Census Do you believe in the bible?

People should be made to feel uncomfortable more often.

 

Posting in threads which debate the bible is consent to having one's beliefs questioned.

Saying your beliefs to someone is consent to having your beliefs questioned.

 

and what am I missing???

 

This poll is thunderously stupid. Do I believe that every word of the Bible is literally true? Obviously not. Do I think that it parts of it--particularly the four books of Kings and the synoptic Gospels--portray historic events with some obvious embellishments? Yes. So which option in this poll am I supposed to choose? I'm leaning towards "yes", since the entire "The Bible is stupid lolzz!" movement seems to be spearheaded by self-congratulatory atheists who have no idea how different the historical method is from the scientific.

 

No set of beliefs should be immune from criticism and questioning.

 

Oh, I know! And I know the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses and Luke and Matthew use Mark (which was not written by an eyewitness) and a "lost gospel" as sources. I know there are historians who still take them seriously as historical accounts, but they have no good reason to. Then again, this the same discipline that loves to eat up Greek and Roman propaganda (and ancient "historians" who at best wrote down what a dude living in the area of the event told them) and only fairly recently began to question it heavily.

Guys, there were like a trillion Persian soldiers attacking 3.79 Spartans. Seriously! And they were all playing fiddles!

 

It is obvious from context that the OP meant "Do you accept the metaphysics of the Bible" not literally "Do you believe the Bible is historically accurate?"

 

I hear it worded the same way from evangelicals often enough.

 

The Bible is not even close to fully historically accurate, and anyone who will tell you otherwise will do so because of ideological pre-commitments.

 

Sure. But that has no bearing on the question of whether its hypocritical to criticize others for challenging one's beliefs when one actively spends their time challenging the beliefs of others in the same uninvited fashion.

Again, while true, this has nothing to do with what was said. The hypocrisy of criticizing others beliefs aggressively when one doesn't want their own questioned in the same fashion is pretty evident. It doesn't matter if you think beliefs should or shouldn't be immune to criticism, it only matters that you violate that position in select cases.

I'm not sure this thread would qualify. There are plenty that do, but I don't know that answering a poll is an invitation to cross examination.

This is true to an extent. If one volunteers their beliefs, then they should certainly be prepared to have those beliefs challenged. But one cannot solicit the beliefs of another person, and then use the fact that they answered the question as an excuse to "challenge" them. That's much like the game of objecting to a policy because it's "controversial" when your objection is the cause of the controversy to begin with.

 

When has anybody said they didn't want their atheism questioned? If there were any evidence that showed any faults in atheism's position, I would be glad to see it. And no, "ur going to hell if you don't believe in God" doesn't count.

 

What do you mean they have "no good reason" to treat them as historical accounts? The pertinent question is to ask whether or not there is any good reason not to consider them as historical. This may seem like an obscene reversal of burden of proof, but it's not, hence the difference between the historical and scientific methods I alluded to. The fact that the nascent Jewish Jesus Movement gained any traction at all from the oracular and enigmatic rabbi who accomplished virtually nothing but getting himself killed--and who cursed Yahweh in his death throes, at that--is compelling evidence that he existed. If one were going to cobble together a Messiah out of whole cloth, the putative nexuses between the deeds of Yeshua and Old Testament prophecy would be far less tenuous and ambiguous than they actually are depicted as being.

 

Ah yes, the "criterion of embarrassment." Meh.

Anyway, Jesus probably existed. I just said the Gospels are awful as historical accounts.

 

Well, yes; as I said, they are liberally embellished. But if you're going to use the presence of miracles in the synoptic Gospels as dispositive of historicity, you should be equally prepared to argue that Kathryn Kuhlman never existed.

 

No, it's not the miracles. It's that they were written by men who had never even met Jesus-- probably hadn't even met people who had met him. Their authorship is completely unknown. The sources the authors used for the writings are unknown (except that Matthew and Luke used Mark and "Q"). Along with the miracles, I suppose, I find them difficult to take seriously.

 

The biggest reason to consider the New Testament unhistorical is that it can be shown to be constructed almost entirely of references to similar events in the Old Testament. It is a literary construction, and many elements of the Gospels do not make sense without taking that into account.

There is no compelling reason to believe that Jesus really existed, but I would rather have bamboo shoots up my fingernails than do that debate again. The idea that it is only fringe nutjobs who question the existence of Jesus seems to come, generally, from Christian apologists posing as Serious People (TM). When analyzed, the arguments for his existence usually come down to appeals to authority and withering scorn, neither of which are very convincing.

 

So what? Joseph Ellis never met Thomas Jefferson, or met anybody who knew him, or met anybody who met anybody who etc. ad infintium. Now, of course, in this case, and most other titans of history, we have primary source documents to attest to the existence of the figure in question, so nobody can even have a reasonable doubt that said person existed. But there's no ironclad nexus between the existence of primary source documents and the historicity of a given figure. Just because the authors of the Gospels attained their knowledge through oral tradition vice written documents is immaterial. The preponderance of evidence is that someone named Yeshua existed. Is this an indisputable fact? Obviously not; I definitely wouldn't bet my life on it. But given the bevy of material surrounding him, the iconoclasm of his teachings, and the success of the movement surrounding him, it seems to me it's much harder to gain a footing for advocating non-historicity than historicity.

 

"The preponderance of evidence is that someone named Yeshua existed."

Simply put, you are totally wrong, and trying to add legitimacy by calling him Yeshua is laughable.

 

You are completely wrong. The putative fulfillments of Old Testament prophecy ascribed to Yeshua--which are generally parenthetical to the narrative--are extremely tenuous and make little to no exegetical sense when examined in their own original context.

 

http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_midrash1.htm

Read and learn.

 

Who would have ever thought if that one squints really hard one can find parallels between the life and teachings of a Jewish rabbi and traditional Jewish teaching? Positively wild, I tell you.

 

There isn't much or any really that is credible

This requires more than mere assertion. I can buy Jesus as a "revaluator of values", but his teachings are not very unique.

Attributable to the appeal of the teachings (which functioned as a kind of far left movement in the context of Roman Judea) and random historical good luck, not to mention the exploitability of Christian dogma for reinforcing social order when turned to authoritarian aims

 

Weaksauce.

 

EBB, frankly some of those examples do strain credibility.

Take for instance the claim about the apostles. This event was supposedly based off an incident where Moses, overwhelmed by the administrative demands of his position, set up a whole series of officials with ascending levels of authority to help him troubleshoot, at the suggestion of his father-in-law. This, supposedly, is exactly Jesus's selection of the apostles. Except here, the number is wrong. And they are all equals rather than being arranged in a hierarchy. And they didn't really help so much, because they are in fact depicted as spending a lot of time not comprehending the points Jesus was trying to make. And Jesus wasn't really overwhelmed in the first place. And it was actually designed to denigrate rather than highlight the position of Jesus's family (strange, considering the prominence of James, son of Mary and Joseph, in leading the church from its very outset, as recorded in the rest of the New Testament). How much "similarity" is actually left in this case? A public figure had a less prominent group of close confidants. That's not really an earth-shattering parallel.

 

Jabba-Wocky skeptical about an argument against Christianity? Positively wild, I tell you.