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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: The Tension of Faith | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22508 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.4
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PaulK writes: quote:Except that the problem is yours. You - at best - forgot the context of the discussion and tried to claim that you hadn’t said things attributed to you in one message - by attacking a statement made in another. That’s hardly my mistake. Mistake? I didn't say anything about a mistake. I was referring to your inability to describe even a bit of context or understand the quote at the top of Message 676. You didn't even attempt to make a case, and still haven't. All you can seem to do is invent vague fictions.
quote: No, I knew all about that false claim of yours. "That false claim?" Why, how specific of you, but certainly consistent.
quote: Except that you aren’t proving any mistakes. But if you want to convince me that you are engaging in intentional misrepresentation this is a good way to go about it. Denying your obvious mistakes while blaming others. Tut tut.
quote: The Chronology of the Ancient Near East would be an example although it’s often broken down into separate entries (e,g, Assyrian Chronology) I mentioned Tycho Brahe and you skipped over to ancient historical chronologies and expected me to follow? What a wingnut you are. By the way, in my quote of your text I fixed the typo in your broken link to "The Chronology of the Ancient Near East." Check out your Message 733 if you don't believe me. It's very visibly and obviously broken. Normally I fix people's broken links for them, but I left this one undisturbed since I'm probably not the person you trust most at this point. You *really* should proof your posts. If nothing else reading your own words would show you what a poor job of explication you're doing.
quote: Trust you to pick on a typo. Which, if you must know is due to changes in the iOS keyboard with iOS 11, of course reading in context could tell you that the word should be it Ah, poor baby, they changed your keyboard.
quote: Since i’m not referring to your attempts to find common ground it seems that you have just made her another mistake, You're obviously failing to read in context again. By the way, your new iOS keyboard layout is also causing you to end a lot of sentences with a comma. I was wondering why you were doing that. Have you ever considered proofing what you write, or do you just type it up and throw it out into the void?
quote: I mean any written document at all since that is what you seem to be talking about. But this leaves all the examples where written documents are useful evidence unaddressed. No it doesn't, because you're using the wrong definition of evidence.
quote: It comes from the context you left out - before your full quote. There you are with your "context" again. I think your definition of context must be, "Things I wish I'd said but forgot."
...a lot of interesting questions have little or nothing to do with the truth of the stories.
Message 678 Well, hallelujah, you did a message link. Congrats!
quote: I know I did. Nah, sorry, there was nothing coherent there. Maybe it made sense to you, but that's it.
As I have pointed out 1 Corinthians is useful evidence for Early Christian belief whether it is true or not. I agree and have said precisely the same thing.
False documents can be useful evidence - for some things. Really! I'm fascinated, please go on.
quote: It certainly isn’t a good way to convince people of anything, let alone Faith who can’t even accept that the Biblical accounts are of low quality as evidence. And yet you said that you were trying to convince her. Redefinition don’t bring anything new to the table. It seems more like an attempt to delegitimise genuine (if weak) evidence by playing a definition game. Yes, good points, but doing the same old dance with Faith once again was already a proven failure.
quote: You haven’t even got the basics worked out. Sure I do, you just lack the necessary comprehension.
quote: The mere fact that I listed likely explanations in Message 579 and I am concerned only with explaining the claims made in the cited verses. Which I note do not explicitly interpret the events as miraculous.. Thus I know the nature of the explanations, and all I need know about the miracles. Well that's a load of nonsense. You don't even know what natural events stood in for the miracles, so you couldn't possibly know "the nature of the explanations." But you've got conceit, I'll give you that.
quote: But the plausibility of miracles is not in question. The question is the plausibility of my explanation versus your idea that the whole account is fiction. Assuming that the account contains explicit miracles is simply wrong, and yet another of your mistakes. Nope, sorry, the mistakes are all yours. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Grammar.
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AdminPhat Inactive Member |
Somehow I get the feeling that EvC members of long standing actually get off on arguing the person rather than the position...if for no other reason than boredom.
Keep in mind, however, that these posts are read by others, and the argument provides no useful information---apart from your individual characters. Percy, you do realize that the EvC archive is like a giant communal diary and/or blog. We have lost a few members and as I reread their old posts, it is all of the legacy that I can remember about them. Perhaps in a faith-based topic we can collectively show each other some forgiveness and tolerance for minor nitpicky details that are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I am not taking sides...I value the uniqueness of each member here. My only comment is to argue in love rather than spite and let the other guy have the last word once in awhile even if they are wrong in your opinion. Watching this exchange is kinda amusing...I sense that you all love to argue. One thing I respect is that nobody runs.
