The Christian Theology Education Thread

[Salt n Vinegar]

1 hour ago, Hillonearth said:

I've always found it distinctly worrying that anyone thinks they're getting the direct-from-the-tap version of the big message of Christianity from reading the bible, far less feel confident to pick and choose the bits they want to focus on.

None of the four canonical gospels in the new testament were written prior to 70ADish at the earliest, and parts of them might even date to the second century, which would strongly suggest them to be at best garbled word-of-mouth rather than anything based on eyewitness accounts.

Factor in the fact that what actually became Christianity was much more along the lines of St Paul's ideas....he freely admitted to never having met JC, but based his ideas on the big chap coming to him in a vision and telling him alone what he'd really meant the whole time, much of which was almost diametrically opposed to the more closely aligned to Judaism proto-Christianity being practiced by the people who'd actually known him.

Finally, you have to take into account 2000 years of mistranslation and tweaking to suit contemporary political and theological needs...an obvious example was the mistranslation of the word mekhasheph...."You shall not suffer a poisoner to live" is a more accurate translation than the "You shall not suffer a herbalist to live" of the middle ages, which was eventually changed yet again to "witch." at a time when folk remedies were being equated with witchcraft by those in power. Accurate translation* of that one word would probably have saved a lot of old wifies being burnt at the stake.

*I trust that you are not suggesting that the Bible as available in the UK, which has been and is still used by Christians to guide them, may be 'inaccurate' ? Shockeroonie. 

[Ginaro]

5 hours ago, Hillonearth said:

None of the four canonical gospels in the new testament were written prior to 70ADish at the earliest, and parts of them might even date to the second century, which would strongly suggest them to be at best garbled word-of-mouth rather than anything based on eyewitness accounts.

Funny timing as I saw this tweet from an MP. As if the only two options are hoax or truth...

 

[VincentGuerin]

18 hours ago, Shotgun said:

Could anyone take a stab at explaining the whole "Jesus died for your sins" bit to me? I've heard it all my life but nobody has been able to tell me what it actually means.

Ok. Disclaimer, I don't believe this stuff, but I went to hunnars of Sunday School and have God-fearing family.

God hates sin, and for some reason not yet revealed to anyone, the punishment for sin is death. All through the Old Testament there are examples of blood sacrifice to atone for sin/keep The Big Man happy. The 'Jesus died for our sins' thing is based on the idea that Jesus was God become man, without sin, yet took on the punishment for everyone else's sin, so that wrong'uns like you and I can be made as if we'd never sinned if we just choose to believe in Jesus.

Now, a sensible man may ask why God (who is meant to love us and that) has devised such a system, given that the powers of reasoning he has given us would make most of us likely to reject the whole thing as preposterous nonsense, leading the majority of mankind to oblivion.

Although, what the Bible actually says about Hell is worth examining and is a whole other topic. Spoiler: It's not as clear as people think.

31 minutes ago, Ginaro said:

Funny timing as I saw this tweet from an MP. As if the only two options are hoax or truth...

 

That even the most enthusiastic believer could claim that the Gospels are first-hand, eye-witness accounts is remarkable. He simply cannot possibly believe that, unless he has no idea about the book he's reading.

They are not first-hand, eye-witness accounts.

The Gospels are like me sitting down just now and trying to write a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis in a world with no photographs, no video footage, no internet, and no reliable records at all other than what I'd heard from older people who said they could remember it.

[Fullerene]

40 minutes ago, Ginaro said:

Funny timing as I saw this tweet from an MP. As if the only two options are hoax or truth...

This reminds me of the time I went to a bookshop in Stornoway where "Das Kapital" was prominently displayed in the Fiction Section!

[mathematics]

FWIW I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which details the various religious and whatnots which had an input into the current day depiction of “satan”*:

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Birth-Satan-Tracing-Devils-Biblical-ebook/dp/B00OO199EY

 

* not Henry Templeton in this case

Edited February 23, 2023 by mathematics

[vikingTON]

12 minutes ago, VincentGuerin said:

That even the most enthusiastic believer could claim that the Gospels are first-hand, eye-witness accounts is remarkable. He simply cannot possibly believe that, unless he has no idea about the book he's reading.

