Christian Marriage is a lifelong 1m1w covenant

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So, because you believe these fairy tales, you think it should all be written into laws restricting us to live life as you and yours see fit. Are you monumentally arrogant or very stupid?

What the hell makes you an authority. You can't use your book of fairy tales to defend your position. I'm straight, so I have no horse in this race. However, for you to call others sinners for engaging in natural desires is incredibly arrogant. You can't have the world run by your perverted beliefs...

In the King James bible, there's a huge conflict on page 1. PAGE 1. Imagine all the other errors in a book that couldn't get past page 1 without screwing it up.

Atheists believe ideas that were handed down to them by thinkers such as Stoic, Skeptic, and Epicurean philosophers, and numerous others from around the world. They didn't originally insert such ideas into the popular consciousness themselves after all. So on the shoulders of philosophers of all ages and from many different time periods we all impose restrictions on people's lives with our laws.

Because of the most ancient philosophies we have a deep revulsion towards murder. People primarily used biblical arguments during the Civil War to point out how monstrous slavery is, a good example of which is Sec. of State William Seward's "Higher Doctrine" arguments that there is a "higher doctrine than the constitution" (if you don't believe me look in the annals of Congress).

So the fact of the matter is that we also have other options for the situation than your two proposed options. One of which is that you are monumentally out of your depth when you say that religious ideals shouldn't be involved in making laws. This is extremely contradictory considering that you are probably in favor of a whole host of laws that are religious in origin, whose underlying principles were conceived of thousands of years ago. Saying that religion should have no role in lawmaking, is of a logical consequence the same as saying that religion should have no role in our thinking (which clearly sounds fascist if carried to this logical conclusion).

Find one instance for me, if you will, where the constitution itself says that there is a separation of church and state. And find one instance for me, if you will, of the founders discussing this and saying that religious sentiment shouldn't be involved in lawmaking. What you will find, on the contrary, is that they felt that the State shouldn't interfere in religion, and that when came to constitutional rights no creed should come into the picture. That's a far cry from the vaunted concept today of a "separation of church and state".

Oh, and have you ever read any original manuscripts yourself? Can you tell us that you are familiar with Strong's, Liddell and Scott, Vine's Expository, Pratico's Basic of Biblical Hebrew, or any other lexicon or concordance? Truly sound theology isn't built on English translations, but by careful translators with decades of experience.

If you would like to, I'd be happy to answer any number of translation problems you can pile up for me. Pile them right up and I'll shovel them down my gullet with pleasure, monsieur. We've all had the popular version of this issue spoon-fed to us in sources like the History channel (I shudder to even mention a channel full of such quackery), but clearly there has never been enough exposure of the real rigorous methodologies involved in historiography, philosophy, theology, and linguistics.

The truth if the matter is that we have thousands of manuscripts and extra-biblical instances of the languages to compare, and in the modern and revised Scrivener's Textus Receptus and Byzantine Codex, there is a general consensus even among liberal scholars that we know at the very least what the original texts themselves are in each doctrinally important passage. The rest of the ambiguity is normally grammatical issues that don't have any theological impact. There certainly were errors in translation over the ages but we have thousands upon thousands of manuscripts and fragments to compare.

Last edited by Lukecash12 on 01 Jul 2015, 6:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

There are very many inconsistent statements in the Bible. You can say you are consistent in your understanding of the Bible. However, that means you chose the verses you wanted and discarded those you didn't like. How then can you claim you have a consistent biblical understanding?

I hate to break it to you, but I needed none of that to call bu**sh*t on religious belief. I came to this conclusion before I was in a position to read those philosophers. There is no need to justify thinking something is nonsense when it's nonsense. And you cannot prove anything about beliefs in religion except that there are people who believe this nonsense...

They're still believing nonsense. Just because you dress it up and make it pretty doesn't make any argument correct...

This itself isn't an argument at all. It amounts to nothing more than "nuh'uh".

So let's see again if you can give a direct answer to this portion:



If you cannot reconcile the obvious contradiction in your own thinking that has been demonstrated here, then clearly you have conceded the point. It is a simple argument. While I am easily in a position to back up my claims, and have done so plenty of times, what we see from you on these subjects is a string of unsupported claims and the same tired old arguments.

You can establish your vaunted superiority and my stupidity all you like. The text itself in these threads demonstrates that I've made the necessary educational leaps and bounds to back up my claims. And I'm not trying to browbeat you or condescend to you. What I am doing I inviting you to be intellectually honest and candid. Can you muster up something without hiding behind pithy little statements? Without demonizing your opponents without senseless ad hominem arguments and other genetic fallacies? You'll never encounter the essence of any religion until you take down this unseemly barrier of pride, issuing statements such as: "well are you just stupid or dishonest/a-jerk?"

Here's another interesting contradiction here: you seem to value reason and feel that all religion is nonsense. Yet at the same time you say that you knew religion was nonsense before you studied any serious literature on such subjects, like Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Descartes, etc. So here we have a man that takes pride that he doesn't believe in "nonsense", yet he disparages the whole historical process of reasoning itself. Clearly this is not a consistent picture.

