It's hard to call someone wise when he's busy calling himself God.
I realize we can't discount his teachings based on this alone; that'd be a fallacy. I'm just pointing out that if Jesus was not divine, he was a madman.
As for who said anything about believing in some parts of the Bible without believing in Jesus's divinity: Boredman did, given his apparent view that the Bible isn't divinely inspired.
edited 13th Mar '12 7:06:15 PM by Muramasan13
Smile for me!On the contrary, Diogenes was exceptionally rational- he simply chose to teach people rationality and provoke thought in others by by acting in strange ways, then loudly justifying his behaviors to passersby. An illustrative, historical story:
Jesus, on the other hand, claimed to be the Son of God and stuck to his story even when it was clear that it would lead to his death. If he was not truly the Son of God, then this is in no wise the behavior of a wise man.
edited 13th Mar '12 7:34:24 PM by Muramasan13
Smile for me!@Mura: What's confusing to me is that certain parts of the Bible tend to be discounted as obviously immoral or false, but others are not. Discounting any part of the Bible based on an outside subjective standard opens any part of the Bible up to the same sort of examination.
Much to my BFF's wife's chagrin, No Pants 2013 became No Pants 2010's at his house.![]()
The problem is that both choices should seem equally unpalatable to believers.
If, for instance, I want to say, "Well, no outside standard of review - the Bible is the only authority," then I must accept discrimination against women, a murderous God, and the tacit acceptance of slavery.
If, on the other hand, I declare those things to be abhorrent, then I am using an outside standard to declare them to be so, and then could do so with regard to things like nonbelievers (or anyone, really) burning in hell, or discrimination against homosexuals, or other things that mainstream Christianity seems to accept.
Much to my BFF's wife's chagrin, No Pants 2013 became No Pants 2010's at his house.Christian ethics doesn't really come directly from the Bible, except for recent fundamentalists. Mainstream Catholic ethics is drawn from Thomas Aquinas and natural law, all under the assumption that God created a universe with rules that can be derived from the existence of an ordered world.
If you assume Christians accept no morals authority but the Bible, you're setting up a strawman to beat up.
We're not just men of science, we're men of TROPE!I merely presented that as one of two possible options. If Christian ethics derived from natural law can declare immoral what God does or dictates in the Bible, then I see no reason not to extend that to passages outside what the mainstream is willing to overlook.
Again, my point is that if you have an outside system of ethics that can be applied against the Bible, that system applies equally to forced rapist marriage and the concept of nonbelievers being tortured for eternity.
Much to my BFF's wife's chagrin, No Pants 2013 became No Pants 2010's at his house.^ Hell isn't in the Bible. "Turn the other cheek" is. I don't believe in Hell, but I do believe in nonaggression.
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something AwfulIt all depends on what your "outside standard of measurement" is. If this standard also comes from God, which nearly all of us believe, then we are obligated to try and use it, even, perhaps especially, when it appears to conflict with other sources of truth and goodness. "Natural Law" is one such source, so is one's own conscience. When these three disagree, we are forced to undertake some very hard thinking. Which is probably the whole point. "He who has ears, let him hear." I don't pretend to understand God's plan, if he has one, but it seemingly has something to do with learning to deal with uncertainty. Wisdom begins by acknowledging that some problems have no simple objective solution.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.![]()
"If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell." —Matthew 5:29-30
"A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: 'If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.'" —Revelation 14:9-11
"And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever." —Revelation 20:10
"Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire." —Revelation 20:15
Yes, Hell is in the Bible.
Somehow you know that the time is right.Simple truth, we will never get all of Christianity to agree on a specific translation of the bible, let alone how to interprete it.
So with that in mind, I can only wish more Christians will have a working capability of Koine Greek and Aramaic.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur![]()
The NT made extensive use of existing Greek/Roman concepts of the afterlife (mostly Hades, Tartarus popped up once or twice) — probably to relate to the Roman populace better — or an actual place outside Jerusalem (Gehenna — the Valley of Hinnom). They were all translated wholesale as "hell" later on.
That's one of the reasons the Bible has to be read with a critical eye. It was written by people with motives, and has been dubiously translated even more often by people with motives, often as they were coming into power and had reasons to make things more authoritarian. That said, it can't really be discounted any more easily than anything else written by man, because all of it is written by people with motives.
edited 14th Mar '12 2:40:27 PM by Pykrete
So is Beowulf, The Epic of Gilgamesh (it was the Babylonian hell the Christians adopted), and the Code of Hammurabi. But I don't see people using these texts to justify hate and violence to others with the same zeal that the opposition teaches love and tolerance.
edited 14th Mar '12 8:12:16 PM by Gabrael
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

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Who said anything about that? Also, it's quite easy to believe that someone was a wise man with good lessons to teach without believing that they were divine in origin.
"Roll for whores."