I’ll explain, Gary – my Mom used to say something similar – “Where is it at? – Just before the at.” See, asking where something is “at” is not the best grammar, asking where it is, is sufficient by itself – the “at” is unnecessary. It was my Mom’s way – and likely Nan’s as well – of correcting my grammar. And yes, Nan was deflecting.
Josh – I’m surrounded by Rednecks and two miles from a Muslim cemetery, so sure, I’m gonna paint a big, red “A” on my house, maybe a target on my back while I’m at it.
After divulging way too much information to the US Census bureau in some mandatory online survey last night, I’m a bit shy to share anything else, but I guess it’s a big state… I’m in NY.
Nan, if your gonna start correcting all ours grammer youve got your work cut out for you. (Maybe you should start with William’s capitalization)
the west coast of Floriduh!
I live right next door to a catholic church, a Baptist church, a Methodist church and a muslim gas station.
or as I like to say, a white church, a black church and a Mexican church and a muslim gas station.
Hi nate, thanks for your summation. I think you are a very decent guy and there’s no need to apologise for that! But Led Zep? I didn’t know young guys like you had even heard of them! 🙂
“I agree as it relates to myth or parable, but not to fictionalized history. If you are giving an account of what happened and include things that did not actually happen – that, to me, is a non-truth.”
Pretty much every culture, I imagine, tells stories about their past that explain their present. Australian aboriginal nations have stories that go back at least 10,000 years that contain legends, practical guidance on finding waterholes and tribal boundaries …. and in some cases memories of the effects of sea level rise after the last ice age. If you asked a modern aboriginal about whether they were “truthful”, I think they would just look at you, and yet the sea level rise stories show they contain truth-based memories.
Ancient Israelite stories were probably transmitted maybe a tenth of that time, so it isn’t unreasonable that they contain truth, but as they were re-told and re-told in an oral culture, they were modified and adapted for new purposes and circumstances. There wasn’t ever (I imagine) any deliberate “untruthfulness”, they were just that nation’s stories, told in the way that nation told its stories. I am not part of their culture so I don’t understand that very well, just as I don’t understand the aboriginal people’s stories. But I don’t see how God couldn’t use those stories to communicate truth of a different kind. And I don’t see how it matters to me that I cannot unravel the percentage of “historical truth” and legend, or know which bits are which.
I feel like we tend to judge ancient peoples by modern standards, and that is anachronistic.
“Actually I thought using the word newspaper was being generous :)”
Touche! 🙂
“I do see your point. I just don’t think it’s a good comparison. As william pointed out, “you dont have to imagine your wife. you see her. you can touch her. you have conversations and real experiences.”
Yeah, William made the same point. But you are comparing two different things. If I say a billiard ball and the Sahara Desert are both yellow, it wouldn’t be relevant to say “no they’re not because they’re not the same size!”.
I was responding to your statement about evidence and “faith”, and pointing out that we use both all the time. I suggested that for me trusting in Jesus (something being questioned) is similar in the balance of evidence and faith to deciding to get married (something more familiar). Yes, it is dissimilar in many other ways, including what you and William mention, but that doesn’t stop it being similar in the way I said. And therefore showing that the difficulties of evidence vs faith that you raised are not unfamiliar to most of us, and yet that doesn’t in itself prevent us from acting. So while I understand and appreciate that you will have many reasons leading to your lack of belief in Jesus, I don’t think this one is really a valid objection.
This debate will never end with UnkleE for one simple reason: “Poofing”.
We atheists and agnostics reject the supernatural. It’s not that we have evidence to disprove the supernatural, it is that we choose not to believe in **anything** that can not be examined by the scientific method and reason. For this reason, we do not believe in leprechauns, Santa Claus, fairies, unicorns, goblins, etc. And for this reason, we do not believe in virgin births, water-walking, or walking/talking zombies.
Believers obviously **do** believe in the supernatural. However, I for one wish that Christians would just be honest and concede that, in our daily lives as human beings, even if the supernatural exists, a supernatural explanation for any event is typically the last of all possible explanations. Specifically, a supernatural explanation should be the last explanation considered for an event if there are numerous natural explanations that can fully explain the event.
