Posted on 05/01/2008 3:09:53 PM PDT by sitetest
“The Old Testament is rife with tribalism, violence, bigotry, and polygamy all sanctioned by God.”
The error here is to judge God’s will against some new age or modernistic worldview. God is the ultimate authority, so he doesn’t have to follow any silly little ideology of man.
I would advise the use of ordered reason in place of chaotic thinking. That is, if you take a look at the message of the Bible, you see it presents an ongoing process of man’s reconciliation with God, including various covenants. The most important I think (I’m not a Bible expert) are the Covenant with Moses and the New Covenant of Jesus Christ. The arrangement of this progressive reconciliation is logical and consistent (the Commandment against adultery, for example, was given after the polygamy of Jacob), and values are clearly ordered according to a hierarchical pattern.
The Ten Commandments are of the highest value, as is the New Covenant which includes the Trinity and God’s desire that we have faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
And with that statement you reveal the crux of many a skeptic's criticism of Christianity. Dawkins and Hitchens dwell on this in their recent Athiest apologetics. But does God really sanction this?
The first "sin" reported in Genesis is the disobedience to God when Adam and Eve eat the Apple that gives them the knowledge of good and evil. That Adam and Eve were even able to make that choice i.e. to disobey God, shows that God meant business when He gave man Free Will. Further evidence that He meant business came shortly afterward when He "repented" that he had made man, so appalled that He was that they would make this choice, yet He did not destroy His creation but allowed them to continue on in this state of Sin. The word "Sanction" implies both approval and allowance. God clearly does not approve, but yes, he does allow because apparenty, man's Free Will is THAT important to Him. Skeptics argue that, by allowing Sin God must approve of it, but they must ignore the doctrine of the Fall and Free Will in order to make this argument. The remainder of the Bible, both the Old and New Testament must be read within this context.
Even more so though, the Bible needs to be viewed in its entirety and not on the gritty messy details which there are many. The overall message is clear, God created man, man disobeyed God and brought sin into the world and therefore became separated from God, Christ came to bridge the separation and save man. Jesus uses many parables to emphasize certain moral points, some of these parables contain stories of brutality and unfairness (at least to modern man). Does that mean that Jesus approves of, and advocates, that brutality? Of course not.
What is really perplexing to me about these skeptics of Christianity is that they are promoting an argument that the Christian God is evil and therefore that is good reason to believe that that God does not exist. At the same time the skeptics concept of evil is based on traditional Judeo/Christian morality. Folks we have a merry go round here and my favorite Athiest, Nietzche, attempted to put a stop to it to no avail. I call Nietzche my favorite Athiest because he was genuinely true to Athiesm by denying God and the morality that goes with Him. Nietzche determined that, in the absence of God, we needed to come up with a new moral system based on the truth and brutal reality of the ineluctable struggle for existence and dominance, and his proposed moral system was to place Power above all else. Hitler's eyes must have bugged out when he saw that.........yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww the path to my Destiny!
Good explanation.
I must clarify—certainly the New Covenant ranks highest of all.
"Cutting and pasting doesn’t save thinking, it saves typing!"
Dear sister, I do not for a moment reject the red letters in my various versions of the Bible.
I have a severe weakness in that I love a good debate. If you read my profile, you will see that I married a devout Catholic lady, and that I was raised on the Bible. She got the raw end of the deal.
I can argue the Bible all day, but I really don't want to. I envy the peace of mind that faith brings. I am, however, incapable of it.
I argued with you without consideration of your love of your faith, for that I apologize.
Sorry, Herr Blucher, I was responding to reasonisfaith. Please accept the same response in another gender :)
Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism the destroyer. Nevertheless, the Galilean, who later was called Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who too up His position against Jewry. Galilee was a colony where the Romans had probably installed Gallic legionaries, and it's certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son of a whore-- of a whore and a Roman soldier.- Adolf Hitler, Table-Talk, p. 76
Clearly, Hitler didn't buy the virgin birth, but then neither do 27% of the Anglican clergy.
And you'll note it says nothing about "rape".
The claims of a Roman soldier as the father of Jesus was made by a Greek Jew, Celsus, as confirmed by Origen of Alexandria in Contra Celsus, Book I.
Of Celsus, his writings as a whole has been lost. nothing remains of his work except whatever Origen quotes.
From chapter 28, Origen spends the next twenty chapters trying to debunk Celsus' claim by declaring the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew texts as being superior to the original Hebrew text (Isaiah 7:14) and that the claims of other "virgin births" (Mithras, Horus, Adonis, Dionysos, etc) by pagans were all just myths because Jesus was spoken of by the prophets.
And in his best known argument, Origen states that it's only proper that the Christ-child be born of a Holy Virgin. Otherwise what kind of sign would that have been if a plain ole non-virgin gave birth to a child?
Thus ends today's lesson in Christian history ...
If by addressing me as "sister" you are implying that you believe that I am a Nun then all I have to say is LOL! If you have other intentions with such an address well then I will chalk it up to the stress of a saturday afternoon debate using time that should be spent on other things.
Aside from that, God wants your heart and your mind, you can Reason into Christianity, many have. Try G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy) and C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain). Of course Faith is also important, but it takes less Faith to believe in God than it does to disbelieve. Unfortunately, as you have noted, one Faith can bring you peace of mind and another only turmoil. Choose wisely.
You might want to see my next post. I apologize for calling you sister. I thought I was responding to someone else
Indeed, Plato was the president of the Eugenics Society and president of the first International Eugenics Congress. No, wait, that was Leonard Darwin.
Saves you some thinking.
Saves you some thinking.Better than you can say snoogums.
You do Know that it was Charles Darwin that discovered Natural Selection?
You haven’t seen my copy.
See my post at 170
Most logical post award. You win nothing tangible. Instead you will be shunned and ridiculed by both sides. Enjoy your special moment! ;)
I agree completely and would only add that it borders on historic revisionism to prop up the tenuous connection to one while completely ignoring or discounting the directly stated connection to the other.
Guild by association is not a logical means of argumentation. “Nazi’s used trains to haul Jews to the concentration camps, therefore we should all shun trains.”
"I don't understand what the controversy is here. Hitler and his Nazi regime misappropriated religion and science to justify their misdeeds. I think that's something that Christians, Jews and atheists can agree on ... whether any of the above are scientists or not.
Christianity isn't to blame for Nazism. Evolution isn't to blame for Nazism. Blind nationalism, near-Satanic religious fervor and science with no moral or ethical code to speak of are. Hitler and his ilk were evil incarnate. It shouldn't come as a surprise that they tainted everything and everyone they touched."
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