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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?

They do this with Christianity, too, and they just love them some "former/ex-Evangelical/Fundamentalist" who is now out there saying "it ain't necessarily so" (sorry, Bart Ehrman, but you're the poster child for this as far as I'm concerned).

If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely.

I don't know. From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.

I think it works both ways; for the liberals who have discarded religious tradition but aren't out-and-out declared atheists (they'd probably mumble something about being agnostic if pushed on it), the liberal Christians/Muslims/Jews give them that aura of authority by association, too, by coming out with "Yes, guys, you're in good with God because Godself never said nothing about contraception/polyamory/queer trans IVF babies" and propping them up that way. It's a two-way transaction: the religious liberals get the acceptance and support of the mainstream liberals, and the mainstream liberals accept them as weapons to use against the redneck knuckledraggers: "Oh, A is educated and knows the history and theology, unlike Bubba-Joe the Southern Babtist".

a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts

laughs in Catholic Er, maybe you heard about a little thing called the Reformation? Very big on this, that the True Pure Gospel Message had been corrupted and infiltrated by human interpolations and interpretations and that you had to go back to the Source. All through the history of Protestantism, there have been new denominations created over "No, we have the One True Pure version" - not to be picking on the Baptists, they just have the most accessible example for this in the Trail of Blood. 'Our church is the One True Church which survived in secret down the centuries despite the corruption and falling-away of others' (usually it's we Catholics who get it for this). The insistence about the KJV translation is just one attempt at the preservation of inerrancy, a complex topic of its own, but comparable for the necessity of adding in "in the original manuscripts" to cover this problem.

From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.

Church is a lot more about community and social network then it is about scripture and theology for a lot of people. I don't think liberal Christians sit in the pews every Sunday, bring Casserole to the potluck, and do charitable work for political clout. There was a generation raised in the church who gradually became secular humanists and I think it's better for society that they preserve community organizations like churches then abandon them in pursuit of consistency.

laughs in Catholic Er, maybe you heard about a little thing called the Reformation?

Unless you're some weird flavor of Greek-Catholic I've never heard of... You know that there were various latin translations, and the current one (the vulgate) wasn't finalized until St Jerome, several hundred years into the A.D., right? That's an awful long time for errors to creep in before we get into the translation stuff.

Maybe that's why the Catholic church has the reputation for changing quicker than the Orthodox churches (probably the only groups for which that comparison is valid).

Right, the Protestant Reformers (Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc.), following Erasmus, were going back to the actual Greek and Hebrew, so the "translations are the problem" take doesn't apply here.

Oh, I know about St. Jerome and the Vulgate and the Septaguint.

But the "real Holy Book has been perverted by corruptions over the years so we have to go back to the original texts in the original language" isn't unique to Moslems, is what I'm saying.

I think most of them, heart of heart don’t actually believe but don’t want to admit it to themselves. They like the trappings, the music, the friends they see at church, and the idea of helping their fellow man. It just boggles the imagination that someone could legitimately believe that the God who created the heavens and the earth says that something is wrong and you given the equivalent of a “yeah, but i want it to be okay so it is okay.” Ideals, especially ideals that you hold dear always have consequences. And to me, the absolute hallmark of a person believing a given set of propositions is whether they change their behavior in light of that.

Most people really use religion as a security blanket or insurance policy.

Many Christians, including some of the more conservative ones, do not believe that every single word of the Bible is the literal word of God. On the contrary, the letters of Paul (for example) are the word of Paul — some of which Paul himself believes to have come from God, and some of which is explicitly given as “I didn’t get this from God but it seems like common sense.”

55% of American adults believe that the bible is inerrant, so that is the most common belief, and is usually taken as pretty important—Protestants tend to have a high view of scripture, and Catholics also affirm that the scriptures are infallible, I belief. (Officially speaking, of course. That doesn't mean every layman knows every thing.)

Ah, you're referring to 1 Corinthians 7:12.

Here's the passage:

10 To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband 11 (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife.

12 To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. 13 If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. 14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy because of his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy because of her husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 15 But if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace. 16 For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?

I've seen some take this as talking about Jesus' own teachings on divorce, and still affirm that Paul is infallible. Some others think that Paul is fallible in that passages, since he recognizes it as from himself, even if he's infallible in general. In any case, Paul goes on to say at the end of the same chapter:

I think I too have the Spirit of God.

This reads to me as that it might be defending or affirming his authority, in some sense, at least. He does so more strongly in other places. Paul says in the same book (1 Cor 14:37),

If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord.

In 2 Peter, it says

15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.

So there, at least, Paul's writings were considered to be scripture.

