02-16-2007, 02:50 PM | #821 | |||||||||
Elf Lord
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Second, my NIV Bible translation translates the scripture the way it does, and it is based upon the early Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic texts, and the translation was worked out by over a hundred scholars. These things aren't a powerful refutation of your point, but they do leave me questioning it and with my hands tied as to finding evidence confirming or denying your position. Sometimes people translate in a purposely biased or misleading way, in order to support their theological perspective. I need to examine the validity of your argument more closely before I can accept it, and I don't have access to the information. Quote:
But if you're going to just assume that the Bible is wrong rather than proving it's wrong, then what's the point of a debate? And I wouldn't go by the King James Version's translation over the more recent translations. The King James Version was based on the Textus Receptus, which was compiled by Erasmus. Quote:
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Which Hebrew Old Testament translation are you using? Quote:
The thing is, these passages are all written of as physical events. They aren't written in poetic form, and in no passage does it say they are visions, dreams or words from the Lord. Hence it would have to be a modern interpretation imposed on the text that says this was a non-historical event, a metaphor. When it's written as historical and interpreted as non-historical, we're getting into people deciding for themselves what their religion is and what their God is saying. They aren't hearing God and listening to him anymore, but rather are making up their own religion on their terms, rather than accepting what the Bible says. That's the major error of religious liberalism. It has no ground to stand on and rely on- only the slush of a swamp.
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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02-16-2007, 03:34 PM | #822 | |
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02-16-2007, 04:30 PM | #823 | ||||||||
Elf Lord
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The more documents you have, over the larger an area of geography, the more you can cross-check them to work out what the original would have said. I'll give you some sources. Bruce Metzger got a master's degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, a doctorate from Princeton University, and was awarded honorary doctorates by five colleges universities, including St. Andrews University in Scotland, the University of Munster in Germany, and Potchefstroom University in South Africa. He has authored and edited fifty books, served as resident scholar at Tyndale House, Cambridge, England, as visiting fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, in 1974 and at Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1979. He is professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary after a forty-six-year career teaching the New Testament, was chairman of the New Revised Standard Version Bible Committee, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and serves on the Kuratorium of Vetus Latina Institute at the Monastery of Beuron, Germany. He is the past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, the International Society for New Testament Studies, and the North American Patristic Society. I cited this background on him from page 57 of "The Case for Christ." In his words, "In addition to Greek manuscripts, we also have translations of the gospels into other languages at a relatively early time-into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. And beyond that, we have what may be called secondary translations made a little later, like Armenian and Gothic. And a lot of others- Georgian, Ethiopic, a great variety. "[This matters] because even if we had no Greek mansucripts today, by piecing together the information from these translations from a relatively early date, we could actually reproduce the contents of the New Testament. In addition to that, even if we lost all the Greek manuscripts and the early translations, we could still reproduce the contents of the New Testament from the multiplicity of quotations in commentaries, sermons, letters, and so forth of the early church fathers." According to Metzger, "The quantity of New Testament material is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of antiquity. Next to the New Testament, the greatest amount of manuscript testimony is of Homer's Iliad, which was the bible of the ancient Greeks. There are fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts of it today. Some are quite fragmentary. They come down to us from the second and third century AD and following. When you consider that Homer composed his epic about 800 BC, you can see that there's a very lengthy gap." According to FF Bruce, eminent professor at the University of Manchester, England, and author of The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, "There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament." And according to Frederic Kenyon, the former director of the British Museum and author of The Palaeography of Greek Papyri, "in no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament." He further said, "The last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed." Quote:
