The Bible; Divinely Inspired?

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Do you believe the Bible is Divinely inspired

Yes; it is the literal word of God	2%	[ 1 ]
No; it is a complete and utter fabrication	17%	[ 7 ]
Yes; it is divinely inspired but interpreted by humans and therefore imperfect	10%	[ 4 ]
Yes; but much has been lost in translation and interference but in essence it is true	14%	[ 6 ]
No; it is just a vague and loose record of Middle Eastern history with some interesting embellishments	57%	[ 24 ]

Total votes : 42

twoshots
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20 Jan 2009, 11:59 am

Orwell wrote:

Dussel wrote:

slowmutant wrote:

Get used to asking for Evidence, Please 'cause you're never going to find what you're looking for. No one can give you Evidence Please. It's like other kinds of wisdom which can never be given, only experienced.

There is nothing out which can be only "experienced". Everything is measurable and follows the rules of physics, described in the language of mathematics.

Then show me the physics of poetry, art, and music. And no, not a description of the physics of sound waves. Mathematically prove to me the worth of Dvorak's 9th Symphony.

Math is beautiful and useful. Physics also is beautiful and useful. But neither of these are everything. There is more to the world, and not all of it can be so coldly quantified.

Well, I disagree, but I think the real problem is that stating that everything can be understood mathematically and physically is really quite impossible to prove, and given the fact that math and physics are human constructs it seems quite unlikely that they can characterize everything, given the fact that there is no reason why the human mind should have evolved to be able to understand everything.

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DNForrest
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20 Jan 2009, 12:04 pm

Orwell wrote:

There is more to the world, and not all of it can be so coldly quantified.

Correction: Not yet.

Science may not currently explain everything, but at least it is constantly advancing, whereas religion is at a standstill. Though an equation to show how such things occur would involve potentially infinite variables to get it exactly right, it isn't unfathomable for an equation to be within our reach that gets it almost spot on.

Dussel
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20 Jan 2009, 12:09 pm

Orwell wrote:

Then show me the physics of poetry, art, and music.

An MRI-scan will show that your brain recognizes the pattern of music or poetry, neurons will be activated which will give further signals, may even will result into a harder heartbeat, etc.

It is in the end a complex process, a process which just start to understand, but even today this process can be manipulated easily. You want to experience warm feeling for a person? Take with him/her 50-100 mg Methylenedioxymethamphetamine IV - it will come, automatically.

Orwell wrote:

And no, not a description of the physics of sound waves. Mathematically prove to me the worth of Dvorak's 9th Symphony.

I think I would start here with analysing permutation pattern of the Fourier-Analysis of the sound waves and would than look into similarities of brain activities (a very first idea to look into this more exactly).

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20 Jan 2009, 12:21 pm

I think another question to ask is- who inspired the founders of Christianity to choose which scripts were to form parts of the Bible and which were to be tossed away and labeled apocrypha?

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Dussel
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20 Jan 2009, 12:32 pm

anna-banana wrote:

I think another question to ask is- who inspired the founders of Christianity to choose which scripts were to form parts of the Bible and which were to be tossed away and labeled apocrypha?

The current list of books was compiled at the time of First Council of Nicaea and First Council of Constantinople, when the dogma of the double nature of Christ and others were defined. I assume the current list is just the collection of books which fit into the dogma, whilst others (Gospel of Peter of Thomas) were kicked out, because those did not confirm with the unified teachings. The unification was needed, because Christianity became state religion and so the unified teaching was basis for the unified realm and church.

So it stayed till the 16th century (and later).

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20 Jan 2009, 12:38 pm

anna-banana wrote:

I think another question to ask is- who inspired the founders of Christianity to choose which scripts were to form parts of the Bible and which were to be tossed away and labeled apocrypha?

Easy..men. :wink:

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20 Jan 2009, 1:06 pm

MissConstrue wrote:

anna-banana wrote:

I think another question to ask is- who inspired the founders of Christianity to choose which scripts were to form parts of the Bible and which were to be tossed away and labeled apocrypha?

Easy..men. :wink:

Men that were likely heavily vested in specific financial and political institutions that gave them power and profit over others.

"Let's start a new game, and make up the rules to our advantage."

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greenblue
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20 Jan 2009, 1:45 pm

anna-banana wrote:

I think another question to ask is- who inspired the founders of Christianity to choose which scripts were to form parts of the Bible and which were to be tossed away and labeled apocrypha?

