I put some scriptural credibility challenges (https://write.as/dvfi4zeyotiky.md) to a Christian apologist on X some weeks ago. The usual rigmarole followed in which he first accused me of being either Indian or Jewish (to pre-emptively disqualify me? Somehow?) so I had to post a photo where I touch bologna. Then came the physique test, to which I replied both Aquinas & Lewis were fat, disqualifying their works by his own rule. So it went, throwing things at the wall to see if anything stuck that would spare him from having to attempt a proper answer. Finally, he grew exasperated and said "Look, argument is a waste of my time & yours. Just go read Mere Christianity, Lewis answered all your questions decades ago."So I went and bought Mere Christianity. Leery, because this has happened before; a different apologist promised me my challenges were refuted in The Case for Christ, which turned out to be a snipe hunt; sending me off in search of something that wasn't there, to get rid of me without conceding. When I later confronted him, he was unremorseful, instead tickled that he'd tricked an atheist into reading so much apologetics. Then smoke bomb + ninja vanish.Now I'm halfway through book 3 of 4, in Mere Christianity. Parts 1 & 2 purported to reconstruct something close to Christian doctrine from first principles, but amounts to projecting human morality onto the universe (denying it's reducible to instinct, socialization or the superego) plus Lewis' misunderstanding of what the big bang & evolution entail. These wrong turns then compound, baked in as foundational dependencies in his chain of reasoning, errors carried forward. The greater problem however is that I'm now roughly halfway through the book, and there's no sign Lewis will ever address the credibility challenges I was promised he refutes. I begin to fear I was too trusting, and have been deceived by Christians a second time. I don't want to believe this is true, but the remaining chapter titles don't bode well. Should I conclude Christians are tricksters, and broadly untrustworthy? Charitably, maybe he didn't know, having never read Mere Christianity himself. It's "The Big Famous Christian Apologetics Book" that always receives glowing recommendations, he might've naturally assumed it would cover everything. The enduring popularity of faith promoting hoaxes also testifies to a tendency in this crowd not to investigate the basis for their beliefs if there's reason for concern that what they might find would be injurious to their faith. If there is some book that actually does answer my challenges, what is it? Also, how can I trust that I'm not being given the runaround for a third time?
https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-im-not-a-christian>In short, the primary reason I reject Christianity is that I think Christianity has many doctrinal commitments that are likely to be false. Many of the core Christian claims strike me as very implausible, particularly when considered as a whole. In short, the Christian claims that are hard to accept are: >The trinity.>The atonement.>The perfection and accuracy of Jesus.>The inspiration of scripture. >When evaluating Christianity, there can sometimes be something of a bait and switch. Christians will note, correctly, that if Jesus rose from the dead then Christianity is almost guaranteed to be true. But then they’ll mistakenly infer that the only thing that needs to be considered when evaluating Christianity is whether Jesus rose from the dead. >This isn’t right. Christianity is a worldview, not just a claim that one man once rose from the dead. In evaluating a worldview, whose claims are probabilistically dependent on each other, one needs to look at the worldview as a whole, not merely at one of the core claims. In evaluating Orthodox Judaism, for instance, one cannot merely look at the evidence for the revelation at Sinai—they must also look at whether it’s plausible that, for instance, every word of the Torah is from God.
>>25012604Cool but I'm not looking for more polemic. I learn nothing by reading materials I already agree with. I'm searching for more robust, comprehensive apologetics than the two books so far recommended to me, which didn't satisfy.
>>25012604I don't see you mention the Johannine Comma. The (much) later addition of which is the basis for Trinitarian doctrine. That seems like too strong a point to leave out
>>25012515(from the link)>Explaining away issues like events being out of order (Earth before stars, birds before land animals) as metaphor doesn’t explain why the metaphor wouldn’t have worked just as well (or better) with an accurate order of events.In the early Gnostic text Apophasis Megale and IIRC somewhere in Origen, it's suggested that much of Genesis is obviously wrong when taken literally specifically in order to direct the attentive reader to interpret it non-literally. The example given in the Apophasis Megale is Genesis 1 having day and night before the sun was created, which I guess was noticeably wrong enough to be seen as absurd even back then.If you're writing an allegory, it makes sense to compromise the outer appearance rather than the substance wherever a choice has to be made, because compromising the outer appearance a little can help point the reader toward something deeper going on with the story, while compromising the substance risks the substance being lost entirely.Of course, that doesn't justify why the author would convey their ideas as allegory in the first place when they could just convey them plainly. There are conceivable excuses for doing that, but I'm not sure any of them work in the standard Christian worldview.
