Thread: The Bible for Grown Ups Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.
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Posted by Cherubim (# 18514) on
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There is a recently published book called "The Bible for Grown Ups". I heartily recommend this to all. The author explains the areas of contradiction and posits reasons why different writers wrote accounts that were clearly factually untrue, and why in the context of the time this was unimportant. There is only folly to look at the bible through the eyes of a 21st Century Christian. For example, whilst most clear thinkers know that Mary wasn't a virgin and the Bethlehem account just didn't happen, this book explains why she couldn't have been a virgin and why Jesus was born in Nazareth and couldn't have been born in Bethlehem.
I especially recommend this to fundamentalist Christians.
Posted by mr cheesy (# 3330) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Cherubim:
For example, whilst most clear thinkers know that Mary wasn't a virgin and the Bethlehem account just didn't happen, this book explains why she couldn't have been a virgin and why Jesus was born in Nazareth and couldn't have been born in Bethlehem.
Glad we've got that sorted out at last, then.
quote:
I especially recommend this to fundamentalist Christians.
Not sure how many fundamentalist Christians you know, but I'm doubting this kind of knowitall writing would have an impact on them whatsoever.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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Sounds rather simple-minded.
If large chunks of the human race hold particular opinions, it's rarely wise to just dismiss them all as not being grown-ups, or to assume that they have no foundations for their beliefs.
A single explains-everything-for-you book is unlikely to have the depth of a frog pond in August.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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quote:
Originally posted by mr cheesy:
quote:
Originally posted by Cherubim:
For example, whilst most clear thinkers know that Mary wasn't a virgin and the Bethlehem account just didn't happen, this book explains why she couldn't have been a virgin and why Jesus was born in Nazareth and couldn't have been born in Bethlehem.
Glad we've got that sorted out at last, then.
quote:
I especially recommend this to fundamentalist Christians.
Not sure how many fundamentalist Christians you know, but I'm doubting this kind of knowitall writing would have an impact on them whatsoever.
I was one for 30 years and I've have laughed this to scorn. Now I'm a raving, postmodern liberal, I still laugh it to scorn. Bye Cherubim. It was brave of you to foray out from the shallow self congratulatory safety of 'atheist republic' and 'The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (Official)', but you must get back home before you get et.
Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on
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I haven't read the book (only the "look inside" bit on Amazon which seems quite unexceptionable).
But the "Spectator" review seems to suggest that it's taking us back to the "Quest for the Historical Jesus" of over a century ago. If that is true (and it may only be the reviewer's perception) than it's hardly new (but, then, nor was "Honest to God").
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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I would like a good 'Bible for grown ups', though. I remember first reading EP Saunders, Phyllis Trible, Michael Goulder, Theissen, Crossan, Ched Myers and others. Wonderful, disturbing, exciting experiences, having my mind forced open.
I'm all for grown up bible study, but it doesn't usually come in a book with that on the cover.
Posted by Sipech (# 16870) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I remember first reading EP Saunders, Phyllis Trible, Michael Goulder, Theissen, Crossan, Ched Myers and others.
Crossan, really? ![[Paranoid]](graemlins/paranoid.gif)
He's rather like a marble amongst the bowling balls of the rest of that list.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Sipech:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I remember first reading EP Saunders, Phyllis Trible, Michael Goulder, Theissen, Crossan, Ched Myers and others.
Crossan, really?
He's rather like a marble amongst the bowling balls of the rest of that list.
Really? I'm not in academia so I don't know how Crossan is seen there, but for connecting with a wide readership and promoting a comprehensive take on the New Testament, taking social anthropology seriously, I think he's very significant.
Posted by Sipech (# 16870) on
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Crossan's credibility suffered a lot by his co-founding and subsequent involvement with the Jesus Seminar. Out of that group, only Marcus Borg escaped from the group with anything resembling a serious reputation.
Crucial to Crossan's hermeneutical gymnastics was his addition to whatever was novel, particularly the gnostics. He construed various "gospels" from 2nd and 3rd century texts and claimed (without evidence) that they represented much older traditions than those which lay behind the canonical gospels.
Ultimately, his contribution to biblical scholarship is on a par with Ken Ham's contribution to biology.
Posted by leo (# 1458) on
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Crossan just likes being on the telly
Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Sipech:
Ultimately, his contribution to biblical scholarship is on a par with Ken Ham's contribution to biology.
Ouch!
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Sipech:
Crossan's credibility suffered a lot by his co-founding and subsequent involvement with the Jesus Seminar. Out of that group, only Marcus Borg escaped from the group with anything resembling a serious reputation.
Crucial to Crossan's hermeneutical gymnastics was his addition to whatever was novel, particularly the gnostics. He construed various "gospels" from 2nd and 3rd century texts and claimed (without evidence) that they represented much older traditions than those which lay behind the canonical gospels.
Ultimately, his contribution to biblical scholarship is on a par with Ken Ham's contribution to biology.
Reputation with whom? Are you talking as an academic insider, Sipech?
I know that Crossan made use of hypothetical early gospels in his studies on Jesus. Not really so unusual. Proto-Luke, proto-Matthew, Q, and sometimes layers within Q have often been posited and argued from. Crossan added Thomas and may have elaborated others. He offers a grid of sources which can be consulted to see which sayings and stories are closest to Jesus, and argues that this treatment of sources helps check the human tendency to make judgements according to personal preferences. I think I remember that he also discusses the danger of circularity in evaluating constructed sources.
In more recent books he has relied more on anthropology and cultural readings.
I am only familiar with his mass market books, though.
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on
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I haven't heard of this book before, and it's unlikely that I will be reading it. There are already too many other books I haven't read.
However, if a book claims to be "The Bible for Grown Ups" then spends all its inky energy on arguments about the virgin birth, it isn't really living up to its title. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be The Bible for clever but still rather spotty adolescents.
IMHO the point when one begins to grow up is when one starts to have a relationship with the text and to let it have a relationship with you. Regarding it as a textbook for living that one must simply obey or a manual that one has grown out of and can sit in judgement over both fall badly short.
I can't express this all that clearly, but as years have gone by, I find the scriptures more authoritative, not less. I'd be hard put to explain exactly how I mean that, save that:-
a. Neither Lev 11:19 nor Deut 14:18 mean that we are obliged to classify a bat as a bird.
b. We should take the narrative seriously. We should not bowdlerise out the bits we don't like. Their presence in the text is not an endorsement that we should - or are entitled to - behave like the people we meet in its pages. Whatever we draw from the text, we should engage seriously with it, what the writer selected, and what we think they might be trying to say.
c. One has to be a conceited ass to be persuaded by the argument 'they were primitive people who believed in miracles, but we know better'. They knew just as well as we do that in the normal way of things, sick people are not healed, neither loaves nor fishes multiply from nothing and people do not walk on water. That's why they called the events miracles and in each case is one of the two reasons why they recorded them as something exciting?
The other reason, the reason why they selected that miracle, rather than another one, is that the event is saying something about Jesus, who he is, why he is here, what he does.
Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on
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I've not read the book, beyond a quick skim on Amazon look-inside, so this may be very wild of the mark. But ...
There's a tendancy in books marketted at evangelicals to give answers. The string of "difficult passages in the Bible" books are usually good examples, they present the solution the author has to remove the difficulty in the passage. Or, the "how to read the Bible" books which present a very narrow perspective of what the author finds useful. I fear this book may fall into the same category, presenting what is "the adult understanding of these passages".
This is something I find really irritating, and why I've largely abandoned reading books aimed at the evangelical mass market.
You tell things to children. Adults are capable of working things out themselves. A book entitled "The Bible for Grownups" shouldn't be giving answers, as though the readers were children in a class room. It should be enabling adults to be adults and explore the questions themselves (in community, with help from others etc).
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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I want to see the books of the Bible published separately or in collections, without the traditional look of a Bible - the India paper and double columns, gold edges and tooling. With no verse or chapter numbers, no headings or illustrations.
I would like the printing and style of translation to make the books look and feel different from each other.
Psalms might be printed one to a page, like a faber and faber poetry book.
Galatians and other short epistles could be on one piece of paper folded several times.
The individual gospels could be slim leather bound books easily slipped into a pocket or a bag.
The Pentateuch should be beautiful, like a Folio edition; heavy paper and hard covers. The sort of book you can only read at a desk or table.
Joshua and Judges should be ugly, printed on cheap paper in a Soviet press specially started up again for this Bible project.
The Book of Ruth should be beautifully handwritten - not a reproduction, each copy should be handwritten and priced accordingly.
And so on. I hate the way we have turned these extraordinary books into "the Bible", with one consistent style, and with helpful aids to the reader. I want people to stumble across a passage one day and then never be able to find it again. I want them to be able to tell when they open a book of Wisdom Literature that it's not the same as prophecy just by the road surface. I want some of it to feel unfriendly, some of it intensely foreign, all of it incredibly old: undomesticated. Perhaps it should be called the Feral Bible.
Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on
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I like your idea (have you come across The word on the street?), but I have to take exception to this: quote:
I hate the way we have turned these extraordinary books into "the Bible"
The only reason the Bible has come down to us is as a collection of books recognised as such by our forefathers in the faith.
The parts are all good, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and needs to be borne in mind.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Joshua and Judges should be ugly, printed on cheap paper in a Soviet press specially started up again for this Bible project.
![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif)
You'd not do that to me, would you???
More seriously, the problem with formatting bits of it as "unfriendly" or what-have-you is that there is no clear agreement on which bits to treat that way. And your version of "unfriendly" differs from mine (I'd never handwrite a book I actually wanted to read, and that's not just because my handwriting is dreadful).
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
A single explains-everything-for-you book is unlikely to have the depth of a frog pond in August.
Isn't the Bible itself often portrayed as the one book with all the (important) answers?
Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on
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More like the book with all the important questions.
