Senior Expert
Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 8,177
Netherlands
|
Quote:
it is based on love, forgiving, self-abandonment, charity, such things. the bible, especially the new testament, is a guideline
There's more to the bible then just being a 'guideline' according to a lot of christians. Hence the threats of ending up in hell and such for disbelieving.
Even if just a guideline, when it's based upon wrong socalled 'facts', errors, pure speculation and fantasy, when it has contradictions and when people interpret it differently than it was actually written down, especially when they assume it's all meant literal, then it's very legit to debate for example the genesis chapters. You can't ignore the problem of translation from Hebrew to other languages, as doing this could change the meaning/form of certain events. As certain arguments have shown, the whole translating thing matters a lot.
The moral guidelines inside the bible is great, but you don't really need a bible nor do you need to be a christian to understand or think off those moral guidelines yourself. Infact, parts of the bible are not so nice when it comes to moral teachings and then I mostly would refer to the old testament.
Quote:
Namely, the bible is a book written by an ancient culture long ago. We're now living in a 'modern' culture, and generally people don't give a fig about 'primitive' cultures, because such progressive societies view themselves as superior to any such ancient society.
It would be a severe mistake to consider any modern society highly superior to older ones on beforehand. You can't look into the minds of those people back then, but even the technically not so advanced cultures can have had an extremely rich and advanced (ex. mostly oral) culture.
Quote:
However, 99% of the time, the problem isn't the text, but the skeptic coming to the text, reading it with a modern mindset as if its a newspaper written yesterday with them in mind.
If only it was this simple, but it's not. By the way, I think often religious people consider themself to be the superior ones, claiming to have knowledge about something they couldn't possibly know, let alone the total lack of evidence in the first place. We're usually not the ones trying to bend translations to fit our interpretations.
Cheers
Last edited by PHeMoX; 03/14/07 23:33.
|
