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Jastiger posted:Actually there is. Like you said with Moby Dick, its one thing to say "I think it means X", and another thing to say "I think it means Y, Y really happened, and we are morally justified in the real world to behave like Y says". One is an opinion and analysis of the work, the other is a prescriptive approach. Its only prescriptive to people who accept the premises, so there is no point dialog with people who don't. Just as the people studying Moby Dick don't have much to say to somebody who says "I hate that book, it loving sucks." Well, that's the book they are trying to study.
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Feb 14, 2015 05:57
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Agag posted:Again, there isn't any evidence to provide for metaphysical claims. And my original point was that theology doesn't exist to answer external challenges. Its a given that people who aren't religious or belong to a different religion consider its claims invalid because they reject its premises. But that does not make the empirical criticism of faith-driven action not actually criticism. It is criticism and it is the most valid that any criticism can be. That a faith-based thinker may ignore all criticism of their faith, on the basis that anyone who does level criticism against it is not accepting the premises upon which it is based, and thus their criticism is invalid, is a deficiency of faith-based thought. You are essentially saying that the only valid criticism of theologically derived actions and opinions is to be a member of the religion and accept its fundamental premises. Which would logically render any faith-based decision impossible to criticise as long as it is derived from the fundamental premises of the religion. You don't see an issue with this?
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Feb 14, 2015 06:03
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OwlFancier posted:But that does not make the empirical criticism of faith-driven action not actually criticism. It is criticism and it is the most valid that any criticism can be. That a faith-based thinker may ignore all criticism of their faith, on the basis that anyone who does level criticism against it is not accepting the premises upon which it is based, and thus their criticism is invalid, is a deficiency of faith-based thought. Exactly he's hitting the nail on the head here. It doesn't matter if others say "That book sucks". What if a believer says, "Father Apologist, why is X the way it is"? Is this now all the sudden the wrong question to answer? This person needs a way to find the answer to why X is the way it is. Boom, apologetics is born, because Father Apologist has NO WAY to verify the answer (otherwise it'd be science and not theology). So you're essentially saying that the only person that is qualified to really dig into apologiets is Father Apologist. Don't you see how self defeating, mastubatory, and ultimately circular this is?
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Feb 14, 2015 06:05
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Agag posted:I'm not sure what you are trying to say. Theologians do lots more than map out their religion: they maintain its claims to be true, and to be supported by facts run through rational examination - they affirm that the religion's underlying premises are true. Atheists deny those premises are true. Those things have a lot to do with one another; they're in direct opposition.
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Feb 14, 2015 06:21
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I would actually be more comfortable with the idea that God was once a mortal being and slowly, through trial and error, figured out the responsibilities and powers entangled with being God, and puts mankind through this world not as punishment, but as a learning experience.There's not a lot to gain or care about when you have some impersonal, abstract God. At the end of the day most Americans don't care about long, extended theological arguments about God and want a God that can provide some kind of meaning to their life. Even if we could somehow use theology as a means to self-destruct God or defeat its underlying premises most people wouldn't consider it a challenge to their way of life. Everything we perceive is warped through the lens of our own personal experience, and God, if he is truly impersonal and distinct from the physical world, is at once distorted when perceived by us. Thus, all information we could possibly glean from this kind of God is distorted and thus there is no trustable way of discerning real "knowledge" from him. He cannot be understood, proven or disproven. If he can be understood, he still holds the cards as God and will only tell us what he wants us to hear. Trying to understand God is a losing game. Can we trust God? Needing faith to first understand theology is not only circular, but impractical, because no religious organization has accepted the basic ideas of the Bible on faith alone. Different factions within religious organizations have disagreements over interpretations of the Bible and hash out compromises to prevent schisming (the creation of the Bible itself is a good example). Everyday actions we do in our lives can come in conflict with the laws handed down in the Bible. Pastors can play fast and loose with interpretations of the Bible to convert followers. Reality prevents even the most pious from working on faith alone. The existence of theology itself shows that faith alone is not enough, to question or to rationalize is to show a lack of faith. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Feb 14, 2015 |
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Feb 14, 2015 08:05
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One problem with theology is that is there no way to quantify what we do not know. Knowing what we do not know, or what is at the frontier of our knowledge, is the first step in making any kind of discovery. It's what propels the sciences and technology and leads to innovation. Theology does not have this, because we are dealing with something intangible. Theology is always therefore reactionary, because it has nowhere to go, and creates nothing of real value.