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Modulous Member Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined: |
but calling it evidence that miracles are real or evidence that the events described actually happened does not seem fine. Why? Can you give me a bit more to go on? Well that was largely my question to you! Other than 'I don't believe miracles can happen' or things to that effect - what is your actual argument. It seems incredulity is your principle argument at this point and I don't think it's sufficient for this point. Can you go further in your explanation?
In what I wrote that immediately preceded the part you quoted I gave examples of what seemed appropriate about considering the Gospel of John as evidence, and I offered those to show how different they were from the supposed evidence of miracles to make clear why that doesn't seem like real evidence. Can you expand on why it doesn't seem like real evidence, though? I understand why other aspects can be considered evidential, I'm just hoping for more regarding the parts you don't.
Because it's a miracle. I just got back from Mars. I wrote it, so in your book that's evidence. How do you know it isn't true? 'Because it's a miracle' isn't an explanation to knowledge of falsehood. As for your question - yes it is evidence. But I have other evidence to hand that calls your testimony into significant dispute.
One dictionary's definition of evidence is "that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof." Nothing in John tends to prove miracles or be grounds for belief in miracles The evidence I see strongly suggests many people think it is grounds for belief. An apparent witness report is grounds for belief, even if you have reasons beyond the evidence in examination to for opting to disbelieve the witness.
I don't see it as evidence. That's your business, of course. Nevertheless I happen to think a testimony is evidence, as do most other people - professional historians included. Like when you argue with Faith about what constitutes scientific evidence of a global flood (or not), you make reference to how the term evidence is used in science. Well this is history. And a written witness statement is evidence of the things testified to. Even if, upon analysis, it is regarded as unreliable evidence.
Well, The Diary of Anne Frank and the Gospel of John are completely different beasts. The likelihood of finding accurate information in a diary is far, far greater than finding it in a religion's origin story full of the supernatural. The reliability or accuracy of the mundane events in either is a different question as to whether either is data that can interpreted using historical methods to support, to varying degrees, various historical hypotheses. We can be confident in Frank's account of there being Nazis rounding up Jewish people on the grounds of corroboration. Some minor event like asking someone to fill a jar, less so. We can, however, use historical methods - as you hint at - to suggest that Frank seems like an honest reporter of things generally and so her jar filling story has more credibility than John's jar filling story.
This again makes me feel like we throw around the word evidence indiscriminately. Everything written or asserted isn't evidence. Anything that makes claims about what happened in the past is evidence about what happened in the past. We can use various methods of evidence analysis to make determinations as to its credibility. I think you are using evidence to just mean 'supports something to a degree that causes me to either believe it - or at least come close to that'. That just isn't a reasonable approach to history, though. Whether it convinces you or not is not relevant as to whether it is evidence. A witness stands up and says 'Percy killed my cat'Another witness stands up and says 'Tony killed your cat' They are both evidence we can approach, examine etc., in order to try to determine what happened in history. If the first witness says, on further questioning 'Percy used magic to control Tony's actions', it's still evidence being given. It's just we both probably believe the credibility of this account less.
Displays as boxes in Chrome, but Safari displays it. Neat that there's Cuneiform. I know, right? It is odd regarding Chrome but then Chromium's had unicode problems for years - I'd have thought Google would be all over fixing that, but there you go.
Sure, but is it really a possible strand of true history Heh. True history. The answer, of course is, who knows? It's literally ancient history! I doubt it is historically accurate.
say a possible part of a document signed by William the Conqueror at Old Sarum? Or is it line from a script from The Man in the High Castle? Calling one possible historical evidence and the other fictional historical evidence just seems, well, wrongheaded. One might be historical evidence, while the other is without question not historical evidence. Well what of Hermann Goering's testimony at the Nuremberg Trial? Is that evidence? I say it is. We have to acknowledge that he is a biased observer under duress, and someone who is likely guilty of worse things than lying to save his own skin - which should colour the way we interpret what the evidence tells us regarding the truth of things. What about Emmy Goering's testimony in My Life with Goering - published 30 years after said life? What of testimony of *her* daughter, Edda? Or of Bettina Goering his grand-niece if it were given today? They may have access to family oral tradition that could be considered evidence. It's reliability may well be questioned, of course, but still...
But John being non-Synoptical is just an excuse to evade the question. There are miracles that appear in all three Synoptics, so choose one of those. Isn't that, for you, evidential corroboration? I answered this, not evaded it. I said, "To some extent, but other considerations weaken the corroboration". If we pick one of the three to corroborate John, we still run into problems of their disagreements, even over mundane things. But this is a pointless rabbit hole to go down, surely?
