Posted on 09/27/2005 9:12:23 AM PDT by Junior
What I think he intended by his notebooke remark was to say that understanding biology was more useful than metaphysics. The god you profess to worship got PMS one day, killed everybody, then felt bad about it and promised never to do it again. It didn't solve the problem of misbehavior, and any omniscient being would have known that in advance, but you think it makes sense, The story is a Babylonian myth, but your willingness to believe it a true story about the creator of the universe says someting about your moral compass. Don't preach to me about morals.
First you presume to tell me what you think Darwin's intentions were, and then you proceed to make a juvenile comment about God and what he did when he got PMS which proves why he is nothing more than "a myth." LOL
Your statements reveal you to be a biblical illiterate yet you nevertheless presume to make "just so" statements about God and Christianity. This is what some of us call, "trailer park scholarship".
It deserves "Calculated Contempt" for this reason:
It doesn't take very long to realize that a thorough understanding of the Bible -- and this would actually apply to any complex work from any culture -- requires specialized knowledge, and a broad range of specialized knowledge in a variety of fields.
Obviously the vast majority of believers spend their entire lives doing little more than reading the Bible in English (or whatever native tongue) and importing into its words whatever ideas they derive from their own experiences.
This process is very often one of "decontextualizing" -- what I have here called "reading it like it was written yesterday and for you personally."
Let's anticipate and toss off the obvious objection: "Why did God make the Bible so hard to understand, then?"
It isn't -- none of this keeps a person from grasping the message of the Bible to the extent required to be saved; where the line is to be drawn is upon those who gratuitously assume that such base knowledge allows them to be competent critics of the text, and make that assumption in absolute ignorance of their own lack of knowledge -- what I have elsewhere spoken of in terms of being "unskilled and unaware of it."
And is my observation to this effect justified? Well, ask yourself this question after considering what various fields of knowledge a complete and thorough (not to say sufficient for intelligent discourse, though few even reach that pinnacle, especially in the critical realm) study of the Bible requires:
Linguistics/language -- indeed three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Criticizing the Bible in English is a hallmark of critics, who must inevitably resort to one of several excuses: "The translators obviously thought this was good enough, so that settles it."
It never occurs to them to ask why a certain translation choice was made, or to make a critical study of the word in question as needed; in a most extreme case -- veteran readers know to whom I refer -- we have persons who think that it is impossible for there to be any new insights into ancient languages, and will openly reject out of hand any more recent study suggesting a word or words have a more nuanced or different meaning than the chosen English word.
It is also ridiculous to assume that even the matched English word can be vested with the same contextual significance as the original word -- any bilingual can attest that there are plenty of examples between languages of words that do not adequately capture all nuances when they are used to translate another word. A reader has added that English itself has changed, not only in the hundreds of years since the KJV, but also in the last decades since the NIV was written (which is the reason there is a new TNIV coming out, and why we now even have word studies on the KJV!).
Literature -- One prominent critic advises people to "read the Bible like a newspaper." That is absolutely the worst advice that can be given for reading any text that isn't a newspaper. The genres of the Bible include narrative, poetry, proverbial literature, wisdom discourse, a treaty (that's what Deuteronomy is, believe it or not!), legal codes, genealogies, biography (that is what the Gospels are!), personal letters and general letters, rhetoric (an art form in the ancient world), riposte, and apocalyptic. Treating each one as a newspaper -- written yesterday and with our own ideas in mind -- is a mistake constantly made by critics who impose their own absurd genre-demands on the text.
Textual criticism -- this is a specialized field of determining the original state of a text.
Archaeology -- a field with many sub-fields of it's own, which may involve knowledge of geography, geology or chemistry.
Psychology -- the study of human behavior, essential to understanding the motives of persons in a text; yet most people do not even have basic knowledge of their own psychology! This aspect is complicated by the variance in human behavior we note in our next entry:
Social sciences -- it is in this field that we have found the most ignorance among critics, and not much less of it in others. It would shock the average pew-sitter to be told such things as that: persons in the world of the Bible did not have what we would call an internal conscience; or that Biblical society was heavily focused on honor, much like Japan's culture. No, most assume that people everywhere and at every time have been pretty much the same. That's one of the biggest mistakes a critic can make.
History/historiography.
Theology/philosophy -- obviously!
Logic -- oh yes -- we know, most critics think they have a handle on this one; but most have done little more than memorize the names of a few fallacies, and then look for them everywhere they go. Sadly this is the one area in which people are mostly "unskilled and unaware of it" -- or else, they presume that this is all they need, and never bother to study in any other area.
Miscellaneous -- I may think of more later, but as a catch-all, for example, you may have to learn a bit about biology (for example, if someone says the Bible teaches wrongly about the ostrich's living habits) or other areas. That's quite a list, but there's one more note to add -- the holistic ability to put all of it together.