(Sorry, that was just too easy to pass up).
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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The Bible has one anciently mediated answer. Jesus. The ancient mediation creates more necessarily bizarre questions which cloud the answer.
Posted by Evangeline (# 7002) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
I've not read the book, beyond a quick skim on Amazon look-inside, so this may be very wild of the mark. But ...
There's a tendancy in books marketted at evangelicals to give answers. The string of "difficult passages in the Bible" books are usually good examples, they present the solution the author has to remove the difficulty in the passage. Or, the "how to read the Bible" books which present a very narrow perspective of what the author finds useful. I fear this book may fall into the same category, presenting what is "the adult understanding of these passages".
This is something I find really irritating, and why I've largely abandoned reading books aimed at the evangelical mass market.
You tell things to children. Adults are capable of working things out themselves. A book entitled "The Bible for Grownups" shouldn't be giving answers, as though the readers were children in a class room. It should be enabling adults to be adults and explore the questions themselves (in community, with help from others etc).
Yes this!
Posted by St Deird (# 7631) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Cherubim:
whilst most clear thinkers know that Mary wasn't a virgin and the Bethlehem account just didn't happen
We do? Gosh.
Posted by Gramps49 (# 16378) on
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Was the Virgin Birth really an issue when the New Testament was written? Apparently not for the writers of Mark and John--and, to my knowledge, none of the epistles mention it or even allude to it. Revelations does hint about it. The most important issue is the resurrection--all else is of little consequence.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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The Resurrection of whom?
[ 22. September 2016, 20:20: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
Posted by Kaplan Corday (# 16119) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
A single explains-everything-for-you book is unlikely to have the depth of a frog pond in August.
Dang me, that's the sort of purty picture talk that us ordinary folks can get a handle on!
Not like that fancy-pantsy, big-city talk theys is always usin' on this Ship.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Cherubim:
I especially recommend this to fundamentalist Christians.
One of my rules that I use when reading book reviews is that if the reviewer especially recommends a book to the people with whom he (or less often she) disagrees, the book is probably not much good.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
A single explains-everything-for-you book is unlikely to have the depth of a frog pond in August.
Dang me, that's the sort of purty picture talk that us ordinary folks can get a handle on!
Not like that fancy-pantsy, big-city talk theys is always usin' on this Ship.
Yeah, well, I grew up 30 feet from a Southern California frog-oops-toad pond, and I know whereof I speak. In August you could walk over the cracked ground and hear the toads chirping a foot underground.
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on
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quote:
Originally posted by St Deird:
quote:
Originally posted by Cherubim:
whilst most clear thinkers know that Mary wasn't a virgin and the Bethlehem account just didn't happen
We do? Gosh.
Well, I always knew I was not a clear thinker. Me and the White Queen are buds: We sometimes believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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I'm aware that in my heart of hearts I haven't quite given up on naive realism when I find I very much want to disprove the Virgin Birth, and compel people to agree with me.
The frustrations of the "it's just a story" position - there's no way back out.
Posted by que sais-je (# 17185) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Yeah, well, I grew up 30 feet from a Southern California frog-oops-toad pond, and I know whereof I speak. In August you could walk over the cracked ground and hear the toads chirping a foot underground.
Here in SW UK our frog pond is pretty much the same depth all the year round. It just the water is a bit colder in Winter. Not sure what metaphor you could make of that.
Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on
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When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
Gosh, it must have been a wet Thursday in an English November when Shakespeare wrote that!
Posted by Huia (# 3473) on
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I don't know about the book, but I'm fascinated with toads chirping underground. We don't have then here.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
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They estivate. Apparently being sort-of asleep doesn't stop them from making noises as you walk overhead. I know that's what it is, because being an inquiring sort of girl at age 12, I helped a friend lever a dirt clod up so we could see what was down there. The toad looked mildly surprised to see us, and we carefully put the clod back into place.
Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on
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Cherubim--
Welcome to the Ship.
quote:
Originally posted by Cherubim:
There is a recently published book called "The Bible for Grown Ups". I heartily recommend this to all. The author explains the areas of contradiction and posits reasons why different writers wrote accounts that were clearly factually untrue, and why in the context of the time this was unimportant. There is only folly to look at the bible through the eyes of a 21st Century Christian. For example, whilst most clear thinkers know that Mary wasn't a virgin and the Bethlehem account just didn't happen, this book explains why she couldn't have been a virgin and why Jesus was born in Nazareth and couldn't have been born in Bethlehem.
I especially recommend this to fundamentalist Christians.
Hmmm...well...hmmmm.
I don't know what did or didn't happen. But I don't have a problem with the Virgin Birth, miracles, the Resurrection, etc.
"...why [Mary] couldn't have been a virgin..." Well, I suspect most adults then (and now) had some idea of how pregnancy happens, even if we moderns might explain the intricacies a bit differently. And they owned domesticated animals, or were at least around them. So they had more opportunities to figure out how it all works.
ISTM that starting out with an "it can't possibly be true" perspective can block your (gen.) mind just as much as "of course, it's all true". So if you (gen.) want to do more than confirm your own biases, if you want to really find truth, then you have to put your preconceptions of impossibilities aside. "Believe nothing. Entertain possibilities." (Anon.)
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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'Clear thinking' is an offensive term, but I think it's good for Christians to inhabit the same worldview as everyone else (mostly). I think it's good to write a book explaining how you can read and value the Bible without having to suspend disbelief. I am concerned when Christians are proud of their ability to hold unusual beliefs.
[ 25. September 2016, 07:27: Message edited by: hatless ]
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
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I think that even when Christians doubt the Virgin Birth, it tends to be for reasons different from those of secular society.
If one doesn't believe in the Incarnation as traditionally understood, one has no reason to believe in the Virgin Birth. If one does believe in the Incarnation, then one's reasons for scepticism will be philosophical or theological rather than empirical - it's not as if there's a series of other Incarnations without Virgin Births that we can use to derive counterexamples. So for example, I do mostly believe in the Virgin Birth but insofar as I have doubts, they relate to issues like the potential mistranslation of Isaiah rather than anything a normal person would be concerned by ...
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
'Clear thinking' is an offensive term, but I think it's good for Christians to inhabit the same worldview as everyone else (mostly). ...
Up to a point Lord Hatless. It's an important point that we need to be making, that we live in a God designed universe and aspire to have a God designed worldview. Some of the time, that may be broadly similar to everyone else's worldview. But when it isn't, we need to be willing to say so. Accommodation to the prevailing worldview of those around us can be, and often is, taken too far.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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How so?
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
'Clear thinking' is an offensive term, but I think it's good for Christians to inhabit the same worldview as everyone else (mostly).
Are you under the impression that "everyone else" holds essentially the same worldview??? That is most assuredly not the case. So how are we to decide which of the multiple, competing worldviews present in society we should conform to?
I get what you're saying about not making a point out of being odd for the sake of being odd-- but there is certainly some value in being distinctive, at least if those distinctives are built around critical, reflective, reasonably moral thinking.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
'Clear thinking' is an offensive term, but I think it's good for Christians to inhabit the same worldview as everyone else (mostly).
When that worldview is neoliberal, I think it is not good.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
'Clear thinking' is an offensive term, but I think it's good for Christians to inhabit the same worldview as everyone else (mostly).
Are you under the impression that "everyone else" holds essentially the same worldview??? That is most assuredly not the case. So how are we to decide which of the multiple, competing worldviews present in society we should conform to?
I get what you're saying about not making a point out of being odd for the sake of being odd-- but there is certainly some value in being distinctive, at least if those distinctives are built around critical, reflective, reasonably moral thinking.
I was thinking of worldview in the sense of understanding how the world works, as in things like probability, theories and evidence. We should certainly be distinctive in our values.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I was thinking of worldview in the sense of understanding how the world works, as in things like probability, theories and evidence. We should certainly be distinctive in our values.
The distinction between probability, theories and evidence on the one hand, and values on the other, is one of the foundational planks of neoliberalism.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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Neoliberalism means small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
'Clear thinking' is an offensive term, but I think it's good for Christians to inhabit the same worldview as everyone else (mostly).
Are you under the impression that "everyone else" holds essentially the same worldview??? That is most assuredly not the case. So how are we to decide which of the multiple, competing worldviews present in society we should conform to?
I get what you're saying about not making a point out of being odd for the sake of being odd-- but there is certainly some value in being distinctive, at least if those distinctives are built around critical, reflective, reasonably moral thinking.
I was thinking of worldview in the sense of understanding how the world works, as in things like probability, theories and evidence.
Again, there is no universal worldview of "how the world works"-- but a bunch of competing idealogies. How you read things like "probabilities, theories and evidence" is influenced by the assumptions you hold about reality.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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If we believe the world is God's world, then I think this must be something we believe is true about the world everybody lives in. It can't be an add-on for Christians.
An example of the sort of thing I'm thinking about is the cute idea of God-incidences. Something unusual and striking is noticed and one person says what an amazing coincidence it is. Another says, 'Well I believe in God-incidences', meaning that this is a message from God, or a sign of God's approval. In doing that that seem to me to be opting out of the world view that we share in common, which is that sometimes, often things just happen, and our lives are not full of deliberate interventions.
That's not to say that talking of God-incidences might not be simply a way of saying 'I see a God in this' just as we might see God in a rainbow, and not be challenging meteorological understandings, but offering an overlaying understanding. It could be this, but often, I think, it's denying the common world view and asserting that the world is a different sort of place, with interventions from outside.
There are, of course, many Christians who will say that, if Jesus was God, then he could do anything, or if I pray about some situation, then all normal expectations are suspended, because this world is subject to intervention from God as the characters and events of a novel are subject to interference by its author. But it seems to me that to do this is to uncouple faith from the real world, and to make God something less than creator, a being within the world that some people choose to believe in.
