Questions for religious people?

Not everything you read is true.

“also this is just information I’ve gathered from things I’ve heard from people, about the bible.”

I think the bible allows for microevolution (changes and adaptation within a population), but seems to be against macroevolution (change at or above the level of species).

Like the different variations of the same species of birds that darwin found on his trip to the galapagos? But I thought that anything involving evolution whatsoever was just ignored. Is there anything that suggests your idea to be true, from the bible?

I agree with phoenyx. Genesis mentions some genetic variation within the first generation after A&E, implying that one of their children was dark complected.

Also does the bible believe in pangea?

Nope, my bad. That was NOAH’s son, Ham

People lived longer in the beginning of the bible, there seemed to be more variation in size (mentions “giants” and Goliath) and it mentions that Ham’s wife was dark-skinned (if I remember correctly), which would all suggest, to me, that the human species has changed/evolved.

So the bible shows evidence of evolution/ genetic variation, but it does not directly imply that such a process exists?

Oh also, another Bible question, how is it physically possible for one man to gather two of every living creature and put them on a boat that he built (was it by himself?-forget that too), and sail away to live happily ever after?

Yeah, I think that the whole “Noah” episode raises even more problematic genetic questions than do Adam and Eve. Not only do you have the whole human gene pool again reduced to a very few individuals, but every single species on earth reduced down to one or two mating pairs!

lol@thebible
see people just make it so damn hard to believe in anything.
Then again I never did believe, even when I was a young child I always questioned religion. I mean it’s gunna suck if I’m wrong about the whole no god thing, but then again, the only way I would ever believe is for selfish reasons. I just don’t want to go to this supposed “hell”. And permit I do take up religious activities for my own selfish reasons, is that not a sin? and would I not go to hell just for that? and is it not cruel of god to deny humans who simply do not believe, to go to heaven, but rather spend all eternity in hell?

This is exactly why myths aren’t supposed to be taken literally. The symbolic and metaphorical meanings of these things are dense and enriching. The literal meanings are strange and awkward. If it we weren’t so culturally saturated with it, we’d respond the same way to it that we do to the idea of zeus making love to leda as a swan, or the norse myth of a cow licking a stone and bringing forth a man-god.
I think the rich metaphore is lost when people take these things literally. The real meaning of it collapses. The bible is translated again and again and different things are literally said each time. If we keep the notion of the metaphore to the mythology, its consistent. Myth is not intended to be 100% literal. Its to teach things. To learn life lessons from. A life lesson isn’t: “The world is 6000 years old”. A life lesson is “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth…” or “If you’re given a garden of beauty and perfection and a life to equal it, don’t take advantage of the trust that your superior put in you and go against his singular explicit instructions. Ignore peer pressure, and think for yourself.”
All myth is filled with these timeless concepts.

@Grim
You’ve just described “Pascal’s Wager”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal’s_Wager

@Grim: Here’s a quote that comes to mind. (Particularly the last bit of it, but the whole thing is included to give context.)

“People will then often say “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would chose not to worship him anyway.)”
-Douglas Adams

@delirium: See now the way you have described the bible as myth is obviously an atheistic view(which I agree with), but most of the truly religious people I know would never admit this to be true, and would stubbornly stick to what they have come to accept as the truth. My questions were asked so I could see the response from the people who so persistently defy all logical explanation for fault within the bible’s “truth”. However if you look at it as mythology, then I could find its content almost enjoyable!

@harp: I couldn’t find anything that I described. sorry :[

A question I have for both religious and atheist believers, what made you believe/disbelieve?

@Grim
Pascal looked at the whole belief/non-belief issue as a kind of high-stakes bet. To paraphrase: “If I believe in God but am wrong, I haven’t lost much, The believer’s lifestyle isn’t so terrible. But if I choose non-belief and am wrong, the consequences would be disastrous. Hence I’d be better off betting on belief”

In fairness to Pascal, who was one hell of a logician, he never intended this kind of reasoning to be a stand-in for more heartfelt belief, but rather as an impetus for it.

