(Part 2) Top products from r/AskAChristian

>I suppose to get right down to it, one of the major things that make me unsure about the Bible is because of how it can be so misinterpreted.

I think that this should make you unsure about people, but not the Bible. People twist things, and in fact we are told that people will twist Scripture within the Bible. Beyond that, even people with good motivations are imperfect thinkers. You, myself, and everyone else, when we approach the Bible, we bring with it our own baggage. Our understanding, our lives, and what we think now affects how we read the Bible. This is normal, but we need to recognize it in order for us to get around it and try to see what the Bible actually says (I'll mention this kind of stuff more below). Even with this in mind, this doesn't have any affect on the trust-worthiness of the Bible itself.

>Of course, one of the biggest things we hear about is that homosexuality is a sin. I don't know how many places it's been mentioned, but the only thing I recall about it is the very famous line "Man shall not lie with man as he does with a woman" or something along those lines.

I referenced a few places where homosexuality is brought up, but I'll link them here. The Leviticus passage (which is what you just referenced) is not the only one.

Romans 1:26-27, 1 Timothy 1:8-11, and 1 Corinthians 6:9-11.


>But while I was trying to learn and understand more about the Bible, what's real and not etc, I have also read several times that this line was something that was difficult to translate from its original texts, and that it originally referred to "sexual satanic rituals" with large groups of people

This is indeed a route people try to go. On nearly every topic you are going to have people telling you things that seem convincing on both sides. I would recommend looking into hermeneutics techniques (how to read, interpret, and understand the Bible). I'll talk more about this in a bit.

For this specific text, I don't think it holds up. I assume that this case is made because Molech is mentioned in the preceding law. Here is that section:

21 You shall not give any of your children to offer them[b] to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. 22 You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. 23 And you shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion.


The whole chapter is Leviticus 18. The first tip of hermeneutics I'll give you is "Context is King." Always check for context.


This chapter is one long list of things that the Israelites are not commanded to do and which the other nations will be condemned for (this along with the fact that they are restated in the NT are why I think they are still binding).

The law concerning Molech is either in regards to sacrificing children to the false god or dedicate them to him, likely as temple prostitutes. Either way, it does not mean that the following verse is related to Molech, and if it is then we could say the same thing about bestiality, but this (I think you would agree) is obviously sinful. Taken even further, you could argue that incest was okay, but again, this is obviously not the case.

The idea that the immediate context indicates that this is talking about temple sex worship or orgies (I think) is unfounded and it doesn't take the context of the chapter as a whole into account. With that said here is a link to a debate between James White and a guy who holds this view that you are talking about. To be upfront, this is probably the best defense of homosexual acceptance I have ever heard, and he even made me think his arguments were valid for a moment...but as the debate went on and the more I thought about it the less sense it made.

Maybe you'll come away with a different conclusion though.

I'll also link this response post by Preston Sprinkle (who does a lot of work in this with nothing but love). He addresses this concern in point 2. Lastly, here is a short video by John Piper on the topic.

>It's one of those things that make me unsure of what to believe from the Bible.
It's concerning because I keep coming back to thinking "How do any of us know what is really right from the Bible?"

It takes time. My advice to you would be "don't panic, take your time." I have had foundational shifts in my thinking change because of what I realized the Bible was teaching. This is a part of growing and maturing in the faith. Sometimes it can be painful and exhausting but it is worth it and it will help you in the long run.

I think that looking into how to do hermeneutics will be helpful. I'd recommend How to Read the Bible for All its Worth. I'll link a couple of videos that might help as well. Exegesis and Hermeneutics (its a bit choppy, but it has good content). You'll also want to be aware of two fancy-pants words: Exegesis & Eisegesis. Rather than explain those in-depth, I'll just link to this 3 min. vid by Francis Chan that explains the concepts (these are also brought up in the other vid).

The key thing you want to look for is consistency. Is what I believe consistent with this text? the context? the Bible as a whole?

Here is a clip about the textual variants issue I was talking about. I recommend the whole thing, but you'd have to order it.

>I don't want, or plan to give up on my faith, but I'm afraid that even with me believing in God, and that he will save me, I can't help but wonder if he really will save me, or if he even saved departed loved ones who believed in God, but still did small things that seem to sound like they were sinful.



I would again recommend reading Romans 8. And also let me reassure you that we are not saved by our good works or by a perfect understanding of doctrine. We all err in one way or another. Salvation is a gift, we are saved by grace through faith. If you truly wish to seek God, to do as he says, and to love him then there you should take comfort in that. God recognizes that we are not perfect, he has taken that into account. This is the reason he sent Christ. Don't let the fact that you are confused keep you from rejoicing in God. Confusion does not negate salvation.

> That's really implausible. What makes you think any of it is true?

That's a great question! I believe in Christianity for reasons including personal experience, the lack of cogent arguments against it (an area I've studied for some time, and that's not meant as a challenge against you or anything, though I'm happy to answer your questions and objections), the historicity of the Biblical documents (archeologically, especially those of the New Testament and the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Nazareth), the remarkable ability of theism to best explain a wide range of the data in human experience (such as the possibility of our having reliable cognitive faculties and their deliverances, the beginning of the universe, the existence of objective moral values and duties, the "fine tuning" of the initial conditions of the universe for the development of intelligent life and our exorbitant means of observing the world around us, the fact of widespread religious experience, the implausibility of the development of conscious agents from inorganic matter, the irreducibly of certain instantiations of biological complexity to any naturalistic incremental evolutionary mechanism, the existence of regularity and a bias in nature towards simplicity and aesthetic features (which I am happy to elaborate on), the possibility of change (the actualization of potentials and the nature of hierarchical causal series), and a great deal more that space does not permit me to detail).

