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PRmerger
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Yep.You can describe the Catechism and Psalms as insulting, but you are better off to tolerate that others have a view they have a right to advance, especially in a Catholic forum where it is expected that, if nowhere else, the Catholic right to free speech will be tolerated.
It’s like the person who’s being told she’s drinking arsenic being offended that you’re insulting her drink.
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Vera_Ljuba
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Why don’t you familiarize yourself with the rules and guidelines… here forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=2801887&postcount=3 ?No Catholic is allowed to quote the Bible on atheism?
Have you taken over CA?
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goout
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Originally Posted by Bradski View Post
Animals two by two.
Animals two by two.
In the world of sports mareketing they call this getting “posterized”.
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CHRISTINE77
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Atheist seem to cry a lot.
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goout
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This is the best articulation of the reality I’ve seen.As I’ve observed from you with nigh-perfect consistency, yours is a problem of paradigm.
Allow me to illuminate:
“Fundamentalism” is not a solely religious word. As I have a penchant for Oxford concerning general definitions, here it is:
In this context, however, both seem to be fairly apt.
When you “scratch an atheist and find a fundamentalist”, you’re revealing that the atheist in question has lodged most of their religious counter-arguments against a very specific interpretation of some religious thing (usually a text).
They will generally insist that their interpretation of the text on behalf of the religion is the correct one, thus others are not - even if those other interpretations are provided by confessed practitioners of the religion in question. As such, the atheist’s counter arguments are axiomatically valid as their “fundamentally correct” interpretation is “really” the right one.
This is a behavior I’ve seen the thread-starter engage in quite a few times, interestingly.
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inocente
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The point of polls appears to elude you.
A common strategy when voting is to discard candidates with a policy you completely oppose, then from the remainder chose who you think most closely represents your view. The winning candidate isn’t somehow a fallacy if you don’t completely agree with all her policies. The poll asks a closed question with the intention of choosing the candidate who most closely represents everyone’s views. If you think that process is stupid reductionism I suggest you move to North Korea where you will find kindred spirits.
Similarly in the case of these surveys, the intent is to discover which most closely (and least closely) represents peoples’ views.
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Vonsalza
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Maybe it does. But I do have the benefit of some formal learning on the matter; specifically, what does and does not make a good poll.
One of the errors a poll can have is in coding. If you wish to create a poll with a fixed set of replies, then your fixed set should contain a sufficient number of options within its code to allow for all possible replies. When you limit the poll code for whatever reason, you inherently inject error and ambiguity into the poll results - by rule.
Additionally, polls can ask objectively bad questions. I don’t mean “bad” in a moral sense, but in a technical sense.
Your poll question asks the following:
In your opinion, which does (L+A+E) equal? (L) or (A)?
L = Literal
A = Allegorical
E = Error (“Error” can be further reduced, but you get the picture)
(L+A+E) = Bible
Surely even you see the reductionist error here. Surely.
I completely agree. But then you have an intellectual obligation to qualify the results with a term denoting the ambiguity created by the use of the word “closely” rather than “exactly”.
It helps keep the uninformed from incorrectly interpreting the results to make universal statements based on completely particular data - a clear and classic error in logic.
In this case, it would be incorrect to state “(X) percent of Christians are biblical literalists”.
What would be correct is “When forced to chose between ‘literal’ and ‘allegorical’, (X) percent of Christians felt ‘literal’ best described their overall view of the bible”.
Anyone who would argue that the statements say the same thing would be unable to pass college-level stats classes.
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Charlemagne_III
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Why don’t you go to the management and complain that Catholics are quoting Scripture?
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Charlemagne_III
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inocente
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Hmmm, I think you sailed off by yourself there
. The actual poll question makes no attempt at a binary divide, and doesn’t mention literal, allegory or error, or opinion. Here it is again:“Which of the following statements comes closest to describing your views about the Bible? (a) the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word; (b) the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally; or (c) the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.”
A precis would be more like:
"Which is closest to your view? The bible is (a) the actual word of God; (b) inspired by God; or (c) had no (name removed by moderator)ut from God.
For instance, I’m on another thread right now with a Catholic. He interprets “Let there be light” as “Let there be photons”, a scientific statement about the big bang . Whereas I interpret it as “Let there be spiritual light”, as in “the glory of the Lord shone around them”, “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”, etc.
So both of us read that verse literally, just in very different ways. If asked about that verse alone I think he, like me, would answer (b) as neither of us believe God dictated it, nor that it wasn’t inspired by God.
The contention of some posters in the first two or three pages of the thread seemed to me to be that fundamentalism, aka bible literalism, is largely the domain of Protestants and atheists, and that anyone with any sense would see it as foolish and childish.
But the surveys (and they’ve been repeated regularly over 40 years) indicate that when asked which comes closest to their view, currently roughly 1 in 5 American Catholics answer (a) “the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word”.
So there are a significant number of Catholics who are not just literalists for the sake of being literal, they are literalists because on balance they believe the bible is the actual word of God.