I don’t find it at all compelling, personally.

Oh, thanks for the summery, but what I was saying was that even if I chose to believe it would be for all the wrong reasons, therefore canceling out any of my desired consequences (going to heaven).

Yeah, I think that’s how most thinking folks would see it nowadays, but I think there’s still a whiff of Pascal’s wager that underlies a lot of religious belief.

To the additional question. Here’s my reasoning (and apologies beforehand to anyone that finds this offensive. It’s not):
If there is a god and s/he is almighty, why does s/he need us to worship her/him? If we are created in god’s image, how can we do god justice by denying human nature (greed, lust, envy, to name but a few).

If there is a god and s/he is almighty and created us in his image, I can’t convince myself to believe that s/he would want us to turn our backs on our nature and waste the precious life we have been fortunate enough to have on worshipping her/him, rather than living, experiencing and enjoying the world.

If s/he does want us to conform to something that is against our nature and spend our lives worshipping her/him, s/he’s not so ‘above-it-all’ (I know there’s a word for it, but can’t think of it right now), because that’s vanity. And that wouldn’t show much faith in her/his own creation, yet supposedly s/he can’t be wrong…..

I could go on, but basically, I just can not buy in to it. Even if (on the off chance) there is a god, I don’t believe any of the religions have gotten it right.

People take the word myth wrong. There’s no more validity in Christian myth than there is in Hindu. There’s also no less validity in Christian myth than there is in Hindu (or any other). Myth doesn’t imply falseness. Myth is just a traditional story that passes on particular values. It doesn’t mean that it’s particularly incorrect.

In my opinion there’s truth in all traditions. There are plenty of things that are exaggerated for emphasis to make them ‘miraculous’. But the good deeds of people, and the prophets and so on I consider to be all fairly accurate. That’s why all Myth has historical context. People tell of what they know. A collection of Myths (a religious text) was created through much collaboration. These tales are both a mythic text and a historical one that started as a verbal tradition. You see it over and over again in more modern settings. The Aztecs reactions to the Spaniards. The worlds response to Pompeii. The Egyptian myth even talks about these effects from a huge volcanic eruption. They felt them all the way in Egypt and mention them in their mythological texts! We’ve found artifacts of wars mentioned by the Greeks. The greeks didn’t just explain these events historically, they described them along with the religious interactions and implications of everything.

Sorry for the rambling. I just absolutely LOVE mythology/theology. Its one of my absolute favorite things to study. Especially comparative mythology and using it to map out human travel and spread and comparing it to other models (liguistics, archeological, etc.) and…....

right…. rambling…. sorry.

@delirium
Don’t apologise. Your ‘ramblings’ are very interesting to read :)

I appreciate that you’re actually reading them. ;) I wasn’t sure anyone (who wasn’t looking to flame me for it) would.
If you’re particularly interested in this, I highly suggest looking up Joseph Cambell. He’s incredible. He has books, but they’re quite large and dense. What’s more accessible is a video series he did. If you want the name, in particular, I can get it for you.

delirium makes some great points. I think we misread myth because we impose our Post-Enlightenment rationale on narratives that were never meant to be interpreted using the same measures of truth that we rely on. To us, something either happened or it didn’t. Period. But for most of man’s history, the factuality of an account was beside the point. What was that Native-American way of introducing a story? Something like, “I don’t know if this actually happened, but it’s certainly true”

Thanks for the tip. I like this quote of his: “God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that. ”

@wildflower: Isn’t he excellent? I could never say it all as well as he does… but he has such a rounded understanding and has had so much influence on my perceptions of the world.

@Harp: Thank you, and it reminds me of the quote: “History is written by the victors.” Nothing is black or white. There’s all these gray area in history and mythology and tradition. Literal interpretations can be dangerous.

