Author Topic: General Religious discussion  (Read 54378 times)

darxbane

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #120 on: April 30, 2009, 03:15:27 PM »
The question is, what do you accept as proof?  Is it that you must see it yourself, or be shown a picture?  What do you consider proof of something?  I am asking seriously.  You are obviously a very skeptical person, but you are consistent with it, which is admirable.  Now I am curious to know just how skeptical you are. Non-belief is the same as disbelief, by the way.  You either believe it, or you don't.

Believe me, there are many Fundamentalist Christians out there who do literally believe that God physically looks like a human male.  Even those who take the bible literally (some even to the point that they still think the Earth is flat), will not change their views if aliens visit this planet.  I have heard some wild theories, but the simplest one is that non-terrestial beings would be a trick of Satan.
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mtlhddoc2

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #121 on: April 30, 2009, 03:31:37 PM »
disbelief is basically not accepting something which has been nproven to be a fact, as a fact:
1. the inability or refusal to believe or to accept something as true.
2. amazement; astonishment: We stared at the Taj Mahal in disbelief. 
Whereas non-belief does not have a dictionary reference. but basically. It means, to me, "I do not believe that" period. It is skepticism, but not denial. I am not a "fact denier", I am just a non-believer.

As far as proof required. Well, It would have to be something where, if I could fact check it, I could come  to the same conclusions. It couldnt hurt if I could see it myself. I am just as skepitcal of "science" as I am religion. Since much of the fringe sciences, like astrophysics, is leaps of faith and sometimes just making stuff up.


darxbane

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #122 on: April 30, 2009, 04:26:01 PM »
I understand now.  You base your beliefs purely by your own experience, if at all possible.  No intuitive leaps, just pure Empiricism.  I can respect that. 

Not to nitpick, but disbelief does not always mean you are denying truth.  It also means exactly what your definition of non-belief is; which is that you do not accept the evidence presented as sufficient proof.   

I wanted to write something profound here, but I couldn't think of anything.

Peter Ahlstrom

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #123 on: April 30, 2009, 04:42:42 PM »
Yeah, the dictionary.com definition of disbelief doesn't match up with the other dictionaries' very well.
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mtlhddoc2

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #124 on: April 30, 2009, 06:00:37 PM »
dictionary.com is Webster's Dictionary isnt it? ???

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #125 on: April 30, 2009, 06:27:17 PM »
dictionary.com is Webster's Dictionary isnt it? ???

no, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ is webster's online dictionary, though dictionary.com may take from them, but i dont know about that.
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Peter Ahlstrom

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #126 on: April 30, 2009, 07:49:42 PM »
dictionary.com has two main dictionaries on it, plus a few others, none of which are Merriam-Webster's. The top hit is the "dictionary.com unabridged" definition, presumably written by dictionary.com editors basing it on the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition. The second hit is usually the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition itself, which is more accurate than the dictionary.com unabridged definition. You can also get AHD4 definitions from its publisher's website bartleby.com, but the interface there sucks, so when I want to use AHD4 I always use dictionary.com and skip down to the 2nd definition.

M-W is more respected in the publishing field than AHD4 but I prefer AHD4 for some uses; it's not a bad idea to check both.
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The Jade Knight

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #127 on: April 30, 2009, 08:21:53 PM »
I find that, these days, Wiktionary is usually (but not always) better than them all.

However, M-W is definitely the most respected American Dictionary, hands down.  If you want a British Dictionary, there is only one:  OED.
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Patriotic Kaz

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #128 on: April 30, 2009, 08:59:33 PM »
I have a problem when slang is added to the dictionary so i don't think highly of Webster
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SarahG

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #129 on: April 30, 2009, 09:12:24 PM »
Wow, Darxbane, you know some fundamentalists with a lot weirder beliefs than any I've met!  Tell me, do they take the Bible literally enough to believe that King David was actually a sheep (Psalm 23)?  That's always been my favorite example of why no one actually takes the Bible literally and we all interpret it to some extent; I'd be sad if I couldn't use my favorite example anymore.
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Patriotic Kaz

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #130 on: April 30, 2009, 09:56:45 PM »
I know people who think his mind became a sheeps
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SarahG

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #131 on: April 30, 2009, 10:02:44 PM »
And yet he could still write poetry, while he was a sheep?  Boy, that's even weirder!
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Renoard