So will Christians concede that their belief system is built upon the pattern of accepting the least likely explanations for multiple ancient events instead of accepting the most probable natural explanation?
For instance, which is more probable?
1. A virgin was impregnated by a divine ghost or an early Christian made up this detail?
2. Jesus really walked on water, or this story was made up or developed as a legend?
3. Jesus tomb was empty because an ancient Hebrew god had resuscitated him, or someone had moved or stolen the body?
4. The Gospels were written by eyewitnesses who copied Mark, a non-eyewitness, to write their stories, or the Gospels were written by people writing down the version of the story currently circulating in their town/country?
5. The eloquent, highly stylistic Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—Galilean peasants (except Luke)– or were written by anonymous, educated Greek-speaking Christians who were not eyewitnesses but were only repeating a story that they had heard?
6. Early Christians believed in a Resurrection because they had really seen a walking/talking dead body or because superstitious, poor, uneducated, despondent disciples had visions, hallucinations, and false sightings of their beloved leader?
Christians must repeatedly accept the supernatural explanation for one biblical and historical event after another to maintain their belief system. Even if just one of these assumptions is false, the entire house of cards comes crashing down.
Ancient Israelite stories were probably transmitted maybe a tenth of that time, so it isn’t unreasonable that they contain truth, but as they were re-told and re-told in an oral culture, they were modified and adapted for new purposes and circumstances. There wasn’t ever (I imagine) any deliberate “untruthfulness”, they were just that nation’s stories, told in the way that nation told its stories.
This pretty much matches my opinion on how these stories came about. It’s not deliberate lies (although I wouldn’t rule that out either), it’s just the natural progression of a story handed down from person to person. But now I see no way of calling this divine inspiration. If the source of the story comes from the last guy who told it, this is human inspiration. The fabrications are the hallmarks of a human being. Trying to say that a perfect deity is just as susceptible to passing along misinformation as any other person would be is, in my opinion, a strange position to hold.
I was responding to your statement about evidence and “faith”, and pointing out that we use both all the time.
I think you are using the word faith to be equivalent with trust. If this is true, then yes, all throughout our lives we employ trust and it is a well accepted practice. But I don’t think this is the same as what you are doing with God/Jesus. Trust is something that is built upon experience. We slowly build trust in people as we get to know them, learn their character, and watch how they behave in various situations. There is a lot of interaction and communication. So I don’t see how trust can be applied to what are basically religious concepts / theories.
Now I know why I’m so confused. The first time, UnkleE, you used the word faith it was in a different context. You wrote “Firstly, we should determine our beliefs by the evidence, and then consider how our faith (or our unfaith!) fits in later”. Replacing faith with trust in that sentence doesn’t really fit. I knew there was some reason that word did not make sense to me…
Firstly, we should determine our beliefs by the evidence, and then consider how our faith (or our unfaith!) fits in later”.
The classic Cherry-Picker’s wet dream scenario.
The hardcore evidence fully supports a mythological Pentateuch but for the Christian, it is still a ”maybe”, yet the completely hearsay, non-verifiable solely biblical evidence for a resurrection is rubber stamped as a Done Deal.
Thank the gods for Gary Habermas etc.Come Jesus. Come soon.
“Now I know why I’m so confused. The first time, UnkleE, you used the word faith it was in a different context.”
Yes, it’s a problem, the word “faith” carries a number of meanings, as any dictionary will show. That is why I have at times bracketed it with other words like belief, trust and risk. I’m sorry if I haven’t been as clear in my usage as I might have been.
” I don’t see how trust can be applied to what are basically religious concepts / theories.”
I think it is quite analogous. In relationships, we know a person’s character to a limited degree only based on what we observe them say and do. That is good but imperfect and incomplete information. On that basis we take a risk and trust our assessment and trust the person, so we believe we are making a good choice. Looking back after 48 years of marriage, I am much confirmed it was a good choice.
For me, it is the same with Jesus. I knew his character to a good but imperfect and incomplete degree from the written sources. On that basis I took a risk and trusted the information and my assessment of it, and trusted him, and so I believed I was making a good choice. Looking back after about 53 years, I am again confirmed that I made a good choice.
Of course there are many differences in the two situations, and the word faith is used in several slightly different ways, but I think the analogy is still good.