@wildflower
I had never seen that quote, but that’s a fantastic way to put it, and is very close to my own understanding. I find that any attempt to delineate God, even by using the word “God”, is non-sensical. I’ve tried but failed to find a quote (could it be from Meister Eckhardt?) to the effect that “nowhere in the Bible is God even mentioned”.

wow. If I’m the only “religious person” who’s going to respond to this discussion, it’s going to take me a long time to write a response tonight.

@Harp
Sounds intriguing. Haven’t found it yet, but you got me googling :)

@WF: Campbell is a huge part of my education. When most kids were going to sunday school… I was being taught about world religions and being read Campbell. I was given lessons on all of the primary religions and my mother and I read each text together and would discuss all of the ideas that intrigued me or those that I didn’t understand. (My mother is Not an atheist). **Takes a picture of the mythology section of the house.** Its kind of absurd… but i’ve read or skimmed every single book there at one point or another. The top shelf and about half of the second shelf are all campbell. The rest are various books all about religion/myth/religious texts/characters in the texts/the texts themselves… etc.

Phoenyx, I’m not Christian (which is what I assume Grim meant), but I would say I’m religious. I’m Buddhist.

All this searching for quotes…..I so need to read Nietzsche! I’ve read about him, but I’m just finding so many good quotes (but don’t worry, I won’t misinterpret his work as a certain Austrian did).

Mmm. Buddhism is one of my absolute favorite religions. It’s my favorite to study, to read texts of, to look at art of… and that which i feel most akin to.

Christianity in particular does not deny that evolution exists – it denies the possibility of macro-evolution. Micro-evolution does exist without a doubt. It is the concept of one species evolving into another species that Christianity and a number of other belief systems reject.

The issue with religious texts and particularly with the Old Testament is that it relies heavily on two principles: The first is that or story telling through generations which at some point will cause enough deviation that very little of the original truthful story remains. Stories told like this are also blurred between fiction and non-fiction. For example, the bible may well be based on actual events which have been contorted by hyperbole and the need for excitement in the re-telling of history. In this case, people have, over time, produced a story which creates an additional character to explain the phenomena that occurred: God. This means that what is accepted as truth to the people who believe in this text is only partially true, or in some cases completely fictional.
The second issue is that these kinds of texts don’t rely on citation or scientific method in oder to prove their point, they will say that you have to believe in something in order for it to reveal itself, that makes sense because as soon as you believe in something you will start connecting together information which confirms your belief.
People can disprove the Bible all they want, but it is really only the issue of how you understand it and if you take it all in literally that counts. Anyone can prove their religious beliefs if they only use small examples from the Bible as their evidence.

Answers in Genesis is a ministry that answers many honest questions such as yours including pangea, etc. They produce a video that I believe is called “One Blood” that addresses the issue of races. Pasted below is an excerpt from one of their websites. Here is the link to the entire article, http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/are-there-different-races. They also offer an explanation about why interbreeding in early days, even up to Abraham who married his half sister, was not a genetic problem . I hope this is helpful.

“Racial” Differences
But some people think there must be different races of people because there appear to be major differences between various groups, such as skin color and eye shape.

The truth, though, is that these so-called “racial characteristics” are only minor variations among people groups. If one were to take any two people anywhere in the world, scientists have found that the basic genetic differences between these two people would typically be around 0.2 percent—even if they came from the same people group.19 But these so-called “racial” characteristics that people think are major differences (skin color, eye shape, etc.) “account for only 0.012 percent of human biological variation.”20

Dr. Harold Page Freeman, chief executive, president, and director of surgery at North General Hospital in Manhattan, reiterates, “If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of 0.01 percent.”21

In other words, the so-called “racial” differences are absolutely trivial— overall, there is more variation within any group than there is between one group and another. If a white person is looking for a tissue match for an organ transplant, for instance, the best match may come from a black person, and vice versa. ABC News claims, “What the facts show is that there are differences among us, but they stem from culture, not race.”22

Although the science that you list is fairly accurate… the rest of that site is absolute bollocks.

