What the Bible is Really About

Revelation In Space said:
At least not the smug, unreasonable, arrogant variety I'm accustomed to like a few here
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All good guys on here!
I actually used to be that angry atheist. I have mellowed out since.
I only mainly take issue with theists who decide science is wrong because it disagrees with their holy book.

So we will lock horns I think but hopefully like gentlemen.
 
Revelation In Space said:
That isn't uncommon. Interesting, isn't it? Think of all that was at stake when you should have been informed and all that motivates you now.
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Reading as a devotee and studying as a student are two different things.
Also reading scholarship on the subject is completely different.

I honestly did not know anything about the Bible till I was 15. That was only because we got a true intellectual as a stand in religion teacher as opposed to our nut job regular teacher.
I learned about circumcision and other Jewish traditions,the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic but the Gospels were written in Greek.
The fact that Mark not Matthew was written first and the first three Gospels are "seen together." Synoptic.

Reading people like Ehrman, Finkelstein, Vermes, Stavracopoulou came much later.
 
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Pinball1970 said:
All good guys on here!
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Of course. We're all good.

Pinball1970 said:
I actually used to be that angry atheist. I have mellowed out since.
I only mainly take issue with theists who decide science is wrong because it disagrees with their holy book.
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Science is self-correcting, isn't it? You don't take issue with atheists or theists who decide science is wrong, that it needs corrected, but the Bible is wrong because it disagrees with science? You were born only a few months after me, do you realize that you were 20 years old before science figured out that babies could feel pain? They wouldn't anesthetize them even when performing serious procedures like heart surgery. They would only temporarily paralyze them to keep them from struggling.

As far as I can tell science only disagrees with the Bible in two subjects. Macroevolution and the global deluge and science only roughly speculates on the absence of in the latter. The former, as I've stated elsewhere, has never been observed. The Bible says humans produce humans. Macroevolution says humans evolved from a common ancestor. Which have you observed?

Pinball1970 said:
So we will lock horns I think but hopefully like gentlemen.
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Naturally. I don't mind if it gets heated. That too is natural. Worldviews become a part of us and when they're threatened, we take it personally.
 
Revelation In Space said:
Science is self-correcting, isn't it? You don't take issue with atheists or theists who decide science is wrong
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Yes that's pretty much it. Science does not care if the study is by a man, woman, atheist or theist.
Does the study stand up to peer review?
Can the results be repeated?
Is the study applicable?
 
Revelation In Space said:
The Bible is about the vindication of Jehovah God's name through the ransom sacrifice of Christ Jesus. That's the short answer.
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No, it's not.

Ransom theory of Salvation is overly complicated and includes the implication that Jesus' mission is complete. Here's a twenty-four year-old note↗:

Ransom theory espoused that the Devil had seized dominion over human souls and affairs. Medieval Christian philosophers worked hard to wrap their skulls and souls around that. Elaborate plays were written, casting humanity as the stake in a massive lawsuit, with either Jesus or Mary arguing for Good, and the Devil arguing for the forces of evil. In the end, no resolution was possible that did not invest too much power in the Devil for the philosophers' comfort. With Ransom Theory, you have the Devil, created by God, allowed to subjugate the people, so that they might appeal to God to save them. Jesus, by this notion, was the ransom, with the trials a philosophical exploration of the principles involved. The biggest problem with Ransom is that Jesus' mission is thus completed at his death, and, having ransomed humanity from Evil's clutches, no longer has any compelling reason to involve himself in human affairs.​

A note from twenty years ago↗ reminds of the history: Ransom was apparently favored from the fourth century into the eleventh; it is worth noting that the proposition for how Christ's salvation works emerged after Arius and Athanasius came to a head at Nicaea, and before the Christian canon was settled in the fifth century. Formally or academically, it all goes downhill from there: Anselm infused feudal elements into a Satisfaction thesis, and Abelard romanticized, in the twelfth century, the idea of Christ's love in a Moral-Influence scheme. Socinianism is a Unitarian joke written by humanists in the sixteenth century. The only note I kept on "Divine Justice" is that it's a form of Substitution written by a lawyer in the seventeenth century.

