The last time I entered into an earnest discussion of spirituality with a theist friend of mine, what I wanted to bend my brain around was how he could claim to derive his faith from studying the Bible, when (from the few passages I’ve read myself) it’s a text that absolutely does not stand literal interpretation. (For instance, I wanted to know how he reconciled an interest in science, in particular the science of evolution, with a Bible that literally argues for a “young Earth” incompatible with the known duration implied by the fossil and geological records.)
Basically I wanted to know precisely what his belief system consisted of, which was very hard given the many different conceptions of Christianity I bump into. I’ve read “Mere Christianity” on his advice, but I found it far from sufficient—at once way too specific on some points (e.g. a husband should be in charge in a household), and way too slippery on the fundamentals (e.g. what is prayer really about).
I’ve formed my beliefs from a combination of the Bible, asking other Christians, a cursory study of the secular history of the Roman Empire, internet discussions, articles and gut feelings.
That said, if you have specific questions about anything, feel free to ask me.
I’m curious what you think of evidence that early Christianity adopted the date of Christmas and other rituals from pre-existing pagan religions?
ETA: I’m not saying that this would detract from the central Christian message (i.e. Jesus sacrificing himself to redeem our sins). But that sort of memetic infection seems like a strange thing to happen to an objective truth.
I think it indicates that Christians have done stupid things and one must be discerning about traditions rather than blindly accepting everything taught in church as 100% true, and certainly not everything commonly believed by laypersons!
It’s not surprising (unless this is hindsight bias—it might actually BE surprising, considering how unwilling Christians should have been to make compromises like that, but a lot of time passed between Jesus’s death and Christianity taking over Europe, didn’t it?) that humans would be humans. I can see where I might have even considered the same in that situation—everyone likes holidays, everyone should be Christian, pagans get a fun solstice holiday, Christians don’t, this is making people want to be Christian less. Let’s fix it by having our own holiday. At least then we can make it about Jesus, right?
The worship and deification of Mary is similar, which is why I don’t pray to her.
So, suppose I find a church I choose (for whatever reason) to associate with. We seem to agree that I shouldn’t believe everything taught in that church, and I shouldn’t believe everything believed by members of that church… I should compare those teachings and beliefs to my own expectations about and experiences of the world to decide what I believe and what I don’t, just as you have used your own expectations about and experiences of human nature to decide whether to believe various claims about when Jesus was born, what properties Mary had, etc.
So, my own experience of having compared the teachings and beliefs of a couple of churches I was for various reasons associated with to my own expectations about and experiences of the world was that, after doing so, I didn’t believe that Jesus was exceptionally divine or that the New Testament was a particularly reliable source of either moral truths or information about the physical world.
Would you say that I made an error in my evaluations?
Possibly. Or you may be lacking information; if your assumptions were wrong at the beginning and you used good reasoning, you’d come to the wrong conclusion.
Ehh… even when you don’t mean it literally, you probably shouldn’t say such things as “first day as a rationalist”. It’s kind of hard to increase one’s capability for rational thinking without keeping in mind at all times how it’s a many-sided gradient with more than one dimension.
Here’s one:
Let’s say that the world is a simulation AND that strongly godlike AI is possible.
To all intents and purposes, even though the bible in the simulation is provably inconsistent, the existence of a being indistinguishable from the God in such a bible would not be ruled out because though the inhabitants of the world are constrained by the rules of physics in their own state machines or objects or whatever, the universe containing the simulation is subject to it’s own set of physics and logic and therefore may vary even inside the simulation but not be detectable to you or I.
Yes of course this is possible. So is the Tipler scenario. However, the simulation argument just as easily supports any of a vast number of god-theories, of which Christianity is just one of many. That being said, it does support judeo-xian type systems more than say Hindiusm or Vodun.
There may even be economical reasons to create universes like ours, but that’s a very unpopular position on LW.
To me it seems straightforward. Instead of spelling out in detail what rules you should follow in a new situation—say, if the authorities who Paul just got done telling you to obey order you to do something ‘wrong’—this passage gives the general principle that supposedly underlies the rules. That way you can apply it to your particular situation and it’ll tell you all you need to do as a Christian. Paul does seem to think that in his time and place, love requires following a lot of odd rules. But by my reading this only matters if you plan to travel back in time (or if you personally plan to judge the dead).