The sort of belief we have in the Virgin Birth is an issue. If you read the biblical texts in order to find out what happened, where Jesus was born and when, who his parents were and what were their circumstances - a perfectly reasonable thing to do - then a pregnancy without sex and sperm is a problem. It's something which in our shared world, which is God's world, according to our common understanding doesn't happen.
To say that it's a miracle, or that the Bible says it and I simply choose to believe it is, I think, a violent act. It trivialises, it breaks faith with our fellow humans and, I would say, the God whose world it is.
There are other ways of believing in the Virgin Birth, of course, understandings that don't do a violence to our world view (a world view which I regard as a precious and hard won thing), and which allow us to stay in dialogue with our neighbours rather than leaping off into some anti-rational mindset. These are the powerful and fruitful ways I think we need to seek.
Posted by St Deird (# 7631) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
The sort of belief we have in the Virgin Birth is an issue. If you read the biblical texts in order to find out what happened, where Jesus was born and when, who his parents were and what were their circumstances - a perfectly reasonable thing to do - then a pregnancy without sex and sperm is a problem. It's something which in our shared world, which is God's world, according to our common understanding doesn't happen.
People also don't tend to come back to life. If we profess one, why not the other?
Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on
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Because we believe that Jesus was Truly Man as well as Truly God. You must not compromise His humanity
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Neoliberalism means small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media.
Exactly hatless. We're talking a philosophical worldview, not a mere technocratic economic one which is informed by an impoverished philosophy.
[ 26. September 2016, 09:14: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
Because we believe that Jesus was Truly Man as well as Truly God. You must not compromise His humanity
Is His humanity compromised by hypostatic union in virgin birth?
Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on
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The trouble is Martin that your reply ( as with all the Creeds ) is informed by Greek philosophical concepts many of which are dated.
Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on
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Forgot to ask the question: Is the doctrine of the Virgin Birth a biological or a theological statement?
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
... But it seems to me that to do this is to uncouple faith from the real world, and to make God something less than creator, a being within the world that some people choose to believe in. ...
But that prejudges the question which is the 'real world' or to put it more accurately, which is the right understanding of how the world is.
If I say God cannot do something that does not fit with how I understand the world to be, that is saying the 'real world' is no more than the version of it I expect it to be.
If God is God, it has to follow that the 'real world' is the version of it that he created, as he engages with it, the world he sees rather than the one I do. If my understanding is less than his, it is my understanding that must defer.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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Of course they're dated, anciently enculturated from the moment they're written shamwari. The VB is a biological claim, a claim about reality, a miraculous and therefore theological claim. Without it Christianity only has the similar claim of the resurrection of otherwise nothing but a human to something human and more claiming to be having been divine by some other means than by hypostatic union. As a hypostatic union (of which there are infinite of course) He was always fully human and fully divine by nature, from conception.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
... But it seems to me that to do this is to uncouple faith from the real world, and to make God something less than creator, a being within the world that some people choose to believe in. ...
But that prejudges the question which is the 'real world' or to put it more accurately, which is the right understanding of how the world is.
If I say God cannot do something that does not fit with how I understand the world to be, that is saying the 'real world' is no more than the version of it I expect it to be.
If God is God, it has to follow that the 'real world' is the version of it that he created, as he engages with it, the world he sees rather than the one I do. If my understanding is less than his, it is my understanding that must defer.
It's hard to talk about these things, as in technically difficult, because our words and phrases are often unhelpful.
'Real world' was unhelpful there. Just the world would be better, and God's world would be more precise, but probably less clear.
I am talking about people making room for their beliefs by radically changing their world view. People who appear to fully accept the common world view when they take their doctor's advice or buy a computer or judge how fast to drive, but in special 'Christian' or religious areas throw all that away and say all sorts of strange things might be true because God.
Our common world view is not complete, not agreed by everybody, and there are probably some very different alternatives out there, but for most people in the more connected bits of the world, most days of the week it is uncontroversial. And I think it is a very good thing, and we all know it, and it distresses me to see people asserting their right to believe whatever they like because God, miracle, prayer and you can't stop me.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Neoliberalism means small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media.
It means that because it believes that values are something that can be separated off from evidence, theories, and probabilities. Small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media are the practical manifestation.
(For more on Neoliberalism, or specifically neoclassical economics and how it depends upon the separation of fact and value, see among other books, John Lanchester's How to Speak Money, Ha Joon-Chang's Economics A User's Guide, and especially Robert and Edward Skidelsky's How Much is Enough?)
As a rough precis of the argument, if you believe it's not possible to assess values by evidence and theory, the only way to assess values in public is to see how strongly people feel about them. And the only way to see that is to see how much time and resources, that is, money they're willing to spend on them. Thus, on these assumptions, how people act within an unregulated market is an accurate reflection of what they value.
Underlying this is a picture of the human being as someone who arbitrarily choose values by non-evidential means, but who evaluates the means to achieve their values by rational evidence. The two faculties, evidential reasoning and value-based reasoning are separated as means to ends. Since values are arbitrarily chosen their importance can only be determined relative to each other; by what the human agent is prepared to sacrifice for what. Which is to say, by what the economic agent is prepared to spend on and what they're prepared to forgo.
Posted by simontoad (# 18096) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
I haven't heard of this book before, and it's unlikely that I will be reading it. There are already too many other books I haven't read.
However, if a book claims to be "The Bible for Grown Ups" then spends all its inky energy on arguments about the virgin birth, it isn't really living up to its title. Perhaps a more appropriate title would be The Bible for clever but still rather spotty adolescents.
IMHO the point when one begins to grow up is when one starts to have a relationship with the text and to let it have a relationship with you. Regarding it as a textbook for living that one must simply obey or a manual that one has grown out of and can sit in judgement over both fall badly short.
I can't express this all that clearly, but as years have gone by, I find the scriptures more authoritative, not less. I'd be hard put to explain exactly how I mean that, save that:-
a. Neither Lev 11:19 nor Deut 14:18 mean that we are obliged to classify a bat as a bird.
b. We should take the narrative seriously. We should not bowdlerise out the bits we don't like. Their presence in the text is not an endorsement that we should - or are entitled to - behave like the people we meet in its pages. Whatever we draw from the text, we should engage seriously with it, what the writer selected, and what we think they might be trying to say.
c. One has to be a conceited ass to be persuaded by the argument 'they were primitive people who believed in miracles, but we know better'. They knew just as well as we do that in the normal way of things, sick people are not healed, neither loaves nor fishes multiply from nothing and people do not walk on water. That's why they called the events miracles and in each case is one of the two reasons why they recorded them as something exciting?
The other reason, the reason why they selected that miracle, rather than another one, is that the event is saying something about Jesus, who he is, why he is here, what he does.
Top thread. Everyone's saying top things. This is my 'post of the thread' so far. Thanks for your efforts Enoch.
Posted by BroJames (# 9636) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
The sort of belief we have in the Virgin Birth is an issue. If you read the biblical texts in order to find out what happened, where Jesus was born and when, who his parents were and what were their circumstances - a perfectly reasonable thing to do - then a pregnancy without sex and sperm is a problem. It's something which in our shared world, which is God's world, according to our common understanding doesn't happen.
To say that it's a miracle, or that the Bible says it and I simply choose to believe it is, I think, a violent act. It trivialises, it breaks faith with our fellow humans and, I would say, the God whose world it is.
Beginning with the end of this quotation, I would argue the first two phrases in the paragraph are themselves a trivialising way of making statements about Christian belief which gloss over many much more nuanced ways of believing.
More importantly, though, the first paragraph quoted could equally be said about the resurrection. The resurrection is surely one of those things "which in our shared world, which is God's world, according to our common understanding doesn't happen."
I'm not arguing for an unquestioning credulity about miracles, but in principle it would seem odd to accept the resurrection, but to balk at the virgin birth.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Neoliberalism means small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media.
It means that because it believes that values are something that can be separated off from evidence, theories, and probabilities. Small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media are the practical manifestation.
(For more on Neoliberalism, or specifically neoclassical economics and how it depends upon the separation of fact and value, see among other books, John Lanchester's How to Speak Money, Ha Joon-Chang's Economics A User's Guide, and especially Robert and Edward Skidelsky's How Much is Enough?)
As a rough precis of the argument, if you believe it's not possible to assess values by evidence and theory, the only way to assess values in public is to see how strongly people feel about them. And the only way to see that is to see how much time and resources, that is, money they're willing to spend on them. Thus, on these assumptions, how people act within an unregulated market is an accurate reflection of what they value.
Underlying this is a picture of the human being as someone who arbitrarily choose values by non-evidential means, but who evaluates the means to achieve their values by rational evidence. The two faculties, evidential reasoning and value-based reasoning are separated as means to ends. Since values are arbitrarily chosen their importance can only be determined relative to each other; by what the human agent is prepared to sacrifice for what. Which is to say, by what the economic agent is prepared to spend on and what they're prepared to forgo.
Interesting. Can you give examples of values chosen on evidence? And couldn't there be a way of choosing values which us neither about evidence nor random? I'm thinking (dare I say the word?) of poetry and narrative.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
If we believe the world is God's world, then I think this must be something we believe is true about the world everybody lives in. It can't be an add-on for Christians.
An example of the sort of thing I'm thinking about is the cute idea of God-incidences...
To say that it's a miracle, or that the Bible says it and I simply choose to believe it is, I think, a violent act. It trivialises, it breaks faith with our fellow humans and, I would say, the God whose world it is.
There are other ways of believing in the Virgin Birth, of course, understandings that don't do a violence to our world view (a world view which I regard as a precious and hard won thing), and which allow us to stay in dialogue with our neighbours rather than leaping off into some anti-rational mindset. These are the powerful and fruitful ways I think we need to seek.