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Vonsalza
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No, you’re just having difficulty absorbing a very elementary concept in logic. And you apparently know so little about polls that you probably shouldn’t cite them.Hmmm, I think you sailed off by yourself there
If you take a text with parts that are unambiguously literal and parts that are unambiguously allegorical and then ask if the text on the whole is literal or allegorical, you’ve comitted the sin of reductionism.
Whatever the poll findings may be, they must be qualified in a way that shows they were reductionist.
Applied to your poll:
If (X) percent of Christians picked “literal”, this does not mean that the same percentage of Christians interpret the opening of Genesis literally.
The only conclusion you can correctly draw is the poll’s stated findings: when forced to choose, (X) percent of Christians describe their overall view of scripture as literal.
Applying that general result to any specific passage is done stupidly, as that is not what the poll asked.
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inocente
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To summarize our conversation so far.
You didn’t even appear to know what a closed question is. You apparently still haven’t even read the survey question as you keep substituting your own. You keep insisting on imposing your own notion of literal vs. allegory which has nothing to do with the survey.
You’ve claimed that by amazing coincidence, you have formal learning in philosophy, statistics and social research. Yet your only arguments are that for 40 years the question asked by the professionals has been “stupid” and “thoughtless”, and that I’m thick and ignorant.
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Vonsalza
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Your fundamental error here is the conflation of the poll findings with people who interpret any specific section of the bible as literal or otherwise.
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CHRISTINE77
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And it makes sense. Before I came back to religion, I felt that everything was meaningless. I wasn’t suicidal, but I was pretty sick of everything. Religion gives you hope and meaning.
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CHRISTINE77
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PRmerger
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PRmerger
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minkymurph
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Outcomes of polls and statistics compiled as a result of questionnaires are notoriously unreliable in terms of interpretation as they are open to manipulation.
Questionnaires are often compiled to gauge public opinion, but answers are not necessarily reflection of what people really think. I was recently a questionnaire on abortion law in Northern Ireland. One of the questions was would I support a law preventing women travelling to Scotland and England to have an abortion. My answer would have to be no as a result of the issues such a law would give rise to, but this answer in conjunction with answers I would have given to other questions would have been interpreted as I support expansion of abortion law in Northern Ireland, and I would not have wanted my answers interpreted as such.
It cannot be said because X number of people answered Y to this question X number of people think Z. Furthermore, there is no black and white ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the question should the Bible be read literally. I would say no one reads the entire Bible literally. Ask a Protestant fundamentalist what they think Jesus meant when he said drink my blood and eat my flesh and they will say this passage of Scripture is symbolic. They do not accept Peter was the rock on which Jesus would build his Church, and struggle with ‘the power to bind and to loose’ in terms of what it means. There are also passages of Scripture were it can be said the author never intended it to be read literally. What puzzles me about radical atheists is they don’t disagree with this, yet would still argue about the Bible based on a literal reading of it.
I would also say radical atheists are the new fundamentalists. I say this based on their words and actions. In my parents time fiery evangelical preachers stood on street corners shouting through megaphones, ‘Get saved or burn in hell.’ There has been a contemporary revival of this in my home town - though not on the same scale, and every week there are insertions in the local paper, ‘Remember the days of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah.’ In other words - Godlessness (atheism) is to blame for all the worlds ills and homosexuality is an abomination. Current law prevents them from actually publishing this but they can cite Scripture so we know what they are getting at.
Radical atheists seem to have adopted a similar strategy in that they repeatedly publicly state, 'There is no God, I hate God and Religion, anyone who believes in God is a deluded fool, Religion is to blame for wars and many other ills in society.
Fundamentalists argue intelligent design should be taught in schools as a science. Radical atheists argue religion should not be taught in school at all.
Fundamentalists make no distinction between radical atheists and those who are not radical.
Radical atheists make no distinction between religious fundamentalists and those who are not fundamentalists.
Both deny there are any comparisons.
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minkymurph
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Further arguments radical atheists have presented to me:
Christ should be taken out Christmas and it should be celebrated as a Winter Festival and nothing else.
Public funding should be withdrawn from faith schools - even though many of them sent their children to faith schools.
The Pope should make a public statement there is no God, the Bible is tosh and believe some day this will happen.
Telling your child there is a God and raising them in a faith is tantamount to child abuse.
If God appeared to them in person they would still not believe it.
Use of the phrase omg is met with, ‘There you go again! There is no God!’ Suggest they come across as angry they categorically deny it and claim they perfectly calm.
But - state they have no desire to convince you there is no God or dissuade you from practicing your faith. That is your choice - it just comes with a consequence.
Religious fundamentalists have their equivalents.
In conclusion -
Atheists who have presented these arguments to me have not worked in years, go through life in a haze of alcohol and cannabis fumes and claim they are rational thinkers who contribute to society.
In the past I have attempted to reasonably discuss the failings of the above arguments, but to no avail as apparently I’m just brainwashed.
All this said I am willing to be persuaded there are no comparisons between radical atheists and religious fundamentalists.
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