But I gather that a lot of Christians disagree with me. I don’t know if I understand the objection—possibly they’d argue that we lack the ability to see how the rules follow from loving one’s neighbor, and thus we should expect God to personally spell out every rule-change. (So why tell us that this principle underlies them all?)
Using exegesis (meaning I’m not asking what it says in Greek or how else it might be translated, and I don’t think I need to worry much about cultural norms at the time). But that doesn’t tell you much.
To me it seems straightforward. Instead of spelling out in detail what rules you should follow in a new situation—say, if the authorities who Paul just got done telling you to obey order you to do something ‘wrong’—this passage gives the general principle that supposedly underlies the rules. That way you can apply it to your particular situation and it’ll tell you all you need to do as a Christian.
Yes, I agree. Also, if you didn’t know what love said to do in your situation, the rules would be helpful in figuring it out.
Paul does seem to think that in his time and place, love requires following a lot of odd rules.
That gets into a broader way of understanding the Bible. I don’t know enough about the time and place to talk much about this.
But I gather that a lot of Christians disagree with me. I don’t know if I understand the objection—possibly they’d argue that we lack the ability to see how the rules follow from loving one’s neighbor, and thus we should expect God to personally spell out every rule-change. (So why tell us that this principle underlies them all?)
The objection I can think of is that people might want to argue in favor of being able to do whatever they want, even if it doesn’t follow from God’s commands, and not listen even to God’s explicit prohibitions. Hence, as a general principle, it’s better to obey the rules because more people who object to them (since the New Testament already massively reduces legalism anyway) will be trying to get away with violating the spirit of the rules than will be actually correct in believing that the spirit of the rules is best obeyed by violating the letter of them. Another point would be that if an omniscient being gives you a heuristic, and you are not omniscient, you’d probably do better to follow it than to disregard it.
Given that the context has changed, seems to me omniscience should only matter if God wants to prevent people other than the original audience from misusing or misapplying the rules. (Obviously we’d also need to assume God supplied the rules in the first place!)
Now this does seem like a fairly reasonable assumption, but doesn’t it create a lot of problems for you? If we go that route then it no longer suffices to show or assume that each rule made sense in historical context. Now you need to believe that no possible change would produce better results when we take all time periods into account.
If you want Bible verses to use to dis Christianity, I suggest 1 Corinthians 14:33-35 and Luke 22:19, 20.
I’d be interested in your ideas of what books you’d recommend a non-Christian read.
The last time I entered into an earnest discussion of spirituality with a theist friend of mine, what I wanted to bend my brain around was how he could claim to derive his faith from studying the Bible, when (from the few passages I’ve read myself) it’s a text that absolutely does not stand literal interpretation. (For instance, I wanted to know how he reconciled an interest in science, in particular the science of evolution, with a Bible that literally argues for a “young Earth” incompatible with the known duration implied by the fossil and geological records.)
Basically I wanted to know precisely what his belief system consisted of, which was very hard given the many different conceptions of Christianity I bump into. I’ve read “Mere Christianity” on his advice, but I found it far from sufficient—at once way too specific on some points (e.g. a husband should be in charge in a household), and way too slippery on the fundamentals (e.g. what is prayer really about).
I’ve formed my beliefs from a combination of the Bible, asking other Christians, a cursory study of the secular history of the Roman Empire, internet discussions, articles and gut feelings.
That said, if you have specific questions about anything, feel free to ask me.
I’m curious what you think of evidence that early Christianity adopted the date of Christmas and other rituals from pre-existing pagan religions?
ETA: I’m not saying that this would detract from the central Christian message (i.e. Jesus sacrificing himself to redeem our sins). But that sort of memetic infection seems like a strange thing to happen to an objective truth.
I think it indicates that Christians have done stupid things and one must be discerning about traditions rather than blindly accepting everything taught in church as 100% true, and certainly not everything commonly believed by laypersons!
It’s not surprising (unless this is hindsight bias—it might actually BE surprising, considering how unwilling Christians should have been to make compromises like that, but a lot of time passed between Jesus’s death and Christianity taking over Europe, didn’t it?) that humans would be humans. I can see where I might have even considered the same in that situation—everyone likes holidays, everyone should be Christian, pagans get a fun solstice holiday, Christians don’t, this is making people want to be Christian less. Let’s fix it by having our own holiday. At least then we can make it about Jesus, right?
The worship and deification of Mary is similar, which is why I don’t pray to her.
That’s interesting.
