Passer wrote:Pebble wrote:Passer wrote:Pebble wrote:It is only through the lens of faith that one can construe the bible as true. This seems an odd place to come to get to the point of being comfortable with accepting the veracity of the bible. Does this mean that you want to become comfortable with the lack of veracity of the bible?
I've had my faith for as long as I can remember and I've also had doubts for as long as I can remember. Recently I decided to research what it is I think I know. What I learn might lead me away from Christianity.
Why would the lack of veracity lead you away from christianity? Many christians accept that the bible is written and copied by fallible beings and to be interpreted rather than accepted as the word of god. They treat it as inspired by god, and retain a strong faith in what they take to be its core messages.
The bible is supposed to be the word of God. So I can't help think the message should be clear with no ambiguities. After all we are talking about an omnipotent and omniscient being. If I am saying the errors are down to man, then how can I distinguish that from any other man made book? It's unfalsifiable
First of all, any entity
genuinely living up to the "omnipotent and omniscient" assertion, should be able to devise a means of ensuring that the humans selected to disseminate any message do so without cocking things up on a grand scale. Or, if the humans in question are simply too irredeemably stupid to perform this task, perform the task itself, so that there's no room for error or misunderstanding.
Of course, the whole Genesis story blows the "omnipotent and omniscient" assertion out of the water on a grand scale, because it asserts that the magic man in question purportedly fabricated a "perfect creation", only to build into this "perfect creation" a self-destruct mechanism, whereby the whole edifice could be turned into a gigantic turd, simply because some humans ate the wrong piece of fruit. Worse still, the same magic man then guarantees that the self-destruct mechanism will be set off, by purportedly fabricating humans in such a manner that they are completely bereft of essential pieces of knowledge, and that the only way they will ever acquire that knowledge, will be to eat the fruit in question and set off the whole BSOD episode. The vision we're left with, is not so much that of a fantastically gifted entity forging a marvellous and awe-inspiring universe, but of a 15 year old hacker in his mother's basement, building malware into a game for the shits and giggles.
Then, of course, there's the slight problem of which humans this entity purportedly "chose" to be its special messengers. Instead of choosing, say, the Ancient Chinese, who developed a pretty advanced civilisation with commendable speed, or the Ancient Greeks, whose thought was sufficiently sophisticated for it to remain part of the underpinnings of Western Civilisation to the present, this entity chose instead, a bunch of piss-stained nomads whose idea of advanced thought, was to write ten chapters devoted to the business of setting fire to small furry animals in order to please this entity. Instead of choosing people who had a decent command of philosophy, mathematics, and in the case of the Greeks, had at least some passing connection with a prototype of the modern empirical method, said entity chose the idiots who were too stupid to count correctly the number of legs that an insect possesses. Who in their right fucking mind, would choose the short bus people to be the 'elect' responsible for disseminating a message of cosmic importance to the species in question? The idea that the prime requirement for the task, was that the chosen instruments be nothing more than a bunch of Chatty Cathy dolls, undermines the entire enterprise from the start, because any reasonably intelligent entity with a message to present, wants that message to be presented by intelligent, articulate advocates, who moreover are capable of demonstrating by example, that said message is worth listening to. The example set at the start was hardly a stellar one, and this theme has continued through to the present, but for now, let's stick with the past, and look what happened - the chosen advocates were, apparently, not even up to the task of abiding by what was, for the standards of the time, a reasonably well-defined set of rules. Though the manner in which some of those rules clashes violently with essential aspects of human nature has a fair amount to do with this.
Indeed, moving on to the present, the same correlation of religious adherence with stupidity continues unabated, and in the modern era, has attained a hyper-Pythonesque level of absurdity. We have fundamentalist "Christians" in the USA, some of the most brashly vocal advocates for their religion, who are incapable of opening their mouths without uttering platitudes of excremental banality. These people routinely embrace ideas that are not merely delusional, but outright psychotic, and cheefully cling to attitudes so explosively at variance with the actual tenets of the religion they profess to adhere to, that the resulting spectacle is frequently beyond satire. Even the so-called 'professional' advocates exhibit either a mental command of elementary concepts that would be laughed at by my tropical fish, or a level of duplicity that calls into question fatally any notion that religion is purportedly a vital necessity for any semblance of ethical awareness, let alone good ethical practice. As for the likes of ISIS in the Islamic world, I wouldn't advise people without requisite protection to touch their fulminations with an extremely long barge pole.
Indeed, the small number of people who
do manage to set an example worth following, as a result of their religious adherence, are all the more remarkable and newsworthy against the otherwise depressing backdrop of failure. It's no wonder said small number of worthies become fetish icons in their own right, because they're such a stark contrast to the norm within their respective religions, that the desperation to present them as exemplars becomes an exercise in bathos.
As a consequence of the above, anyone experiencing even the
slightest temptation to let religion influence their thinking, should pause and worry
deeply about the requisite malaise.
by 