Again, I find the way you are generalizing what I presume is your own "worldview" to pretty much everyone on the planet-- or even everyone in your nation-- to be a bit of an aggressive assault. It's not just Christians who believe in spiritual realities/truths-- even the famous "nones" (no religion) often believe in a spiritual dimension to life.
There simply is not ONE common, universal worldview. There isn't. To suggest that the Christian worldview is a "violent" assault on a common worldview is therefore to begin with a false presumption.
Now, if you want to argue that reason and evidence and the scientific method are important and valuable and should not be set aside for religious belief, have at it. There are many within our culture, and I daresay on this board, who would agree. To some degree, I would agree. But it is far from a universal truth, even among non-religious people. You need to begin the argument with an accurate portrayal of the cultural understandings you're presuming to speak for.
Once you recognize that there is a whole spectrum of "worldviews"-- ways of approaching truth and organizing our observations of the world-- co-existing on our planet and within Western society-- it gets a lot harder to argue that any one worldview needs to "conform" with any other worldview. That argument on it's own will fail simply because there isn't that sort of common understanding about the nature of truth. However, you can argue why one worldview is superior to another, or why the presumptions of one might usefully be considered by another.
[ 26. September 2016, 16:33: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on
:
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
It's hard to talk about these things, as in technically difficult, because our words and phrases are often unhelpful.
Your concern is that Christians might take pride in believing something that is antithetical to our collective experience as humans and yet you can't come up with an easy way of saying what that collective experience is? I would say that if you can't easily describe this shared reality that Christians are living outside of that said reality isn't shared by as many humans as you believe. Usually the experiences that we collectively share as humans can be described with one word.
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
'Real world' was unhelpful there. Just the world would be better, and God's world would be more precise, but probably less clear.
I suspect you are having difficulty explaining what you mean because you don't want to admit what you are actually saying.
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
I am talking about people making room for their beliefs by radically changing their world view. People who appear to fully accept the common world view when they take their doctor's advice or buy a computer or judge how fast to drive, but in special 'Christian' or religious areas throw all that away and say all sorts of strange things might be true because God.
And now we are back to circular arguments about some worldview that is common to all but can't be described. How many Christians suggest ignoring the advice of doctors? Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses do but then orthodox Christians don't consider them Christians. Now, I suspect you have a problem with excluding them but I don't. In any event, what shared worldview holds that it is always advisable to take the advice of one's doctor? Frankly, most of the problems I'm currently experiencing in my life would not not exist if somebody I love would have ignored the advice of her physicians and instead followed the collective wisdom of humans going back thousands of years. Hell, she is so far one of the lucky ones what with still being alive.
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
Our common world view is not complete, not agreed by everybody, and there are probably some very different alternatives out there
Well, if its not complete, not agreed upon by everybody, and has different alternatives, then it really isn't a common worldview is it?
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
for most people in the more connected bits of the world, most days of the week it is uncontroversial.
Just go ahead and say what you mean. What you are calling the common worldview that we as humans share is nothing more than the collective opinions currently fashionable among educated upper middle class white people. It is still controversial even among educated upper middle class white people much less humanity as a whole. See the push back you are getting on this forum made up largely of educated upper middle class white people as evidence.
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
it distresses me to see people asserting their right to believe whatever they like because God, miracle, prayer and you can't stop me.
Indeed...equating one's feelings with reason is one of the foundations of this worldview. Whether it is a feature or a bug depends on your perspective. For me, it is a bug. A bug that makes the whole worldview not only intellectually indefensible but rather annoying.
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on
:
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
it distresses me to see people asserting their right to believe whatever they like because God, miracle, prayer and you can't stop me.
It distresses me that you assert your right to tell me what I should and shouldn't believe even if you can't stop me from believing what I wish. Not to mention that you accuse me of perpetrating a "violent act" because I believe what I do. I feel violated. Pot, kettle.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
There are, of course, many Christians who will say that, if Jesus was God, then he could do anything, or if I pray about some situation, then all normal expectations are suspended, because this world is subject to intervention from God as the characters and events of a novel are subject to interference by its author. But it seems to me that to do this is to uncouple faith from the real world, and to make God something less than creator, a being within the world that some people choose to believe in.
Even if this is true (and FWIW although I don't agree with you I don't think it's obviously wrong), this seems to me a way of thinking that is entirely alien to the general population, i.e. it is about as far away from the popular worldview as the Summa Theologica.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
It means that because it believes that values are something that can be separated off from evidence, theories, and probabilities. Small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media are the practical manifestation.
Interesting. Can you give examples of values chosen on evidence? And couldn't there be a way of choosing values which us neither about evidence nor random? I'm thinking (dare I say the word?) of poetry and narrative.
It is only on the neoliberal picture that one chooses values, and I do not accept that picture. Values are not a matter of choice, like so many varieties of cereal on the supermarket shelf.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the concepts 'values' and 'evidence' and the demand to link them directly presuppose the separation to which I'm objecting.
That is, the central cases of the concept 'evidence' are legal: some testimony that establishes some discrete fact - the defendant was present at a certain place and time, the wounds were caused by such and such type of instrument, and so on. Those kind of discrete fact do not by themselves command any direct evaluative significance.
Instead, they build up by interpretation into broad philosophical anthropologies and worldviews, that cannot normally be directly refuted or confirmed by any single discrete fact, but only by sustained discussion and restatement. And certainly when it comes to philosophical anthropology, narrative is important in so far as humans are agents, and to talk about agency is to talk about narrative.
From the philosophical anthropologies and worldviews are derived ethical evaluations, orientations towards good.
It is not however true to say that narrative is not about evidence. It is simply that the evidence has to be interpreted to form a narrative. (I leave aside the question as to whether there is any evidence as such without and prior to interpretation.) And no single evidential fact on its own can overturn the interpretation.
Augustine converted from Manichaeanism to Christianity because he found Manichaeanism ceased to make sense of his experience of life. One cannot say that any one discrete fact was decisive (not even the faulty Manichaean astronomy). Yet one cannot say that his conversaion was not based on facts in his life.
(I choose Augustine simply because he's someone whose conversion has been frequently examined, rather than because I want to present him as exemplary.)
To say poetry is a way of choosing values which is not about evidence is just as meaningful as saying that prose is a way of choosing facts which is not about value judgements. Which is to say, not meaningful at all.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
Too many responses, and too many misunderstandings of what I'm saying. I don't know where to begin.
The common understanding I've spoken of is simply the current materialist, physical, biological, historical model of the world and how it works. We have no difficulty talking about, say, how to tackle the Zika virus, because there is a well established understanding of epidemiology. There are no significant voices talking about sympathetic magic as a possible solution. If a car goes wrong, what percentage will do anything other than get the services of a mechanic? There are disagreements about climate change, but it's mainly from people wriggling in the closing gaps in the evidence. The deniers are trying to make their case in the same sorts of ways as their opponents, arguing about evidence, models, feedback, etc. They don't bring, say, astrology into the debate. In academia, subjects like history and economics where there are plenty of energetic disagreements, nonetheless find it possible to have a meeting of minds within a common language.
Just a few examples. We could all easily add many more. I think this can be described as a common worldview. I think it's a great achievement, and quite a remarkable one. There are a few fuzzy edges where mathematical conundrums are unsolved. Quantum physics is very strange. We think there will be limits to what we can know or predict. Some areas of life are very resistant to clarity. In the main, though, we can talk about all sorts of things to all sorts of people because we have a common worldview.
When Christians take a crude view of the Virgin Birth of the sort that would make a geneticist whimper, and defend it by saying, well, God can do anything, that, I think, is a problem.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
So Dafyd, do you think we are unable to choose values; that they are simply given to us by our broad philosophical anthropology? Why, then, do we disagree about values so much?
I don't, incidentally, see poetry as a way of choosing values, but as a way of communicating them, and of expressing them potently so that, perhaps, we or others might choose them, or live by them with more commitment.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
What problem?
Posted by St Deird (# 7631) on
:
Again, hatless - how does this not apply to the resurrection?
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by St Deird:
Again, hatless - how does this not apply to the resurrection?
It does.
Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on
:
So for you, hatless, Christianity should just be a philosophy and a moral framework for the experience of the material world? There should no considering of the possibility of transcendence attached to it since that cannot be proven materially or mathematically? Oh, yeah, and those of us who like our Christianity with a dollop of mystery are committing violence against people with your world view. Great. ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Too many responses, and too many misunderstandings of what I'm saying. I don't know where to begin.
The common understanding I've spoken of is simply the current materialist, physical, biological, historical model of the world and how it works...
I think this can be described as a common worldview.
Except that it's not. Again, not even close. No matter how many times you insist that it is. This very thread has demonstrated that there is a whole spectrum of beliefs. Some hold that ONLY those things that you described are real-- the material, observable, measurable world confirmed by scientific discovery. Some hold that ONLY the spiritual realm is real and some or all of the material world is an illusion (this is a minority view in the West). And many, many people-- not just Christians, but people of all sorts of religions, both organized and informal-- hold some mixture of the two-- that there is both a material and a spiritual realm, that may or many not overlap entirely or partially. In many parts of the West, that "mixed" worldview is probably the norm, although there are so many variations it would be hard to say any one of these is the majority.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
We have no difficulty talking about, say, how to tackle the Zika virus, because there is a well established understanding of epidemiology. There are no significant voices talking about sympathetic magic as a possible solution.
Apparently you haven't encounter the anti-vax movement.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
If a car goes wrong, what percentage will do anything other than get the services of a mechanic?
I have known a great number of people, both Christians and non-Christians, who have engaged in prayer in these circumstances. I know of one who claimed a miraculous "healing" of their car while they were holding a key portion of their disabled engine in their hand. Of course, you would dismiss their account, perhaps rightly. But it is undeniable that there are, in fact, people who respond to such problems in some spiritual manner.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
They don't bring, say, astrology into the debate.