One of the things about faith, though, is that you don't get to know the answer. Convoluted stories about how Salvation, Atonement, or Redemption work are the sort of piety that is its own reward.

†​

Anecdotal: There is an obscure story I might refer to as the Blanco episode; I'm not the only one who saw it, but I might be the only person to still talk about it. There was a Bible paraphrase, called The Clear Word, written by a man named Jack Blanco. And, sure, Bible paraphrases are a bad idea in general, but in this case, not even church elders were comfortable with the thing.

Part of what went wrong is that in one edition—it might have been the children's version, or some such—Blanco sought to simplify a detail in Genesis that apparently caused some confusion, so he told a completely different story. That's how bad it was. The confusion has to do with Gen. 3.22↱, that "man has become like one of us", and it's true, the question remains: Who is God talking to? (Who is "us"?)

The answer is, of course, both simple and complicated; Blanco's write-around had to do with the Son inquiring of, even doubting, the Father, and the Father reassuring the Son this was all part of the Plan.

For whatever reason, it seems absolutely no atheists noticed.

But it's also an option Christian philosophers never favored for obvious reasons: The Crucifixion as part of a master Plan is kind of ridiculous.

To the other, it makes more sense than Ransom, and accounts for a strange thing not present in that old summary: It's one thing to invest too much power in the Devil, but consider the prospect that it's not simply "the Devil, created by God", but also that Satan, an instrument of God's will, is "allowed" to subjugate the people. At that point, what we mean by what God allows becomes an important question.

Ransom theory is overcomplicated, and, accounting for the point that Satan is an instrument of God's will (Job 1.11-12↱), describes a pantomime.

One important question does come to mind: When you describe the Bible as vindication of God's name, &c., are you describing a cohesive story as if reading the book cover to cover?

Because in that context, the Bible is about vindicating superstitious men of antiquity trying to justify themselves in a particular context that generally won't make much sense to us, today.
 
Pinball1970 said:
I learned about circumcision and other Jewish traditions, the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic but the Gospels were written in Greek.
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Actually, they spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and most commonly Latin. Pilate didn't likely speak Aramaic. All modern-day European alphabets stem either directly or indirectly from the Greek alphabet and the Greeks adopted it from the Semites. You can see that by comparing Greek letters of the 7th century BCE to Hebrew characters from about the 8th. They had a similar order, for example alpha and aleph, beta and behth, delta and daleth. But the writers of the Christian Greek scriptures didn't use classic Greek, they used the common (koine) Greek. From about 300 BCE - 500 CE was the age of Koine. It was almost universally known. Thus, the Septuagint.

Pinball1970 said:
The fact that Mark not Matthew was written first and the first three Gospels are "seen together." Synoptic.
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Yeah, I know the "scholars" would have you believe that. Actually, Matthew first wrote his gospel in Hebrew, as was attested to by Jerome in his De viris inlustribus (Concerning Illustrious Men), chapter III: “Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed.”

Pinball1970 said:
Reading people like Ehrman, Finkelstein, Vermes, Stavracopoulou.
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Pity, that.
 
Tiassa said:
No, it's not.
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Yes it is.

Tiassa said:
Ransom theory of Salvation is overly complicated and includes the implication that Jesus' mission is complete.
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Exactly. Whenever some theology is being puked at you and it has terminology like that, it means straight up bullshit. If it has the word theory in it, for example, or is some convoluted quasi-intellectual academia jargon not unlike economics, to distract and impress, it means the person puking it at you doesn't know what they are talking about.
 
Pinball1970 said:
Yes that's pretty much it. Science does not care if the study is by a man, woman, atheist or theist.
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Tell it to Carl Sagan.

Pinball1970 said:
Does the study stand up to peer review?
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Peer pressure, funding, publishing, tenure. That's what it really is about.


Pinball1970 said:
Can the results be repeated?
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Repeat creation. Repeat macroevolution.

Pinball1970 said:
Is the study applicable?
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Now you're talking. Publishing, tenure, funding, peer pressure. Churches are tax exempt. Science is tax funded. No corruption there.

Covid was one in a long line of fake pandemics. You should probably wake up to that. Then maybe climate change, vaccines, etc.
 
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