Monday, March 14, 2011

Response to Method Skeptic Comments

Thank you for your comments.
You said: Revelation is necessarily a first-person experience, for anyone else, it is hearsay...

Let me begin by saying I agree with you. Paul, Peter, Thomas, and all the rest would not have given their lives for Christ if they did not have a 1st hand revelation given by God. Now you may say Muslims today are dying for their god today, does that testify to the idea that muslims have also had a personal revelation given by God? Well, Jesus said you will know them by their fruit. Muslims dying for their faith are doing so because they are trusting only what they have been told. They are not questioning their religion. They are doing these things not for others but for themselves, because they believe their death will assure sex with virgins and mansions in heaven. Jesus and His 1st disciples were put to death for spreading the message they had received. God has chosen to use both the testimony of others and personal experience to draw us to faith. That is good, because if my faith was based only on my own experience, then I could question myself as being crazy. However, when I hear the testimony of millions of others who have had the same type of experience, it encourages and strengthens my faith.

When I came to faith in God, it was originally based on a personal revelation God gave me. My motive here is not to intellectually save people. My motive here is to break down walls people like my self built up. The walls I built in my own mind blinded me from even considering the possibility that the Bible could be true. I like you had hundreds of reasons to believe the Bible was flawed or just totally false. However, these reasons I had for rejecting the God of the Bible were based on my own collection of misinformation that I had been fed. It was also based on my own selfish love of sin. I did not have an understanding of scripture in context. I would pick things out of context, and read into things. In doing this I missed what the original point of the scripture was. It was only when I let go of my pride and pre-conceived notions of God that He responded to me, when I asked Him to reveal Himself. Ever since then I have been studying the Bible and searching out the answers to all those doubts and questions I had about His word.

Let me also point out that salavtion is not dependent upon how much you know about scripture. Salvation is dependent upon faith in God. God has given us natural knowledge, it is called our conscience. We all know naturally that we have sinned. The reality is that I am no more righteous in and of myself than a mass murderer. If it was not for the grace of God, we all would have the capacity to do such evil. We do not commit such evil because we have been brought up in a positive environment with a chemical balance in our brain that makes it less likely that we would do such a thing. But God is responsible for my environment and my chemical balance. THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT GOD CREATED MASS MURDERERS. Man created sin, not God. Through God's influence in the world He has kept mankind from destroying himself which is in our sin nature. So the fact that you and I are not mass murderers is a reason for us to give thanks to God for His influence on our hearts. However, Jesus said if w so much as hate someone, we are in danger of the same judgement as a murderer. Hate for someone in God's economy is the same as murder. We look at these things different, but the only difference between someone who hates and a murderer is God's influence in that person's heart preventing him from acting upon that hate.

The only way we can be healed of this disease we have inherited called SIN, is through faith. Faith causes us to deny our natural selfish tendencies, and reach out to our creator. When we do that, God responds to us by revealing Himself to us in an intimate and personal way.

As for your question. You are making a few assertions based on speculation. For example you assert the disciples did not speak Greek. I'm not sure how you could possibly know that. They lived in the Roman empire where Greek was the primary language. But aside from that. Even if they did not speak Greek, it does not matter, because in context of the entire account, it is obvious what Jesus is saying here. Jesus goes on to define what He meant in verses 5 and 6, where He points out that we must not only be born in the flesh, but we must be born of Spirit of God in order to get into heaven.

9 comments:

  1. I am a bit at a loss as to how to respond, given that your avoidance and misapprehension of my points is nearly total, but I'll give it a shot.

    You said: Revelation is necessarily a first-person experience, for anyone else, it is hearsay...

    Let me begin by saying I agree with you. Paul, Peter, Thomas, and all the rest would not have given their lives for Christ if they did not have a 1st hand revelation given by God.


    STOP. First, millions of people all over the world have given their lives for millions of causes, so someone's strength of belief or willingness to die is worth precisely zero when it comes to evaluating whether their claims are TRUE. Your statement “would not have given their lives for Christ if,” is completely false.

    The point about hearsay is that a certain select number of people in history supposedly got it straight from the horse's mouth. The rest of us, on the other hand, are not only expected to take their word for it, not even their firsthand word for it. All we’ve got is this crummy book, with all its glaring flaws.

    The walls I built in my own mind blinded me from even considering the possibility that the Bible could be true. I like you had hundreds of reasons to believe the Bible was flawed or just totally false.

    I repeat: you have it utterly backwards. I started from a position of faith, of belief, and through reading and study and following the evidence came to the conclusion that the Bible is a work of historical fiction. You have the end of the road confused with the beginning.

    It was also based on my own selfish love of sin.

    Your personal self-loathing is irrelevant, though I hope you get some counseling. I do hope you’re not gearing up to tell me how much I must love sin, because that would be an ad hominem attack as well as an incoherent statement, and you’d never go there, right?

    I did not have an understanding of scripture in context. I would pick things out of context, and read into things. In doing this I missed what the original point of the scripture was.

