Posted                       

quote:

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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. ...

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Posted                         

quote:

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Originally posted by Enoch:

quote:

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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. ...

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:
Neoliberalism means small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media.

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Posted                       

quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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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.

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Posted                         

quote:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:
Neoliberalism means small government, unregulated markets, and privately owned media.

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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.

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Posted                      

quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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originally posted by hatless:
It's hard to talk about these things, as in technically difficult, because our words and phrases are often unhelpful.

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quote:

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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.

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quote:

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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.

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quote:

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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

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quote:

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originally posted by hatless:
for most people in the more connected bits of the world, most days of the week it is uncontroversial.

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quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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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.

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Posted                          

quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:

quote:

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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.

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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.

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Posted                         

quote:

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Originally posted by St Deird:
Again, hatless - how does this not apply to the resurrection?

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Posted                      

quote:

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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.

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quote:

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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.

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quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:

If a car goes wrong, what percentage will do anything other than get the services of a mechanic?

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quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:
They don't bring, say, astrology into the debate.

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quote:

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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.

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quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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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?

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Well said Lamb Chopped. That gets two

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Brexit wrexit - Sir Graham Watson

Posted                       

quote:

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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?

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quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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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.

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quote:

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originally posted by hatless:
It does.

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Posted                         

quote:

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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.

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Posted                         

quote:

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Originally posted by cliffdweller:

quote:

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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.

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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).

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quote:

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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.

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quote:

---

quote:

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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.

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Apparently you haven't encounter the anti-vax movement.

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quote:

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quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:

If a car goes wrong, what percentage will do anything other than get the services of a mechanic?

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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.

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quote:

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quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:
They don't bring, say, astrology into the debate.

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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:

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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.

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Have you spent much time in academia? There is very little "meeting of minds", especially when there is an energetic disagreement.

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quote:

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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:

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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.

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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.

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Posted                         

quote:

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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.

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Posted                         

quote:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

quote:

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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?

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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:

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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.

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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.

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Posted                         

quote:

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Originally posted by Beeswax Altar:

quote:

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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.

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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.

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quote:

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quote:

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originally posted by hatless:
It does.

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"It does" is not a valid answer to a question that begins "how does."

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Posted                       

quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:
I think that a form of magic is precisely what poetry is.

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Posted                       

quote:

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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.

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Posted                      

quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:
(lots of responses to my comments that seem to be totally missing the point...)

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...then finally getting to the point:

quote:

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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.

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quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:

I can see that I've upset you and a lot of people, and that wasn't my intention.

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quote:

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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.

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Posted                         

quote:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:

quote:

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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.

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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.

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Posted                          

quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:

quote:

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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.

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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Originally posted by hatless:

quote:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:

quote:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Posted                      

quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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Originally posted by Greatest I am:

quote:

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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.

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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

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Posted                       

quote:

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Originally posted by Greatest I am:
Isn't faith described as not having a logical or reasonable foundation for that belief?

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Posted                      

quote:

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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]

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Posted                         

quote:

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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.

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Posted                       

quote:

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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.

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