They are not first-hand, eye-witness accounts.

The Gospels are like me sitting down just now and trying to write a history of the Cuban Missile Crisis in a world with no photographs, no video footage, no internet, and no reliable records at all other than what I'd heard from older people who said they could remember it.

While this is true, by the same standard the vast majority of even *significant* historical events before the widespread adoption of the printing press suffers from the same issue. There is no contemporaneous, surviving account of Alexander the Great. One of the key 'sources' for William Wallace was from a court poet churning an anti-English political campaign (against a Scottish king) nearly 200 years after Stirling Bridge. That's before we even start with the nonsense of 'Roman history' over a 1,000 year period in the West alone. Quite often these are presented as first-hand accounts - and we rely on them even when they are not. 

By the standards of pre-modern historical events, the Gospels are not a terrible set of sources and can be cross-reference to non-religious works as well for the non metaphysical stuff. Tom Holland's take on The Rest is History is the sensible one here.

[VincentGuerin]

4 minutes ago, virginton said:

While this is true, by the same standard the vast majority of even *significant* historical events before the widespread adoption of the printing press suffers from the same issue. There is no contemporaneous, surviving account of Alexander the Great. One of the key 'sources' for William Wallace was from a court poet churning an anti-English political campaign (against a Scottish king) nearly 200 years after Stirling Bridge. That's before we even start with the nonsense of 'Roman history' over a 1,000 year period in the West alone. Quite often these are presented as first-hand accounts - and we rely on them even when they are not. 

By the standards of pre-modern historical events, the Gospels are not a terrible set of sources and can be cross-reference to non-religious works as well for the non metaphysical stuff. Tom Holland's take on The Rest is History is the sensible one here.

I don't disagree with any of that. Difference is, I'm not being told that my view on William Wallace should dictate how I live my life and will eventually decide the eternal fate of my soul.

[Hedgecutter]

FWIW, parish ministers of old have been a royal pain for me, as far as Ordnance Survey 'name books' go (the records that give references/descriptions for the names that appear on the OS maps)

It's been very clear that (especially in the 19th Century) several local ministers heard a far fetched tale and informed an OS surveyor who entered the info as fact because such a high-standing member of society endorsed it.  In turn, plenty of sources have run with stories of "caves X miles long in which a (now ghost) Piper wandered in and never returned*", all because of a minister-endorsed tale.  Last year I visited an annoyingly remote cave that was supposedly the home of an outlaw who lived within and used it to shelter a "dozen cattle", which is rather remarkable for a void that measured 7m long and 0.5m at its widest point. Yet another site now recorded under the 'utter nonsense, barely worth registering other than to save others a wasted visit' category.

Anyway, my point: religious leaders spread clearly bullsh*t stories which end up in respected print, word goes about, and everybody treats it as fact.  Hopefully you can see the parallels here.

 

*and there's nearly always a dog that runs out of the cave having lost its hair because it encountered the omnipresent Devil biding inside.  Worth remembering that the religious people of the day believed all this to be genuine. 

Edited February 22, 2023 by Hedgecutter

[Salt n Vinegar]

1 hour ago, VincentGuerin said:

I don't disagree with any of that. Difference is, I'm not being told that my view on William Wallace should dictate how I live my life and will eventually decide the eternal fate of my soul.

Correct about that - you are unlikely to receive advice, instructions or direct threats from another human, given authority by someone else, or claiming "authority", saying that he (it's usually a "he") knows how William Wallace wants you to live your life - and of course only he and his pals have "the truth" about these things. 

Further, you won't receive any warnings from that human about ignoring others who want to give you diametrically opposed advice, instructions or direct threats about the rules William Wallace wants you to follow. The other chancers, trying to tell you these things which are based on exactly the same source material, are either genuinely ignorant, willfully ignorant or under the influence of the Devil. 