America Inc. fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Feb 14, 2015 |
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Feb 14, 2015 09:10
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:One problem with theology is that is there no way to quantify what we do not know. Knowing what we do not know, or what is at the frontier of our knowledge, is the first step in making any kind of discovery. It's what propels the sciences and technology and leads to innovation. Theology does not have this, because we are dealing with something intangible. Theology is always therefore reactionary, because it has nowhere to go, and creates nothing of real value. This is perfectly fine so long as theology confines itself to subjective topics. Literary (or any form of art) criticism, for example, is equally "reactionary", since we can only approach such a thing from a combination of an existing work and our current perspective. The propulsive force ought to come, then, from the practice of art/religion. Most sects of Christianity fail one or both of these tests, though.
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Feb 14, 2015 11:06
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steinrokkan posted:You are remarkably dense, I can only hope it's willfull on your part. Miltank posted:Please cite a source for your claim that most Christians view God as a person of some sort but first define what you mean by "of some sort" There are also differences in the way members of different religious traditions conceive of God. For example, nine-in-ten (91%) Mormons think of God as a person with whom people can have a relationship. This view of God is shared by large majorities of Jehovah’s Witnesses (82%) and members of evangelical (79%) and historically black (71%) churches. Fewer members of mainline Protestant churches (62%), Catholics (60%) and Orthodox Christians (49%) share this conception of God. Majorian posted:I have a feeling it has something to do with not understanding that when Christians refer to God in "Three Persons," they don't mean "persons" as we usually use the term in English. Here one would be inclined to say that yay, we found the source of the confusion, it was a simple equivocation; we had a word where the speaker used one meaning, while the listener used another. Oopsy daisy! It's like we're in a British airplane and someone said "cock" and the guy next to him got offended at the sexual vulgarity, but it turned out he's just talking about a valve. Tee hee! Now that we've got that cleared up we can put that issue to rest and move on. Except we can't. It's not an innocent confusion at all, and the word "person" has always meant someone with human qualities, except when push comes to shove in theological debates and the religious apologists need to find a way out of defending the absurdities and embarrassments of maintaining belief in bronze age myths in the modern day. They'll throw out voluminous word salad to erect an incomprehensible structure of a system where "person" means something else, (and the academic lengths will impress the common believer into even stronger belief that's now supported by fanciful theology in addition to the common traditions) but as soon as soon as no one's looking, God will go right back to being a "person" as the word has always meant. But in the face of today's knowledge, these academic theologians are so embarrassed by the implications of common versions of the beliefs they defend, that many are in complete denial that the religious laymen actually believe those things. Witness how earlier in the thread someone posted, with a straight face, that the notion that God as a person was invented in the 20th century as a fringe view. quote:Delve into this comment a bit, would you kindly? Ratios and Tendency replied to that comment by saying that "Atheists probably know more about Christianity than Christians do about the hundreds of other religions that they reject out of hand," which was of course immediately denied by Badger of Basra by saying that that understanding can only be of a fictitious caricature religion, and not what the religious really believe... of course it can't be an understanding of the real belief because that would violate the first principle that only ignorance can support disagreement with religion. So I decided to bring some facts into that discussion (I know, not a religious forte but someone had to do it) and cited a Pew study (http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey/) based on a quiz of questions about religion, examining basic facts about the general belief of the mainstream versions of a few religions, including Christianity. Surprisingly for some, it did indeed turn out that atheists and agnostics in general do know more about Christianity than Christians know about other religions. Even more surprisingly, it showed that atheists and agnostics know more about Christianity than Christians know about their own religion! Of course that has no bearing on the conclusions of a particular argument above the premises and inference of the argument itself (to say that it does would be an ad hominem fallacy). But to rub it in their faces is 1. fun, especially since unlike them I didn't skip the crucial step of an actual argument that is a foundation for the gloating, and 2. actually serves to expose the vapidity of their "you don't know poo poo" mantra when used as a sole argument. Well no, atheists do know poo poo, and evidently it's statistically more poo poo than the other side. So the religious has better bring more than single-emoticon replies and empty insults. Miltank posted:This guy has heard of trinitarianism(!) so I'm pretty sure he knows his stuff. BrandorKP posted:Hang on now, the humanity of God is a really important thing. Don't be so quick to throw it away. First paragraph: I made an honest effort at mapping it out, and it seems you lost track of things when you were writing it. You start out with the