There are people who will bring astrology into such a debate, they just don't happen to be in the majority. And yes, they are IMHO, mockable-- but they are not invisible, at least not in my part of the world.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
In academia, subjects like history and economics where there are plenty of energetic disagreements, nonetheless find it possible to have a meeting of minds within a common language.
Have you spent much time in academia? There is very little "meeting of minds", especially when there is an energetic disagreement.
People in the same field do speak a common language-- use similar technical terms in similar ways. That does not mean they share the same worldview. It is quite clear, for example, that Stephen Hawking and John Polkinghorne do not share a "common worldview", even though they are both in the same field of study and no doubt agree on very many things within that field.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
When Christians take a crude view of the Virgin Birth of the sort that would make a geneticist whimper, and defend it by saying, well, God can do anything, that, I think, is a problem.
Perhaps, but you'll have to do a lot better than you've done here to convince me or most Virgin-birth-believing Christians that it's a problem. Building your argument on the demonstrably false premise that there is a "common worldview" that excludes the miraculous is not going to do it. So if that is your goal then perhaps you should try another tact. Gaining a better, fuller understanding of the diversity of beliefs in the society immediately outside your front door would be a good start.
[ 27. September 2016, 00:19: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
For what it's worth, the fact that something is a/the accepted worldview has nothing to do with its actual truth. AFAIK every commonly held worldview up to the present has had its spectacular errors. Why should the present day be any different?
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
For what it's worth, the fact that something is a/the accepted worldview has nothing to do with its actual truth. AFAIK every commonly held worldview up to the present has had its spectacular errors. Why should the present day be any different?
Well said Lamb Chopped. That gets two ![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif)
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
Hatless, I have to ask - do you believe in the Incarnation? ISTM that if you do, you have already accepted the violation and everything else is straining at gnats.
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Looks like a case of Spongiform Theolopathy.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
So Dafyd, do you think we are unable to choose values; that they are simply given to us by our broad philosophical anthropology? Why, then, do we disagree about values so much?
Again, you're making the concept of 'choosing' central.
Do you think we are unable to choose beliefs? I think it's about as sensible to talk about choosing values as it is to talk about choosing beliefs. Less sensible: on what basis would we choose values in any case? It makes some sense to talk about choosing a political party on the basis of our values. But if our values are up for choice, on what basis would we choose between them?
The epistemic traffic between values and philosophical anthropology runs in both directions.
(That said, I'm not happy with the metaphor of 'values' either. I think it would be constructive to make an effort to abandon that metaphor as a way of talking about normative goods.)
Why do we disagree about values? We have different views of what the human being is. We have different interests based on class, race, gender, orientation, and we (especially those of us who are in one way or another privileged in those ways) confuse our interests with our goods. And so on. There's no puzzle here unless you have a neoliberal worldview that conflates interests and choices.
quote:
I don't, incidentally, see poetry as a way of choosing values, but as a way of communicating them, and of expressing them potently so that, perhaps, we or others might choose them, or live by them with more commitment.
The same goes for prose. There are a couple of things that can be better expressed by poetry: foregrounding the beauty of skilled craftsmanship on the one hand, foregrounding the role of language in expression and the way our language makes some thoughts easier than others on the other. Not that prose can't do those but it doesn't as insistently impose them on our attention. But otherwise, largely, no. Poetry is not a form of magic.
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on
:
This discussion reminds me of Scot Atran, who argues in his book 'In Gods We Trust' that religions often contain counter-intuitive ideas.
He cites various reasons for this, one being that many religions are costly, and believing in something irrational is part of that cost. It's not meant to be an easy ride. (I would connect that with erosion of the ego, but I don't think Atran goes with that).
But there are other reasons, for example, being memorable, storing important cultural information, and being hard to fake.
I think Atran worked mainly in tribal areas, so his thesis may not be appropriate to religion in Europe and US. I don't know.
Although you could argue that religion becomes irrelevant, not because it is counter-intuitive, but because it no longer stores the vital cultural stuff.
[ 27. September 2016, 10:46: Message edited by: quetzalcoatl ]
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on
:
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
When Christians take a crude view of the Virgin Birth of the sort that would make a geneticist whimper, and defend it by saying, well, God can do anything, that, I think, is a problem.
You do realize that ancient people knew perfectly well where babies come from right? Modern genetics in no way makes the virgin birth harder to believe than it was in the first century. In fact, given artificial insemination, I would think the virgin birth is easier to believe. Of course, if one not conceived through sexual intercourse cannot be totally human as was implied up thread, then modern science is creating monsters. I see no reason why Christians should change what we preach to appease our cultured despisers. When that has been done in the past, bad things happened.
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
It does.
"It does" is not a valid answer to a question that begins "how does."
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
So for you, hatless, Christianity should just be a philosophy and a moral framework for the experience of the material world? There should no considering of the possibility of transcendence attached to it since that cannot be proven materially or mathematically? Oh, yeah, and those of us who like our Christianity with a dollop of mystery are committing violence against people with your world view. Great.
Let's say yes to mystery and wonder, but not locate them in some outside-breaking-in God, but in the natural world itself. Don't look for the supernatural, but see how that natural is super!
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Too many responses, and too many misunderstandings of what I'm saying. I don't know where to begin.
The common understanding I've spoken of is simply the current materialist, physical, biological, historical model of the world and how it works...
I think this can be described as a common worldview.
Except that it's not. Again, not even close. No matter how many times you insist that it is. This very thread has demonstrated that there is a whole spectrum of beliefs. Some hold that ONLY those things that you described are real-- the material, observable, measurable world confirmed by scientific discovery. Some hold that ONLY the spiritual realm is real and some or all of the material world is an illusion (this is a minority view in the West).
You don't say? quote:
And many, many people-- not just Christians, but people of all sorts of religions, both organized and informal-- hold some mixture of the two-- that there is both a material and a spiritual realm, that may or many not overlap entirely or partially. In many parts of the West, that "mixed" worldview is probably the norm, although there are so many variations it would be hard to say any one of these is the majority.
People have different opinions, of course, and special beliefs if they are religious, which they often struggle to articulate in the modern world, because they don't really fit with the common world view, and have to be seen as exceptional, and have special exemptions for them. People compartmentalise their thinking, for instance.
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
We have no difficulty talking about, say, how to tackle the Zika virus, because there is a well established understanding of epidemiology. There are no significant voices talking about sympathetic magic as a possible solution.
Apparently you haven't encounter the anti-vax movement.
I certainly haven't, here in the UK, but aren't the anti-vaxers really just a form of conspiracy theorists? (There's an interesting spiritual dimension to conspiracy theorising, but that's another story.)
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
If a car goes wrong, what percentage will do anything other than get the services of a mechanic?
I have known a great number of people, both Christians and non-Christians, who have engaged in prayer in these circumstances. I know of one who claimed a miraculous "healing" of their car while they were holding a key portion of their disabled engine in their hand. Of course, you would dismiss their account, perhaps rightly. But it is undeniable that there are, in fact, people who respond to such problems in some spiritual manner.
It's an interesting one. I have come across some people who have prayed for a car to start and when it does they see it as an answer to prayer. Is there, perhaps, something else going on? A dead car is a horrible thing, and the thought of the repair bill deeply depressing to someone without much money. The cough of an engine firing up is a true joy in such circumstances, and the despair and joy are good subjects for prayer. I suspect people really know that this is what they are doing, and the prayer is not intended as an alternative to good maintenance.
I've never known anyone try to repair bodywork by prayer. Why is that, do you think? Isn't it the incomprehensibility of the insides of a car, and our helplessness sitting there turning the key and trying to catch the moment with the throttle that leads people to prayer? Not a world view where God intervenes, or they would try prayer to get rid of dents and rusty holes.
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
They don't bring, say, astrology into the debate.
There are people who will bring astrology into such a debate, they just don't happen to be in the majority. And yes, they are IMHO, mockable-- but they are not invisible, at least not in my part of the world.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
In academia, subjects like history and economics where there are plenty of energetic disagreements, nonetheless find it possible to have a meeting of minds within a common language.
Have you spent much time in academia? There is very little "meeting of minds", especially when there is an energetic disagreement.
Energetic disagreement is the meeting of minds. When they don't meet there is silent incomprehension. Think of an Amazonian tribe's first contact.
quote:
People in the same field do speak a common language-- use similar technical terms in similar ways. That does not mean they share the same worldview. It is quite clear, for example, that Stephen Hawking and John Polkinghorne do not share a "common worldview", even though they are both in the same field of study and no doubt agree on very many things within that field.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
When Christians take a crude view of the Virgin Birth of the sort that would make a geneticist whimper, and defend it by saying, well, God can do anything, that, I think, is a problem.
Perhaps, but you'll have to do a lot better than you've done here to convince me or most Virgin-birth-believing Christians that it's a problem. Building your argument on the demonstrably false premise that there is a "common worldview" that excludes the miraculous is not going to do it. So if that is your goal then perhaps you should try another tact. Gaining a better, fuller understanding of the diversity of beliefs in the society immediately outside your front door would be a good start.
[/QB][/QUOTE]You've pointed to a bit of variety, but that doesn't dent my decision to continue speaking of a common world view. I think that's precisely what we have.
Documentaries don't have to explain their starting assumptions at the beginning, they just get going. We all know where they are coming from, because we are (nearly) all coming from the same place. If I watch a film, unless it's some zombie or Sci-fi thing, all the characters will understand the world in pretty much the same way I do (with the exception that they won't mind being shot or punched as much as real people do). You can find some books and films with magical realism, but it's a small number, and of course, it's fiction.
I can see that I've upset you and a lot of people, and that wasn't my intention. I don't think I lead a particularly sheltered existence. I will go to work tomorrow as part of a multi-faith chaplaincy team in a large mental healthcare charity specialising in treatment resistant patients. I will have conversations with some people with very strange worldviews, and I will find once again how near in understanding my Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Muslim colleagues are.