    And again, I say: if this book is the preferred vehicle for an omnipotent, omniscient being to transmit the most important information in the universe, he did a pretty asinine job of it--why should God Almighty's inspired word have any need for broader apologetics?

    By the way, your skills at picking things out of context and reading your own preconceived notions into things are as sharp as they ever were--I've read your posts on biblical "prophecy," and that's a perfect description of your work. Much of Christian commentary on most any subject, actually. Disgust over the rampant intellectual dishonesty among prominent Christian "thinkers" did much to push me away from the faith.

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  2. :::Snip 350-odd words of preaching, palaver and other nonsense:::

    As for your question. You are making a few assertions based on speculation. For example you assert the disciples did not speak Greek. I'm not sure how you could possibly know that. They lived in the Roman empire where Greek was the primary language.

    Aramaic was the primary language of first century Judea, and biblical historians generally agree that Greek would have been a second language at best. My point stands.

    But aside from that. Even if they did not speak Greek, it does not matter

    No, NOT aside from "that." "THAT" is my whole point--I specifically said that Jesus explains the spiritual meaning of the passage perfectly adequately. But WHY DID HE HAVE TO? You can basically look at this passage in two ways:

    1] If the bible is true, then Jesus & company decided to switch from their mother tongue into a language of limited fluency, solely so that Jesus could make a pun, or just muddy the waters. If they'd been using either Hebrew or Aramaic, no confusion would have occurred and he could have skipped to the central message without being interrupted. Or,
    2] Something like the conversation may or may not have happened, but had already been translated out of its native language for the benefit of the larger Greek-speaking audience before the book was committed to paper. It certainly fits with how the questioner is such a dim bulb that he can’t figure out from context and has to feed Jesus such a stilted line of dialogue for him to launch into his sermon.

    This may seem like a very fine nit to pick but this is just one of many lines of evidence that the Gospels were only ever in Greek. For instance, the N.T. typically quotes the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew scriptures--not exactly the hallmark that they're primary sources.

    Secondly, this stuff is supposedly God-breathed and inerrant, so it should withstand strict scrutiny.

    It's just Occam's razor--you can make apologetics for each and every biblical objection I might raise, if you're willing to pile on unfounded assumptions, special pleadings, and a willingness to move the goalposts whenever it suits you. I just think that apologetics in general is pure and simple B.S. artistry, and apologists are full of it, to the brim.

    We can play this game forever--I can raise an objection to something, anything.

    You'll Google it and parrot back whatever stock excuse you find that will let you sleep at night.

    I will shake my head at your stubborn refusal to speculate on why this should be necessary or even possible if the Word of God is anything close to what it's cracked up to be.

    Inerrant scripture shouldn't need you or anyone else to make excuses for it. If you want to keep playing, I'll pitch you a few balls, but don't think that you're making your side look good.

    And even at that, something I meant to say the first time around: If no god exists, then the bible cannot be true. Trying to convince me, or yourself for that matter, that God exists via trying to "Prove [sic] the Bible" is a logical fallacy. Prove God first, then evaluate the claim of whether this book is worth anything.

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  3. I guess I don't quite understand your point of contention regarding this scripture. It is not just nit picky, it really does not prove or disprove anything. You will have to communicate your point a little more clearly.

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  4. Being written in Greek casts extreme doubt on the claim that it is an eyewitness account. I can't put it more plainly than that.

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  5. Again that makes no sense. John could have known both languages and wanted to reach a broader audience. There are other possible explanations too but to use this as your top reason to reject the Bible is somewhat ridiculous.

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  6. Of course it would be. Here again, we have an example of you reading what you want to see and not what I actually wrote. I never said this was my top reason to be skeptical of the Bible; it's not even near the top of the list. I picked it out of a hat, in no small part because it is obscure, and because it isn't one of the well known objections.

    For what it’s worth, John was thought by most scholars to be illiterate (as well as not the author of the book), and your solution is to posit that he was, in fact, fluently bilingual. You're taking speculation as justification for certainty.

    If you want my top reasons, I'll give them to you, in no specific order but all off the top of my head:
    • The fundamental untenability of text as a vehicle for revelation
    • the variance in characterization of Jesus across the Gospels, particularly between Mark and John
    • the schismatic nature of religion in general and theologians' inability to establish consensus on nearly any doctrine
    • the conflicts in Jesus' birth date between the reign of Herod and the governorship of Quirinius
    • no extrabiblical source corroborating the ancestral-home requirement of Quirinius' census—a decree ridiculous on its face, to say nothing of subjecting a heavily pregnant woman to the journey
    • the conflicting Nativity Stories, lineages of Jesus, flight to Egypt stories, and the lack of any extrabiblical attestation to the slaughter of the innocents
    • the vast swathes of Matthew and Luke copied verbatim from Mark
    • the conflicting Easter narratives, including the day it took place, the Last Suppers, the last words, and the divergent Easter morning narratives
    • the story of ZOMBIES WALKING INTO JERUSALEM that's mentioned nowhere else in history other than the book of Matthew
    • the 3rd person impersonal narration of the gospels, including scenes of private events which no disciples witnessed, described in real time and not something they were helpfully told about after the fact.
    • the multiple deaths of Judas Iscariot
    • the doctrinal conflicts between Paul's Epistles and the Gospels
    • the failed prophecy of "this generation shall not pass away" in Matthew 24, the weakness of biblical prophecy in general
    • Numbers 31. ‘nuff said.