The major doctrines of the Christian Church are repeated in many places in the different gospels and epistles, rather than confined to any single passage in any particular book. So if any variation did happen in the passage involving a major doctrine, this would be clarified by the other passages and by other books, including other "variations" of the same book. Yet in addition to this, even the more significant errors didn't get close to damaging the credibility of the New Testament, because there is such a multiplicity of documents over such a broad area. In Metzger's words, "the more significant variations do not overthrow any doctrine of the church." (The Case for Christ, p. 65) Quote:
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The King James is beautiful, with elegant poetry and word choice. It does have more errors of it than the other translations I know of, though. Quote:
About your comment regarding real text-criticism, I'd again refer you to the multiplicity of documents and the work of the scholars I've cited. But I'd like to add to that the point that several of the New Testament books were regarded as scripture by the Early Church right from the get-go (In 2 Peter 3:16, Peter refers to the books by Paul as scripture), and so would have been carefully preserved on merit of that as well. Quote:
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 02-16-2007 at 04:32 PM. |
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02-16-2007, 04:43 PM | #824 | ||||
Elf Lord
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And here you go, if you want someone to refer to him specifically as a mathematician: Quote:
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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02-16-2007, 04:45 PM | #825 | |
Elf Lord
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 02-16-2007 at 04:49 PM. |
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02-16-2007, 05:02 PM | #826 | |||||
Advocatus Diaboli
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How do these statements… Quote:
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Morality does stem from the “utilitarian ordering of society”, you are just not looking deep enough to see the beauty of it. The point is that it is never useful for us to follow "utterly twisted ways" and, in the long run, those who follow those ways fail ultimately. I’ve played in bands for years. Whenever you jam with other people, there are moments where everything just kind of clicks together. You get into a groove that, while hard to pin down as any one specific thing, makes the music sound better than ever before, even to the non-musician. It’s the difference between seeing a band and saying, “that was pretty good” or “that was awesome!” Some musicians almost look on grooving like that as a kind of magical, soulful thing. For some it’s even a “religious experience”. It certainly can be, but what is actually behind it is much more mundane. When you play an instrument, you have your own talents: your virtuosity, your creativity, your energy. How much of each of these you have determines how entertaining you will be to others. You don’t have to have them all. Someone who is very energetic can make up for a lot, just as someone with a lot of technical talent can have zero stage presence and still entertain. When you play with a group of people another factor enters that picture: your ability to interact and complement one another. I’ve played with some awesome musicians who are terrible in groups. They only play to themselves and expect the others to follow along. They can be entertaining, but they never really get that groove. A band that grooves well is one where every musician really listens to and knows the other people he jams with. He knows what kind of fills a drummer is likely to play. He knows when to play hard and when to lay back so another member can take the spotlight. The result is something greater than the sum of the parts. It’s not just a few musicians playing together. It’s a Band. Human society is the same way. The “magic” comes from the interaction of human beings with one another. The best human term for this ability to interact may be empathy. It comes from thousands of years of human societal interaction and is passed down by our parents and our parent’s parents. It’s the sum of human experience on this planet that has brought us to where we are, and is what will bring us forward. It also includes religion, but much like the musical term "groove", religion is a just a name for the very complex human interactions that we have a hard time seeing for what they are. Or, if we do see them, we discount them because we can't believe that humans could bring about such a thing. The thing is, any one human can not. Instead, morality stems from humanity as a whole. Ultimately, it is utilitarian. You don’t kill people indiscriminately because you’d find yourself dead in short order. You raise your children in a responsible manner so they will become positive contributors to society. The society you are also a part of. It’s empathizing with your fellow human being and acting upon those feelings to better society and thus better yourself along the way. Becoming entwined with the world. Finding that social groove. That’s a whole lot of meaning in my book, even if we end up as nothing more than a pile of dirt when we are done. Each and every one of us lives on in society for as long as humanity lives on. And the humility is not before god, but before our own earthly history.
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02-16-2007, 05:21 PM | #827 |
Elf Lord
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I think that listing
the ways, you, Leif, depart, in my opinion, from the beliefs essential to Christianity would not be a productive activity.
The world is not a happy enough place, as it is. *goes to look for a thread about Spring training* |
02-16-2007, 05:46 PM | #828 | |
Word Santa Claus
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Very important NOT TO FOLLOW. 's a joke...