One and say that it has 3 emanations, and go on to list them. The first emanation is the nous, but then it turned out the nous was the second emanation? The third emanation is the soul. OK. So is the first emanation the One? From the beginning, it seemed like the One was supposed to be doing the emanating, not being an emanation, but your later tally looks like it's the latter. I dunno. Whatever. Let's move and say the One can do both jobs. In the second paragraph, you go on to assign homework, and... no. Just address my arguments. Tell me what's wrong in any of the premises and/or inference. If you think I'm using some word simplistically, then explain what it really means, and how I should be using it instead. (And why) In the third paragraph, you go on to talk more about the things that got emanated in the first. Looks like the Logos (which is part of the nous) that was flesh aka Jesus aka indisputably a person. Not the One, not the Father, but a separate guy. But it still shares the same foundational reality as the One/Father. OK? So you're saying that in the common description of Trinitarianism where Jesus "is" God, "is" is used too simplistically, and should really be stated more like "emanates from and shares a foundational reality with." Am I doing OK? Well even with all this, the Old Testament (before there was Jesus) still has a God that has human emotions, intentions, intelligence, social ties, etc., all qualities that are inseparable from ape neurology. Barlow posted:Not even what the Pew Survey says, Atheists only scored highest on religious knowledge. On questions regarding Christianity Mormons and Evangelicals got the highest score. Pretty silly to believe that the Pew survey should effect how we regard your own knowledge though. Those 2 sects did beat out atheists/agnostics, but atheists/agnostics scored higher than "Christian" as a whole in the "Bible and Christianity" section. quote:Vessbot, you are also pretty mixed up and confused on basic theology. I'd suggest reading and introduction to the subject, something like Alister E. McGrath's "Christian Theology: An Introduction" might give you a sense of the diverse views in Christian theology and give you some grounding in arguing against it. No, how about you point out the flaws in the premises or inference of any argument I've posted? Irony Be My Shield posted:Or alternatively he stop making dumb theological arguments altogether because it has no meaning to him as an atheist It does though, religious belief wields tremendous influence in government regarding personal rights, standards in education, policy in scientific research, etc. Surely you've heard in the news about things like abortion, gay marriage, creationsim in school curricula, global warming, things like that....?..no? But aside from the practical implications, it's just plain intellectually interesting that in modern culture most people espouse a bronze-age myth and proclaim to to be completely true in its claims and the root of reality. Agag posted:How would you "fact check" metaphysical claims? When they have implications on the physical world, you can check those results. For example there have been controlled studies on the efficacy of prayer. OwlFancier posted:Not in the sense you seem to be trying to imply. Most Christian denominations that I know of hold god as being impossible to understand, you can know some stuff about him, rather a lot of weirdly specific stuff in some cases, but no sect claims to have 100% mapped the personality of god, or even really claims that god has a personality that would make any sort of sense to a human. Then you should bring your knowledge up to speed. Further up, I posted a study showing so. Also, nothing I've said depends on Christians claiming "to have 100% mapped out the personality of god." But there are enough claims about it to show that it's obviously that of a human-like person. Note that this is in comport with other claims of him "being impossible to understand," because there's no standard that different Christian claims not be in contradiction. If we were examining a coherent system of belief, we'd be stuck at the contradiction between those 2 claims before we can move on to further conclusions. But here, we're not; and you trotting out that one school of thought in the religion's 2000 year history does nothing to counter the claims I'm addressing. Mornacale posted:As for vessbot, if I write a story in which some character is made in the likeness of a real person, you would be insane to claim that the existing person is actually just a fictional construct. Yet an astute reader could draw parallels between the two beings, despite one of them being a material entity and one entirely conceptual, and perhaps use these parallels to become more informed about both the character and the real person. Furthermore, they could potentially draw some conclusions about my understanding of the real person, in the same way as the Bible is not an unmediated list of facts about God, but rather texts about humans' experience of and understanding about God. Obviously God will be anthropomorphized; the Bible is written by and for humans, and therefore will naturally focus on the aspects of God relevant to human reality. This would be true whether God was invented by humans or was in fact an omnipotent being, since the human authors by definition would be unable to understand and communicate the aspects of God that weren't relevant to us. I'm lost in the analogy in the first half of the paragraph. Who is the character and who is the real person? If God is the real person, you're begging the question in saying that I'd be insane to say that he's a fiction. If God of common Christianity is the character, then you're saying that what people think of as God is not real and you are therefore wrong in implying that the religious don't hold their beliefs to be factually true. The Bible (as well as Christian tradition based on it) contains many purported