Oh, by the way, he wants you to give him money. Not once, but repeatedly. 

(Can't wait for the debate about having different kinds of William Wallace schools. ) 

[coprolite]

1 hour ago, VincentGuerin said:

I don't disagree with any of that. Difference is, I'm not being told that my view on William Wallace should dictate how I live my life and will eventually decide the eternal fate of my soul.

This is a good point and can probably apply similarly to the Old Testament.

The OT is similar in both the time that it was probably written down and in the time period that it purports to cover as the mythology of classical Greece. There’s probably archaeological evidence for biblical Jericho like there’s probably archaeological evidence for Troy. The Greek stories are probably more fantastical but the OT has its share of tall tales (parting the sea? Living in a whale?).

Classical Greece and the OT have both exerted influence on our western sense of morality through the ages. 
 

The difference is that there isn’t really any group that refuses to move on from the ideas of Plato and insist on slavery or who will swear blind that snails grow out of the mud. But the other set of Bronze Age stories is treated by some as God’s instructions and by some (not as far as I know, on here) even as a literal natural history.

The flip side of that is that secular types probably underweight the OT’s influence on Western thought and give the Greeks too much  credit.

 

[Hillonearth]

16 minutes ago, coprolite said:

This is a good point and can probably apply similarly to the Old Testament.

The OT is similar in both the time that it was probably written down and in the time period that it purports to cover as the mythology of classical Greece. There’s probably archaeological evidence for biblical Jericho like there’s probably archaeological evidence for Troy. The Greek stories are probably more fantastical but the OT has its share of tall tales (parting the sea? Living in a whale?).

Classical Greece and the OT have both exerted influence on our western sense of morality through the ages. 
 

The difference is that there isn’t really any group that refuses to move on from the ideas of Plato and insist on slavery or who will swear blind that snails grow out of the mud. But the other set of Bronze Age stories is treated by some as God’s instructions and by some (not as far as I know, on here) even as a literal natural history.

The flip side of that is that secular types probably underweight the OT’s influence on Western thought and give the Greeks too much  credit.

 

Perhaps the easiest disproved example of biblical literalism is the intelligent design v. evolution thing....I've got an interest in ornithology and can think of three examples off the top of my head of different kinds of evolution in action just among the birds you can encounter in Scotland.

You've got evolution through dispersal...an ancestral population of gulls spread in all likelihood initially from the Baltic region both to the east and west over the subarctic northern hemisphere...by the time they'd made it all the way round the world and met up again in NW Europe they'd evolved into the two separate species called the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-Backed Gull which you can readily see by looking out of your window.

There's also evolution by separation...the all-black Carrion Crow of the lowlands and the grey and black Hooded Crow of the Highlands were once a single taxon which ended up separated from each other during the last Ice Age during which time they genetically disconnected from each other sufficiently that they're now two separate species.

The last one is evolution through hybridisation....there's a scarce seabird off our coasts called the Pomarine Skua for which there's absolutely no evidence of it having existed prior to as little as 1000 years ago...good luck getting two of them in the ark because they didn't exist back then. The hypothesis is that two pre-existing skua species freely interbred perhaps having been trapped due to an Arctic weather event, with the fertile offspring forming the basis for an entirely new species.

[invergowrie arab]

8 hours ago, Hillonearth said:

Perhaps the easiest disproved example of biblical literalism is the intelligent design v. evolution thing....I've got an interest in ornithology and can think of three examples off the top of my head of different kinds of evolution in action just among the birds you can encounter in Scotland.

You've got evolution through dispersal...an ancestral population of gulls spread in all likelihood initially from the Baltic region both to the east and west over the subarctic northern hemisphere...by the time they'd made it all the way round the world and met up again in NW Europe they'd evolved into the two separate species called the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-Backed Gull which you can readily see by looking out of your window.