“If the source of the story comes from the last guy who told it, this is human inspiration.”
I can see how you will come to this conclusion, and I’m not all that worried about that. But I think everything from way back then is so uncertain that we can’t speak with much certainty about anything very much. If these stories we are discussing (basically Moses and Joshua) are “fictionalised history”, we can’t really say exactly how much of fiction and history is there. The scholarly views reflect this diversity, and the more minimalist view is in a sense a lowest common denominator of what can be reasonably known (not much in this case), but all historians know that any historical analysis yields less than actually happened – much much less in this case..
But your view of inspiration is closer to the “fundamentalist” view than mine. And I think your approach is the wrong way round. Instead of saying “this is how I think God should act” and then critiquing on those grounds, I think a better approach is to ask how things happened, and then ask is it possible or impossible that God acted this way? The world is such a strange place that I think we should be very wary of saying that God couldn’t have done it this way or that way.
And I didn’t say “a perfect deity is just as susceptible to passing along misinformation as any other person would be”, I said that God inspires the authors without dictating to them, and he uses their writings to teach truths. I don’t think God gives misinformation, I think that is you taking on a fundamentalist view of inspiration, but I think he works through fallible human beings because that is the way he has chosen to do things.
But in the end, this is of interest to me but not crucial. In mathematical terms, my mean is about midway between the minimalist and maximalist views, but I have a very high standard deviation, if that makes sense.
The longer this discussion continues – though unklee has made it plain he is no longer willing to provide the evidence for his claims, and neither will he directly address the issue regarding a maximalist like Kitchen – it becomes clear that evidence really is not an issue to one as indoctrinated as he.
Thus,he is quite easily able to reject pretty much any evidentiary based assertion if it does not fit in his quite narrowly focused presuppositional worldview.
What is odd is, while he will always try to cite only those scholars that may have a minor appeal or semblance of respectability to the non-believer, Casey, Ehrman, and Sanders ( at a pinch) a large slice of his belief appears more in line with a ”non-scholar” such as Lee Strobel, or a suoer apologist such as Habermas.
Unklee is on record, somewhere, as stating he would change his view should the evidence point this way yet, here we have a clear case where this is quite likely erroneous.
I would venture to say that 53 years ago, pretty much the entire Christian world would have believed that Exodus/ Moses etc was actual history, rather than the historical fiction we know it to be today, yet now that this information is more or less in the public sphere, we see a Christian like unklee hand waving this away as inconsequential to his ”faith”.
No doubt such manipulative maneuvering is taking place across large swathes of Christianity.
Every new piece of evidence uncovered, be it for the Old Testament or New undermines the Abrahamic religions, and nothing concrete has been offered to turn heads and make one think …. maybe?
It is understandable, therefore for those on the sidelines to wonder how long before the likes of Carrier can state categorically that the biblical character, Jesus of Nazareth is also historical fiction, and Yeshua Ben Josef is simply reduced to a symbol?
Unk: “On that basis I took a risk and trusted the information and my assessment of it, and trusted him, and so I believed I was making a good choice. Looking back after about 53 years, I am again confirmed that I made a good choice.”
This statement tells me the true source of Unk’s Christian belief system: subjective feelings, intuition, and personal experience. It’s not about objective evidence. It is about findings just enough evidence to validate (to him) his subjective feelings, etc.
This is why he will never admit he is wrong. He is unwilling to ever abandon the warm, fuzzy feelings that have become his security blanket in this cruel, dog-eat-dog world.
Gary, I tend to agree with your assessment. In fact, I think this is the primary reason behind why nearly every Christian believes in God/Jesus. It’s just too difficult for many people to live in this world on their own. Rather than rely on their own natural-born source of power, they must turn to an invisible “supernatural” being to help them handle life.
The thing is … this “being” is really all in their mind. And if they could/would just accept that, they might discover the pure joy of being a part of this magnificent universe … no strings attached.
Finding Truth 
new mexico? between A-rizona and T-exas?
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I’ll explain, Gary – my Mom used to say something similar – “Where is it at? – Just before the at.” See, asking where something is “at” is not the best grammar, asking where it is, is sufficient by itself – the “at” is unnecessary. It was my Mom’s way – and likely Nan’s as well – of correcting my grammar. And yes, Nan was deflecting.