If there's no reason to accept it as true, maybe it shouldn't be considered evidence. I didn't say there was 'no reason'. There are reasons, I just think the reasons to reject it are stronger. Whether I accept that the evidence (ie., claimed witnesses, or reports compiled from claimed witnesses) sufficiently supports the claims - say of walking on water -to elicit my belief in them, doesn't stop that evidence from being evidence. Sorry about the punctuation in that bit! Not accepting the truth of the claims of a witness in court doesn't render the witness statement 'not evidence'
Well, like I said, I think the word evidence is overused. Information is presented to the jury. Some of it is evidence. No - it's all evidence. This isn't overusing the word, its using it quite normally. The defence presents their evidence and argumentation, the prosecution presents theirs. The jury decides what the facts are (as they are relevant to the case) based on this evidence. If they think witness A is full of shit, witness A's statement is still part of the evidence. If my garden path is wet, this is evidence it has been raining. It is also evidence that a pipe has burst. If someone says 'a pipe has burst', that doesn't mean it hasn't been raining. It doesn't mean my path is wet because of the pipe. it doesn't even mean a pipe has actually burst. It's just further evidence for the hypothesis that my path is wet because a pipe has burst. The truth of the matter comes from examining all the evidence and making a determination when a certain threshold of confidence is attained. As you said an interwoven pattern. But if all I had to go on was the wetness of the path, that's still evidence - even if it is insufficient to determine the truth.
I don't accept something as true just because there is some evidence. There are conflicting pieces of evidence, there are pieces of evidence which call into question certain types of other evidence. We are both skeptical of eyewitness evidence, and one reason you have already cited is DNA evidence. But my question was about the Bible. For you the Bible contains multiple corroborative accounts of evidence. How do you reject their reality? And that's what I answered. I reject it on numerous grounds, too tedious to go over here especially since we probably agree. I cited one in which I know we certainly do - the unreliability of eyewitnesses. Some others might be biased authors, with an unobfuscated agenda - a biography that conforms to mythological narrative rather than a typical human life - characters that don't feel realistic - Jesus talking to locals in Greek, the distinct lack of miracles since we discovered scientific principles, and cameras etc. I mean I could go on but why bother? Just because there are numerous accounts isn't reason on its own to accept something as true - I'd have thought this was obvious. Check out Message 655 for where I posted some criterion historians have developed when analysing a source...you can see numerous reasons in there as to why I reject their reality.
When she was talking to me (as opposed to berating me) in this thread she kept describing a process whereby faith developed from evidence, and from that faith developed a faith in things unseen. Since the entire chain of faith depended upon evidence at the outset I never could see the distinction between the two types of faith, except as an excuse for believing in the unevidenced, and I still haven't been able to reconcile these claims with her statements something like, "Blessed are those who believe in things unseen." Did you read the source you cited? It goes into this in a way that may be a little less problematic. Think about it in terms of Anne Frank again. If we analyse her work and deduce she is credible, but she makes some historical claims which are neither corroborated nor falsified - we may decide to believe her testimony on the grounds she has proven trustworthy in other areas. So you have evidence (the Bible). If you decide it is credible, you can use that trust - that faith - to believe the things which you might have decided without that trust, shouldn't be believed. But because of the general trust, you can apply it further to more specific acts of trust. At some point, if you trust enough of the Bible that you trust God wouldn't screw us all around, then you trust in the things which only God knows. Heaven, pre-human creation - the future of mankind etc etc --- the truly unseen.
Whether adherents wish to acknowledge it or not, all faith is blind faith. They might believe in their hearts that they have evidence, but there are many religions. Their adherents can't all be right about their supposed evidence, and undoubtedly all are wrong. It's not blind. It's myopic. It's credulousness. It's believing on insufficient evidence. If there were no evidence, then their belief would likely be idiosyncratic akin to the delusions of a psychotic. It's possible for two witnesses, three witnesses, a thousand witnesses at trial to all be wrong and to disagree with one another. It'd still be evidence that can be approached, analysed and used to try and arrive at the truth. Even if that truth is 'many people are too credulous'.
Yeah, I wasn't sure what to think about that because it contradicts the other quote. But besides that, it doesn't mention evidence Perhaps it isn't contradictory and harmonising them is just not as straight forward as thinking 'faith means one thing and one thing alone in all cases'. Reading the whole document suggests that faith is thought of as a multi-faceted thing. It does mention eye witnesses. Which is evidence.
Faith is confidence or trust in a particular system of religious belief, in which faith may equate to confidence based on some perceived degree of warrant.