For lack of better terms I’m going to use “atheist” and “believer.” In this case a believer is a person who believes in a being with incredible power: something like the ability to create a universe and the laws that govern it. The atheist takes a story like Noah, Jonah, Jesus walking on the water, etc. and points out that it is inconsistent with scientific evidence or general observation. To the believer, the atheist has just defined what a miracle is. The atheist is bewildered that someone can believe in something he/she considers on the level of stories of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. The believer is thinking about how awesome it is that God doesn’t always sit back an allow things to take their natural course, but is intervening and revealing Himself to us. Interpretations are different, so nothing is going to come of it.

As to why God needs to be worshiped; he doesn’t. I think He is generally regarded as self-sufficient and without needs. He does require that believers worship him, however. Why? To keep them humble. To keep them properly focused and centered. To provide a fixed point by which they can navigate their lives.

I don’t think that the language of “created in His image” is strong enough that you can infer that he has the same human nature that we do. Maybe the point of giving us commandments that work contrary to some aspects of human nature is that we need challenges to grow and develop. Strength comes by working against resistance; working on and against ourselves.

As to whether or not the bible should be taken literally or not, some parts are obviously not. Isaiah, Daniel, Revelations, etc. all come to mind. However, other parts are. The exercise of figuring it out is left up to the reader. :)

As to why I believe, I’ve had some struggles in my life and I believe God was there for me and pulled me through. He’s been loyal to me so I’m going to be loyal to Him.
(amongst other things)

@Harp
I’m intrigued by the quote “nowhere in the Bible is God even mentioned” because, obviously, the very first chapter and very first verse state: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” so I’m curious what the quote means. Also, I’d like to hear your perspective more, because I think you’d have a different take on things.

@Grim
I can’t think of anything off of the top of my head that would prohibit pangea. In fact (if I remember correctly) some people think that Genesis 10:25 refers to the division of the continents.

@ phoenyx
That’s a beautiful and refreshing expression of your outlook. This kind of discussion can so easily veer toward both “teams” falling back into entrenched defensive positions, and nobody benefits from that kind of thing, so I appreciate that you’re not going there.

Re that quote: again, I regret that I haven’t been able to dig up a source for that, but it was definitely someone writing from a Christian perspective. There is a considerable overlap between the teachings of what have been called “mystic Christians” (e.g. Johannas Eckhardt, St. John of the Cross, et al) and Buddhism. Both stress the ineffible nature of the “ultimate reality”, what Christians would call God. In other words, anything that we might say or think about God, even thinking of God as a separate and distinct being, necessarily underestimates God. A different formulation of that quote might be “If I say anything about God, then it’s no longer God that I’m talking about). That’s the spirit of the quote and what I understand Campbell to be saying, too

Okay…the climate was different then…as in better….and they were closer to perfect as well….and maybe….just maybe you think too much and you need to just accept it or do like most of these so called “intelligensias” here on this page and just be an atheist….just some thoughts! Ta Ta!

They may be thoughts, but they sure weren’t sensical ones.

“Sensical”? Well! LOL!!

It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

sensicsal. Like nonsensical without the non.

Sounds sensical to me, delirium.

I appreciate that, Harp

Wordsmiths with religious questions…..fodder for your Webster’s practice and a forum for your writing skills…very impressive….I guess you look very smart.

Uh, I don’t ever intend to sound or act particularly intelligent, and I would NEVER describe myself (or be described) as a wordsmith. Maybe you just need to read more and learn some new words if you can’t keep up…

Oh okay. I’ll just read your perfect posts.

Hope that goes well for you.

Thank you…..it’ll do till I can find a real example.

I suggest getting a library card.

Well…let us know how that works out for you! Stick with Golden books for now though.

AHAHahahahahahahaha, and you stick with your bible.

Done with this, now.

Haha, this page is like a freaking book! I sincerely thank you all for contributing your deep insights, and helping me get a clearer grasp on this bewildering concept! :D