From: gouge@osceola.cs.ucf.edu (Christopher D. Gouge)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Why Believe?
Date: 28 Sep 92 02:24:05 GMT
Organization: University of Central Florida, Orlando

All this bounced right back to me, so I'm putting it up for everyone
to pick at and ruminate over.


-------------


Jack,

I was tempted to respond to your first posting but didn't.  I am now
sorry I didn't.  I feel some shame (whether I ought to or not) for the
rude responses you've received from others, and so, for their sake
I apologize.  [How did they EVER manage to get mail through...?]

Now, then...

1.  You say that beyond accepting the authority of the Bible, there is
    nothing (besides faith) to compel belief in God.  From a certain
    point of view, I agree totally.  Even some of our own theologians
    have said that all rational thought about God must be based on some
    measure of initial faith -- you must be willing to take SOME revelation
    whether from your own senses or from an ancient document on which to
    base those thoughts.  You must start from God and work outward; you
    cannot start from yourself and work upward.  Without presuppositions,
    you can only spin castles in the air that may or may not have any
    basis in reality.  At the risk of oversimplifying, this seems to be
    the situation: Christians have their presupposition (the Bible) and
    have drawn from it a belief system (Christianity), and you have
    perhaps not a clear presupposition and belief (you haven't said what
    you personally believe) but certainly a clear anti-supposition
    (the Bible is false) and anti-belief (Christianity is false).
    You need "Faith" either way. There's no way around it.  Atheism
    is a religion.

2.  You reject the Bible as a basis for belief, but you don't say why.
    
a.  I have only rudimentary knowledge of textual criticism, but I am
    told that all of the books of the Bible as it is generally known
    are as reliable as any other ancient documents we now have; saying
    that the Bible is corrupt and has lost its original meaning is as
    plausible as saying that Plato, Herodotus, Homer, and Ovid have all
    been completely warped in translation.  Commonly-accepted accounts
    of history are commonly accepted on less textual evidence than the
    historical accounts within the Bible.

b.  Concerning history, it is also worth noting that Judaism and
    Christianity (and Islam to a certain extent) are the only universal
    religions (i.e. claiming to define God, etc., for all mankind)
    that are bound up in historical events.  With doctrine this is
    especially true of Christianity.  If the Buddha had never actually
    lived, Buddhism would not collapse; Muhammad was not particularly
    important to the content of the things he proclaimed; however, if
    Jesus is only a mythical figure, then Christianity goes down the
    tubes.  The most unique and important things to be found in the
    Bible are all historical accounts (the Exodus from Egypt, the
    Resurrection of Christ, the Pentecost).  If you *did* believe in
    the Bible's factual accuracy, you would have to conclude that
    God Himself really *had* revealed Himself to man on man's level.

c.  Concerning the miraculous.  Miracles are more central to Christianity
    than to any other religion; take them away and the religion just
    vanishes into dust.  I don't remember your original posting that well
    but it seemed to me that this is where your problem with the Bible
    might have been.  You might ask, "How can an account of history be
    true if it contains the miraculous?", to which I would reply, "How
    are you so sure that miracles can't be true?"  Materialism, "the
    uniformity of natural causes in a closed system," is a presupposition.
    You can't *prove* that there is no God: you would have to have complete
    and total knowledge of all that exists, and you would have to know that
    God was not among those things that exist...making you omniscient,
    which is one of the attributes of God...!

d.  The writers of the Bible might have been lying (or mistaken) about
    the miracles they wrote about, but I find that highly unlikely,
    in light of the nature of decidedly non-historical accounts of
    the miraculous (such as Greek myths).  This is particularly evident
    concerning the central miracle of Christianity, the Resurrection.
    But I'd rather not go into that right now.  Post again in a separate
    thread and you're sure to get some answers.

3.  One last thing.  You mention intolerance as a consequence of belief
    (specifically Christian, I guess).  It is true enough, and lamentable,
    that some people who claim to be Christians (whether or not they truly
    owe allegiance to Christ, He knows for sure) are bigots, proclaiming
    judgment not just on sin but on sinners, and on things that are different
    from oneself just because they are different.  But a review of
    Christian principles will reveal that this sort of behavior is not
    considered proper.  Jesus drew down terrible curses against the Pharisees,
    who were religious bigots of his day.  The confrontation between Peter
    and Paul (in Acts of the Apostles) was over whether admission to
    Christianity should be restricted to those who embraced a certain
    (Jewish) culture; Paul, who denounced the restriction, was in the right,
    and he won the argument with God's clear approval.  Therefore, do not
    be guilty of the "genetic fallacy" (i.e. that a proposition is true or
    false because of the nature of its origin) and condemn Christianity
    on the premise that you find some Christians offensive.

Whew... I've typed enough.  I hope you find this sound and wholesome.


Scott Whitmore