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Arch,
By “hell”, I’m assuming you were referring to Lynchburg, VA?
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Josh – I’m surrounded by Rednecks and two miles from a Muslim cemetery, so sure, I’m gonna paint a big, red “A” on my house, maybe a target on my back while I’m at it.
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Would you believe, Gary, that there’s a “Bugtussle, Oklahoma”?
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And where is Nate….AT?
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🙂
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After divulging way too much information to the US Census bureau in some mandatory online survey last night, I’m a bit shy to share anything else, but I guess it’s a big state… I’m in NY.
Nan, if your gonna start correcting all ours grammer youve got your work cut out for you. (Maybe you should start with William’s capitalization)
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the west coast of Floriduh!
I live right next door to a catholic church, a Baptist church, a Methodist church and a muslim gas station.
or as I like to say, a white church, a black church and a Mexican church and a muslim gas station.
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or lack thereof, dave? is that it?
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i think nate is from alabama.
what’s the matter, dave? not enough caps lock for you?
nah, i’m lazy and way under-educated – it’s okay. fire away nan, i’m not afraid.
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No worries, guys. I’m not an English teacher. 😉
I just couldn’t resist the “at” comment ‘cuz it was so embedded in me through my younger years. Arch understands.
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in the old, old country
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Hi nate, thanks for your summation. I think you are a very decent guy and there’s no need to apologise for that! But Led Zep? I didn’t know young guys like you had even heard of them! 🙂
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“I agree as it relates to myth or parable, but not to fictionalized history. If you are giving an account of what happened and include things that did not actually happen – that, to me, is a non-truth.”
Pretty much every culture, I imagine, tells stories about their past that explain their present. Australian aboriginal nations have stories that go back at least 10,000 years that contain legends, practical guidance on finding waterholes and tribal boundaries …. and in some cases memories of the effects of sea level rise after the last ice age. If you asked a modern aboriginal about whether they were “truthful”, I think they would just look at you, and yet the sea level rise stories show they contain truth-based memories.
Ancient Israelite stories were probably transmitted maybe a tenth of that time, so it isn’t unreasonable that they contain truth, but as they were re-told and re-told in an oral culture, they were modified and adapted for new purposes and circumstances. There wasn’t ever (I imagine) any deliberate “untruthfulness”, they were just that nation’s stories, told in the way that nation told its stories. I am not part of their culture so I don’t understand that very well, just as I don’t understand the aboriginal people’s stories. But I don’t see how God couldn’t use those stories to communicate truth of a different kind. And I don’t see how it matters to me that I cannot unravel the percentage of “historical truth” and legend, or know which bits are which.
I feel like we tend to judge ancient peoples by modern standards, and that is anachronistic.
“Actually I thought using the word newspaper was being generous :)”
Touche! 🙂
“I do see your point. I just don’t think it’s a good comparison. As william pointed out, “you dont have to imagine your wife. you see her. you can touch her. you have conversations and real experiences.”
Yeah, William made the same point. But you are comparing two different things. If I say a billiard ball and the Sahara Desert are both yellow, it wouldn’t be relevant to say “no they’re not because they’re not the same size!”.
I was responding to your statement about evidence and “faith”, and pointing out that we use both all the time. I suggested that for me trusting in Jesus (something being questioned) is similar in the balance of evidence and faith to deciding to get married (something more familiar). Yes, it is dissimilar in many other ways, including what you and William mention, but that doesn’t stop it being similar in the way I said. And therefore showing that the difficulties of evidence vs faith that you raised are not unfamiliar to most of us, and yet that doesn’t in itself prevent us from acting. So while I understand and appreciate that you will have many reasons leading to your lack of belief in Jesus, I don’t think this one is really a valid objection.
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This debate will never end with UnkleE for one simple reason: “Poofing”.
We atheists and agnostics reject the supernatural. It’s not that we have evidence to disprove the supernatural, it is that we choose not to believe in **anything** that can not be examined by the scientific method and reason. For this reason, we do not believe in leprechauns, Santa Claus, fairies, unicorns, goblins, etc. And for this reason, we do not believe in virgin births, water-walking, or walking/talking zombies.