So, suppose I find a church I choose (for whatever reason) to associate with. We seem to agree that I shouldn’t believe everything taught in that church, and I shouldn’t believe everything believed by members of that church… I should compare those teachings and beliefs to my own expectations about and experiences of the world to decide what I believe and what I don’t, just as you have used your own expectations about and experiences of human nature to decide whether to believe various claims about when Jesus was born, what properties Mary had, etc.
Yes? Or have I misunderstood you?
Yes. Upvoted for both understanding me and trying to avoid the illusion of transparency.
OK, cool.
So, my own experience of having compared the teachings and beliefs of a couple of churches I was for various reasons associated with to my own expectations about and experiences of the world was that, after doing so, I didn’t believe that Jesus was exceptionally divine or that the New Testament was a particularly reliable source of either moral truths or information about the physical world.
Would you say that I made an error in my evaluations?
Possibly. Or you may be lacking information; if your assumptions were wrong at the beginning and you used good reasoning, you’d come to the wrong conclusion.
Do you have particular assumptions in mind here? Or is this a more general statement about the nature of reasoning?
It’s a statement so general you probably learned it on your first day as a rationalist.
In other words, “Garbage in, garbage out?”
Yes.
Ehh… even when you don’t mean it literally, you probably shouldn’t say such things as “first day as a rationalist”. It’s kind of hard to increase one’s capability for rational thinking without keeping in mind at all times how it’s a many-sided gradient with more than one dimension.
Here’s one: Let’s say that the world is a simulation AND that strongly godlike AI is possible. To all intents and purposes, even though the bible in the simulation is provably inconsistent, the existence of a being indistinguishable from the God in such a bible would not be ruled out because though the inhabitants of the world are constrained by the rules of physics in their own state machines or objects or whatever, the universe containing the simulation is subject to it’s own set of physics and logic and therefore may vary even inside the simulation but not be detectable to you or I.
Yes of course this is possible. So is the Tipler scenario. However, the simulation argument just as easily supports any of a vast number of god-theories, of which Christianity is just one of many. That being said, it does support judeo-xian type systems more than say Hindiusm or Vodun.
There may even be economical reasons to create universes like ours, but that’s a very unpopular position on LW.
Come on. Don’t vote me down without responding.
How do you interpret Romans 13:8-10?
To me it seems straightforward. Instead of spelling out in detail what rules you should follow in a new situation—say, if the authorities who Paul just got done telling you to obey order you to do something ‘wrong’—this passage gives the general principle that supposedly underlies the rules. That way you can apply it to your particular situation and it’ll tell you all you need to do as a Christian. Paul does seem to think that in his time and place, love requires following a lot of odd rules. But by my reading this only matters if you plan to travel back in time (or if you personally plan to judge the dead).
But I gather that a lot of Christians disagree with me. I don’t know if I understand the objection—possibly they’d argue that we lack the ability to see how the rules follow from loving one’s neighbor, and thus we should expect God to personally spell out every rule-change. (So why tell us that this principle underlies them all?)
Using exegesis (meaning I’m not asking what it says in Greek or how else it might be translated, and I don’t think I need to worry much about cultural norms at the time). But that doesn’t tell you much.
Yes, I agree. Also, if you didn’t know what love said to do in your situation, the rules would be helpful in figuring it out.
That gets into a broader way of understanding the Bible. I don’t know enough about the time and place to talk much about this.
The objection I can think of is that people might want to argue in favor of being able to do whatever they want, even if it doesn’t follow from God’s commands, and not listen even to God’s explicit prohibitions. Hence, as a general principle, it’s better to obey the rules because more people who object to them (since the New Testament already massively reduces legalism anyway) will be trying to get away with violating the spirit of the rules than will be actually correct in believing that the spirit of the rules is best obeyed by violating the letter of them. Another point would be that if an omniscient being gives you a heuristic, and you are not omniscient, you’d probably do better to follow it than to disregard it.
Given that the context has changed, seems to me omniscience should only matter if God wants to prevent people other than the original audience from misusing or misapplying the rules. (Obviously we’d also need to assume God supplied the rules in the first place!)
Now this does seem like a fairly reasonable assumption, but doesn’t it create a lot of problems for you? If we go that route then it no longer suffices to show or assume that each rule made sense in historical context. Now you need to believe that no possible change would produce better results when we take all time periods into account.
Well, yeah, the first one’s kind of appalling, but the second one’s just kind of kinky.