I believe the church has gone up a blind alley, unable to articulate the faith without using dead categories of thought. Bonhoeffer called it the death leap back to the Middle Ages. It sells God short, who should always be sought in the centre, not the edges, not in weird events or flaky car ignition systems, but in economics and politics and technology.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
Hatless, I have to ask - do you believe in the Incarnation? ISTM that if you do, you have already accepted the violation and everything else is straining at gnats.
The Incarnation is a tool or theme that I use as I think about my faith. It's a way of expressing the significance of Jesus Christ. But when you ask if I believe in it, I wonder what exactly you have in mind, and what a yes would be tying me to.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
So Dafyd, do you think we are unable to choose values; that they are simply given to us by our broad philosophical anthropology? Why, then, do we disagree about values so much?
Again, you're making the concept of 'choosing' central.
Do you think we are unable to choose beliefs? I think it's about as sensible to talk about choosing values as it is to talk about choosing beliefs. Less sensible: on what basis would we choose values in any case? It makes some sense to talk about choosing a political party on the basis of our values. But if our values are up for choice, on what basis would we choose between them?
The epistemic traffic between values and philosophical anthropology runs in both directions.
(That said, I'm not happy with the metaphor of 'values' either. I think it would be constructive to make an effort to abandon that metaphor as a way of talking about normative goods.)
Why do we disagree about values? We have different views of what the human being is. We have different interests based on class, race, gender, orientation, and we (especially those of us who are in one way or another privileged in those ways) confuse our interests with our goods. And so on. There's no puzzle here unless you have a neoliberal worldview that conflates interests and choices.
quote:
I don't, incidentally, see poetry as a way of choosing values, but as a way of communicating them, and of expressing them potently so that, perhaps, we or others might choose them, or live by them with more commitment.
The same goes for prose. There are a couple of things that can be better expressed by poetry: foregrounding the beauty of skilled craftsmanship on the one hand, foregrounding the role of language in expression and the way our language makes some thoughts easier than others on the other. Not that prose can't do those but it doesn't as insistently impose them on our attention. But otherwise, largely, no. Poetry is not a form of magic.
I'm intrigued by this idea of choosing or not choosing. I don't think I did choose my values. They are very similar to my father's, and my desire to be like him. They are influenced by things I find attractive in others, often for reasons I can't readily express.
I think I can empathise to some extent with people who see the world in terms of honour and shame, so there is a little bit of this in me, an echo of the feelings they might experience, but we seem to be different. So values are not chosen like clothes, but are part of our identity, like being right-handed or shy.
I agree that values is an awkward term. It's very economic, and it just gives us the one metaphor for something that is rich and complex. But sticking with it for a moment, I think there are different values amongst people who share a lot in terms of understanding, experience, environment, generation and social position. Political opinions, for instance, are partly explained by self-interest, but plenty of people go against their apparent self-interest. Where is this variety coming from? If it's not choice, it's certainly something personal.
I think that a form of magic is precisely what poetry is.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Beeswax Altar:
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
When Christians take a crude view of the Virgin Birth of the sort that would make a geneticist whimper, and defend it by saying, well, God can do anything, that, I think, is a problem.
You do realize that ancient people knew perfectly well where babies come from right? Modern genetics in no way makes the virgin birth harder to believe than it was in the first century. In fact, given artificial insemination, I would think the virgin birth is easier to believe. Of course, if one not conceived through sexual intercourse cannot be totally human as was implied up thread, then modern science is creating monsters. I see no reason why Christians should change what we preach to appease our cultured despisers. When that has been done in the past, bad things happened.
Ancient people seem to have had somewhat different ideas to us. Even Darwin didn't know precisely where babies come from.
There is an rule in Leviticus against remarrying a Jewish wife you had previously divorced if in the meantime she has been married to a foreigner. It doesn't not apply if the genders are reversed. There is a radically different view of genetics inside that. quote:
quote:
originally posted by hatless:
It does.
"It does" is not a valid answer to a question that begins "how does."
The question was 'How does this not apply to the resurrection?'
'It does', meaning 'it does apply', seems a reasonable answer.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I think that a form of magic is precisely what poetry is.
If by magic you mean a way of expressing values potently, then tabloid headlines and the political rhetoric of Mr Donald Trump are far more magical than any poetry.
I would like to say that poetry is the antidote to magic. Unfortunately the history of poets in the twentieth century is not encouraging to that idea. Any poem can be read as magic. But one of the criteria of good poetry is to be more rewarding when read as anti-magic.
If you read poetry as a form of magic, then if you turn to King Lear all you'll see is a contrived morality tale. If you read it as anti-magic, then you see what all the fuss is about.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
There is an rule in Leviticus against remarrying a Jewish wife you had previously divorced if in the meantime she has been married to a foreigner. It doesn't not apply if the genders are reversed. There is a radically different view of genetics inside that.
Say what?
Could you give me chapter and verse on that one?
Because the only thing I can remember was a law saying that a man might not divorce his wife, watch her marry and divorce some other man (ethnicity not specified), and THEN remarry her again. The point being, I assume, to discourage men from handing women around with as much thought as the mashed potatoes bowl at Thanksgiving. Or to be a bit less snarky about it, to force them to give some thought to whether they really want to divorce in the first place and risk losing her permanently.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
(lots of responses to my comments that seem to be totally missing the point...)
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
...then finally getting to the point:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
You've pointed to a bit of variety, but that doesn't dent my decision to continue speaking of a common world view. I think that's precisely what we have.
This doesn't seem to be a view shared by anthropologists or sociologists. Indeed, the whole point of having a technical term like "worldview" is to describe/explain/understand the various and competing worldviews existing within a society. If we all or even most of us share a "common worldview" there's really not much need for the term in the first place. If the only vegetables in existence were peas, we wouldn't need the broader term "vegetable", we'd just have "peas".
Honestly, to suggest that there is only one or even primarily one "common worldview" in contemporary society seems to me to represent a distinct lack of basic observation.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I can see that I've upset you and a lot of people, and that wasn't my intention.
I won't speak for anyone else, but you haven't "upset" me. There's nothing to be upset about. You are, quite simply, wrong. But nothing upsetting about it.
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I believe the church has gone up a blind alley, unable to articulate the faith without using dead categories of thought. Bonhoeffer called it the death leap back to the Middle Ages. It sells God short, who should always be sought in the centre, not the edges, not in weird events or flaky car ignition systems, but in economics and politics and technology.
If that's what you want to talk then why not just talk about it? Instead of inventing a false consensus, why not simply talk about where you think the church has gone down a "blind alley"? Is it, in fact, our "worldview" (i.e. the presumptions we hold about the make up of reality and the sources of authority we hold for determining that)? Or is it something else? What makes it a "blind alley"-- or a "death leap"? (And while we're on that, can you supply a bit more detail for your Bonhoeffer quote-- which book, what ch or pg? I'm not recognizing the context of the quote you're alluding to...)
All of which one can do, and perhaps profitably so, without assuming some grand social consensus which probably never existed but certainly is not in existence today.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
There is an rule in Leviticus against remarrying a Jewish wife you had previously divorced if in the meantime she has been married to a foreigner. It doesn't not apply if the genders are reversed. There is a radically different view of genetics inside that.
Say what?
Could you give me chapter and verse on that one?
Because the only thing I can remember was a law saying that a man might not divorce his wife, watch her marry and divorce some other man (ethnicity not specified), and THEN remarry her again. The point being, I assume, to discourage men from handing women around with as much thought as the mashed potatoes bowl at Thanksgiving. Or to be a bit less snarky about it, to force them to give some thought to whether they really want to divorce in the first place and risk losing her permanently.
The rule in Leviticus can be found at Deuteronomy 24:1-4. You're right that it doesn't specify ethnicity. I think I read a version where it talks about the woman leaving the land or nation, which I suppose could be a way of reading the reference to house.
That bit isn't so important. I think that this law reflects the widespread belief, up to and including Darwin, that some essence or influence from the male remains after a conception and birth and may be manifested in subsequent conceptions and births with a different male partner.
It's an aspect of what on these boards we have sometimes called the grow-bag understanding of conception. The man provides the seed, and the woman's womb the place where it grows. The extra aspect is that something of the male 'seed' or inheritance remains in the female. There was a famous case in Darwin's time of a horse being mated with a zebra, unsuccessfully, I think. But a later foal from a mating with a proper horse was born with stripes.
Posted by BroJames (# 9636) on
:
The Bonhoeffer reference comes from Letters and Papers from Prison from a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated 16th July, 1944. (p. 129 in my SCM Press 1981 p/b Abridged Edition).
In the letter (ISTM) he is working on his thinking about what it means to live in a world which has done away with the idea of God as a working hypothesis. His criticism of Barth and others is that they, he says, seek to assert the authority of the church or the authority of revelation in the scriptures. It is an attitude of "We believe this because it is the teaching of the Church" or "We believe this because it is what the Bible teaches" which he resists as being a leap of death into the Middle Ages.
It would be interesting to see how he would engage with the rather different discussions about the interface between science and religion which have emerged during the second half of the 20th century.
Interestingly in the context of this thread, Bonhoeffer's response to the intellectual climate as he sees it appears to be strongly rooted in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
Hatless, I have to ask - do you believe in the Incarnation? ISTM that if you do, you have already accepted the violation and everything else is straining at gnats.
The Incarnation is a tool or theme that I use as I think about my faith. It's a way of expressing the significance of Jesus Christ. But when you ask if I believe in it, I wonder what exactly you have in mind, and what a yes would be tying me to.