facts about God. You say "anthropomorphized" as if it started out as some disconnected impersonal being with hardly a possible description, and then got human qualities tacked onto it to make it more relatable in storytelling. Chronologically, it was very much the other way around. quote:Instead of reckoning with these sorts of issues, your argument ultimately begs the question by insisting on grounding theology in strict materialism. You presume that all human traits are determined purely by biological processes (though you also suggested that you believe in free will, which is hilarious if true), and therefore insist that any qualities we share with another being are necessarily material biological similarities. But Christians dispute the premise that materialism is sufficient to explain the universe, and in particular the human condition, so they're quite free to theorize about similarities between humanity and the divine that don't depend on biology or materialism. People are reflexively getting angry at you because you are trying to argue against religion by simply fiating that its premises are false. I'm not assuming materialism. If I did, I would have simply said "there's no such goddamn thing as magical spirits, are you off your rocker?" and in a sensible discussion, that would be enough to put the issue to rest. No, I am entertaining the religious supernatural claims, and you should stop and appreciate that I'm already being generous just in doing that. After all, supernaturalism is just formalized camouflage for inserting makebelieve fantasy into an otherwise rational discussion and attempting to shift the burden of proof onto the skeptic to show why it can't be true. (Case in point, you did that here in the paragraph below.) I didn't fiat away religion's premise, I provisionally accepted that something like God could exist and I said "He would obviously have to have something like our nervous system (oh yeah, and Y chromosome) if he has emotions, reactions, intentions, and speech acts like the ones produced by ours. But in "necessary" form instead of physical  ." And still no one has successfully shown why that inference doesn't hold. (2 posters tried, with infantile concepts of "intelligence" and "emotion" as homogeneous quantities that one could either not have, or just have in some level of strength. If we're intelligent and emotional, then why couldn't some other being be even more intelligent and emotional than us? Like a RPG character attribute.)quote:Finally, even if we were to grant your premise, it's trivial to claim that an omnipotent God could engineer evolution such that it eventually produced a species with some arbitrary mental qualities due to arbitrary biological processes. Accepting an omnipotent God, after all, means we have to recognize that even the fundamental physical constants (and contents) of the universe could be/have been adjusted as needed. Your whole argument is just a paper-thin "gotcha" that goes to pieces at the first glance. steinrokkan posted:This is exceedingly vague and the fact you take it as meaning "physical person of a genus related to apes" reveals conceptual insufficiency. The only thing the term person necessarily signifies is the subjectivity of God, similar to the subjectivity of a legal person which is also entirely divorced from physical and biological notions of personhood. Sorry it's too vague for you? What would you have liked to be more specific? I don't know what to do for you there. You're being too vague in your criticism here. For the seventh time, I'm not saying that Christianity thinks God is a physical person. However, he is taken to be a person, along with many personal qualities such as intelligence, emotion, intention, communication, and social ties, which are concepts entirely rooted in our biology, and therefore God is rooted in our biology. You cannot divorce those qualities from their biological roots. If you did, what would they possibly mean? OwlFancier posted:You do seem to be engaging it a bit of false equivocation, or at the least using the descriptions of god's personhood as a prescriptive idea to infer lots of other things about god, which doesn't really work. What's the equivocation? What word am I using with 2 different meanings, and what are those 2 meanings? I think you're mistaking "prescriptive" (as in, I want something to happen, or mean something, based on my authority) for "implication" .. .as in, certain claims logically entail certain conclusions. That those conclusions may be unpleasant or embarrasing, is not a basis for rejecting them; the onus for someone who wants to reject them is to show something wrong with the original claims or the inference used to get from them to the conclusion. For example, we know from historical fact that: 1. Von Braun was a Nazi 2. Von Braun was fundamentally important to America's national glory of the moon landing Therefore, a Nazi was fundamentally important to America's national glory of the moon landing. It's unpleasant and embarrassing, but inescapable from the premises and inference. To make your iceberg analogy more representative of the discussion at hand, every account by those who claim to have seen what's below the surface is a giant lizard-like creature that has bat-type wings and breathes fire. When skeptics critically examine those accounts, the claimants starts twisting themselves into pretzels like "oh no, only insane fundamentalists have ever said it's an actual dragon," and "it's a supernatural dragon you can't see with your senses, and transubstantiates into an iceberg anytime you look," "it's a 'necessary being'," it's not dragon "we usually use the term in English," "it's so ~complicated~," "you have to read a bunch of Medieval scholarship on dragons and icebergs before you're qualified to even engage the question," "it's a conceptual dragon" "humans cannot understand icebergs" etc. vessbot fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Feb 14, 2015 |