How serious is this? Very. A carefully crafted argument about a text being an interpolation can be undermined by a single point from Greco-Roman rhetoric. A claim having to do with psychology can be destroyed by a simple observation from the social sciences.
Not even most scholars in the field can master every aspect -- what then of the non-specialist critic who puts together a website in his spare time titled 1001 Irrifutible Bible Contradictions?
Do these persons deserves our attention? Should they be recognized as authorities? No, they deserve calculated contempt for their efforts. (By this, I do not mean emotional or behavioral contempt, but a calculated disregard for their work from an academic perspective.)
They have not even come close to deserving our attention, and should feed only itching ears with similar tastes.
Skeptics with largo egos who complain that this site does not always link to the articles it is addressing need to be told that their efforts -- engaging what I will call from here on "trailer park scholarship" -- do not deserve links.
The Aryan Stormfront page may as well complain that Holocaust memorial sites do not link to them; or, the Flat Earth Society may as well demand links from professional geology and geography departments at college websites. Who are these people trying to kid? Their scholarship, as a whole, is reckless and pitiable; what they know, they have learned from reading a few popular books with no conception of the broader issues and fields at hand. Why does this site need to link to some injudicious blunderbuss who claims that Lev. 25:23, which has God saying the land is "mine," has to be read figuratively because if it were literal, then it would cause problems because people would then covet the land owned by God and that would cause them to break the commandment against coveting?
Why do we need to link to people who refuse to come to the social world of the Bible on its own terms, and accuse scholars who are experts in the social world of the NT of being ignorant, based on nothing more than a bare English reading of the texts?
These people deserve not links, but contempt and obscurity.
And I might add, so do those who choose to buy into their biblically illiterate BS. bttt
I think I touched a nerve.
Oh dear me. I'm all alone with tens of thousands of scientists who have labored over these questions, cumulatively, for hundreds of years. I'm so afraid.
I notice in your diatribe that you neglected to present and argument against what I said. It doesn't take a scholar to know right from wrong.
Sequence the DNA of three sexually reproducing species. Pick a gene all three share and call the variants A1, A2 and A3 and compare them. Let's suppose that A1 and A2 have fewer differences than either does to A3 and represent this as ((A1,A2),A3). PREDICTION: if you do the same for some other shared gene B, even if the function is unrelated to A, you will find ((B1, B2), B3). This is deduced from the theory because it posits descent from a common ancestor and genetic traits are inherited as observed by Mendel.
I've simplified of course and the test will be statistical, but I think you get the idea.
Now, let's hear your testable prediction from an assumption of ID. No ad hoc hypotheses please.
Is that why you chose as your standard for determining right and wrong to be the Christian one? LOL
Actually, it's a good thing any time a moral relativist is smart enough to make that choice - especially in light of the fact that you post on a web site which was founded to uphold and defend our Constitution - a document which is meaningless unless it stands guard over absolute (self-evident) truths, (which include our inalienable - ONLY because they're God-given -rights. LOL
I have trouble imagining Jesus getting pi$$ed off one day and killing everybody and then regretting it.
Maybe it's just me.
The story of Noah is a fable.
Probably. I've put him on VI.
I'm so ahamed for falling off the wagon.
I see that you have chosen to ignore what I wrote HERE - either that or it went right over your oblivious head. LOL
I haven't ingnored it. I just think it's irrelevant.
Out of necessity. LOL
Next time touch it with a hammer.
And you can quote this with a straight face. I asserted that the column did not exist, and you send me to an article that asserts the same thing. But it doesn't matter because we know it should exist. Call it what you want, if it gives you comfort, then have at it.
Just don't bother me with your evangelism.
evangelism |i?vanj??liz?m|
noun the spreading of the Christian gospel by public preaching or personal witness. • zealous advocacy of a cause.
You're either an idiot or a liar. I don't have to care which. I gave you source material that shows there are sites where every major defined layer in the column exists in one stack (not that such is an important question).
You came back asserting that the article says the opposite of what it does. Dazzling. Do you speak English? Do you stop reading as soon as you find one sentence you can spin? What is the problem here?
Simple enough, just explain why there is a world, rather than nothing, then I will answer.
Two thousand years ago, a governor in an obscure eastern province of the Roman Empire asked a condemned prisoner what his definition of truth was. At the time it was a sarcastic response to his prisoner's absurd claim that he was the way, the truth and the life. But the governor's simple query, "What is Truth?" spans two thousand years with a challenge that many of today's Christians are incapable of answering.
Contrary to what the world's philosophers would tell us, true faith is not based on an irrational leap rooted in feeling or the heart. Feelings do not determine what is true. In reality, faith is a logically reasoned determination, an extension from what is known, to what must be - based on demonstrable evidence. In essence, it isn't true because we believe it; we believe it because it's true.