There's also evolution by separation...the all-black Carrion Crow of the lowlands and the grey and black Hooded Crow of the Highlands were once a single taxon which ended up separated from each other during the last Ice Age during which time they genetically disconnected from each other sufficiently that they're now two separate species.

The last one is evolution through hybridisation....there's a scarce seabird off our coasts called the Pomarine Skua for which there's absolutely no evidence of it having existed prior to as little as 1000 years ago...good luck getting two of them in the ark because they didn't exist back then. The hypothesis is that two pre-existing skua species freely interbred perhaps having been trapped due to an Arctic weather event, with the fertile offspring forming the basis for an entirely new species.

Not to mention human eyes. They are fucking rubbish.

https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-008-0092-1

 

[Hillonearth]

11 minutes ago, invergowrie arab said:

Not to mention human eyes. They are fucking rubbish.

https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-008-0092-1

 

And while we're at it, no omipotent hyper-being would have ever "intelligently" designed the scrotum unless it was for a laugh.

[vikingTON]

9 hours ago, Salt n Vinegar said:

Correct about that - you are unlikely to receive advice, instructions or direct threats from another human, given authority by someone else, or claiming "authority", saying that he (it's usually a "he") knows how William Wallace wants you to live your life - and of course only he and his pals have "the truth" about these things. 

Further, you won't receive any warnings from that human about ignoring others who want to give you diametrically opposed advice, instructions or direct threats about the rules William Wallace wants you to follow. 

It's like you've never actually studied 'nationalism' as a historical phenomenon to make such obviously wrong claims. 

And of course the revival of Wallace's story - from second-hand accounts - and its portrayal by Hollywood was itself a part (though not the only catalyst) for a new emphasis on Scottish nationalism in the past 25 years. Which is full of references to historical figures (Wallace, Bruce, Burns etc.) and their interpretations/instructions for how Scots should decide their future hundreds of years later. 

That's not a drive-by on Scottish nationalism: it is a demonstration that societies now produce secular myths and founding doctrines that carry out the same roles as religious ideas and leaders in the past. 

Edited February 23, 2023 by vikingTON

[scottsdad]

16 minutes ago, virginton said:

It's like you've never actually studied 'nationalism' as a historical phenomenon to make such obviously wrong claims. 

And of course the revival of Wallace's story - from second-hand accounts - and its portrayal by Hollywood was itself a part (though not the only catalyst) for a new emphasis on Scottish nationalism in the past 25 years. Which is full of references to historical figures (Wallace, Bruce, Burns etc.) and their interpretations/instructions for how Scots should decide their future hundreds of years later. 

That's not a drive-by on Scottish nationalism: it is a demonstration that societies now produce secular myths and founding doctrines that carry out the same roles as religious ideas and leaders in the past. 

Absolutely right. William Wallace in particular, his story is pieced together from various second and third hand accounts (Blind Harry's Wallace etc) that went on to become part of the legend.

Record keeping in the middle ages wasn't up to much.

[Hedgecutter]

37 minutes ago, Hillonearth said:

And while we're at it, no omipotent hyper-being would have ever "intelligently" designed the scrotum unless it was for a laugh.

See the 'recurrent laryngeal nerve' in the neck, which now goes on a completely pointless / inefficient detour down to the heart and back.

[Salt n Vinegar]

10 minutes ago, virginton said:

It's like you've never actually studied 'nationalism' as a historical phenomenon to make such obviously wrong claims. 

And of course the revival of Wallace's story - from second-hand accounts - and its portrayal by Hollywood was itself a part (though not the only catalyst) for a new emphasis on Scottish nationalism in the past 25 years. Which is full of references to historical figures (Wallace, Bruce, Burns etc.) and their interpretations/instructions for how Scots should decide their future hundreds of years later. 

That's not a drive-by on Scottish nationalism: it is a demonstration that societies now produce secular myths and founding doctrines that carry out the same roles as religious ideas and leaders in the past. 

