Plato's Playground
Cervantes,
I appreciate this post--it's helpful to see what your purpose is with this project.
You mention that you have found dialogue with believers to be difficult and strained, and you mention that sometimes believers think you are being hostile or incivil, which seems to mystify you. Here are some past posts on this blog:
"people of faith are at the same time,arrogant enough to think they know everything, and sufficiently feckless to be, not just content, but proud to be utterly ignorant about the object of their greatest obsession, the imaginary God"
(posted earlier by Cervantes)
"Theologians" have spent the past couple of thousand years spouting oceans of bullshit to try to cover up and obscure these completely obvious, inescapable logical contradictions."
(posted in 2005 by Cervantes)
I would not be surprised if you said the above comments more to elicit feedback than to communicate well-reasoned thoughts, but such comments don't generally foster great dialogue.
Listen, I have no intention of "converting" you. I have a great interest, however, in good, honest dialogue. And, if you want to dialogue about faith and the Bible, I'll be interested to read your posts.
I hope, as you read through the Bible, that you will see a God and a text that is surprisingly different from what you heard growing up and from what you have experienced from some "Christians" you have met.
nc, I am always puzzled by the assumption believers very often make that people like Cervantes and I must have been raised by "bad" Christians who must have given us false information about the Bible. That would certainly surprise the Christians who raised me, and I suspect it would surprise Cervantes' uncle. There is one definition of "arrogant" that would cover people who assume that anyone who disagrees with them must have gotten bad information. Just sayin'.
Cervantes, fear not. If anyone converts you I'll convert you back. John 15:13.
Tanta,
Reading my post again, I see that it does sound like I'm implying Cervantes may have been given a "wrong" view by "bad" Christians growing up. I did not intend to give such an impression. In my response to his first post, I was thinking about the many people I personally know who were given a very wrong impression of "Christians" or of faith when they were growing up. But, it's not right for me to make that assumption of Cervantes from what he posted.
I am very concerned about people who say that they represent Christ or "Christian" faith and yet whose life seems to reflect nothing of that. All words, no action. And it does not take much assuming to see the damage of that all around us and throughout history.
My uncle was the rector of Trinity Church in Branford, CT, and my mother was a Sunday school teacher. Just so y'know.
And I don't think it's hostile to believers to say that theologians have labored mightily to paper over the contradictions in the Bible. That's just a fact, which you have to face if you want to have an honest discussion.
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