I have in mind the idea that Christ was God in some sense that isn't true of me, you or Jeremy Corbyn.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
There is an rule in Leviticus against remarrying a Jewish wife you had previously divorced if in the meantime she has been married to a foreigner. It doesn't not apply if the genders are reversed. There is a radically different view of genetics inside that.
Say what?
Could you give me chapter and verse on that one?
Because the only thing I can remember was a law saying that a man might not divorce his wife, watch her marry and divorce some other man (ethnicity not specified), and THEN remarry her again. The point being, I assume, to discourage men from handing women around with as much thought as the mashed potatoes bowl at Thanksgiving. Or to be a bit less snarky about it, to force them to give some thought to whether they really want to divorce in the first place and risk losing her permanently.
The rule in Leviticus can be found at Deuteronomy 24:1-4. You're right that it doesn't specify ethnicity. I think I read a version where it talks about the woman leaving the land or nation, which I suppose could be a way of reading the reference to house.
That bit isn't so important. I think that this law reflects the widespread belief, up to and including Darwin, that some essence or influence from the male remains after a conception and birth and may be manifested in subsequent conceptions and births with a different male partner.
It's an aspect of what on these boards we have sometimes called the grow-bag understanding of conception. The man provides the seed, and the woman's womb the place where it grows. The extra aspect is that something of the male 'seed' or inheritance remains in the female. There was a famous case in Darwin's time of a horse being mated with a zebra, unsuccessfully, I think. But a later foal from a mating with a proper horse was born with stripes.
IMHO that kind of thinking doesn't show up in the Bible (the "something of the male seed remains" bit). To the best of my knowledge, the only person barred from marrying any woman of any history that he chose (okay, bar incest or adultery committed with one another!) is the high priest. He must marry an Israelite virgin*--not a widow or divorcee. Everybody else, including ordinary priests and kings, can marry whomever the hell they like. Which is not what one would expect in the case of a country where "the seed remains" was their theory of genetics.
The high priest thing is interesting, and could conceivably be used to support your idea. However, that sort of falls apart in the absence of a similar restriction on David's line later, or on ordinary priests and Levites, for whom lineage was all-important too. I suspect it has more to do with the doubly-set-apart status of the high priest, which also prevented him from attending even his own family's funerals, also unlike everybody else.
No, the passage you mention goes on to say "Would not the land be utterly defiled?" The objection seems to be a moral one (land is also said to be defiled by unpunished murder and by idolatry AFAIR). Marriage is not something to be picked up and set aside like embroidery, or handed from person to person like a newspaper. Though the rhetorical question God poses there ("And would you now return to me?") suggests that God is willing to forgive even that and take Israel back.
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by BroJames:
The Bonhoeffer reference comes from Letters and Papers from Prison from a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated 16th July, 1944. (p. 129 in my SCM Press 1981 p/b Abridged Edition).
In the letter (ISTM) he is working on his thinking about what it means to live in a world which has done away with the idea of God as a working hypothesis. His criticism of Barth and others is that they, he says, seek to assert the authority of the church or the authority of revelation in the scriptures. It is an attitude of "We believe this because it is the teaching of the Church" or "We believe this because it is what the Bible teaches" which he resists as being a leap of death into the Middle Ages.
It would be interesting to see how he would engage with the rather different discussions about the interface between science and religion which have emerged during the second half of the 20th century.
Interestingly in the context of this thread, Bonhoeffer's response to the intellectual climate as he sees it appears to be strongly rooted in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ.
That's helpful, thanks.
And yes, that does sound very much like Bonhoeffer-- and as true and relevant today as it was then. His point, of course, would seem to be the complete opposite of what you appear to be arguing here.
Posted by BroJames (# 9636) on
:
I'm not quite sure what I am arguing, or what I appear to be arguing. You're not mixing me up with Steve Langton are you?
[Typos]
[ 28. September 2016, 14:52: Message edited by: BroJames ]
Posted by Greatest I am (# 18671) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Sounds rather simple-minded.
If large chunks of the human race hold particular opinions, it's rarely wise to just dismiss them all as not being grown-ups, or to assume that they have no foundations for their beliefs.
A single explains-everything-for-you book is unlikely to have the depth of a frog pond in August.
Isn't faith described as not having a logical or reasonable foundation for that belief?
Is that not why Martin Luther said ---
“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.”
“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.”
If not, please define faith for us please.
Regards
DL
[ 28. September 2016, 15:19: Message edited by: Greatest I am ]
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
:
Please refer please to the Book of Hebrews please.
PS, that's in the Bible.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Greatest I am:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Sounds rather simple-minded.
If large chunks of the human race hold particular opinions, it's rarely wise to just dismiss them all as not being grown-ups, or to assume that they have no foundations for their beliefs.
A single explains-everything-for-you book is unlikely to have the depth of a frog pond in August.
Isn't faith described as not having a logical or reasonable foundation for that belief?
Is that not why Martin Luther said ---
“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.”
“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.”
If not, please define faith for us please.
Regards
DL
No, that's not why Luther said those things.
To explain what he meant, I'd have to give you a multi-hour seminar in the context of his time. (To everybody else--Luther was fond of hyperbole, and not at all fond of people introducing non-biblically-based arguments into theology.)
As for defining faith--why should I? Give me a reason besides your command.
Posted by BroJames (# 9636) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Greatest I am:
Isn't faith described as not having a logical or reasonable foundation for that belief?
Not by me it isn't. I wouldn't say that faith is necessarily about believing things which are illogical or irrational, rather that it's about believing in something which could logically or rationally be true, but which cannot be proved to be true by logical or rational means. (Actually, I really want to say that faith is not primarily cognitive and factual so much as about putting trust in a person.)
[ 28. September 2016, 16:54: Message edited by: BroJames ]
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by BroJames:
I'm not quite sure what I am arguing, or what I appear to be arguing. You're not mixing me up with Steve Langton are you?
[Typos]
Hatless, actually. My apologies
[ 28. September 2016, 21:19: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on
:
Hatless, my apologies but Lamb Chopped, as she so often is, is right on the prohibition on marrying the same wife twice. It's regarded as pollution of the land. There's nothing about foreigners. Nor is there anything about any belief in a residual genetic influence of the husband who first covered the wife.
Scripture doesn't give a fuller reason, but I think somewhere there's a rabbinic gloss about the disgustingness of lending one's wife to another. So, I suppose, if divorce was allowed as a concession to human weakness, it had to be final and irrevocable. Remember that theoretically, there was no need to have divorce for adultery because the wife got stoned.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
Hatless, my apologies but Lamb Chopped, as she so often is, is right on the prohibition on marrying the same wife twice. It's regarded as pollution of the land. There's nothing about foreigners. Nor is there anything about any belief in a residual genetic influence of the husband who first covered the wife.
Scripture doesn't give a fuller reason, but I think somewhere there's a rabbinic gloss about the disgustingness of lending one's wife to another. So, I suppose, if divorce was allowed as a concession to human weakness, it had to be final and irrevocable. Remember that theoretically, there was no need to have divorce for adultery because the wife got stoned.
Why would it be pollution of the land to remarry?
In fact the OT society was quite keen on handing women round in Levirate marriage, and believed a marriage to the dead husband's younger brother could provide children for him.
The law in Deuteronomy is definitely about not remarrying a former wife after an intervening marriage and, like Levirate marriage, makes no sense without a different understanding of conception and gestation.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
Why would it be pollution of the land to remarry?
In fact the OT society was quite keen on handing women round in Levirate marriage, and believed a marriage to the dead husband's younger brother could provide children for him.
The law in Deuteronomy is definitely about not remarrying a former wife after an intervening marriage and, like Levirate marriage, makes no sense without a different understanding of conception and gestation.
As for why remarriage-after-another-marriage should pollute the land--hey, I can't tell you that except by referencing their culture, which says the same thing about idolatry and unavenged murder. You'd have to ask an ancient Hebrew. But it appears that they considered any major sin to pollute the land, and in the prophets, such things were said to result in the land "vomiting you out" into exile. Since the land was believed to belong to the Lord and not the people, and was his gift to them, it makes sense that any major infraction of the law of the Lord would be considered to have a bad effect on the land, his gift.
As far as the "quite keen on handing women round in levirate marriage," that's precisely what levirate marriage is designed to avoid. A levirate marriage doesn't just benefit the deceased husband's family by providing him with a legal heir. It benefits the woman by providing her with a culturally-sanctioned means of ongoing financial support so she doesn't lose husband and home in a single blow--particularly dangerous in a patriarchal culture where most land and businesses are held by men, and where she may not be able to find a second husband easily given the fact of her childlessness (which was usually blamed on the woman, and might well scare off suitors). Mosaic law and pre-Mosaic culture give her a strong entitlement to the levirate option, and put pressure on the possibly-reluctant bridegroom to agree to it or face permanent public shaming. We see this in action in the case of Judah and Tamar, and also in the book of Ruth.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see any evidence for your idea that they believed a woman could become pregnant from a deceased husband. The levirate was a legal arrangement, and they knew perfectly well that any children born of the new marriage would be biologically sired by the brother, not the deceased husband. If it were otherwise, why would Onan have bothered with birth control? And why are Perez and Zerah always spoken of as Judah's sons, when Tamar had had two husbands of that family before him?
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
Then Judah said to Onan, ‘Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her; raise up offspring for your brother.’ Genesis 38:8
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
Yes indeed. He did NOT say: "Financially support your sister-in-law but stay out of her bed (sex isn't necessary anymore, your brother took care of that!) until she has a child."
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
Look, if you want proof that the ancient Hebrews had a dodgy grasp of genetics, you just need to cite that passage where Jacob breeds spotty sheep by feeding them in front of spotty strips of cloth. But none of that proves that they didn't know a man and a woman were both necessary for conception!
As someone else has already said, the proof that they knew about the birds and the bees is precisely the fact that Jesus' conception is supposed to be miraculous! If they thought parthenogenesis just happens once in a while then it wouldn't be a miracle would it!
