Posted: Apr 13, 2019 7:14 pm
willhud9 wrote:
Both. Inerrancy and infallibility are two concepts most lay people don’t really consider accurate.
There's a difference between "most lay people" and "most moderate Christians" too. You're being somewhat unclear on who you are talking about.
willhud9 wrote:Do the majority of Christians believe in a literal global flood? No. Why? Because they accept the story as allegory, myth, and symbolism.
There's an implied contradiction between myth, and allegory/symbol. It is possible to be a non-literalist and simultaneously believe in infallibility and inerrancy. It is possible to have an allegory or a symbol for something true. Myth however implies something false by most definitions. "It is a myth that people who eat chocolate get acne". So I think you're being unclear exactly what you are trying to say.
I am questioning the implied claim that most religious moderates aren't inerrantists. It is my experience, though I readily admit I don't have poll numbers and would be happy to take correction, that if you were to press them on the details, they would rather come up with re-interpretations and odd excuses, than admit outright that the bible has errors and falsehoods in it.
That's why we get apologetics like "it was meant for another time" rather than "Yah, that's pretty bad and false"(especially given that religious people, even religious moderates, definitely are NOT moral relativists and will get insulted if you tell them). It's why we get "It's an allegory", rather than "yeah, it's definitely false". It's because, it seems to me, they ARE actually inerrantists strongly predisposed to try to keep scripture true but reinterpret it rather than reject it, it's just that the inerrancy is maintained by re-interpreations("6 day creation actually was meant as 6 long ages") rather than outright denial of facts("no, it's 6 days no matter what your fallible science says").
willhud9 wrote:Rumraket wrote:Nobody has claimed people exclusively get their religious ideas from their scriptures. In fact Harris has stated the opposite, exactly concerning moderates. They are moderates BECAUSE they also taken on secular or other extra-scriptural views, and are as a consequence re-interpretating the scriptures in a non-literal way (or, as he's also completely correct about, they some times simply forget some of the bad passages exist and ignore them).
Then Harris is a moron and needs to take a course on sociology and anthropology and realize what religion is.
Why should he do that? How does that alter his argument about moderates?
What you're saying here doesn't make sense. In this particular instance Harris actually agrees with you, that religions evolve and have historically evolved and adapted to encompass extant social and cultural norms. One of the ways it does that is by religious people starting to read their scriptures as allegories, symbols, and metaphors, as opposed to taking them literally. That way they don't have to admit it contains errors or is false.
willhud9 wrote:Rumraket wrote:When you remind these people of the Bad Passages(tm), they will invariably offer up some laughable rationalization for why that passage is still true and still probably the inerrant word of God, it's just that "it was meant for another time". Oddly enough the idea that it is just backwards bronzeage bullshit doesn't enter their minds.
And you like Harris have examples of this? Or just your own anecdotes?
Anecdotes would by definition be examples. And yes I have plenty. We've certainly had people around here say that. One could go watch The Atheist Experience and see how religiously "moderate"(in the sense that they aren't literalist or fundamentalist) callers often respond to the problem of biblical slavery, to get more examples. They do that by doing what you're doing, saying it was a different time back then and God's message was just right for that time. That's a typical apologetic from moderates. Another is to insist it needs to be understood as allegory or metaphor, or that they were "just servants" and it had nothing to do with the kind of slavery we saw in the US.
willhud9 wrote:Rumraket wrote:How do I know they do this? Experience. Even some atheists do it, they "excuse" certain biblical passages as just being intended for another time. A strange moral relativism creeps in, where some things no matter how cruel or barbarous can be totally okay just because they happened a long time ago.
Well considering I’m a moral relativist and considering I think absolute morality is bollocks I think you’re hard pressed to convince me that the morals of 100 AD were not just as valid as the morals of 2019.
And presumably every period in between. Prevailing views as the time and place would have been just as valid as any other place and time? Why would the length of times between periods, or the accidents of national borders, determine what is or isn't right or wrong? At what resolution does your relativism break down. Days, weeks, months, decades? Meters, kilometers, border checkpoints? It's wrong for us but not for them, because that's were a fence was placed, or a line drawn on a map?
willhud9 wrote:Different times. Different perspectives. Applying morals anachronistically through the past is fallacious for many reasons. Not least because society progresses. It’s a goal of civilization to adjust and change.
So, in fact, slavery in the united states could have ben morally right, at least for a time. The Holocaust could have been morally right in germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Who are you or me to say what they did is wrong, it was just their culture and religious beliefs. Why should the fact that people outside german borders were more likely to disagree mean they were really morally in the wrong in germany?
willhud9 wrote:Rumraket wrote:Particularly the topic of slavery will have their heads explode in acrobatic mental contortions. Somehow Gods commands about biblical slavery (who to take as slaves, how to deceive them into indefinite servitute, and when and how to beat them) was morally fine because that was just the culture at the time, but slavery in the united states was bad. Apparently that wasn't "just the culture at the time" too.
Not really
Why not? What sets the 1700's apart from 100AD? Why wasn't slavery in the 1700's "just as valid" as it was in 100AD?
willhud9 wrote:Quite simply he states that moderate Christians aren’t exactly Christians because they cherry pick their verses.
Where does he do this?