Nearly. Secular myths rely on, or are based on information which is subject to revision, improvement or even being disproved by those kryptonite-like irritations called research and evidence.  Religions can sometimes get things right eventually. After all, the Vatican did apologise for prosecuting Galileo when he claimed that the Earth revolved round the sun. I mean, yes, it did take until 1992 for it to happen, but better late than never.

We know nowadays where the sun goes at night. We don't need evil spirits to explain illness and only the loony end of the spectrum now blame humans non-Biblical physical urges for geological or meteorological disasters. Earthquakes or tsunamis aren't now widely regarded as results of gay marriage. The averagely well educated teenager knows more about the real world than anyone around 2000 years ago. They could probably write a better guide for life than the authors of the Bible. 

I have no idea what sort of evidence it would take to make me believe in the supernatural. However if there is a "God" as believed in by Christians, he/she/it would certainly know. Cue not revelation but tumbleweed.

Politics and religion are pretty similar in many respects. Control being the major one.  A common feature is that humans pursuing religion seek to control or influence everyone else in the real world by promising reward or punishment in "the next". 

The effects of religion at present in the UK are mostly at the minor end of the scale. You might describe it as being of the tea and sandwiches in the garden with the Vicar variety, that kind of thing. In the UK, religion has largely had its teeth pulled*. My suggestion would be not to worry about the issues around religion (particularly as it affects the lives of non or other believers) in places where it is weak, other than where there are concerns about were a person's religion might affect the principles of equality. Rather, look at it where it is strong, even dominant. The picture isn't quite as benign in them.  

(*although Bishops in the Lords, unelected religious reps in local authority education committees and claims of religious authority for the monarch as appears on every UK coin are, for some, sources of irritation.) 

 

[Florentine_Pogen]

13 hours ago, Hedgecutter said:

FWIW, parish ministers of old have been a royal pain for me, as far as Ordnance Survey 'name books' go (the records that give references/descriptions for the names that appear on the OS maps)

It's been very clear that (especially in the 19th Century) several local ministers heard a far fetched tale and informed an OS surveyor who entered the info as fact because such a high-standing member of society endorsed it.  In turn, plenty of sources have run with stories of "caves X miles long in which a (now ghost) Piper wandered in and never returned*", all because of a minister-endorsed tale.  Last year I visited an annoyingly remote cave that was supposedly the home of an outlaw who lived within and used it to shelter a "dozen cattle", which is rather remarkable for a void that measured 7m long and 0.5m at its widest point. Yet another site now recorded under the 'utter nonsense, barely worth registering other than to save others a wasted visit' category.

Anyway, my point: religious leaders spread clearly bullsh*t stories which end up in respected print, word goes about, and everybody treats it as fact.  Hopefully you can see the parallels here.

 

*and there's nearly always a dog that runs out of the cave having lost its hair because it encountered the omnipresent Devil biding inside.  Worth remembering that the religious people of the day believed all this to be genuine. 

 

[Salt n Vinegar]

2 hours ago, Hedgecutter said:

See the 'recurrent laryngeal nerve' in the neck, which now goes on a completely pointless / inefficient detour down to the heart and back.

Specifically in the case of the giraffe it's as spectacular an example of what could be called 'unintelligent design" as you could look for. It tweaked my interest. 

I must confess that I'd be interested to know if the candidates to lead the Scottish Parliament (which of course has responsibility for education) accept evolution.  If not.. sheesh. 

There's so many sects that it's hard to keep up. The Free Presbyterian Church website is, shall I say, a bit alarming on evolution and the Free Church website appears silent on the matter. As Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying "“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." 

Edited February 23, 2023 by Salt n Vinegar
To add final sentence

[Crawford Bridge]

On 22/02/2023 at 08:17, hk blues said:

Possibly for the same reason Americans say wader instead of water. 

That's a stereotype. 

There's a significant amount of Americans who pronounce it "warter".