Is there a preponderance of consensus in this field?

Perhaps a canonical list of laws that are considered obsolete?

Show me some inconsistencies and I'll address them one by one. I've already given examples of hermeneutic methodology in the last page, so I've been quite clear as to how I can claim I have a consistent understanding: rigorous methodology informed by the same methodology seen in historiography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics

No law has any bearing on salvation, and the NT is considered the primary tool for determining which ethical ideas of the OT are relevant today. It must also be noted that there are ethical instructions that the NT didn't address, and as such they still stand. But if you read Romans it is clear that God's ethical instructions in the penal justice system are prescriptions, and by that I mean that they are not requirements but instructions that are there for our benefit. The scriptures are explicit when they say that the only unpardonable sin is "blaspheming the holy spirit" (which means not accepting a relationship with God). His instructions are for our pleasure, not for us to hate ourselves and others.

There are also numerous references in the OT too, that the Law wasn't adequate for the situation, and ritualizing good behavior and learning it by rote does not make us right with God. It is our love for Him that makes us right with Him. As much as God punishes the Hebrew nation in order to set it right, He also forgives them numerous times and through His prophets gives numerous references to a better and more final justice system: the satisfactory justice system.

As for a consensus: most Reformed theologians agree with this notion of the free gift of grace. Some older order Churches and it's theologians, such as Roman Catholicism, believe for instance that performing a work is an example of accepting grace and we must continually accept grace. They also believe that there are cardinal (grave) and venial (acceptable) sins, so we must confess our sins to a priest and do appropriate penance. In any case the great majority of Christendom agrees that there is only one unforgivable sin, and there has been a landslide of scholarly material as of late against any concept of grace that doesn't agree that it is a free gift.

I happen to be a nondenominational Christian myself and would very much like to share my own understanding of grace if you are interested. I believe there is something in the Bible called "radical grace" and have spent the last ten years of my theological career at EPS and St. Anselm's establishing the concept with numerous language studies. My main academic bent on theological issues has been that I've prioritized anthropology and historical methodology over using preconceived theological notions to conform seemingly disparate texts to my own understanding.

Last edited by Lukecash12 on 01 Jul 2015, 7:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's not meant to be an argument. Do you argue that Grimm's fairy tales are valid. If you did, you would be foolish and you would receive derision for it. One doesn't debate a crazy person ranting on whatever is in their minds. By the way, I'm not suggesting you're insane or crazy.

Last edited by pcuser on 01 Jul 2015, 7:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Then it is merely a statement of opinion and as such it has no consequence in a debate. Are you willing to assess your own ideas and my own ideas, or are you only interested in making the same tired statements that have been made a million times over like "that's just a fairy tale", "you are a bronze age thinker", "religious people are irrational"? Can you explain exactly why it is that you think the way you do? Or are you only interested in pontificating?

Btw, Grimm's Fairy Tales by their very design weren't meant to communicate anything historical. The bible, on the other hand, has been part of historical discussions for thousands of years and it is nowhere near a foregone conclusion that the whole thing is merely a fairy tale. If the bible is a fairy tale and Jesus, for example, wasn't at least a real person, we can't even say that Julius Caesar was a real person if we apply such skeptical standards to secular history. Every person in antiquity who wrote a historical text had their motives. That doesn't mean that historians aren't aware of those same motives. The mere presence of motives doesn't invalidate a fact. So when we throw in with quacks like the Jesus Seminar we ourselves are actually peddling nonsense, not the numerous scholars who see historical value in the bible (liberal scholars among them).

Last edited by Lukecash12 on 01 Jul 2015, 7:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'll bite.



What evidence do you have that supports your assertion that any specific laws were religious in origin. Which specific religion do you claim as the origin for said laws? We've seen the ethical stance of religions evolve in line with, and in response to, societal ethics. I argue that religion is a by-product of civilisation, not the cause of it. The ethics of religious groups broadly reflect society, not the other way around - though there's arguably some seepage in both directions.

An example of a society which has no history of religion or faith can be found in the Pirahã:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/n ... ett-amazon

Some excerpts from the article:







Not at all. It's saying that religion should have no role in lawmaking, and nothing more. Try to remember, we've tried religious law in the past. Consequences included (but were not limited to) stoning of blasphemers, executions of heretics and superstitious burnings and hangings of women (and men) suspected of witchcraft.

If I said to you that I believed in and could prove the existence of unicorns, would you bother to debate it or rightly dismiss it out of hand? Crazy people don't make rational statements. They spout nonsense. Religion is nonsense made up by fearful people of the past to control others. It deserves no more than that to counter it. I'm not going to waste time researching and posting something that wouldn't prove anything. That is the point, I guess. You have spent your life researching to prove that nonsense. I'll not rise to that bait. When a hypothesis that can't be proven true or false is presented, it's not considered worthy of discussion. The only exception is in math, where in any given consistent system, you will have statements that can be neither proven or falsify. Fermat's last theorem was thought by many to be one of these statements until someone sat down for seven years and finally proved it to be true. It's a little mind bending, but math and physics can do that to you...