>While I'm no expert, Catholism does not *assume* the existence of God
>and the absolute authority of written scripture (sola scriptura).
>Catholism begins by approaching the Bible as any other ancient work,
>and from textual criticism concludes that the accuracy of the
>text is more certain than the accuracy of any other ancient work.
I would be interested to see how their logic works.
>Next, the Bible is looked at historically, and the life, death and
>reported resurrection of Jesus is examined. Using the Gospels,
>extrabiblical writings from the early centuries and what we know
>of human nature, Catholicism concludes that Jesus what either
>what he claimed to be or was a madman. They then go on to rule
>out his being a madman, and hence, all that he said must be true.
Ah, yes, the "lunatic, liar, or lord" argument. This is so old and
has been dealt with so many times that it's rather sad to see that
anyone still takes it seriously.
First of all, this argument assumes that what we know about Jesus
(i.e., what he said, etc.) is historically accurate. I have never
seen that satisfactorily proved. Heck, I haven't seen satisfactory
proof that Jesus even *existed* (though I figure he probably did).
Second, it assumes that, if Jesus did claim to be the son of God
and really wasn't, then he would have to have been a stark-raving
lunatic. No doubt they think that we should find references in the
Bible to Jesus screaming, running around naked, pulling around his
hair, and banging his head against trees. But this doesn't logically
follow. One can believe something totally irrational and still be an
outwardly sane, even overhwelmingly persuasive, person otherwise (just
look at David Koresh). One can even be a truly good and wonderful person
and still believe in something irrational. Or, for that matter, how
do we know that Jesus really believed what he said? Perhaps he was just
intelligent enough to know that the only way he could get all of these
violent, ignorant, superstitious people to believe him was if he convinced
them that he was the son of God.
The point is, there are all sorts of possibilities. To summarily narrow
it down to two and then immediately discard one of them simply because
one doesn't like it is incredibly poor logic.
_____________________________________________________________
| Russell Stewart |
| http://www.rt66.com/diamond/ |
|_____________________________________________________________|
| Albuquerque, New Mexico | diamond@rt66.com |
|_____________________________|_______________________________|
If Rush is Right, then I'll take what's Left.