But 55% is barely better than half. And for those who consider it to have errors, I think you’d have to figure out what they don’t buy for the thing to make sense. 63% of Americans call themselves Christians, and 55% of Americans hold the Bible as inerrant. Which gives almost 10% who don’t. But “has errors can mean anything from very minor typographical errors to “oops we have the wrong books”.

I personally think the Jesus of history is best reflected by the Ebionites’ tradition, which would be a fairly strong “yes there are errors” thing. But then again, I don’t think anyone else would call Ebionites Christian in the modern sense.

Thank you for your explanation of 1 Corinthians 7. I’d probably respect it more if it did make a distinction between inspiration and personal best judgment, but I can see how the text supports your interpretation. Agnostically speaking, I probably shouldn’t hold it against Paul in the event that he either truly always speaks with inspiration or honestly believes that he does.

I’m having trouble squaring some of the statistics in your link with broader statistics in the USA. In particular, their survey would have it that 71% of Americans, in 2021, believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God in some sense (even if it might contain errors). But in 2021, only 63% of Americans said they were Christian.

So is the discrepancy all made up of Jews and Muslims? Are there “unaffiliated” people who nevertheless believe the Bible to be inspired by God? It would be helpful to know how the responses in the American Bible Society survey split up by stated religious affiliation, honestly.

In any case, this certainly supports the idea that a large percentage of Christians think the Bible “has no errors” (even if many say some of it is “symbolic and not literal.”) Still, as an outsider, I think I’m still most inclined to define “Christian” to mean people who believe in the divinity of Christ. I don’t think that someone who believes that Paul believed in an imminent apocalypse and writes with reference to that view is somehow “not Christian” if they still think that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and will someday return to judge us all, for example.

To be clear, I gave two differing interpretations of 1 Corinthians 7 that could be consistent with asserting the infallibility of Paul in his letters.

As to the surveys, that's a good point. Here's another poll with a number higher than 63%, which is odd as well: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394262/fewer-bible-literal-word-god.aspx

It's less clear in the options than the American Bible Society survey, but it does have a number higher.

I wonder if these have different sampling mechanisms, and ones unrepresentative of the general public?

Pew research appears to be depending on data from here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/religious-projections-appendix-a/ Gallup appears to be using telephone calls: https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/394616/220706ViewsofBible.pdf

American bible society also had theirs from online surveys, but its number was higher than Pew's, so it's not just surveys vs. telephone.

I disagree that most churchgoers don't believe in a way that would be hard to admit to themselves.

There are so many degrees of belief, especially about confusing things on which one is not an expert, that it only takes a small amount of rationalization to deal with any discrepancy. All you have to do is consider doctrinal disputes to be above your pay grade and defer to the theological experts, who assure you there is a complicated answer.

E.g. you might believe in quantum physics, without being bothered by the fact that different physicists subscribe to different interpretations of superposition.

I don’t think we’re talking about an obscure concept here. What the Bible says is more or less “gays, among others cannot inherit the Kingdom.” That’s not “well I’m not an expert so…” it’s plain text, and plainer if you read Leviticus.

But even so, if a person says they believe something and try to wiggle away when the rubber meets the road, I don’t think it’s a belief they hold that strongly. If I thought that quantum theory allowed for faster computers, I might well invest in a company trying to build one. If I thought there were martians on Mars, I’d send a signal if I could. If I think history is a process then I’d be looking to find patterns that allow me to predict the future in the past.

I'm no Bible expert, but I claim that even if it's relatively starkly written, that's still not a real problem for most people. Again I think quantum mechanics is a good analogy, with all sorts of intuitively-wrong-sounding claims made by supposed experts with tons of social proof.

I agree that if you start looking for patterns on your own it's pretty clear, but I think most people are (mostly rightly) in a state of learned epistemic helplessness on most topics.

Bart Ehrman

I don't think Ehrman is a fair example. He's not a Christian and doesn't claim to be.

As an aside, I think it's kind of funny that Ehrman is often viewed as some kind of fire-breathing skeptic by Christian apologists (if I had a penny for every time i heard an apologist say something along the lines of "even Bart Ehrman accepts/believes/doesn't deny X") despite the fact that most of his positions are pretty middle of the road and sometimes even conservative in his field.

He's not a Christian and doesn't claim to be.

But a lot of the atheist/anti-Christian/anti-Fundamentalist places like presenting him as such. "Prominent Christian theologian says view of the Bible is bunk" goes over better than "Non-believer says view of the Bible is bunk".

Are you sure? I can't remember ever seeing Ehrman presented as a Christian. He's always been open about being an evangelical who lost his faith when he was pretty young. Though he says it had nothing to do with his study of the Bible and was instead related to his inability to reconcile the problem of evil.

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