Again, nothing about evidence. See the word 'warrant'. As the entry continues, quoting Lennox:
quote: Good stuff, but we already know that evangelicals believe their religion is based upon evidence. You're not going to have any trouble finding stuff on the Internet attesting to that view. Then we can agree that the religious perspective on what 'faith' is is not 'without evidence' but in fact they do see 'faith' not as 'blind' but as based on evidence.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying, but I still see it as dissonant to view all occurrences of the written word as evidence of the real world, particularly that which is already known to be fantastical. I continue to think this is due to you being of the opinion that evidence must be something that renders something 'probably true' as opposed to 'that which increases the probability of something being true by any degree'. If we had no Gospel, no Bible at all and someone started making claims here (well obviously this forum may not exist without the Bible, but I digress) about some ancient guy called Joshua who walked on water... we'd rightly be puzzled to understand where it was coming from. If however, someone witnessed this event and wrote it down...we'd be flying in the face of historians to say 'you have no evidence'. It'd be more correct to say 'some anonymous author writing in the 1st Century is hardly credible enough evidence to justify belief in something so fantastical as that'.
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Phat Member Posts: 18354 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.0 |
Mod writes: The evidence I see strongly suggests many people think it is grounds for belief. An apparent witness report is grounds for belief, even if you have reasons beyond the evidence in examination to for opting to disbelieve the witness. Personally, I tend to believe written or even verbal reports from people whom I know personally (or to a lesser extent online) but that is probably not the right way to go about it. If someone whom I knew said that they saw a UFO, for example, and then described the event as they perceived it, I may take their testimony as possible credibility after ruling out any mental disorder or substance abuse. This is not possible, however, with authors whom we have never met. Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith Paul was probably SO soaked in prayer nobody else has ever equaled him.~Faith
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Phat Member Posts: 18354 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.0 |
...that which is already known to be fantastical. I have observed that in general, believers are less apt to care so much whether a claim is fantastical or not.. In fact, the more fantastic is is, the more likely we are to believe it. We have confirmation biases surrounding our belief in our Deity. Were there no suggestion of magic, many of us would lose interest. A religion or belief based only on facts is boring. Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith Paul was probably SO soaked in prayer nobody else has ever equaled him.~Faith
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined:
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SO remarkable that millions of normal intelligent people, and even some very very educated intelligent people as well, have regarded the Bible's evidence as sufficient to utterly commit their lives to Jesus Christ over the last two thousand years, and in so doing made the world a better place. For a good amount of that history there were incentives for many people to say they found the Bible persuasive, and punishments for saying they didn't. Not that I know of. What period would that have been and who was it that enforced such a position? Actually the opposite was the case for centuries when the Roman Church insisted that the Bible be read only in Latin (if at all, since they often taught nothing from the Bible at all, but only the pagan philosophers and pagan religious superstitions. One priest who encountered the Bible for the first time admitted that if that is Christianity nobody in the Church teaches it) and people were burned at the stake for translating it into the common languages. Most people were illiterate before the Protestant Reformation, which made sure they got the Bible in their own language as well as instruction in how to read it.
Even now - there are many places where professing broad scepticism in the Bible may harm your career. I'm sure that could be although I don't personally know of it. What are you talking about? As a matter of fact I think it is far more likely for someone who does believe the Bible, or confesses to being a Bible believing Christian, whose career could be threatened. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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LamarkNewAge Member Posts: 2424 Joined: Member Rating: 1.3 |
This Samaritan issue really is important because the miracles, in Acts of the Apostles, were described as being witnessed by all of Samaria and Jerusalem (with massive conversions).
Here is an article by a conservative on the issue. John P. Meier, «The Historical Jesus and the Historical Samaritans: What can be Said?» biblica, Vol. 81 (2000) 202-232 page 202
It would be nice if you would engage the actual issues. Your quote about the "centuries when the Roman Church insisted " on things is really strong evidence that people were forced to swallow the ideas of "miracles from God" without critical reflection. Now, in the 21st century, can you engage the issues critically? From the first page of the scholarly article (which first appeared in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament)
quote: Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I guess I'm just not interested enough to try to figure out what you are claiming. I assume a reasonable explanation for any phenomena in the Bible especially when someone acts like there isn't a reasonable explanation.
ABE: Ya wanna know why? Because I have all kinds of evidence that the Bible is trustworthy and its critics are anything but. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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LamarkNewAge Member Posts: 2424 Joined: Member Rating: 1.3 |
quote: You know exactly what the issue is. There is no evidence at all for Samaria converting to Christianity. Out with a Christian Samaria (in the first century) and out with the miracle story. A major Palestinian town in Roman times that Acts says was converted to a Christian town. It is a made up story and you have essentially admitted it.
quote: Look at this massive timeline (full of every bit of historical evidence found) for Samaria. The Samaritans: 720 BC The pagan half-Jews of the Old Testament. You have no evidence for the miracle story. A lot of evidence it is fictional though.
