Okay, ladies too. But I was going for a "Sunday, Sun-nday Sunda-ay" feel with the headline. I've always liked this Watterson throwaway reply to Karl Marx from 1987-ish. But, after reading some of the firestorm of responses to Erich's post about Misquoting Jesus, maybe religion hasn't really lost any ground.…
Debate goes on, seeming forever, about the issue of religious belief in a secular society. The validity of sacred texts becomes grist for the mill and sides line up over What Would Jesus Do bumper stickers. We see competing fish on cars–Darwin fish with feet in answer to the unembellished christian fish symbol, then a bigger fish labeled Truth swallowing the diminutive Darwin fish, and on and on.
What is really at issue here hasn’t got one thing to do with who believes in god or evolution. Belief is a self-contained, private matter. The issue that gets lost in all the polemic is very simple: behavior.
Those who would sap the poison from the “inerrant word” crowd are defending their assumed right to live the way they want. One might argue that belief in god doesn’t really limit people, and as far as it goes, that is true. If you, as an individual, choose to believe in god, then you have elected to reform your life according to the tenets of your new faith. You may adopt whatever modest or byzantine traditions and habits you wish. After all, you have chosen this, you get to do it.
What you don’t get to do is tell everyone else to behave accordingly, and that’s where the meat of the issue lies.
Because fundamentalists–and we’re talking about fundamentalists here for the most part, of any stripe–do not adopt such an extreme view of faith out of intellectual curiosity or even spiritual need. They …
How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating “The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself? It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.”
The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist. Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however. He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings. It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.
As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God. It contains no mistakes.” Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:
We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.
(Page 7). At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries. Upon realizing this, …
In Eastern cultures (Chinese, Navajo, Sri-Lanka, etc) they respect and even worship their direct and distant ancestors as a part of everyday life. The religions all embrace this basic respect for your elders. However, in the West, what's done is done, and the past buries its own dead. Except when…
Here's an audio track of Richard Dawkins discussing his new book, The God Delusion, on the Alan Colmes show on FOX. I thought that Colmes did a good job allowing Dawkins to bring out his points. Some of the call-in comments are amusing, especially toward the end of this 24 minute…