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Feb 14, 2015 17:35
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You are arguing that because people treat god somewhat like they would a person, and that when they purportedly interact with god they do so as they would a person, that god therefore is more or less exactly like a human. Which doesn't really work because Christianity very clear that god is very complicated. That humans tend to interact with everything they perceive to be intelligent as they would another human, doesn't mean that everything is another human. People also think about their pets as though they are people but that doesn't make them very much like a human. I would think the consistent Christian view is that god looks like a person to you because that is the easiest way you can understand him, but he is actually rather more complicated than that. You're being prescriptive because you're taking every time someone expressed their impression of god as being person-like and then using that to tell people that they actually believe god is basically a human being. And in doing so you're ignoring all the other times they say god is not at all like a human being. It is possible to say that a thing seems human to you, while also knowing that it is not. You can't really do a big 'aha gotcha!' thing by only paying attention to the former and ignoring the latter.
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Feb 14, 2015 19:20
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Twelve by Pies posted:I kind of feel like "how to interpret this" is maybe unique to the modern day.
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Feb 14, 2015 19:22
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In philosophical discussion, when you're talking about hypothetical highly intelligent beings, person has a different meaning from everyday English. In common usage, humans ARE the only things with complex enough intelligences to be considered moral agents, so person overlaps with human with 100% accuracy. Via Google: Moral agency is an individual's ability to make moral judgments based on some commonly held notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong." When you're referring to God being like a person, it's the assumption that he's an intelligent being with the capacity to make decisions, and the awareness of his decisions and their repercussions that makes him able to be morally responsible for them. It's a statement that he's relatable as a social being, not that he's human-like.
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Feb 14, 2015 19:41
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Infinite Karma posted:In philosophical discussion, when you're talking about hypothetical highly intelligent beings, person has a different meaning from everyday English. In common usage, humans ARE the only things with complex enough intelligences to be considered moral agents, so person overlaps with human with 100% accuracy. Via Google: Moral agency is an individual's ability to make moral judgments based on some commonly held notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong." Even in everyday use "person" is context-dependent and broader than human. Corporation, states, associations can have personhood - the key is whether they are autonomous subjects within the given situation. Also it doesnt mean that a person is held to the same morality and rules as a physical person - these rules again change depending on their area of subjectivity. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Feb 14, 2015 |
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Feb 14, 2015 20:34
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Vessbot, do you speak any other languages than English?
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Feb 14, 2015 21:09
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Mornacale posted:Well, that depends. Certainly the kind of postmodern "there is no objective meaning" approach is a recent development, but only slightly more recent than the idea of literalism. I think there's a sort of popular bigotry that assumes that ancient people weren't as smart as us, and part of that is the idea that we can understand their literature on a "deeper" level than they could (see also: Ancient Aliens). I think this idea doesn't stand up to history; more than a few parts of the Bible are explicitly metaphorical, after all, and it would be a disservice to the writers/audience to suggest that they didn't recognize implicit symbolism also. You're right to say that it's false to assume that ancient people weren't as smart as us and thus were all literalists, but it's also wrong to try and pretend that literalism just sprang out of thin air sometime around America's founding. While it's true that biblical literalism is probably at the height of it's popularity and before Evangelicals it wasn't quite so concentrated the belief did exist before those movements. Do you think that there weren't stupid people in the past along with very smart people? You'd have to have quite a romanticized view of 200 CE people to think that each and every person alive was some sort of enlightened thinker with greatly nuanced, modern even, views of biblical interpretation.
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Feb 14, 2015 21:36
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This is a truly edgy thread. I bet the OP refuses to pick up his room too, because, like, Sunday School sucks.
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Feb 14, 2015 21:43
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TheImmigrant posted:This is a truly edgy thread. I bet the OP refuses to pick up his room too, because, like, Sunday School sucks. I always wondered why evangelicals don't despise fake intellectual conservatives who pretend to value Christianity more than they despise liberals. Then I remember they are, without exception, dumb as posts.