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LamarkNewAge Member Posts: 2424 Joined: Member Rating: 1.3 |
quote: Here is one.
quote: There were fictional stories thrown in to make a point. Where is the evidence of a massive Christian community in an important city? There aren't even any (fictional?)traditions for crying out loud. It was a made up miracle story. Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.
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LamarkNewAge Member Posts: 2424 Joined: Member Rating: 1.3 |
quote: What is the evidence then? Acts wasn't written by an observer, as even the ICR admits. (I forgot to link that quote to it's site, and now can't find it, so I put " Luke’s aim was to show a progression of conversion " into Google , and still can't find the site. I did find a quote from the Institute for Creation Research)
quote: Nice to see an admission that the author wasn't an observer. And it was apologetic. And everybody must admit that it was written no earlier than 62 AD. (because it ends there) So written decades later, by somebody who wasn't there, and it was apologetic (history) in nature. (There seems to be an obsession with bringing a "Holy Spirit" into the mix of early (what we now call) Apostolic Christianity, and it seems like it was previously lacking in the Jewish Christian communities) What about the Samaritan evidence though? Where is the evidence for this great Christian city of Samaria? Born of miracles (according to Acts)
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.5 |
Lengthy replies seem to be a waste of time so three examples will show what is going on here.
quote: In reality this is what was said:
Consider, where can we find names but in written documents ? Records of astronomical events are used to establish chronologies. The Amarna letters tell us of the dealings of the Egyptians with their neighbours. Josephus gives us a good - if heavily biased account of the Jewish revolt. I've been distinguishing between evidence and information. The names, the astronomical events, the Amarna letters, Josephus' accounts, they're all information, not evidence. Names are something we have no evidence for. Astronomical events leave evidence behind, which today we can record with proper instruments. Tycho Brahe, good as he was, made recording errors.
You will note that Tycho Brahe’s errors are introduced to answer the point that Records of astronomical events are used to establish chronologies.. And it is not at all clear why Brahe’s errors are of any great relevance to the point (Were his records used to establish any chronology at all ?)
[quote]
It comes from the context you left out - before your full quote.[/qs] There you are with your "context" again. I think your definition of context must be, "Things I wish I'd said but forgot."
...a lot of interesting questions have little or nothing to do with the truth of the stories.
Message 678 Well, hallelujah, you did a message link. Congrats!
[/quote] Since I quoted the relevant context and provided a link to the message it is clearly something I DID say, not something I wished I had said
quote: Obviously I do know the nature of the explanations that I listed in my post - which is linked. To say that I cannot is ridiculous.
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Tangle Member Posts: 9516 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Modulous writes: And my point [that anything written is evidence] is that it is not []If Pullman testified that he sees those daemons, and/or reports what witnesses to those who have are saying about them - then it would be evidence. We agree then, Pullman's written words only become evidence if he personally testifies to them and there are other witness reports. His written words alone are not evidence of daemons. I rest my case.Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona "Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android "Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
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Modulous Member Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined: |
We agree then, Pullman's written words only become evidence if he personally testifies to them and there are other witness reports. Well I said and/or other witnesses. Pullman's testimony alone would suffice to be called evidence, it'd just be strengthened by other witnesses.
His written words alone are not evidence of daemons. If the aforementioned testimony is either in writing or gets written down they are written evidence.
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Modulous Member Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined: |
What period would that have been and who was it that enforced such a position? Most of European history. The enforcers were the common folk, the priests, local authorities, local nobles all the way up to the Monarch or Pope.
Actually the opposite was the case for centuries when the Roman Church insisted that the Bible be read only in Latin...Most people were illiterate before the Protestant Reformation, which made sure they got the Bible in their own language as well as instruction in how to read it. I was referring, as you did, to educated people. Educated people would likely have studied Latin, the Bible and a variety of theological works as part of that education. Intelligent people who are told by a priest about the contents of the Bible - would likewise too run into problems if they expressed overt skepticism. And after the Protestant reformation intelligent people would still risk significant problems - including torture and death, to question the reliability of the Bible.
I'm sure that could be although I don't personally know of it. What are you talking about? Running for office in the USA is commonly difficult for a known skeptic. Most politicians profess faith of some sort - even as their actions often suggest otherwise.
As a matter of fact I think it is far more likely for someone who does believe the Bible, or confesses to being a Bible believing Christian, whose career could be threatened. I've not seen that. I've seen cases of people inappropriately proselyting or failing to perform duties citing their Christianity run into problems.
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