Looking for religious information, especially Christian

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Converting Catholic here.

If you want to know how to read the Bible from a Christian perspective, it's gonna depend on which tradition you wish to adhere to. Catholics and Orthodox, for example, believe heavily in passed down tradition in addition to the Bible.
Also, the Catholic Bible has more canon books than the Protestant Bible.

Basics to keep in mind.....
-Passage context. Too many people cherry pick verses to make points, but don't take into account the actual context of the verse according to surrounding verses. This leads to a great amount of error.

-Historical context. Many Bibles have footnotes that help with this. But some understandings of things are greatly affected by historical context. For example, the "clobber passage" (anti-LGBTQ) verses end up wildly different when you know history. (Their actual context is believed by some to be the condemnation of the pedophillic practice of pedestry and temple prostitutes, which was common when the New Testament was written.)


I was raised Protestant (specifically baptist), so feel free to ask questions if you'd like.

The writings of many believers often defy my best attempts to understand their perspective, and although they fail to persuade me of anything much, I often find it almost impossible to identify exactly why they fail. Sometimes I'll see clear mistakes in their thinking, but many times my mind will just "bounce off" what they're saying, like oil trying to understand water. It's as if I know it's all wrong but as a scientist I don't like to abandon it until I can explain clearly and exactly what about it is wrong.

This paper offers some explanations as to how ASD brain wiring may in many cases make it so, and how somebody like me may never understand religious thinking:

https://escholarship.org/content/qt6zh3 ... 99502e.pdf

This article from a Christian apologist seems unusual in that it at least starts by acknowledging the logical flaws in many popular theist arguments (for the veracity of scripture) in a way that makes sense to me. Most other apologists don't talk about such things, presumably out of fear of throwing red meat to the other side. I'm still in the process of working through the rest of the article. By the time it ends, it seems to have gone way out of whack with my thinking style. What I'm interested in is, at what point does he begin to fail to make sense to me?

https://answersingenesis.org/is-the-bib ... e-is-true/

Perhaps the underlying problem is that theists usually don't know anything about the autistic mind, and therefore only address the neurotypical, who is open to non-rational means of persuasion?

www.arkdiscovery.com

I would avoid this particular site. It contains a huge amount of misinformation and utterly bizarre, culty nonsense that probably doesn’t reflect the views of most Christians.

!	Cornflake wrote:
	Several posts accusing members of being under some sort of demonic control or of not adhering to one particular belief system or deity have been removed - they amounted to personal attacks.

It's certainly interesting to anybody studying Christianity, as a representative sample of one of its more minority wings. More on Ron Wyatt, the Noah's Ark man, here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Wyatt
https://web.archive.org/web/19991117042 ... wyatt1.htm

To help educate yourself on the stories of the old testament...just download "the 55 Greatest Hits of Sister Rosetta Tharpe".

Get your literature lesson about the Bible...along with some aerobic dancing!

The fifties gospel singer was the first genius of the electric guitar...was copied by Chuck Berry who in turn was the forerunner of all the rest of the guitarists of rocknroll.

So she was a pioneer in both ...God's music, AND the Devil's music!


https://youtu.be/5SoZG4yDaJA


https://youtu.be/Dkebb-6zK4I

It's worth noting that most Christians aren't fundamentalists and don't believe in a literal interpretation of the creation myths in the bible. The fundamentalists who are hostile to mainstream science are like the tip of the Christian iceberg. They're the most visible, but they're only a small fraction of the whole.

Likewise, most Christians don't consider only members of their own sect to be proper Christians. That's another trait typical of fundamentalists but atypical of mainstream Christianity.

A lot of the fundamentalist ministries that peddle YEC are more than happy to lie through their teeth about science and about scientific discoveries in order to further their cause. Gutsick Gibbon regularly debunks the claims of creationists (both OEC and YEC). TalkOrigins is another good resource.

Of potential interest, even other YECs reject Ron Wyatt's claims about having discovered the ark. Answers in Genesis, another well-known YEC group explicitly call his claims fraudulent.

The Durupınar site, where Wyatt claims to have discovered the ark appears to be a naturally occurring geologic formation, not a historic artifact. There's no boat, no signs of a boat, no signs of manmade cargo, etc.

All in all, one needs to rely on faith in order to believe because if one is looking for literal evidence of biblical claims, they're going to be disappointed.

Well yes, (cognitive) faith and belief are much the same thing as far as I can tell - the holding of a thing to be true to fact without the necessary evidence. And those who say that being religious is a matter of faith are essentially admitting that the necessary objective evidence doesn't exist, otherwise this faith thing would be completely unnecessary.

But some still assert that the evidence is there. This guy, for example, though he starts off by fairly logically debunking a number of fallacious notions of the "proof" of the veracity of religion, then goes on to make an even stranger "proof" of his own - it seems that for him, the veracity of the Christian bible is the only reason why logic works, that his god is somehow holding the entire universe together. To him, this is all blindingly obvious and anybody who doesn't agree with him is "tenaciously resisting" something that "we are all hard-wired" to accept. I've looked carefully for some supporting basis behind his assertions, but it's just not there:

https://answersingenesis.org/is-the-bib ... e-is-true/

The bible is true because god said so in the bible. We know god is true because the bible says so is about the most compelling argument they seem to have.

Well, to his credit, he for one admits that a book calling itself true doesn't make it so:

"It does claim that all of its assertions are true and useful for teaching. Such statements do prove at least that the writers of the Bible considered it to be not merely their own opinion, but in fact the inerrant Word of God. However, arguing that the Bible must be true solely on the basis that it says so is not a powerful argument. Yes, it is a relevant claim. But we need some additional information if we are to escape a vicious circle."

What astonishes me is the way a person who has the intelligence to figure that and a number of other things out can then go on to talk such complete nonsense. It's as if he lost his sense of reason halfway through.

It's good that he acknowledges the role circular reasoning plays in religious apologetics, but that makes me think he understands that what he's peddling isn't true. If he understands that, he's a con artist rather than merely wrong.

I just remembered that there’s an entire Yale course on YouTube on the New Testament that I’ve heard is good but haven’t watched yet. I watched a few lectures of one on the Old Testament which is very informative although a bit dry.

The first episode of the NT one:



The first episode of the OT one:

I kinda feel like everyone has and is prone to cognitive bias, and things like being religious or even being atheist, to know that you're "for sure" correct would require so much thought and complex research and the ability to sort these things through like an expert.... that we all ultimately end up settling for what's just generally easier for us to accept.

For some that's religion. For some it's being agnostic or atheist.



I have dabbled a bit in apologetics and some scholarship stuff, but for me the best "proof" has been interactions with my god. I honestly don't have the spoons and energy to sift through hours of data every day and then spends decades processing it all.... I can do it if given enough incentive, but it's like getting blood out of a turnip otherwise.

It’s impossible to prove that something doesn’t exist. I can’t prove that there aren’t fairies for example. My stance on fairies is disbelief until I am given valid, objective evidence of their existence. I feel the same way about God. Of course, even if I was given proof does not mean that I would worship him, her, or them. I would not worship a god that was all-powerful and that could end suffering right now but chooses not to. The Biblical reason is not good enough for me. Of course, that’s more of a thought experiment. I haven’t seen any compelling evidence for God yet.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 25 Dec 2023, 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.