripture, which is to glorify God and guide us in our relationship with Him. To that end, Scripture is true and useful. But if you are the kind of person who gets all hung up on a talking snake then you probably are not interested in the spirtual significance of what you are reading anyway.

Ancient fables remain fables; they do not become true with the passage of time.

[Ranjr]

So what? The colors of lines on a road map do not match the actual greys of asphalt and concrete. Are you saying no one should "believe in" maps because they do not look like satellite photos?

If your reason for not trusting Scripture is because it does not satify modern expectations for bios and science text books...then you truly misunderstand the purpose of Scripture, which is to glorify God and guide us in our relationship with Him. To that end, Scripture is true and useful. But if you are the kind of person who gets all hung up on a talking snake then you probably are not interested in the spirtual significance of what you are reading anyway.

How so?  Does everyone who reads the Bible looking for a relationship with God find it?

No.  They don't.  You are making an emotional appeal in an attempt to claim spiritual high ground.

[arewethereyet]

So what? The colors of lines on a road map do not match the actual greys of asphalt and concrete. Are you saying no one should "believe in" maps because they do not look like satellite photos?

If your reason for not trusting Scripture is because it does not satify modern expectations for bios and science text books...then you truly misunderstand the purpose of Scripture, which is to glorify God and guide us in our relationship with Him. To that end, Scripture is true and useful. But if you are the kind of person who gets all hung up on a talking snake then you probably are not interested in the spirtual significance of what you are reading anyway.

Are you God?

He just thinks he is.  

Pretty sure that's a no-no.

[Paleophyte]

Just maybe... God exists and I'm going to hell?

I'm convinced he doesn't exist but I was wondering what you all have to say about this weird guilt of mine of thinking that maybe, just maybe, God exists and I'll end up in hell when I die.

I ask honestly because I wanna get rid of these superstitious bullshit in my brain.

Take comfort in the certain knowledge that Hell would be the preferable destination. Any Deity that would create Hell and then send innocents there to be tormented unspeakably for eternity probably isn't going with the rainbows and unicorns motif in Its Heaven. At a minimum, you're looking at having your memories wiped and your free will sucked out. Because if they don't then Heaven is an eternity of the certain knowledge that everybody who isn't there with you is currently balls deep in bubbling lava while a demon wears them as a cock holster. Or worse. And the best part of Heaven is that you'll spend the rest of time singing the praises of the Architect of these twin torments. Heaven and Hell will be distinguishable only by the finest of forensic analyses.

All of that speaks strongly to an omni-malevolent deity, or at best one that's criminally incompetent. The universe that we inhabit simply doesn't support that any more than it does the all-loving god that the theists claim. It's simply uncaring at its worst. Look around you and know that there is beauty in the world, and know that no god that could create hell could have made that.

[Paleophyte]

If your reason for not trusting Scripture is because it does not satify modern expectations for bios and science text books...then you truly misunderstand the purpose of Scripture, which is to glorify God and guide us in our relationship with Him. To that end, Scripture is true and useful.

Is this the Scripture that was written and edited by the same Romans that tacked your saviour to a crucifix? Wouldn't have been my first pick for trustees of The Word of God.

But if you are the kind of person who gets all hung up on a talking snake then you probably are not interested in the spirtual significance of what you are reading anyway.

The talking animals don't help its credibility any. It reads a bit like a very poorly written C.S. Lewis novel only with even more bigotry.

[Fake Messiah]

What I also wanted to say about this question is that if there is some sort of afterlife then it certainly has nothing to do with Christianity or the Bible. That book has been so wrong about everything it claimed that it is most certainly completely wrong about the afterlife if there is one.

[Belacqua]

So what? The colors of lines on a road map do not match the actual greys of asphalt and concrete. Are you saying no one should "believe in" maps because they do not look like satellite photos?

If your reason for not trusting Scripture is because it does not satify modern expectations for bios and science text books...then you truly misunderstand the purpose of Scripture, which is to glorify God and guide us in our relationship with Him. To that end, Scripture is true and useful. But if you are the kind of person who gets all hung up on a talking snake then you probably are not interested in the spirtual significance of what you are reading anyway.

Recently I read Andrew Bowie's Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy, and felt like I made a lot of progress in understanding how non-literal, non-conceptual images work. The title says "modern philosophy," but in fact it deals almost entirely with German Romanticism and Idealism. 

As you can imagine, these movements get up and running with Kant, and that means that the noumenon/phenomenon distinction is crucial. They insist that since the phenomena we know are creations of the mind, and that since the mind is not vast enough to map out accurately all of the noumenon, then there must be vast parts of the world that cannot be known through analyzable mental concepts. And of course this is where art comes in. The images in art (including poetry, music, etc.) are valuable because they are NOT translatable into simpler concepts. The da Vinci code is the opposite of what we should be doing, looking to find one-to-one secret meanings for puzzling symbols. 

This shows up the common modern idea that if something in the Bible (or any book really) isn't a literal statement of truth it must be a metaphor. And by metaphor people generally mean a simplified version, in which the tenor of the metaphor maps one-to-one with a particular vehicle, reducing the trope to a simple word-substitute. A code that can be deciphered with one meaning, once and for all. We see this sometimes when people confidently say something like "Adam and Eve's fall is a metaphor for adolescence" or some similarly simple and easy interpretation. It's a way to shut down the richness of what it could really be. 

Since artistic images, for the Idealists, are not conceptual, they are a separate way of bringing the noumenon into our mental experience. But we must refrain from interpreting very much at all. The image remains a non-rational, not-explicable, but possibly very powerful, alternative means of taking in reality. 

And since the noumenon is not exhausted by the logical, rational bits we chop up for ourselves, we need these artistic images for a fuller understanding than the rational analysis can give. 

William Blake, who was very much in line with the Germans on this, was adamant that the unbelievable images in the Bible, and particularly its contradictions, showed how valuable it was. This is largely a new version of Negative Theology -- finding ways of talking around what human beings can never really say. But it's also a way of acknowledging that if God is infinite, then he contains the rational (to humans) as well as the irrational (to humans). A Bible that was fully consistent with what humans know of the world and fully compatible with human reasoning could not be, for Blake, a book inspired by an infinite God -- which for him was another name for the thing-in-itself noumenon. 

I'm just scratching the surface of this so far. I'm halfway through Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, but damn this is dense and slow going. What's clear though is that for these thinkers, and for all the earlier ones who inspired them, the non-rational, non-decodable image is of great importance. So as always it's frustrating to read people who say that talking snakes make the Bible unbelievable, or that certain contradictions prove its falsity. There is no reason to think that God would follow human rules, and (if we follow the German and Blakean views) there is plenty of reason for him to provide us with powerful non-rational images. 

Likewise it's frustrating to see people find an episode in the Bible, interpret it in a way that makes it seem silly, and then pass judgment on that interpretation. It's their own thoughts they are interpreting. The episode in the Bible, as art, resists final interpretation and logical resolution. Which (Blake says) proves it's true.

(Sorry to go on a bit -- I'd been thinking about this stuff lately.)

[The Grand Nudger]

Makes it seem™ silly, lol. No..friend, they actually are silly, and amusing reinterpretations based on kantian philosophy are just that.