    Let me ask you this question: how many of these were you aware of while you called yourself a skeptic? Did you research them yourself, or were you just going on half-remembered secondhand indictments—somebody rattled off a list like the above and you just took their word for it (as you accuse all skeptics, at all times and all places, of doing)? Or, have you only learned about many or most of them only in the past ten years, in the form of straw men for apologists to fill full of arrows at their leisure?

    Having done my homework and also read Christians' attempts to explain away these problems (I guarantee you’ll find apologetics for each and every single one of them), needless to say I am unconvinced. How many excuses, concoctions, harmonizations, encrusted speculations do you endure, just so you can keep a white-knuckle death-grip on the preconceived notion that this is, must be, the truth?

    Or do you one day decide that bending over backwards is not any more warranted for the bible than it is for every other holy book you never believed in?

    Do you one day realize that the standard of evidence you're willing to accept for the Bible, would not only put you in the position of having to accept mutually exclusive religious claims, but also UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, homeopathy, dowsing, and infinite other varieties of nonsense?

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  7. I always have to laugh when I hear people use the term "most scholars" Did you actually ask all scholars that exist or just the liberal ones. I also find it ridiculous that anyone could claim to know John was illiterate, especially when the early church fathers all credit him with writing his gospel epistles and Revelation. How quickly you put your faith in modern day liberal scholars but reject the scholars who translated the Bible. As for your top ten reasons for rejecting the Bible. Well lets just say I have heard all of those reasons many times and although you claim not to have gotten these from Athiest.org I am sure it came from something similar. Every challenge you have raised is your subjective opinion and is not based on objective fact. The fact that you listed the death of Judas as an example proves my point that you are either ignorant or dishonest. You complain thay certain parts of scripture are verbatum yet when another account says the same thing from a different perspective you scoff at that as well. As you said I could easily point out the flaws in your reasoning and again they are all based on not having a full understanding of scripture. However you have already made up your mind. You have not had questions you have only attacked. Your questions have been meant only to mock. When you sincerely have a question I will answer but right now it seems a waste of my time. You have not studied the Bible, you have studied how to disprove it. Yet you have failed which is why you are still trying to attack people like me.

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  8. On to the matter at hand*:

    The deaths of Judas are a perfect example of two sources which obviously, blatantly cannot get their stories straight. Apologists love to use the metaphor of trial witnesses when talking about so-called minor differences (but wait, aren't they the ones who keep calling it "inerrant?!")--if every witness related a word for word identical story, you'd accuse them of collusion.

    But in this instance, if one said that the victim committed suicide by hanging, and another said he fell headlong in a field and died of internal injuries, you'd clearly think that one or both of them is flat wrong. (And John Calvin concluded that the author of Matthew made a mistake when he said the prophecy supposedly being fulfilled was in Jeremiah rather than Zechariah.)

    The main apologetic I see is to simply jam the accounts together, as though he hung himself *at* potter's field, and then fell headlong and burst open when the rope broke. But for anyone relating that series of events, the cause of death would never be described so ambiguously. If he was dead on the rope, you'd never say he died of the fall. If the rope broke before he asphyxiated, you wouldn't cite that instead of the fall. There are other explanations, but likewise they're still grasping at straws.

    Likewise, if various witnesses described a bank robbery in differing ways--if one witness said "well, I wasn't there, but the two women who said they were the first on the scene told me that when they got there the door had been cut open and the money was gone," and another said, "well, I wasn't there, but the two women who told me they got there first (one of them different than "witness" #1) said a giant UFO came down, cut the vault open with a laser and pulled out the money with a tractor beam," then you wouldn't be in any position to give either account the benefit of the doubt.

    So it goes. Skeptics** come up with objections, apologists dance and stretch and accuse, and never come up with anything convincing. For you to have 1 Peter 3:15 in your banner is the biggest point worthy of ridicule of them all. Fail, fail, and fail some more.

    (*By the way, that's fourteen bullet points, if you'd bother to read them. It's not a top ten, and I left off the #1, all time, never-gotten-a-remotely-good-explanation problem: the doctrine that God NEEDS to make a blood sacrifice OF himself, TO himself, so that he would have a loophole not to enforce His own laws MAKES NO SENSE. That it involves requirements for INFINITE punishments to FINITE offenses, with nonbelief being both necessary and sufficient to be tortured forever, is just gravy.)

    (**while we're on the subject, "Atheist" has the same suffix as Capitalist, Communist, Originalist, Optimist, Pessimist, etc. Then again, you can't spell "resurrection" right either.)

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  9. I am going to repost my comment AGAIN. If you had bothered to READ IT, you would have realized that the offending language had been redacted. Retreating to censorship rather than engaging the matter at hand is a sign of a weak argument.

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