>>25012683Interesting. This is at least better than other rationales I've so far heard. Thank you. Anything to say about the other points?
>t.
>>25012689
>>25012637You may find the series “Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus” curious. The refutations to general objections, such as “if God good, why bad thing?” and such-like, are there if you want them, sure, but it’s mostly curious for its exhaustive treatment of objections to the fulfilment of specific prophecies, the impossibility of dogma like the trinity, incarnation or what-have-you, all with reference to the Hebrew Old Testament, the Septuagint when it’s relevant, the Greek New Testament, intertestamental literature when it’s relevant, the Syriac Targum when it’s relevant, rabbinic and Christian commentary whenever it’s relevant, etc.In true evangelical fashion, it was written by a man currently under fire for sexual misconduct, Michael L. Brown, but it may answer some of your questions regardless.I also found Michael Heiser’s arguments for the supernatural worldview that one must assume before reading the Bible to be interesting and helpful for understand some strange parts of the Old Testament. He assumes his audience are down with the basic assumptions of “mere christianity,” however, so you may not find it helpful for answering your questions of scriptural credibility.
If your questions lay along the lines of manuscript validity, like, for instance, “is the Bible we have today the Bible that was written in the first century AD?” well, for one thing, it’s impossible to verify the time of writing of the New Testament from the manuscript evidence, since only copies exist now, so all answers are based on the most convincing conjecture. You *cannot* get a perfect answer. You will have to settle for convincing conjecture on dates around the first or second century or the assumption that the oldest manuscripts *are* autographs and assume Christianity is a complete fabrication. I learnt a lot about the manuscripts from online resources. There are websites with high-resolution scans of manuscripts you can reference for yourself. Learning Koine Greek is time-consuming but it’s really not too complicated once you get your head around it. It could be useful for you to study it. I’m not quite as across the questions of Old Testament manuscript validity but I know the oldest confirmed thing that verifies anything written in the Masoretic text is a little metal amulet with the priestly blessing inscribed on it; that’s from the 6th century BC. There’s also some Egyptian and Phoenician (I think?) stele with descriptions of Israel but they’re very contentious. Lots of other archaeological evidence for OT history is full of contention, like the historicity of the temple, of the ark, of the conquest of Canaan, etc., If your scriptural credibility questions lay along the lines of trustworthiness and reliability, as in, “did Peter really know the historical Jesus?” or “did Paul really have a revelation of Jesus?” etc., well, I never found anything quite convincing enough to remove all skepticism and doubt from my mind. Eventually, I simply decided to assume their innocence in the telling of their tales because *I want to believe.* God willing, you will find the answers you are looking for.
>>25012714>file name
>>25012683>even back thenThe ancients weren't retards and they were extremely close readers. The problem is that people somehow think fundies (who are a modern thing) represent the history of Christianity.>>25012515>denying it's reducible to instinct, socialization or the superego)I'm not huge on MC, and think Lewis is better as a fiction writer and literary scholar, but what is wrong with this? You seem to be saying he has a credibility issue because he isn't adopting social theories developed by athiests to support their athiesm. But just because various atheist theories can be made to fit the data doesn't mean they are right either. Actually, athiesm could be true, and Nietzsche, Marx, etc. could still be shit historians and sociologists who get religion wrong, etc.MC is meh though.I'd recommend the Divine Comedy or just go the Patristics. I'm partial to Saint Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses as an introduction and Saint Maximus the Confessor is always good.
>>25012733
>>25012744I hope this isn't real. There can't be guys out there really this gullible.
>>25012738Lewis denies human moral feeling is explicable as instinct. Which is defensible to a point, as certainly not all moral feeling is encoded in instinct. Instinct is the crude morality of animals. Our moral feelings are too detailed and granular to account for this way.Instinct may explain the sense of fairness in monkeys, and some of our modern morals (concerning, say, political corruption or income inequality) seem like higher level expressions of these primordial impulses. But the remainder is socialization, which explains how cultures can differ so drastically on questions like whether dogs are acceptable to eat.Lewis denies that he’s talking about socialization, placing feelings he describes in a way which makes it clear he really does mean socialization, and putting their developmental emergence before the age when socialization begins, like instinct. What is that feeling, he asks. Who put it there, if not Yahweh, god of Abraham?That’s rather putting the cart before horse, though. Because there is something similar to what he means which precedes socialization, called the superego. Christians also perform this sleight of hand with many other presuppositions, placing their conclusion at the start of any chain of reasoning so that reasoning can never lead anywhere which disconfirms the premise. They justify this with rationales like “reason is only possible if my religion is true” when if you dig into that a little, they’re appealing to theistic arguments cribbed from the Greeks, who used them to support gods that Christians reject. It isn’t specific to Yahweh, then, and saying “but Christ is the Logos” is just a more elegant semantical way of doing the same thing, defining their desired conclusion as the foundation of and precursor to logic itself, so that no one may reason outside of that framework.
