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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Another religious freak died, scammer, creeper bit golly gee wiz he was a church going dude!

The Louisiana native was best known for being a captivating Pentecostal preacher with a massive following before being caught on camera with a prostitute in New Orleans in 1988, one of a string of successful TV preachers brought down in the 1980s and ’90s by sex scandals. He continued preaching for decades, but with a reduced audience.

Religion is always the scam. And it’s never been the drag Queens.

OPPs why do people stay religious?? They are either stupid or scammers or child molesters or morally corrupt. Or all of the above. [/quote]

There are lots of religious people who are educated.  They're intelligent and have good jobs and are decent people.  They're just dumb when it comes to religion.[/quote]
So they are essentially followers, which is fine, I don’t think I am better than religious people, I just wish people had more evolved critical thinking skills. [/quote]

DP: Don't you think it odd to just assume highly intelligent people are dumb about one thing? Has it occurred to you that maybe they've studied and thought about it more than you have? Maybe they have a better and more nuanced understanding of their own beliefs than whatever it is you are assuming they believe?[/quote]

I hear you, pp. Most of the people arguing against religion on this forum have a third grade education in it or less.
Why would OP assume that adults believe in things the way they were explained to them when they were eight?
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I cannot fathom how anyone on modern day earth literally believes stories from ancient times, like word for word. Learned adults are doing this. I may not be a religious scholar but this seems insane to me. It’s fine to learn ethics and     cautionary tales, etc., but not literally following these texts.[/quote]

Yeah.  It’s really easy to not understand something that you know almost nothing about.

It’s also very easy to be sure that you are right about something when you don’t know much about the subject.  That’s why anti-vaxxers are so confident in their rhetoric while medical research papers end with a discussion of where they might have been wrong.  It’s easy to feel certain that you are right when you have a simplistic view of a subject.

If you think that educated adults believe the Bible stories in the way you were taught them when you were eight, you are mistaken.

And the Bible is liter-ary.  It isn’t liter-al.  If it were literal, it wouldn’t make any sense.  But there is more than one kind of truth than a description of literal facts.  If you were to describe a rainbow to someone who had never seen one by talking about the different light waves bouncing off water droplets in the air and hitting your retina, you would be describing a literal event, but you would be missing something essential about the rainbow.  Same thing if you only talked about its beauty.  You need to understand some things in multiple ways before you can start to grasp the truth of what they are.

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I am guessing you are the same guy that repeats this trope when challenged by the obvious problems with the Bible. Why not just describe the methodology to know what is true and what is metaphorical?   Telling people “you just don’t understand” is a clear cop-out.

If it is all literal, then, well no it can’t be as any thinking person can see.

If it’s all metaphorical, then who gives a hoot what it says because it’s no different from any other fiction?[/quote]

I don’t normally post on this forum, so I’m not familiar with who you are talking about.  I’m a doctor, and I find this same kind of thinking frustrating when talking to people about science and medicine.

I thought my rainbow analogy was pretty good on describing why both the literal and metaphorical descriptions are needed to understand something.  I’m sorry you didn’t find it helpful.   
[/quote]

What is a metaphorical description of a rainbow?

Why bother with all that anyway?  Why not just describe the process used to tell what parts of the Bible are truth and which are metaphor?  And don’t just respond with “textual criticism” because that has been done by experts and shows the many flaws in the Bible.  [/quote]

I am not familiar with the “process”you are talking about.

If you were to describe a rainbow to an alien who had never been to earth, you would describe light waves, but that’s not all, right?  There is more to a rainbow than that. It is beautiful.  It makes you feel a certain way. 
I’m not sure why you say that a metaphor isn’t true.  Would you say that a poem is a less true description of love than an article about oxytocin and dopamine release?  [/quote]

What I am saying is you are typing a lot of meaningless words.

Rainbows are real.  We can see them.  We can see photos of them.  We can explain why they exist.

If you are separating the Bible into both true and metaphor, what is the process you use to determine which is which?

If you don’t know what I mean by “process”, then maybe you should, or at least refrain from commenting until you do.[/quote]

I am not saying that rainbows aren’t real.  I’m saying that if you want to define what a rainbow is to an alien race who has never seen one and could never see one, you would have to use both facts and metaphor.  Facts alone don’t really do justice to the marvel of a rainbow.

I’m not sure what the process is for separating these things in the Bible.  
Can you give me an example of a process where you differentiate truth and metaphor in another book or subject?
[/quote]

The classic example of this is in the Gospels (Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25": A rich person has as much chance of entering heaven as a camel has of going through the eye of a needle.

Is that truth? Said three times by three different Apostles -- rich people have no chance of getting into heaven.
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NP.  The meaning of this quote is that one cannot simply rely on wealth in order to get into heaven.[/quote]

Well, that's a relief, because I'm rich and I want to go to heaven.  Thanks to this assurance from an anonymous stranger on the internet, I know I can't rely strictly on my many cash gifts to the church to get me there, but it's good to know that they help.  And it's in the Bible so it must be true!  /S
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The anonymous stranger on the internet never said that cash gifts to the church can help you get into heaven.  Nice try, though.[/quote]

Thanks, from another anonymous stranger[/quote]

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