Believers obviously **do** believe in the supernatural. However, I for one wish that Christians would just be honest and concede that, in our daily lives as human beings, even if the supernatural exists, a supernatural explanation for any event is typically the last of all possible explanations. Specifically, a supernatural explanation should be the last explanation considered for an event if there are numerous natural explanations that can fully explain the event.
So will Christians concede that their belief system is built upon the pattern of accepting the least likely explanations for multiple ancient events instead of accepting the most probable natural explanation?
For instance, which is more probable?
1. A virgin was impregnated by a divine ghost or an early Christian made up this detail?
2. Jesus really walked on water, or this story was made up or developed as a legend?
3. Jesus tomb was empty because an ancient Hebrew god had resuscitated him, or someone had moved or stolen the body?
4. The Gospels were written by eyewitnesses who copied Mark, a non-eyewitness, to write their stories, or the Gospels were written by people writing down the version of the story currently circulating in their town/country?
5. The eloquent, highly stylistic Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—Galilean peasants (except Luke)– or were written by anonymous, educated Greek-speaking Christians who were not eyewitnesses but were only repeating a story that they had heard?
6. Early Christians believed in a Resurrection because they had really seen a walking/talking dead body or because superstitious, poor, uneducated, despondent disciples had visions, hallucinations, and false sightings of their beloved leader?
Christians must repeatedly accept the supernatural explanation for one biblical and historical event after another to maintain their belief system. Even if just one of these assumptions is false, the entire house of cards comes crashing down.
Isn’t that a problem?
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“This debate will never end with UnkleE for one simple reason:” he keeps coming back!
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Hi UnkleE,
This pretty much matches my opinion on how these stories came about. It’s not deliberate lies (although I wouldn’t rule that out either), it’s just the natural progression of a story handed down from person to person. But now I see no way of calling this divine inspiration. If the source of the story comes from the last guy who told it, this is human inspiration. The fabrications are the hallmarks of a human being. Trying to say that a perfect deity is just as susceptible to passing along misinformation as any other person would be is, in my opinion, a strange position to hold.
I think you are using the word faith to be equivalent with trust. If this is true, then yes, all throughout our lives we employ trust and it is a well accepted practice. But I don’t think this is the same as what you are doing with God/Jesus. Trust is something that is built upon experience. We slowly build trust in people as we get to know them, learn their character, and watch how they behave in various situations. There is a lot of interaction and communication. So I don’t see how trust can be applied to what are basically religious concepts / theories.
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Now I know why I’m so confused. The first time, UnkleE, you used the word faith it was in a different context. You wrote “Firstly, we should determine our beliefs by the evidence, and then consider how our faith (or our unfaith!) fits in later”. Replacing faith with trust in that sentence doesn’t really fit. I knew there was some reason that word did not make sense to me…
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The classic Cherry-Picker’s wet dream scenario.
The hardcore evidence fully supports a mythological Pentateuch but for the Christian, it is still a ”maybe”, yet the completely hearsay, non-verifiable solely biblical evidence for a resurrection is rubber stamped as a Done Deal.
Thank the gods for Gary Habermas etc.Come Jesus. Come soon.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Now I know why I’m so confused. The first time, UnkleE, you used the word faith it was in a different context.”
Yes, it’s a problem, the word “faith” carries a number of meanings, as any dictionary will show. That is why I have at times bracketed it with other words like belief, trust and risk. I’m sorry if I haven’t been as clear in my usage as I might have been.
” I don’t see how trust can be applied to what are basically religious concepts / theories.”
I think it is quite analogous. In relationships, we know a person’s character to a limited degree only based on what we observe them say and do. That is good but imperfect and incomplete information. On that basis we take a risk and trust our assessment and trust the person, so we believe we are making a good choice. Looking back after 48 years of marriage, I am much confirmed it was a good choice.
For me, it is the same with Jesus. I knew his character to a good but imperfect and incomplete degree from the written sources. On that basis I took a risk and trusted the information and my assessment of it, and trusted him, and so I believed I was making a good choice. Looking back after about 53 years, I am again confirmed that I made a good choice.