Honestly, I can genuinely see reasons for doubting the Virgin Birth but this isn't one of them.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
But since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother’s wife, so that he would not give offspring to his brother.
Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on
:
Yes, see, Onan knew where babies came from.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
Yes. So a) he was aware that children normally result from sex-with-seed, and b) he was also aware that his father Judah was expecting him to have sex-with-seed (coitus non-interruptus?) with Tamar in order to do the necessary to bring about pregnancy. Onan is notable because he is subverting the clear expectation of his culture, which is that you will have coitus-non-interruptus NOW precisely in order to bring about the birth of a child for your dead brother, who has no other way of getting a legal heir. The reason Onan is villainized is because he refuses to do what everybody knows is necessary.
If the culture believed that it was possible for a woman to get pregnant from a previous sexual encounter (as in, more than a menstrual cycle intervening), there would be no need for levirate sex. Just continue to keep the woman around until eventually she gives birth to the long-delayed biological son of her dead husband.
The presence of the Onan story, and in fact of the whole levirate cultural thingy, demonstrates that they knew a man out of the sexual picture for more than a menstrual cycle wasn't going to be siring any babies with that woman.
Posted by BroJames (# 9636) on
:
Indeed the child of the dead man's widow counted as the dead man's child, took his inheritance, and was responsible in due course for her care in her old age. That's why the nearer kinsman in Ruth wasn't that keen on getting the field when he discovered that it would also include caring for Ruth and probably Naomi too, and that it wouldn't effectively form part of his estate. But this legal fiction did not mean that they believed the child was biologically the child of the dead man. That seems to me to be an extraordinarily literalistic reading of the text.
Onan knew the child would not be treated as his heir, and he didn't want that.
Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on
:
But, the story is based on a legal point - Er had died without an heir, Onan was to sleep with Tamar to provide Er with an heir. When Judah died, his wealth would have passed to his sons, with Er dead without an heir then that share of the inheritance would pass to Onan. By spilling his seed, Onan prevents Er having an heir and ensures he will inherit when Judah dies. The only reason he spills his seed is because he knows that if he doesn't then Tamar may become pregnant.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
:
And anyway, all this Old Testament stuff is irrelevant to what St Luke would have thought. The guy was a physician and his grasp of Greek was pretty good. Therefore, he most likely knew about Greek medicine. We don't have to guess about Greek medical beliefs - enough Greek medical texts have survived. And though they had some strange ideas about conception, none of them thought a father wasn't strictly necessary.
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
The law in Deuteronomy is definitely about not remarrying a former wife after an intervening marriage..., makes no sense without a different understanding of conception and gestation.
But that understanding makes even less sense of that law (though it would make sense of in family marriage*). In that there isn't the prohibition against marrying a divorcee/widower which is what's needed. If that were the argument then the remarryer would be the better rather than yet a third contributor (fourth if the woman counts ).
And generally where bio is dodgy, I get the impression that the mother get neglected.
*though so would other ideas.
The other story that needs some sense of biology, is David & Uriah.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
They didn't think you could get pregnant without sex with a man, and they knew it was the semen that was important, but there seems to have been a widespread belief, reflected in the passages we've been looking at, that some part of the semen remained in the woman (in her blood, it was assumed) and would be expressed, presumably to a diminishing degree, in subsequent births.
As others have said, this is barely relevant to the topic.
Posted by BroJames (# 9636) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
there seems to have been a widespread belief, reflected in the passages we've been looking at, that some part of the semen remained in the woman…
I profoundly disagree that the passages you have cited reflect such a belief.
That represents a fundamentalistically literalist reading of the text, not justified by the text itself or, as far as I know by, any other evidence in the text or from our (limited) knowledge of the culture. It makes no contribution to any understanding we might or might not have about beliefs about the begetting of children either at whatever date the text came into being or in C1st BCE. It has nothing to contribute one way or the other to any discussion about what people might have believed about the claimed virgin birth of Jesus. You're right, therefore, that it's very tangential to the thread.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
Hatless, I have to ask - do you believe in the Incarnation? ISTM that if you do, you have already accepted the violation and everything else is straining at gnats.
The Incarnation is a tool or theme that I use as I think about my faith. It's a way of expressing the significance of Jesus Christ. But when you ask if I believe in it, I wonder what exactly you have in mind, and what a yes would be tying me to.
I have in mind the idea that Christ was God in some sense that isn't true of me, you or Jeremy Corbyn.
That's OK then. I believe in the Incarnation very enthusiastically.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
They didn't think you could get pregnant without sex with a man, and they knew it was the semen that was important, but there seems to have been a widespread belief, reflected in the passages we've been looking at, that some part of the semen remained in the woman (in her blood, it was assumed) and would be expressed, presumably to a diminishing degree, in subsequent births.
Compare with the belief of the ancient Modenwestennas that two people can swap a child's existing DNA with their own via a ritual called 'adoption'. Upon signing what were called 'adoption papers' it was believed that they became the parents of the child.
Seriously, child is not solely a biological category in any society. It is a cultural category just as much. To claim that the OT writers had an essentially biological understanding of whose child is whose in these texts, and that this esssentially biological understanding is faulty, is a naive eisegesis. A self-proclaimed anti-realist particularly ought not to make that interpretation.
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
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quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
quote:
Originally posted by BroJames:
The Bonhoeffer reference comes from Letters and Papers from Prison from a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated 16th July, 1944. (p. 129 in my SCM Press 1981 p/b Abridged Edition).
In the letter (ISTM) he is working on his thinking about what it means to live in a world which has done away with the idea of God as a working hypothesis. His criticism of Barth and others is that they, he says, seek to assert the authority of the church or the authority of revelation in the scriptures. It is an attitude of "We believe this because it is the teaching of the Church" or "We believe this because it is what the Bible teaches" which he resists as being a leap of death into the Middle Ages.
It would be interesting to see how he would engage with the rather different discussions about the interface between science and religion which have emerged during the second half of the 20th century.
Interestingly in the context of this thread, Bonhoeffer's response to the intellectual climate as he sees it appears to be strongly rooted in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ.
That's helpful, thanks.
And yes, that does sound very much like Bonhoeffer-- and as true and relevant today as it was then. His point, of course, would seem to be the complete opposite of what you appear to be arguing here.
Could you explain why you think Bonhoeffer and I are taking opposite sides?
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
They didn't think you could get pregnant without sex with a man, and they knew it was the semen that was important, but there seems to have been a widespread belief, reflected in the passages we've been looking at, that some part of the semen remained in the woman (in her blood, it was assumed) and would be expressed, presumably to a diminishing degree, in subsequent births.
Compare with the belief of the ancient Modenwestennas that two people can swap a child's existing DNA with their own via a ritual called 'adoption'. Upon signing what were called 'adoption papers' it was believed that they became the parents of the child.
Seriously, child is not solely a biological category in any society. It is a cultural category just as much. To claim that the OT writers had an essentially biological understanding of whose child is whose in these texts, and that this esssentially biological understanding is faulty, is a naive eisegesis. A self-proclaimed anti-realist particularly ought not to make that interpretation.
This tangent refuses to die!
I'm not making any claim about the meaning of child. I know that there was a belief before modern genetics that some part of the male principle persisted in the female and could be expressed in subsequent matings with different males, and I'm suggesting that a law in Deuteronomy and levirate marriage might be evidence that some at least in ancient Israelite society held that view.
The bigger point is that there were numerous different understandings of conception and inheritance in biblical times, and we mustn't assume that Matthew and Luke's understanding of these matters, and the way they framed their ideas of the Virgin Birth on the one hand, and what seems obvious to people today (with our identical world views) on the other, are similar.
[ 29. September 2016, 22:59: Message edited by: hatless ]
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
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quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
I have in mind the idea that Christ was God in some sense that isn't true of me, you or Jeremy Corbyn.
That's OK then. I believe in the Incarnation very enthusiastically.
Well ISTM the Incarnation, with or without the Chalcedonian definitions, is already, in your terms, an example of the outside breaking in.
ISTM the dichotomy you describe already has a name in classical theo-speak: it is the Scandal of Particularity. The idea that an infinite God was bound in a particular man in a particular time and place. And this Scandal isn't a theological obscurity but lies at the heart of Christianity.
So classical theologians agree that God is the ground of our being and the Prime Mover - which corresponds to your 'nature is super' - but also, although the 'old man on a cloud' stuff that the ex Bishop of Woolwich objected to isn't literally true, it's nonetheless somehow a fitting image for God - which I think corresponds to your 'super-natural'. Just as God is the God of generalities - such as the Imago Dei in each of us - He can also be the God of particularities - the Incarnation. And in the same way, if He is the God of general scientific laws, He can also be the God of specific events, such as miracles.
Posted by Honest Ron Bacardi (# 38) on
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hatless wrote: quote:
The bigger point is that there were numerous different understandings of conception and inheritance in biblical times, and we mustn't assume that Matthew and Luke's understanding of these matters, and the way they framed their ideas of the Virgin Birth on the one hand, and what seems obvious to people today (with our identical world views) on the other, are similar.
Is there any chance that you could point us to some source that gives evidence for this assertion about the understanding of conception (relating to the retention of the male seed), hatless? I've not heard of it, and if it exists it needs to be shown that it was believed within the community we are talking about.
There are papers on this subject, as I pointed out in another recent post. And FWIW, they don't conclude that the dominant belief was that the woman merely acted as an incubator. That would more realistically describe the medieval view, which is sometimes called sub-Aristotelian. (Aristotle believed that conception required two active principles - the seed from the man and the menstrual blood from the woman).
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on
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So, hatless, how does Incarnation work without being physically conceived by the Holy Spirit? And if that's impossible how can dead meat be resurrected?
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