Question for Rat, potato, and other X-Xtians

[LMNO]

I'm curious about something.

I never really grew up a Christian.  My grandfather used to take us to an Episcopal church when I was little, but I never paid attention, and we stopped going when I was 8.  Plus, my dad was a physicist, and my mom just didn't care, so it just wasn't discussed much.

I only got into comparative religion during High School, so my Bible knowledge is much more 3rd person removed than being in it, and I never really heard any of the abstract reasoning regarding some questions about the Bible.  Not to mention, I doubt an Episcopal church would have bothered with some of the thornier things mentioned.

So anyway, I know a few of you are ex-"hardcore" Christian literalists; y'all would have some insight into the ways of church reasoning.  The reason I bring all this up is because of a few points in The God Delusion I read last night, and I'd like to hear how a devoted person would respond.

NOTE:  This is not necessarily a Xtian-bashing thread, or at least it is not intended to be.  I am honestly interested in the ways SRS Xtians handle these issues.

Essentially, it's about the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, and how the two just don't line up with each other regarding the circumstances of how they got to Bethlehem, and how the lineages documented in each gospel differ widely.

I know, these are trivial points, and not crucial to Christ's "let's be nice to each other" message, but I was just interested how a literalist would handle something like that.

Again, this is pure curiosity, and not yet another LOL XTIAN thread.

[Golden Applesauce]

I don't know the super-literal everything-in-that-book-is-distilled-truth crowd's way of thinking that much either, as I was raised more Catholic, and specifically Jesuit-educated, where we took a much more freewheeling approach to things like "orthodoxy." 

Their response is "No shit, the two books were written years apart and for different target audiences.  One was more concerned with establishing Jesus as legitimate to the intellectual and religious elite of the day, and the other was making Jesus seem as impressive as possible to the common people."  Or something.  It's been years since I've had a real scripture course and I'm probably mixing the gospels and their authors up.

[LMNO]

Yeah, I understand intellectually why the books are different; that's not really the issue here.

I suppose it's understanding how the rationalization would go, and how/where to draw the line between, "the apostle made that part up to appease their audience," and "but that part is 100% the True Word of God, and actually happened."

[P3nT4gR4m]

Yeah, I understand intellectually why the books are different; that's not really the issue here.

I suppose it's understanding how the rationalization would go, and how/where to draw the line between, "the apostle made that part up to appease their audience," and "but that part is 100% the True Word of God, and actually happened."

That's the real genius. The fact that one part of the "book written by the actual hand of god himself" can be discounted as a crock of shit, without bringing into question any of the rest of it. I'm interested in this too. It's like ninja-level cognitive dissonance.

[LMNO]

Yeah.  I mean, it's easy to have Authority say to some kid, "because I say so," but theology scholars and literalists must have to come up with an actual explanation for it.  That's what I want to learn about.

[AFK]

I lost my religion when I was 13.  Up til then I was a somewhat devout, good little Baptist boy.  So my memory is a little foggy but what I do remember is that my church would pretty much just focus on the birth as accounted for in Matthew.  There was never any, from what I remember, concerted effort to rationalize the two against each other or explain why there might be inconsistencies.  It was just ignored and nobody ever brought it up. 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

JW's see Matthew as writing for a specific audience about the ministry of Jesus, while Luke was writing from a historical perspective and had done more investigation into the whole story. So Matthew provides a very abbreviated view of Jesus and his birth from a virgin through holy spirit, while Luke covers the side story of John and more detail about the family and their specific experiences.

In the same way, a person writing about the Bush administration might just briefly mention the 'questionable' election, focusing more on what he did in office... while a person wanting to write the whole account would probably talk about the full thing including the Supreme Court etc.

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled[a] among us, 2just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Luke basically says so right from the start. I've never really understood how anyone could think that the slight variations in detail would be anything other than variations in detail. That God's Word is inspired, doesn't mean that God is a mimeograph that repeated himself four (or more) times... maybe he inspired Luke to focus on the history, because the main message had already been spread to  Theophilus and his people.

Even Paul spoke about the difference between being babes drinking milk to growing up and eating meat as a spiritual metaphor. Luke is providing depth.

*takes off religion hat*

It's much better to focus on the fact that the whole thing is nonsense 

[fomenter]

comedian Steven Wright

" i have two pares of reading glasses ....     one for fiction and one for nonfiction...      i read the bible twice  once with each pair ...."



"there was no difference"

[Thurnez Isa]

LMNO you think that is contradictory read the 4 Gospel accounts of the resurrection
Just for fun map out Ghost Jesus' journey around and put down dates when he's suppose to be wear in each Gospel and see who...