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Feb 14, 2015 21:46
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I think Vessbot may be Richard Dawkins. Well, he's too stupid for that. Maybe Richard Dawkins' PA?
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Feb 15, 2015 01:31
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vessbot posted:However, he is taken to be a person, along with many personal qualities such as intelligence, emotion, intention, communication, and social ties, which are concepts entirely rooted in our biology So what you're saying is it would be impossible to create an artificial intelligence that was capable of these things because it doesn't have fleshy parts in it?
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Feb 15, 2015 05:37
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vessbot posted:I'm lost in the analogy in the first half of the paragraph. Who is the character and who is the real person? If God is the real person, you're begging the question in saying that I'd be insane to say that he's a fiction. If God of common Christianity is the character, then you're saying that what people think of as God is not real and you are therefore wrong in implying that the religious don't hold their beliefs to be factually true. In my analogy, God corresponds to the real person, but the point is not to claim that they are in fact real. Rather, I am presenting another context in which you could create a "being" in the image of another while remaining very clear that they are not physically or cognitively similar. Another analogy would be a song cover, where it's clearly made in the likeness of the original but may have any number of major differences. The point is that saying one thing is "like" another leaves a whole lot more room for difference than you're allowing. quote:The Bible (as well as Christian tradition based on it) contains many purported facts about God. You say "anthropomorphized" as if it started out as some disconnected impersonal being with hardly a possible description, and then got human qualities tacked onto it to make it more relatable in storytelling. Chronologically, it was very much the other way around. This is manifestly untrue, since of course there is no actual person called God that could start concrete and get more abstract. Certainly I don't mean to imply that this increases over time, rather that it's natural for humans in all periods of time to anthropomorphize all kinds of things. As someone else said, we often think of pets as if they were humans, but of course we know they are not. quote:I'm not assuming materialism. If I did, I would have simply said "there's no such goddamn thing as magical spirits, are you off your rocker?" and in a sensible discussion, that would be enough to put the issue to rest. No, I am entertaining the religious supernatural claims, and you should stop and appreciate that I'm already being generous just in doing that. After all, supernaturalism is just formalized camouflage for inserting makebelieve fantasy into an otherwise rational discussion and attempting to shift the burden of proof onto the skeptic to show why it can't be true. (Case in point, you did that here in the paragraph below.) How can you possibly accept that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent supernatural being exists and yet continue to insist that such a being could make humans vaguely similar to them only by perfectly matching their exact biological processes? If in fact you're accepting the premise of an infinite supernatural God then it's quite obvious that the explanations for how humanity can be "in his image" without requiring specific physical correspondence are equally infinite. But of course you are not really accepting this at all; you are attempting to argue theology from materialist terms and then acting smug when it predictably doesn't work. But that proves nothing about religion and plenty about you. Of course supernaturalism is bullshit and the argument begins and ends in ontology. But you're not content to disagree about whether the supernatural can be considered to exist or not--if I had to guess, it's because it makes you uncomfortable that you can't "win" because the choice of ontologies is subjective--so you've embarked on a project to try to insult Christians by "logically" "proving" their God, if real, is just a monkey. We all get it dude, you think religion is bad and religious people are stupid and you know better than them. Thanks for posting about it. Who What Now posted:You're right to say that it's false to assume that ancient people weren't as smart as us and thus were all literalists, but it's also wrong to try and pretend that literalism just sprang out of thin air sometime around America's founding. While it's true that biblical literalism is probably at the height of it's popularity and before Evangelicals it wasn't quite so concentrated the belief did exist before those movements. Do you think that there weren't stupid people in the past along with very smart people? You'd have to have quite a romanticized view of 200 CE people to think that each and every person alive was some sort of enlightened thinker with greatly nuanced, modern even, views of biblical interpretation. Absolutely there are always stupid people, but "what would a stupid person take away from this?" isn't really the purpose of textual criticism. I don't believe that Biblical literalism was the intent of the authors (outside, perhaps, of specific books or passages), I don't believe there's any evidence that the books were widely understood to be literal by their intended audiences, and most importantly I don't think the texts themselves support the idea. So ultimately I think it's safe to say that it's best to approach any given Bible passage assuming that it isn't claiming literal factuality until the text suggests otherwise. Also, I think we should be careful assuming that a stupid person in 1st-Century Judea would make the same mistakes as a stupid person in 21st-Century America. It's not just our understanding of how to interpret stories that's changed, but also the cultural context that shapes our assumptions of how stories work and what they're for.
