Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Really? And if God wanted you to slaughter your own child, then it would be right to do that, too? Certainly, it would seem that Abraham thought so.
Nobody ever said that Sheriff Andy Taylor's son was infallible.
I didn't read it as an accusation - it was a simple request aimed at making people THINK about what they were about the lay down before responding. All too often I find that replies that are come to in defense of The Bible very much appear to lack that key element - as they are far too often too easily torn to shred using even a modicum of sense/logic.
My best guess is that you are a very intelligent person, and so you realize that in order to defend anything in The Bible, one has almost no choice but to fabricate things, or, at the very best, pontificate on possibilities that they have absolutely no real idea are correct or not. So, a request to "not make crap up" stymies prospective apologists right off the bat - which is very frustrating, I'm sure.
I would beg to differ, and there is an entire industry that attempts to smooth over many of the rough edges that The Bible presents, because there have been many, many people (like myself) who object to some of its content. From what I have heard and read, this mostly ends up being appeals to "magic", semantic games, large stretches of the imagination to tie disparate sources of information or ideas together, or simply bad excuses with poor evidential support.
Okay... even if I grant this, you DO understand that none of that, in any way, makes its contents TRUE, right?
And? What is this suppose to mean to me? Why should I care about this? People have also used the idea of black as unclean, evil or dark in some bad or scary way, and conversely white as pure, clean and light in some good and encouraging way. Does that make the color black "evil?" Does that make the color white "good?" I hope, for your sake, you answer "no" like a rational, thinking person would.
So funny how believers seem to think that they can provoke some kind of anger or irritation response by saying that religious things are "important" to the unbeliever. You think I care how "important" you think The Bible is to me? Seriously? How strange that would be.
I can tell you exactly why I focus on the negative - because there are so very many people surrounding me with this daft notion the The Bible is inerrant - and they don't even know half the content I bring to their attention when I do bring the more sullied bits up for discussion. So I spend very much of my time focusing on those negative bits, for sure - to make sure that I have ammunition of all kinds to bring at the believer when I inform them that I do not believe their stories, and for when they make that fatal mistake of saying how great all the content of The Bible is. It is all too easy to smash their delicate hopes for the text to pieces at that point. Though normally it doesn't go that far - because they fear the implications too greatly, they normally choose instead to bow out of the conversation entirely.
On the surface that does sound "right," doesn't it? However, peel back a layer, and you realize that all throughout our history, people have been correcting the thought processes of one another in all sorts of beneficial and important ways. Such as coming to the germ theory of disease. How many people has that little nugget helped out since the discovery of how viruses and bacteria operate, and the gaining of knowledge of how to avoid or combat them? If a person who believed in blood letting, for example, were to just decide that blood letting was "true for them" - well... that's just asinine as we can see it now, from our relatively advanced perspective, now isn't it? That's how this really works. Not "what's true for you is true and what's true for me is equally true." That's just a nice-sounding sentiment that doesn't really mean or provide us anything.
Why is everyone on this site so afraid of a little emphasis? I want to make sure people get what I want them to out of what I write. So sue me. I don't care what you think about capital letters, honestly. Can you read them? Yes? Good enough for me then. Christ. What a thing to complain about. I'll try and keep everything lowercase for you, and make sure that I use only italics, bold and underlining in order to protect your delicate sensibilities. How's that?
We'll examine what you said:
Most of what these various works bring to bear (and especially what your "trinity reference" relies on) is symbolism. To be an inspiration and underpinning, without being the thing itself, is to rely on the symbolism of the thing(s) to drive you forward. So, we might say that something Shakespeare, for example, wrote had some profound meaning or implication to the human condition - but it isn't the human condition, obviously - it is only a caricature, hyperbole or exaggeration for effect. The reason I called on "black" and "white" and the symbolism that has been applied to those colors - also for centuries (probably even more than four I'd wager) - was to provide an easy example that displays how the symbolic meanings applied to various things (especially literary tropes) are not the things themselves, and very often that disconnect leads to people taking various things for granted (such as how "nice" it would be for people to love their neighbors like they love themselves), or creating ridiculous stereotypes (such as the idea that flies or goats represent evil, or are somehow "bad" compared to other creatures), or propagating foolish bits of "knowledge" that make them believe they are "oh so clever" because they have picked up on idiotic things like this, that writers likely never meant as intellectual providence in any objective sense, and call them "true."RestlessSoul said:
Haha... of course you took the black/white dichotomy to be a reference to skin color. Of course you did. Likely so triggered by even the mere mention of even slavery's symbolism because that glaring hole of support for immorality is one of the easiest things to pick on about The Bible. What I said about "black and white" had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery. It had to do with attaching completely unnecessary or certainly "not necessarily true" meaning to things like colors - or literary works.
So it is based on a demonstrably false premise.
You are free to believe this, but I know it is a false belief, because I already wrote my reply, but was hesitant to post (see Note below)
I asked a legit question, given the start of your OP
Does not apply to me, because
Message understood: go ahead and cast your pearls -- this swine will not rend you.
Thanks, I appreciate that