>>25012765But, one question he never asks is “do we need metaphysical grounding for our morals, in order for civilization to function?” I’d argue that we plainly don’t. Civilizations with varying moral codes have flourished or floundered throughout recorded history, some existing for longer than both the Christian and Jewish religions.There are better and worse morals, as judged by the level of dysfunction in a given culture, which may be judged in turn against its own ideals. But we can get more grounded than that, if we try. Game theory furnishes a means of mapping out & justifying rules of interpersonal conduct on a purely pragmatic basis. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, with which I trust most are familiar enough that I needn’t recapitulate it, reveals the archetypical strategies people use to protect themselves or take advantage of others in a low trust environment.But, it also shows us how to build trust, and how not to lose it so easily. Forever Grudge throws out any alliance following a single betrayal, not accounting for accidents or variations of mood. Always Forgive is the hapless doormat Yeshua implores us to be. Tit for Tat is how most people actually behave, but it’s prone to retaliation loops. Tit for Two Tats is then revealed to be the optimal strat, letting the first offense slide in case it was a fluke, to prevent never-ending cycles of revenge at a small personal cost.None of this was etched into the fabric of the universe! We concluded to it by reason. Which is also how I conclude to truth as the anchor of morality. I agree with apologists that morality must be fixed to some immovable landmark or principle, else corruption and confusion may distort it over time into anything.My thinking goes like this: On a hierarchy of values one might optimize for, truth must necessarily come first, because the moment you compromise it for some other value, you lose the ability to optimize for that value effectively (something you need accurate information in order to do).In this way I conclude to the primacy of truth, by its universal necessity to optimize for literally any other value you could possibly choose. Even to lie, one must first know what’s true before they can distort or conceal it.
>>25012688>Anything to say about the other points?Not much, but I guess I could say for point 7, "The Problem of Interaction precludes immaterial souls" that I believe there are versions of Christianity that don't require strictly immaterial souls? There's the idea of soul-sleep, where between now and the resurrection, the dead are just unconscious. And in support of that death is often referred to as sleep in the New Testament. And if you want to avoid that and still have immediate heaven and hell, I guess you could just say that when you die God uploads your soul-pattern to a new body, so there's no point where the soul is without a medium. I don't know how heretical that view would be though.
>>25012773You could also say that the soul itself is composed of subtle material that interacts with the body and separates out when a person dies, and science just isn't advanced enough to detect it yet. Maybe God has designed it in such a way that we can't detect it so that we won't be able to mess with it. Maybe God mindwipes anyone who figures it out.
>>25012773"Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into ‘soul’ and ‘body’ is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body… Someone who accepts — as I myself do, taking it on trust — the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more ‘scientifically’ if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit." -Arnold Toynbee
>>25012790>No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a bodyNDEs commonly feature the subjective experience of being a soul without a body, floating above the body, often feeling surprisingly clear minded and clear-sensing despite the state of the body. Explain that, anti-disembodied-spirit-ists.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience#Characteristics
>>25012822Pineal gland releases DMT into the dying brain. Better question is what the evolutionary advantage of such a mechanism is, if it happens as an organism dies. I think it's a malfunction of how we dream, personally.
>>25012836I'm sure I saved a lengthy study a little while ago going over how DMT, among other suggestions, isn't a very good explanation for NDEs, but it looks God erased it from my bookmarks to keep us in the illusion of materiality.
>>25012858Divine hiddenness would be a joke if it were so easy to see through. But that's funny, guy. You're okay. You can come over, drink my beer & fuck my sister
>>25012866I'll be there in spirit, if you insist. Keep an eye on your beer and your sister if you want to see evidence of the paranormal.
>>25012875on second thought, maybe just your beer, no offense
>>25012881It's ok she's dead anyhow
>>25012515>https://write.as/dvfi4zeyotiky.md404'd can you repost?
>>25012913Not OP but it still works for me