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02-16-2007, 05:59 PM | #829 |
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I think I'm just going to stop bothering with this argument, after this post, Lief, since you seem to ignore that my point is not to say that it is impossible to read the New Testament back into the Old, but that the Old can be perfectly well interpreted without taking Jesus as the Messiah or accepting a Trinity. I've found several translations, just by googling, that read "the Lord is our righteousness" not "the Lord our righteousness" - because Hebrew, like Latin, allows you to drop forms of the verb to be.
You also don't seem to bother to read what I say very carefully. "Second sentence of what verse and chapter?" No verse and chapter. Second sentence of the quote from me you had chopped out of my argument and then gotten confused by earlier. And the Bible talks of many things as physical events which I doubt are so. I strongly doubt God actually wed Israel in a marriage ceremony, but you'll find that several times described without explicit poetry. I find the children to be just such a metaphor as well. On the other note of Jesus' ancestry, I've also found non-KJV translations that read "which was [the son] of Heli" following Joseph. The Vulgate, done directly from the Greek, has "qui fuit Heli" (which was of Heli) and the qui quite clearly refers to Ioseph, the most recent nominative form.
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02-16-2007, 07:35 PM | #830 | ||
Elf Lord
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Count Comfect, you have me very thoroughly outflanked on the language issues, as I don't know the Hebrew language. I haven't the resources to research your statements and find out whether you're right or not, or what other factors may be involved, and also I don't have the linguistic background with this that you have. So I'll have to bow out on this one, for now. You've won the first round, for your knowledge is greater than mine.
If I ever learn more about these issues and how the language relates to them, I may come back to you on it. At present, I know that there are many Old Testament translations that clearly state these different passages as "The Lord our Righteousness," and "his name shall be called . . . Mighty God," and from my perspective, maybe they're right! Or maybe your translation is better! I don't even know what the translation you're speaking from is. I can't judge whether or not the Christians are imposing their interpretation on these words or you are using a faulty translation, or are making some other error. So I'll just have to submit you've won our first round of this conversation. You're far more knowledgeable than me on this, at present. Quote:
On the marriage issue, I have a rather different interpretation. In my view, God invented human marriage as the symbol of the divine relationship between himself and humanity. So from my perspective, it would be the other way around . Human marriages are the symbol, and God's marriage with Israel is the real thing . This view comes primarily from the New Testament, though not solely. The Psalms talk about how all nature reveals God's glory, and I interpret the Song of Songs as talking about God's relationship with mankind as well. Quote:
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." Last edited by Lief Erikson : 02-16-2007 at 07:39 PM. |
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02-16-2007, 07:40 PM | #831 | |
Elf Lord
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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02-17-2007, 01:02 AM | #832 | ||||||||
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This is a continuation of post #724.
