Posted: Jul 18, 2017 7:52 pm
Cito di Pense wrote:John Platko wrote:Cito di Pense wrote:Zadocfish2 wrote:
Cherry-picking or no, it's a frankly erroneous to look at the Bible without understanding context.
In any event, Justin, it's pointless to treat the bible as an inspiration of faith without desiring faith at least a little bit. So, the context you're talking about is that of desiring faith. That said, you can look at the bible in a host of other ways, including as a bunch of myths written by ignorant goat roasters who lacked even a scientific theory of disease-causing microbes, which is what they are empirically. The stories you hear about people who read the bible with an "open mind", and were converted, are anecdotes about people whose unstable mental states have not been ruled out. The rationales you hear about the wisdom of the ancients and primitives are just that - rationalizations. Those people would look at you on your motorcycle and think you were God.
Why would anyone of stable mental state seek to rule in stable mental states for writers of a book where virgin births and the like are afoot? The Bible is for those who appreciate the fruits they can pick from a particular sort of unstable mental state.
I'm not talking about the writers, here, as regards 'unstable'. All we know about them is that they were ignorant goat roasters. I'm talking about modern folks who understand the microbe theory of disease.
We can't rule out the unstable mental states of modern folks who understand pathogens? I suppose that's true but so 
The goat roasters were stably ignorant as they concocted their myths.
The Bible wouldn't be very interesting without the unstable mental states that made it what it is. It's hard to imagine what the NT might be if Jesus didn't seem
to his family.
Sometimes the result is like Justin's, flip-flopping between faith and unfaith.
That is so much better than latching on the wrong state. There is no hope in errant stability. That's a lesson the good nuns and priests taught me well - the parable of the irreformable dogma - it ends badly.
I'm not saying unfaith is for everyone any more than you're saying faith is for everyone.
Faith is for everyone - even if it's just faith in unfaith.
Sometimes the faith result is like the one you get, where there isn't any particular source of inspiration of faith, and you just look wide-eyed at anything that might be pressed into service, wedged into position, because there's no limit to the amount of stuff some people need to sustain their unstable faith. You've never made any pretense of the sufficiency of the bible, only declared its usefulness.
Usefulness? Sadly, my extensive research has now concluded that the Bible is rarely useful to people - with a few noteworthy exceptional exceptions, e.g. MLK. And that's bad enough but it does seem to cause a great many people to loose faith in truth.