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Feb 15, 2015 11:33
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vessbot posted:Theologians do lots more than map out their religion: they maintain its claims to be true, and to be supported by facts run through rational examination - they affirm that the religion's underlying premises are true. Atheists deny those premises are true. Those things have a lot to do with one another; they're in direct opposition. Atheists and theologians accept or reject those premises a priori, so they have no dialog with one another. Theologians don't care what atheists say, and atheists don't care what theologians say. They are talking past one another.
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Feb 15, 2015 23:17
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OwlFancier posted:But that does not make the empirical criticism of faith-driven action not actually criticism. It is criticism and it is the most valid that any criticism can be. That a faith-based thinker may ignore all criticism of their faith, on the basis that anyone who does level criticism against it is not accepting the premises upon which it is based, and thus their criticism is invalid, is a deficiency of faith-based thought. Anybody can criticize anything, I'm just saying theologians don't have any role in rebutting external criticism, and the criticism that atheists would level at theologians wouldn't really have anything to do with their work as theologians, but their identity as a religious believer.
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Feb 15, 2015 23:23
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vessbot posted:When they have implications on the physical world, you can check those results. For example there have been controlled studies on the efficacy of prayer. Indeed, and they've shown that prayer is medically beneficial. But does this mean that prayer "works" in the sense it is literally intended, or merely a placebo effect that is purely psychological? It doesn't matter, nor would it matter if it turned out to have no influence or a negative influence, because none of this could actually prove or disprove any metaphysical claims.
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Feb 15, 2015 23:26
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Agag posted:Indeed, and they've shown that prayer is medically beneficial. Actually the 2006 study called "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)" showed that prayer is medically detrimental. Who What Now fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Feb 15, 2015 |
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Feb 15, 2015 23:30
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:One problem with theology is that is there no way to quantify what we do not know. Knowing what we do not know, or what is at the frontier of our knowledge, is the first step in making any kind of discovery. It's what propels the sciences and technology and leads to innovation. Theology does not have this, because we are dealing with something intangible. Theology is always therefore reactionary, because it has nowhere to go, and creates nothing of real value. Theology primarily deals with texts and the interpretation of texts, but generally speaking your argument here could be made about any abstract "liberal arts" discipline. Yet there continue to be new movements and innovations in theology, philosophy, literary criticism and so on. To use a concrete example, Christian theology rather suddenly turned from a toleration of slavery to being vehemently abolitionist. Of course other movements later adopted abolitionism as part of their ideology, but this still ranks as a theological "innovation" that directly improved the lives of millions of people.
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Feb 15, 2015 23:35
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Who What Now posted:Actually the 2006 study called "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)" showed that prayer is medically detrimental. Well you cut off the part where I said it wouldn't matter either way, and in fact the results of studies have been mixed, AND people of the opposing "faction" undermine the credibility of the studies that don't conform to their presuppositions. I'm of the opinion that any medical benefits would be better explained psychologically than theologically, but it remains the case that even if prayer was beneficial or detrimental %100 of the time it wouldn't tell us anything about the underlying metaphysical claims.
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Feb 15, 2015 23:47
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Agag posted:Well you cut off the part where I said it wouldn't matter either way, and in fact the results of studies have been mixed, AND people of the opposing "faction" undermine the credibility of the studies that don't conform to their presuppositions. The study was funded by Templeton Foundation, so if anything they would have tampered with it to show that prayer was effective. And you made a factual claim that studies showed that prayer was slightly beneficial, which is untrue even though your other points are still valid. I agree with your other points and was only correcting that one.
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Feb 15, 2015 23:58
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Who What Now posted:The study was funded by Templeton Foundation, so if anything they would have tampered with it to show that prayer was effective. And you made a factual claim that studies showed that prayer was slightly beneficial, which is untrue even though your other points are still valid. I agree with your other points and was only correcting that one. In the bolded portion I was referring to the fertility study, which skeptics later claimed was bullshit (and maybe it was). Anyway this is a digression, as you point out.
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Feb 16, 2015 00:11
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Agag posted:To use a concrete example, Christian theology rather suddenly turned from a toleration of slavery to being vehemently abolitionist. Of course other movements later adopted abolitionism as part of their ideology, but this still ranks as a theological "innovation" that directly improved the lives of millions of people.