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Where my own moral code, the one I learned growing up, will "trump" the scripture is where I feel people have been interfering with the scripture (through misinterpretation or something else). It's not that my moral code is overriding the scripture, it's that what I learned of the scripture is not jiving with what people are telling me the scripture says. Quote:
Our (you and I) belief in Scripture does not really anchor human morality. It does for us, but humanity is just as volitile. Quote:
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"I can add some more, if you'd like it. Calling your Chief Names, Wishing to Punch his Pimply Face, and Thinking you Shirriffs look a lot of Tom-fools." - Sam Gamgee, p. 340, Return of the King Quote:
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02-17-2007, 02:13 AM | #833 | |||||
Elf Lord
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I think that our modern culture is doing the same thing with abortion, except on a far larger scale. You know my views on that. It is extraordinary to me how us humans can rationalize mass murder, and it boggles my mind that so many people in the West are accepting of the practice. Sometimes I think about it and try to grasp it in my head, but I always fail. I understand the views and arguments, as I've gone over them so many times on these Entmoot threads. But it just blows my mind that people can believe those things or accept those reasons as good enough, and continue to do what they do. Many of the greatest crimes of human history have been committed because of some people dehumanizing others. Quote:
Or are you saying that we are anchored through scripture, but other humans have different forms of morality and are anchored through them? Are you saying all value systems are equally valid, or that all value systems that correspond with an absolute morality that exists and is revealed through scripture are valid, or that the truth of human morality supersedes scripture . . . or . . . Plainly I'm not understanding what you're saying . Quote:
There are parts of the US today, and a much bigger problem in South America, where gangs kill one another and have complete disregard for the value of life. That's a culture with very different moral values. I believe human moral values are relative. There aren't general principles that everyone adheres to across all civilizations. I believe that there is one absolute morality, which is of God, and whenever anyone anywhere behaves in accordance with that spiritual law, they will benefit from it. Whenever anyone abandons it, they will suffer accordingly. The reason human values are relative is that humans have rejected God and don't understand his ways. Most humans get some parts of God's moral law right and some parts of it wrong. When our views about morality come from ourselves rather than listening to God, that is relative and maybe we'll get it right and maybe we'll get it wrong. But the chances of hitting it on the button are slim, because humans have darkened understanding and evil in their hearts. And even if they could work out for themselves all that is moral and immoral, they could not follow it perfectly. The scripture reveals the absolute morality. People cannot follow it of their own will, however. They might succeed in some places and fail in others, but they cannot behave in a sinless fashion required by the Law. For the law of morality is absolute and doesn't find sin of any size acceptable. That's why we need God not only to forgive us, but we need him to save us from our sin, which doesn't mean that he just says it's all right, but rather that we will cease to behave in sinful ways because he is in us. What do you think? And which parts of this do you disagree with? Quote:
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If the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. ~Oscar Wilde, written from prison Oscar Wilde's last words: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." |
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02-17-2007, 02:43 AM | #834 | ||||
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The alternative to making the literal vs. metaphorical determination would be to take it literally all the time (and we both know how scary that would be) or to take it as a metaphor all the time. What do you do? (I'm always happy to learn a new way to understand something.) Quote:
As a side note, it's illegal to deny the Holocaust in Canada.
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02-19-2007, 09:52 AM | #835 | |
Master of Orchestration President Emeritus of Entmoot 2004-2008
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btw, if you don't mind my saying, I imagine you looking like this:
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ACALEWIA- President of Entmoot hectorberlioz- Vice President of Entmoot Acaly und Hektor fur Presidants fur EntMut fur life! Join the discussion at Entmoot Election 2010. "Stupidissimo!"~Toscanini The Da CINDY Code The Epic Poem Of The Balrog of Entmoot: Here ~NEW! ~ Thinking of summer vacation? AboutNewJersey.com - NJ Travel & Tourism Guide |
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02-19-2007, 11:40 AM | #836 |
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You imagine him looking like a choir of singing pipes on a pipe organ? Wow. *taken aback* *flashes off to somewhere else*
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KI6PFA Amateur Radio Operator
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02-19-2007, 12:28 PM | #837 | |
Word Santa Claus
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02-19-2007, 06:04 PM | #838 | ||||||
Dread Mothy Lord and Halfwitted Apprentice Loremaster
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EDIT: Confusticate and bebother it all! I lost like 2/3rds of the post!
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02-19-2007, 06:13 PM | #839 | |
Elf Lord
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Actually,
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Sorry about the missing stuff. I hate that. |
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02-19-2007, 06:50 PM | #840 |
Lady of Letters
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On a sort-of related note:
Churches back plan to unite under Pope Any thoughts? I'd love to see it happen one day, though I very much doubt it will be soon.
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And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand As they have done for centuries, as they will For centuries to come, when not a soul Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks, When England is not England, when mankind Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea, Consolingly disastrous, will return While the strange starfish, hugely magnified, Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool. |
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