Well, there is a reasonable reason why in the New Testament, the gnostic gospels are not included in the Bible, they are of a very different nature than the cannon, the difference is that they are centered towards gnosticism, which is esoteric, mystical and influenced by greek philosophy, which differed a lot from jewish tradition and from the rest of the cannon books, by reading them, you can tell a big difference in doctrine and the way they are written, so in the end, mixing all with the Bible, would have been very inconsistent. And yeah, the founders, so to speak, wanted to mantain the 'purity', consistent and not to include something that deviates a lot from the cannon. I think there is current debate wether the gospel of Thomas should be considered gnostic or not.

Brown's claim in The Da Vinci Code is an interesting Conspiracy Theory though.

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greenblue
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20 Jan 2009, 1:54 pm

twoshots wrote:

The above is complete and utter bull

Sorry, I just liked that signature,
I agree with you on that actually.

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anna-banana
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20 Jan 2009, 2:33 pm

greenblue wrote:

anna-banana wrote:

I think another question to ask is- who inspired the founders of Christianity to choose which scripts were to form parts of the Bible and which were to be tossed away and labeled apocrypha?

Well, there is a reasonable reason why in the New Testament, the gnostic gospels are not included in the Bible, they are of a very different nature than the cannon, the difference is that they are centered towards gnosticism, which is esoteric, mystical and influenced by greek philosophy, which differed a lot from jewish tradition and from the rest of the cannon books, by reading them, you can tell a big difference in doctrine and the way they are written, so in the end, mixing all with the Bible, would have been very inconsistent. And yeah, the founders, so to speak, wanted to mantain the 'purity', consistent and not to include something that deviates a lot from the cannon. I think there is current debate wether the gospel of Thomas should be considered gnostic or not.

Brown's claim in The Da Vinci Code is an interesting Conspiracy Theory though.

yes, very convenient :p

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20 Jan 2009, 2:47 pm

Is the bible divinely inspired???

Nothing a shot of thorizine wouldn't fix.

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20 Jan 2009, 4:20 pm

Dussel wrote:

There is nothing out which can be only "experienced". Everything is measurable and follows the rules of physics, described in the language of mathematics.

Sure there is, experiential facts. If I feel angry, no machine can grasp this simply because the feeling of anger is essentially different from the physical facts underpinning anger. After all, do we understand our anger through measurement and physics, or is this a brute experiential fact? Assuredly the latter, in fact, it would likely lose some of it's essence if reduced to something else.

Quote:

Even a so-called "spiritual experience" is at the end nothing more than a biochemical reaction in our brains, measurable in a MRI-scan, manipulable with a some mg or even µg of some substances.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. If we suppose that all phenomenal facts are reducible to neurological facts, we do not prove that there are not non-material truths, only cause problems for the possibility of knowing these facts.

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20 Jan 2009, 4:23 pm

twoshots wrote:

Well, yes, it is quite impossible to prove simply because it involves arguing a negative. It is sort of like saying "there are no unicorns anywhere", I mean, has anyone been everywhere all at the same time?

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20 Jan 2009, 4:28 pm

DNForrest wrote:

Well, the issue involved here is whether or not these facts are actually of a different nature than scientific knowledge. If they are of a different nature, then science cannot necessarily coldly quantify them, because they are beyond the reaches of science. As, after all, science is the study of physical phenomenon, but what is being asserted is the important of phenomenological phenomenon, which are by their nature, very personal, and recognized through a different form of knowledge than science involves itself with.

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20 Jan 2009, 4:32 pm

Dussel wrote:

And it will not be considered the same either, as I believe that studies on people's intuitions about things shows that they consider a difference between a fake or artificial experience and the real experience to be both existent and important. If people perceive a difference as existing, then there is an epistemic ground to say that a difference exists, as people are the categorizers of their reality.

Quote:

Ah, the issue is that your approach won't really reach his desired problem. "The value" is not a psychological fact, or a physical fact, but rather a reference to something more like an ethical fact, which science, by it's nature, cannot speak on. It can talk about the possible ways that ethical opinions could form and where they currently seem to emerge from in the brain, but the factuality of ethical claims lies in philosophical fields such as ethics and metaethics.

slowmutant
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20 Jan 2009, 5:07 pm

Dussel wrote:

slowmutant wrote:

There is nothing out which can be only "experienced". Everything is measurable and follows the rules of physics, described in the language of mathematics.

Even a so-called "spiritual experience" is at the end nothing more than a biochemical reaction in our brains, measurable in a MRI-scan, manipulable with a some mg or even µg of some substances.

Many would disagree, myself included. But then we're all entitled to our own beliefs. And having certain beliefs, in this case, is not about insisting that they are the "correct" beliefs. At least not in my opinion. See, I'm not so keen on proving to the world that what I believe is only belief worth having. The last thing I will ever do on WP is evangelize. I don't believe in evangelism.

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