Guilty as charged here. If one doesn't apply such a standard, then one can
believe any religious document is true, even when it is patently false. I
could make up a religious document and have people think it is true
because they don't apply that standard.
And it gets me that it is religion alone that asks for such a low standard
of truth. No other discipline asks for an epistemology that makes it
totally non-verifiable, and totally unrefutable. Religion should grow up
and play in the big leagues, where there are hard knocks to be given and
taken. This low standard of truth that theologians adhere to, is a weak,
warm and fuzzy feel-good standard in which they can never be wrong and thus
they are always right.
Perhaps
>it's a matter of education; as someone raised in a mainstream church I was
>never taught that, so I see no conflict in this issue, whereas your
>fundamentalist upbringing taught you that there was a conflict. Even so,
>when you converted to a more liberal outlook, you nonetheless clung to a few
>fundamentalist tenets to keep yourself psychologically grounded in your old
>comforting beliefs as you explored dangerous new territory. This is one of
>them. Some day you may decide you can finally abandon these last vestiges
>of your former YEC beliefs, but until then I feel that they may distort your
>perception if you cling to them too hard.
I hope I never give up the standard of truth I advocate. To do anything
else would lead me to believing false things. And if Christianity is
wrong, I would jettison it in a moment.
>
>"All parents around the world representing all religions, tell their kids
>that their religion is true. But they all can't be true."
>
>If there is only one God (which I believe) then either He operates through
>only one religion or He operates through all. If He operates only through
>one, then it is easy to account for all the doctrinal and theological
>differences between all the religions (man's false concepts vs.. God's
>revealed truth). If, however, God operates through all, then this question
>becomes more difficult. For me there are three possible solutions: 1) God
>is a trickster, like Loki or Coyote, and is playing a massive joke on us
>all; 2) God tells one message to everyone, but the society He is telling it
>to interprets it within its own heritage; or 3) God tells each society only
>part of the message, in which case we are expected to compare notes and
>figure out the whole message for ourselves. I reject Option 1 (though I
>cannot rule it out entirely), but I tend to oscillate between Options 2 and
>3. I stay a Christian out of habit and to honor my parents, but I do not
>reject what truths other religions may have to teach me.
without a doubt, there are truths in all religions. But there can not be
TRUTH in all religions. Truth can not be logically contradictory. A and
not-A can not both be true simultaneously. The Koran says that Jesus was
not the son of God, the Bible says that he was. Judaism says Jesus is not
the Messiah, Christianity says he was. Somebody is wrong. It can't be
helped, but somebody is wrong.
In all this, I am
>not seeking a path to God, because He's always been with me; instead I am
>trying to figure out what He is trying to tell me, and if Christianity has
>some answers but not others, I will look for those other answers elsewhere.
>As such, all religions may in fact be true at their core, though certainly
>not in their details.
You do realize, of course you have a non-traditional form of Christianity,
don't you?
>
>"If they are 2 separate religious accounts artificially put together, then
>they don't really belong together and they probably were inspired by
>different gods/people. And I am not interested in worshipping in a religion
>inspired by people alone."
>
>And I'm not asking you to. But this objection is based on the assumption
>that different religions are based on different gods, whereas they could be
>based on the same God (Who never changes) being forced to work with
>different groups of people (who change constantly).
If your view is true (that God works through all religions) and God never
changes, then He should make it clear whether Jesus is his son or not,
whether Jesus is the Messiah or not etc. For a God who doesn't change, he
has mangled his communication pretty badly.
>Who says that theology has no objective reality? Its reality is different
>from that of scientific reality, but no less objective. You simply use a
>different method to find that reality.
If it is so objective, then why can one religion claim that Jesus is the
son of God and one claim that is heresy? OBJECTIVE knowledge usually means
that it has enough force for the vast majority of people to bow to its
force. If theology is so objective, why is there no power behind its
demonstrations?
Many theologians, including St.
>Augustine, and many Christian scientists, such as Galileo, have acknowledged
>the existence of these two worlds and their separate methodologies, while
>not denying that either is objective. They even went so far as to claim
>that when the two worlds conflict, we should believe the natural world.
Which means that science is more objective than theology!
>It's only modern literalist fundamentalists who insist that these two worlds
>are really one and that Biblical theology must be testable against
>scientific reality.
But in your system, theological reality isn't testable against anything,
yet you claim it is objective. it simply isn't.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm