Any christians experience breakthroughs in their autism?

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Smart sparrow. Humphrey is naturally, like always, utterly correct. However, are you sure he's your pet? It does sounds rather like he does all the thinking. Could it be you have that backwards?

theyre not just arguing, theyre breaking down the pros and cons of each chocolate, researching the ingredients and the various sources for each ingredient etc

It seems Humphrey had you on target since you profess he impresses you more than I do.

You cannot wave a red cloth in front of a bull and expect it to pay no attention.

You do realize, of course, that the publication of the oldest of the accepted Gospels (the Gospel of Luke) dates to sometime after 70 AD, and all the other Gospels (not to mention the Epistles and the Book of Revelation) are even younger than that.

Now, I have no problem with excluding Revelation (I still think St. John the Divine was writing a critique of his current society, expressing his opinion of its eventual destination, couched in allegory and ancient Hebraic codes in order to avoid the attention of the Emperor of Rome), but if you toss all the rest of the New Testament, are you in fact still Christian? <insert impish grin here>


Well, I would certainly expect it to pay no more attention than it would to any other cloth - bulls are colorblind, after all...

For myself, I call myself Christian, although many who claim the title proudly would deny it to me because I don't believe that the Bible is inerrant in all particulars. Much of the Pentateuch is, IMO, best understood as allegory, to explain things to people who didn't have the concepts yet (which explains why, for instance, the sequence of events in Genesis ch 1 is directly contradicted by the sequence in Genesis ch 2); the Epistles should be seen as being filtered through the men who wrote them, especially Paul (who would seem to have been asexual, and have seen this as a blessing - I just see it as evidence that God doesn't need you to be perfect before He'll work through you). I believe in the concept of a living God who loves His creation, but who is letting us have our head because otherwise it kind of obviates the whole free-will thing (perhaps one day I'll understand why it was so important to Him that we have free will), and I believe in the ideals brought to us by His son, the itinerant rabbi who was executed for the high crime of annoying the existing religious establishment (and thus threatening the political stability of the province of Judea - the Roman Empire of that era didn't execute people for religious reasons, but would off you quicker than anything if you endangered the rulers' peace and privileges).

The tricky bit about divine intervention is that God seems to want it to look as much as possible like random chance - I suppose in order to avoid the Observer Effect (if we could prove God existed, there wouldn't be much benefit accruing to belief, would there? It'd be like expecting a blessing for believing in gravity). For myself, I look to the ending of my first, rather unfortunate, marriage, when my ex dumped me for some guy she'd met on AOL. Then, less than a month later, also on AOL (because in the late Nineties, everybody was on AOL - ISPs were hard to come by back then), I met the lovely lady who would become my second wife, mother of my daughter. She was able to accept me for who I am - she actually likes it when I answer the questions on Jeopardy! before the contestant, and is willing to play Scrabble with me provided I let her use a dictionary - and is/was more physically gorgeous than I ever deserved to even meet, much less marry. We talk, we laugh, we rarely argue (and when we do, she's willing to forgive me when I'm right! ), even today, twelve years later; this is good fortune of such ridiculous degree that I find I must credit it to the Divine.

There have been other occasions (like when I asked for a sign of whether I should leave a crappy job, was laid off later that day, and got a vastly better job that paid half again as much a few days later; that one prompted me to look up and say softly, "You didn't need to shout"), but this post is long enough already, wouldn't you agree?

Coming from a bird, I would think that "bird brain" was a complement. If Humphery wanted to insult you he would probably call you a sand brain.

I find this philosophically rather perverse. The concept that God purposely makes it difficult to believe in him indicates an imperfection. If He were fully capable of disguising himself by becoming perceptually invisible He would make it impossible to believe in him. Wouldn't that make atheists true believers?

Obviously you have not attained the level of being bird brained. Birds such as Humphrey are inherently flighty and quite understand that comparable mental conditions are well below the attainment of his companion's mental capability. Once you reach the level of being bird brained this will become obvious. Keep trying.

I don't doubt he tells you that.

Sparrows love stroking human ego to see if they can get them to puff up like a peacock. Humphery did a good job on you.

God allegedly divinely intervened in the Bible several times, so why does he appear to play this game of hide-and-seek? Because the Christian god is false. Christians set faith up as a virtue as a cover for this.

Interestingly enough, we don't really know of the underlying mechanism of gravity, so I'll go ahead and bless you for believing in it.

Having raised Humphrey (he is rather ruffled that you keep misspelling his name) as a son for five years I deeply understand his attitudes and he has the utmost respect for human egos. He has never seen a peacock and would have no idea as to their philosophy and deeply resents your attempts to interfere in and sabotage our family relationships. The intricacies of a sparrow's mind are not capable of disentanglement by someone who has never lived with one.

You do realise (after reading this) that the first century CE ended at the end of the yr 100 CE? Which is 30 years after 70 CE? Revelation was written about 96 CE?

FWIW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel

I know wiki is a questionable reference, but it's easy and it seems to corrispond with what I've read in more authoritive sources RE the experts best guesses.

Bulls are colour blind.

Oh, I just read on, and saw that someone else pointed out that jewel of wisdom before I got there. Never mind.

You do realize, after reading that article and doing a little additional research, that no two "experts" can agree on who the author even was, much less the date it was written - and then there's the contention that it was later badly edited by someone who was unfamiliar with Hebrew...

However, even accepting that date for Revelation, does that mean you'll take Revelation as valid, but reject the Epistles of James and John? (Just want to clarify - most dates for those epistles range into the early to mid 2nd century.)