[Honey]

I grew up thinking it was all stories.  Not literally, ideologically or in any way representing things that actually happened.  Like fairy tales that grown up people believed in & took seriously in ways I couldn't understand then & still find hard to fathom today.  Growing up around kids with different faiths, it didn't come into our play.  As I got older, & having a friend of the family who was a Catholic priest, getting into arguments/discussions with him et cetera.  The Catholic priest guy was more a theologian than a parish priest & a bit of an elitist when it came to religion.  Oh the claims he used to make!  I can see him now in my mind, his Jesuit intensity, & his booming expostulating gesticulating posturing & pontificating!  Ahh, the good ole days.  He was an enigma though.  Fr'instance, as a Catholic priest, he was not obliged to perform marriage ceremonies between people of different faiths, however this was up to the individual priest to decide.  He would therefore perform the marriage ceremony if the people were Catholic & Jewish but not if they were Catholic & Protestant.  His rationale was the Catholic & Jewish traditions were more similar than the Protestant ones.

I was & (still am) interested in the various sacred texts & perspectives of different religions.  I still thought (& think) of them all as stories, some more beautiful than others, some hold more meaning for me personally, but still, all a type of mythology, more metaphorically than literally true.

& then something happened in the last ten years or so.  Like when someone told me something like, "The reason I'm so intolerant of ... is because I'm a Xian."  Now this had me a trifle more confused than usual?  Whatever could they mean by that?  Y'see when I was younger, most of my teachers were sorta hippyish in their beliefs about Jesus.  Hhhmmm.  Then I heard about this "rapture" thing?  Wtf?  People seemed to be somewhat enamored by this thing called the rapture & dreaming their cruel hypocritical fantasies of those unsaved & apparently unwashed folk who were *left behind*?  Honestly, how demented can you get?

Then I started to look a little closer at that particular crowd, y'know the fundamentalists?  & started to glean a little bit more about wtf it all signified?  & it made me sick to my stomach.  Good grief!

At some point in all this, I went back & re-read  Douglas Adams' The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide the following quote is from Life, The Universe and Everything:

"No," said Slartibartfast, with a slight quickening of his step, "the people of Krikkit have never thought to themselves, 'We are alone in the Universe.'  They are surrounded by a huge Dust Cloud, you see, their single sun with its single world, and they are right out on the utmost eastern edge of the Galaxy.  Because of the Dust Cloud there has never been anything to see in the sky.  At night it is totally blank.  During the day there is the sun, but you can't look directly at that so they don't.  They are hardly aware of the sky.  It's as if they had a blind spot that extended 180 degrees from horizon to horizon.

"You see, the reason why they have never thought, 'We are alone in the Universe' is that until tonight they didn't know about the Universe.  Until tonight."

"Imagine," he said, "never even thinking, 'We are alone,' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be."

He moved on again.

"I'm afraid this is going to be a little unnerving," he added.

...

They (the people of Krikkit) flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe.  And then they turned round.

"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.

On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.'

This made me giggle uncontrollably.  Now, whenever I read or hear something from that routinely whining, rigidly idealogical mob, I think of that quote & laugh.

[LMNO]

LMNO you think that is contradictory read the 4 Gospel accounts of the resurrection
Just for fun map out Ghost Jesus' journey around and put down dates when he's suppose to be wear in each Gospel and see who...

Well, yeah.  As I said, I know all that stuff.  And from a scholarly viewpoint, I understand the nature of 80th person accounts 200 years after it happened, plus translation errors, and honest fabrications, and all the rest.

Again, it was the way it was explained away that I am interested.

[Elder Iptuous]

My experience is the same as RWHN's.
it was a non issue growing up.  Surprisingly they never had a critical Q&A period of the sermon.

[LMNO]

See, that's why I was trying to figure out what theologians and absolutist literalists think.

Rat was pretty clear that his branch of the JWs dismissed the discrepancy in a fairly modern way, by saying "the facts weren't the same in each book because one was meant as a difinitive history, and the other was meant to lure the gentiles."  But doesn't that call in to question the rest of Matthew, and whether is can be considered "accurate" or "beguiling"?

[Honey]

Sorry I didn't really answer the question.  From the point of view of the Catholic Priest guy, he was, I think, literally beholden to whatever the Catholic Church told him to believe.  If he was alive when they burned Joan of Arc, he would've believed that was the right thing to do.  If he was alive when that same church delcared her a Saint, he would've believed that was the right thing to do.  A form of crimestop where the Party is replaced with the Religion?

"He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop.  He presented himself with propositions - "the Party says the earth is flat," "the Party says ice is heavier than water" - & trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.  It was not easy.  It needed great powers of reasoning & improvisation.  The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as "two & two make five" were beyond his intellectual grasp.  It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic & at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors.  Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, & as difficult to attain."
-George Orwell, 1984

[LMNO]

Catholics, for certain, have taken an interesting dodge around the issue.  Instead of the Bible, they put their faith in the Pope, who interprets the bible for them, as the Holy Nextel Pager of God.  So instead of what the bible says, they listen to what the Pope says.  Which is nice, for them.