Today's Christians actually do have hardball answers for the modern world; most of the time they just don't know what the questions are and are always giving the wrong answers to the right questions. The most basic questions they cannot answer are: "What is truth?" and "Why do you believe what you believe?"
What we believe about truth affects everything we believe. How do we know what we know? That's why knowing the basis of truth and faith is so important. In the scriptures we are instructed to have a ready word when someone asks the reasons for the hope that lies within us (1 Peter 3:15). We are urged to expound a reason, not verbalize a feeling. Without reason, all we are left with is feeling.
Many Christians are unable to articulate an intellectual basis for why they believe what they believe is true. Likewise, many Bible-based churches are sending their youth into the marketplace totally untrained for combat. They have been given a sword (the Word of God), but have never been instructed in how to use it. As a result, 50 to 80 percent of Christian youth abandon their faith within the first years of college, as soon as they encounter the first opposition to their faith from atheistic professors.
From khouse.org newsletter. If you want to know Christ, then you will find Him. I have nothing more to say on the matter.
The point is that DARWIN is a THEORY. MACROEVOLUTION remains unproven! Any theory can compete with one that is unproven! P.S. Does Patrick Henry ever take time out from these stupid threads of his to bathe?
For the science room, no free speech
By Bill Murchison
Dec 28, 2005
Will the federal courts, and the people who rely on the federal courts to enforce secular ideals, ever get it? The anti-school-prayer decisions of the past 40 years -- not unlike the pro-choice-in-abortion decisions, starting with Roe vs. Wade -- haven't driven pro-school-prayer, anti-choice Americans from the marketplace of ideas and activity.
Neither will U.S. Dist. Judge John Jones' anti-intelligent-design ruling in Dover, Pa., just before Christmas choke off challenges to the public schools' Darwinian monopoly.
Jones' contempt for the "breathtaking inanity" of school-board members who wanted ninth-grade biology students to hear a brief statement regarding Darwinism's "gaps/problems" is unlikely to intimidate the millions who find evolution only partly persuasive -- at best.
Millions? Scores of millions might be more like it. A 2004 Gallup Poll found that just 13 percent of Americans believe in evolution unaided by God. A Kansas newspaper poll last summer found 55 percent support for exposing public-school students to critiques of Darwinism.
This accounts for the widespread desire that children be able to factor in some alternatives to the notion that "natural selection" has brought us, humanly speaking, where we are. Well, maybe it has. But what if it hasn't? The science classroom can't take cognizance of such a possibility? Under the Jones ruling, it can't. Jones discerns a plot to establish a religious view of the question, though the religion he worries about exists only in the possibility that God, per Genesis 1, might intrude celestially into the discussion. (Intelligent-designers, for the record, say the power of a Creator God is just one of various possible counter-explanations.)
Not that Darwinism, as Jones acknowledges, is perfect. Still, "the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent scientific propositions."
Ah. We see now: Federal judges are the final word on good science. Who gave them the power to exclude even whispers of divinity from the classroom? Supposedly, the First Amendment to the Constitution: the odd part here being the assumption that the "free speech" amendment shuts down discussion of alternatives to an establishment-approved concept of Truth.
With energy and undisguised contempt for the critics of Darwinism, Jones thrusts out the back door of his courthouse the very possibility that any sustained critique of Darwinism should be admitted to public classrooms.
However, the writ of almighty federal judges runs only so far, as witness their ongoing failure to convince Americans that the Constitution requires almost unobstructed access to abortion. Pro-life voters and activists, who number in the millions, clearly aren't buying it. We're to suppose efforts to smother intelligent design will bear larger, lusher fruit?
The meeting place of faith and reason is proverbially darkish and unstable -- a place to which the discussants bring sometimes violently different assumptions about truth and where to find it. Yet, the recent remarks of the philosopher-theologian Michael Novak make great sense: "I don't understand why in the public schools we cannot have a day or two of discussion about the relative roles of science and religion." A discussion isn't a sermon or an altar call, is it?
Equally to the point, what does secular intolerance achieve in terms of revitalizing public schools, rendering them intellectually catalytic? As many religious folk see it, witch-hunts for Christian influences are an engrained part of present public-school curricula. Is this where they want the kids? Might private schools -- not necessarily religious ones -- offer a better alternative? Might home schooling?
Alienating bright, energized, intellectually alert customers is normally accounted bad business, but that's the direction in which Darwinian dogmatists point. Thanks to them and other such foes of free speech in the science classroom -- federal judges included -- we seem likely to hear less and less about survival of the fittest and more and more about survival of the least curious, the least motivated, the most gullible.
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