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #132 on: April 30, 2009, 10:12:41 PM »
Sarah there is an enormous difference between accepting the theme and argument of a text literally instead of allegorically, and hyperliterallizing idiom.  You can misunderstand idiom or mistake it for argument. But no one intentionally literalizes idiom.  But it's not very intellectually honest to say that because someone doesn't literalize the idiomatic phrases that they are then not taking the text literally.
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SarahG

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #133 on: April 30, 2009, 11:03:12 PM »
I guess I don't understand your distinction.  To me it seems like varying degrees along the same spectrum of literalness.  I realize that taking the psalmist to be a sheep is at the extreme end, an extreme that no rational reader would agree to, but to me that's exactly why this example demonstrates that we all engage in at least some form of interpretation when we read, even if it's as simple as the interpretive assumption, "The first half of Psalm 23 employs an extended pastoral metaphor to illustrate the psalmist's relationship with the Lord."  My point is that that is an assumption, albeit a fairly obvious and uncontested one.

I think that readers of the Bible draw lines in many different places as to what should be understood literally and what figuratively - but they all draw the lines somewhere.  For instance, there are differences of opinion on the Jonah story, the Job story, the Gospel stories, the Song of Solomon, and the prophecies of Revelation.  Which are meant to be read as historical narratives, and which are meant to be read as metaphor or idiom or something else?  I don't think the answers are always as clear as is the metaphorical meaning of Psalm 23, but I think it's a cop-out when people say they believe every word of the Bible literally, because that's impossible.  Those people (in my experience - it sounds like Darx and Kaz know some exceptions) still engage in genre judgments - they still make distinctions between poetic portions and narrative portions of the text.  And I don't always agree with what they classify as poetry and prose.
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Renoard

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Re: General Religious discussion
« Reply #134 on: May 01, 2009, 12:07:20 AM »
It's really not a matter of spectrum.  Hermeneutics and exegesis are tools to get at what the author really intended to say.  Metaphors and simile's, that take the form of common idiom in the authors day, have to be sharply distinguished from metaphor or idiom that is intended by the author to be part of his instruction or argument.  Confusing the two is not a matter of degree but a pass/fail issue of bad scholarship.

The word doctrine is largely misused by the popular piety and even by leadership in some faiths.  Doctrine is a set of rules for interpretation that arise from deep scholarship.  Doctrines are the structure of a critical perspective used by a given student.  These rules are arrived at by careful study that entails trying to put yourself into the mindset of the original audience of a given work and construct coherent tools for sharing that understanding with others.

After you have gotten at what the author is intentionally communicating then the questions of whether this is allegorical or literally truth come into the equation not before.  This is an entirely different question.  The arguments between scholars over these issues do come down to literality vs allegory. Fundamentalists are only one group among many who believe that the intended arguments, historical accounts and didactic instruction are literally factual and true because of that.  Comparing all these views to misinterpreting an idiom is polemical.

It's tantamount to saying a divinity student who has immersed himself in biblical language, archeology, sociology and hermeneutics is just some uneducated buffoon who picked up a Bible and decided that he was reading a science text written in English 2 years ago.  Even your mocking argument about the sheep writing poetry doesn't hold up.

A hyper-literal mind like you propose would see God herd the MAN David as if he were a sheep and God was his shepherd.  Even changing David into a sheep requires some awareness of the oddity of the phrasing and the oblique descriptions.  In fact the word sheep (hershel) never appears in psalm 23 so it would take a mind with at least the subtlety to understand the allusion, in order to see David as a sheep.

That leads us back to the issue of the student.  A serious student capable of deciphering the allusion is also going to see the idiom.  This illustrates my point that assuming differences in interpretation are as simple and drawing a line where you are going to stop taking things literally ignores the basics of language.  If I said, "You are jumping from the frying pan into the fire with that logic," taking me literally would entail considering if I mean you are literally going to get into trouble.

Only a small child would think I really meant a pan or a flame.  It's not a matter of degree but of cognition.  By suggesting the Bible scholar would or even COULD see pans and flames in this construction is suggesting that 90 units of grad school makes one into a child.

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note on edits.

changed make or break to pass/fail in the first paragraph with the caveat that I don't literally mean that the reader on the scholar are in my class.  I will not be grading posts.  Please understand this is idiom.
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« Last Edit: May 01, 2009, 02:33:28 AM by Renoard »
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