Subject: Re: Music, religion, etc.
From: jason varsoke (jjv@caesun.msd.ray.com)
Date: Tue Jan 18 2000 - 14:23:16 EST
> Like I said, you're closed to even the possibility :) Too bad your universe
> is so small. What is "proof" purely depends on what you're open to. If you
> were open to proof, it may present itself. You never know :).
I'm not closed to the possibility. If fact, you could say that I'm
more open because I believe in the equal possibility of Buddha, Mohammad,
JC, Zeus, Chimera, and Barney. Sure all these things are possible. But
none are true. You, however, have to ignore the possibility of Zeus (for
one) because your God tells you he's the only god. Now, who's got the
smaller universe, pal?
And of course, it doesn't matter who has a bigger, or smaller universe,
just as long as you aren't filling it with nonsense.
As far as being open to proof, well anytime He is ready, he can prove
Himself. But He's going to have to do something more suggestive than
giving me bad luck for not believing or something like that. He's gonna
hafta do sumthen like tap me on da shoulder, rapture, bread to fish,
parting the tides before me and so on. And certainly sending Zealots like
David Kerish isn't going to help His cause -- neither yours.
It does irk me, some of the stunts you guys try to pull for the sake of
argument. This whole "open to the proof, it may present itself" stuff is
nothing more than suspension of disbelief that make movies seem real. And
sure, movies seem real if you suspend disbelief, but they are not. If the
proof were really out there then I wouldn't have to be open to it. It
would hit me in the face.
And as we are back to proof: I was just joshing with ya about the
athopamorphizing. I guess it didn't really come across that way. Anyway,
the reason the Faith is not like trust in another is because the choice of
Faith is God's gift of Freewill to all us humans. You get to choose to
believe in Him or not. This is of course unlike Science. You don't get
to choose to believe or not believe in Science - not rationally at least.
> Your statements about God reveal a very shallow understanding of Christology,
> but that's ok. You need to know, though, how little you know.
Read the main book, and a whole lot of philosophy/theology. Never
spent a whole lot of time after that. It's hard to dedicate so much time
to something that is conjecture if you aren't too interested in the
cultural side.
>
> I would say the only way to examine some of the internal claims of the
> Gospels would be to compare them to semitic and hellenist myth accounts, and
> then compare them to contemporary historical accounts (contemporary for first
> century AD). I think I would be arguing that the writers were largely using
> the conventions of historical accounts (the opening of John 1 would be the
> main exception), and affirm from this that the writers themselves believed
> they were writing history, and expected their audience to read them the same
> way.
As for history, I don't really think you can rely too much on the bible
to be at all accurate this way from an external perspective. The first
book of the bible wasn't written until 300 CE or so. They didn't have all
the fancy scientific techniques we have to verify knowledge. They didn't
have computers to help research, or carbon date things. Instead they had
verbal and the scant written record of all this to go from. Can you
imagine what we'd think of anyone today who was writing about early
colonial US and was using no sources other than hersay? By Darwin, please
tell me we learned from Orwell something about history.
> >From here I would argue to the external. I would say that there's a real
> problem in denying the historicity in that the ethical system presented is
> unrivaled in western thought, and that the type of people that would
> consciously record a false history (liars) or unconsciously (stupid and
> superstitious) seems an odd context for such an elevated moral teaching.
Think Fable. That pretty much answers your problem. Has nothing to do
with lying, just fiction. And yes, I admit, though it has its problems,
Christianty is a pretty good moral system. The best part about it is that
it is unassailable. You can't argue with it at all. That's the nice
trick about religion it completely destroys moral relativism.
-jay
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