Of course there are many differences in the two situations, and the word faith is used in several slightly different ways, but I think the analogy is still good.
“If the source of the story comes from the last guy who told it, this is human inspiration.”
I can see how you will come to this conclusion, and I’m not all that worried about that. But I think everything from way back then is so uncertain that we can’t speak with much certainty about anything very much. If these stories we are discussing (basically Moses and Joshua) are “fictionalised history”, we can’t really say exactly how much of fiction and history is there. The scholarly views reflect this diversity, and the more minimalist view is in a sense a lowest common denominator of what can be reasonably known (not much in this case), but all historians know that any historical analysis yields less than actually happened – much much less in this case..
But your view of inspiration is closer to the “fundamentalist” view than mine. And I think your approach is the wrong way round. Instead of saying “this is how I think God should act” and then critiquing on those grounds, I think a better approach is to ask how things happened, and then ask is it possible or impossible that God acted this way? The world is such a strange place that I think we should be very wary of saying that God couldn’t have done it this way or that way.
And I didn’t say “a perfect deity is just as susceptible to passing along misinformation as any other person would be”, I said that God inspires the authors without dictating to them, and he uses their writings to teach truths. I don’t think God gives misinformation, I think that is you taking on a fundamentalist view of inspiration, but I think he works through fallible human beings because that is the way he has chosen to do things.
But in the end, this is of interest to me but not crucial. In mathematical terms, my mean is about midway between the minimalist and maximalist views, but I have a very high standard deviation, if that makes sense.
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The longer this discussion continues – though unklee has made it plain he is no longer willing to provide the evidence for his claims, and neither will he directly address the issue regarding a maximalist like Kitchen – it becomes clear that evidence really is not an issue to one as indoctrinated as he.
Thus,he is quite easily able to reject pretty much any evidentiary based assertion if it does not fit in his quite narrowly focused presuppositional worldview.
What is odd is, while he will always try to cite only those scholars that may have a minor appeal or semblance of respectability to the non-believer, Casey, Ehrman, and Sanders ( at a pinch) a large slice of his belief appears more in line with a ”non-scholar” such as Lee Strobel, or a suoer apologist such as Habermas.
Unklee is on record, somewhere, as stating he would change his view should the evidence point this way yet, here we have a clear case where this is quite likely erroneous.
I would venture to say that 53 years ago, pretty much the entire Christian world would have believed that Exodus/ Moses etc was actual history, rather than the historical fiction we know it to be today, yet now that this information is more or less in the public sphere, we see a Christian like unklee hand waving this away as inconsequential to his ”faith”.
No doubt such manipulative maneuvering is taking place across large swathes of Christianity.
Every new piece of evidence uncovered, be it for the Old Testament or New undermines the Abrahamic religions, and nothing concrete has been offered to turn heads and make one think …. maybe?
It is understandable, therefore for those on the sidelines to wonder how long before the likes of Carrier can state categorically that the biblical character, Jesus of Nazareth is also historical fiction, and Yeshua Ben Josef is simply reduced to a symbol?
Will there be an official apology, I wonder?
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Unk: “On that basis I took a risk and trusted the information and my assessment of it, and trusted him, and so I believed I was making a good choice. Looking back after about 53 years, I am again confirmed that I made a good choice.”
This statement tells me the true source of Unk’s Christian belief system: subjective feelings, intuition, and personal experience. It’s not about objective evidence. It is about findings just enough evidence to validate (to him) his subjective feelings, etc.
This is why he will never admit he is wrong. He is unwilling to ever abandon the warm, fuzzy feelings that have become his security blanket in this cruel, dog-eat-dog world.
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Gary, I tend to agree with your assessment. In fact, I think this is the primary reason behind why nearly every Christian believes in God/Jesus. It’s just too difficult for many people to live in this world on their own. Rather than rely on their own natural-born source of power, they must turn to an invisible “supernatural” being to help them handle life.
The thing is … this “being” is really all in their mind. And if they could/would just accept that, they might discover the pure joy of being a part of this magnificent universe … no strings attached.
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Nan, I think death anxiety plays a significant role.
http://www.psychalive.org/dr-sheldon-solomon-on-defenses-against-death-anxiety-exclusive-interview/
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