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Feb 16, 2015 00:37
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Chin posted:So theology is actually about willful reinterpretation of religious texts to the end of manipulating the faithful. Owned, theists. 
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Feb 16, 2015 00:44
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Chin posted:So theology is actually about willful reinterpretation of religious texts to the end of manipulating the faithful. There seems to be this fantasy among some atheists I've met, online and in person, that religious people think their faith has never changed at all.
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Feb 16, 2015 00:56
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Barlow posted:The fact that religions change and are reinterpreted is by no means a bad thing. Many traditions can justify this easily by saying that revelation is ongoing. Even the most literalistic traditions also face new challenges, how Orthodox Jews deal with things like organ transplants is a great example of this kind of adaption. More alarming to New Atheists, and really my original point, is that all of this happens without any input from them, and that it is not about them at all.
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Feb 16, 2015 03:45
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Agag posted:More alarming to New Atheists, and really my original point, is that all of this happens without any input from them, and that it is not about them at all. What the gently caress are you talking about?
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Feb 16, 2015 03:50
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Who What Now posted:What the gently caress are you talking about? The irrelevance of atheists to theology, or the lives of religious people in general. And vice-versa.
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Feb 16, 2015 03:59
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Agag posted:The irrelevance of atheists to theology, or the lives of religious people in general. And vice-versa. I dunno. The encroachment of religion on civil liberties certainly make theology relevent to athiests. And to thiests as well.
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Feb 16, 2015 04:11
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CommieGIR posted:I dunno. The encroachment of religion on civil liberties certainly make theology relevent to athiests. And to thiests as well. The concern there is legal, not theological. You don't care why e.g. some Christians think they have a say in your reproductive rights, you only care about legally asserting your own autonomy. Also, the most repressive regimes in the history of mankind have all been officially atheist. But of course terrible government abound, if not predominate.
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Feb 16, 2015 04:15
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Agag posted:The irrelevance of atheists to theology, or the lives of religious people in general. And vice-versa. No, you said that "New Atheists" are upset that they weren't directly involved with theology changing its interpretations. Where do you see that? Show me this. Agag posted:Also, the most repressive regimes in the history of mankind have all been officially atheist. But of course terrible government abound, if not predominate. Yes, the regimes supported by cult of personalities headed by near or literal deified leaders sure were atheistic. 
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Feb 16, 2015 04:23
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Agag posted:Owned, theists. Do you actually think that Christian theologians came to their abolitionist conclusions entirely within the context of fervent belief in the divine authorship of a book that says not to hit your slaves too hard? Barlow posted:The fact that religions change and are reinterpreted is by no means a bad thing. Many traditions can justify this easily by saying that revelation is ongoing. Even the most literalistic traditions also face new challenges, how Orthodox Jews deal with things like organ transplants is a great example of this kind of adaption. Having to change and reinterpret so members can do things like get a new kidney doesn't say much for the concept of divine authorship, though.
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Feb 16, 2015 04:23
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Chin posted:Neat evasion, I guess? Theologically speaking, I would say the most important factor is an emphasis on Christology over Old Testament legalism. Jesus' sacrifice is for the benefit of all mankind. All other distinctions of class or nationality are secondary, which is distinct from the Old Testament context of one chosen people favored over all others. The history of theology in all religious traditions (theology and its equivalents) is one of paring down the extraneous details to focus on the essentials. Historically speaking, you can't really deny the fact that the abolitionist movement, particularly in the English-speaking world, is initiated by devout Christians. So even the most diehard atheist would concede that the proverbial broken watch is right twice a day.
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Feb 16, 2015 04:55
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Agag posted:Also, the most repressive regimes in the history of mankind have all been officially atheist. But of course terrible government abound, if not predominate.
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Feb 16, 2015 06:13
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Agag posted:Theologically speaking, I would say the most important factor is an emphasis on Christology over Old Testament legalism. Jesus' sacrifice is for the benefit of all mankind. All other distinctions of class or nationality are secondary, which is distinct from the Old Testament context of one chosen people favored over all others. You keep reiterating again and again how apologetics and theology is about making the law fit modernity and not about the timelessness and authority of god. Just because atheists aren't involved doesn't mean they are irrelevant nor does it mean they can't criticize. You're simply dressing up moving the goal posts as a noble endeavor.
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Feb 16, 2015 06:22
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