> It's also a very anthropocentric way of looking at the universe, which has been around billions of years longer than we have.

I don't think so; rather, I think it is a very God-centric way of looking at the universe. I don't believe we were the entire reason God created the universe, and I do believe that it exists for His glory.

> You're suggesting that God created the universe so that we would come into existence on one planet in it,

No, the creation of the cosmos was not entirely done just so that human beings would wind up in it--that would make it a rather inefficient means of creating us. Rather, God has no shortage of paint, and He exercised His creative power here for a lot more than just humans. Luckily for us, we get to be a part of it and observe the living painting He made and praise Him for it.

> for a tiny fraction of the time, so he could save us from punishments he devised?

This is a caricature of Christian theology. God didn't create everything just so He could "save us from punishments he devised". I commend you to read the Gospels and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity for a better understanding of the Christian system of thought, because the understanding you've presented is in fact confused in many ways.

God created mankind not so that we could be punished, but rather so that we could participate in the wonderful thing that is life and bring glory to Him by living for Him and enjoying Him and His creation. However, we rebelled and continue to rebel against Him and this purpose and bring evil into the world each and every day--perversions to His creation. It is this evil that warrants punishment, punishment which God has done everything in His power to try and save us from by living a human life in the person of Christ and brutally and tortuously dying after resisting all temptation so that we could be vicariously redeemed through Him. By living a perfect life, He did what no man has ever done and so further warrants the right to say what should happen to those of us (all of us) who fail to do the same (which He, by virtue of living perfectly, demonstrated is possible)--and yet His choice, when given even more right to condemn us, is to show us mercy and save us by allowing us redemption before Himself! Hence, His sacrifice and offer of salvation is the greatest example of mercy and love mankind has ever known.

And so He allows us to choose Him, and loves us enough to respect our choice to reject Him and live apart from Him if we so choose (which is what hell is--separation from Him that is chosen by the individual).

> I don't. Thomas Aquinas died 800 years ago and knew nothing about modern neuroscience or psychology. We have a natural tendency to believe whatever we're taught growing up.

I think it's more than just a "tendency to believe whatever we're taught growing up", because virtually all human beings throughout history and in the modern day have believed God exists. And, when you ask them, they will explicitly adduce to you reasons for their believing in His existence--so attributions of human belief in God to uncritical acts of will or psychoanalytic theses seem to me implausible and uncritically formulated or accepted themselves, for they are conceived of without making any account of the individual's reasoning with respect to the question they purport to answer. And Aquinas's sentiment has been repeated throughout the history of philosophy by the most eminent atheists and theist thinkers alike up until the modern day--not that I think that we should reject the ideas of people in the past out of what philosophers call "chronological snobbery", an uncritical bias in favor of contemporary thought by virtue of its being contemporary.

Thanks for the exchange so far, I hope I've helped you understand what I believe and why a bit more. Please note that I do not intend in writing this to sound condescending, so if it comes off that way my apologies.

>In this case I think your argument is invalid, because the fourth premise is not really connected to your first three premises.

I don't think so but I'll re-word it: P4) With logic there's a need to be able to choose objectively between a valid or invalid premise based on its merits.

Conclusion: Under naturalism there is no possibility of objectively choosing between a valid or invalid premise based on its merits as all human actions - thought, word, and deed, are determined by the physical laws.

> The easiest counterexample would be a computer: those are definitely collections of atoms, but they are also able to choose between a valid and an invalid premise, for example in an IF-statement.

There are two major problems with this "computer" solution of yours.

1. As John Searle's Chinese room experiment points out computers do not think. Computers merely mechanically follow instruction; they just simulate understanding, knowledge, an etc.
   
   and that leads to the greater problem for you:
   
   
2. The real work of a computer is done by its programmer; the computer's code and instructions are made by an intelligent designer.
   
   So if you want to go down the road with your computer answer than you'd have to concede that humans need an intelligent designer in order to process If/Then statements
   
   But you could say that some code or instructions happened by "chance" as famed atheist philosopher Antony Flew once tried to show how a 500 word paragraph [and a computer's code is much more complex then this] could come about randomly.
   
   However, according to Flew just getting that done would have taken more time since the beginning of the universe; I believe he said one million "rolls of the dice" per second since the beginning of time. This led him on his journey to give up on atheism and embrace theism. See There Is A God for details.
   
   So you haven'r shown how any of the 4 premises are invalid, nor have you shown how 4 is "unconnected" with the first 3.

I think that the simple reason that God doesn't do that is because it would result in all of us going straight to hell.

Human beings are inherently selfish. If God were to show up and manifest himself as some powerful being, then human beings would only worship him so that they could gain his power and favor for themselves. This is the antithesis of the self-giving love that God wants us to have.

When the time finally came for us to choose to embrace that self-giving love or embrace our own selfishness- seeing God's powerfirsthand would make it MORE difficult to do the former.

For more on this I would recommend: http://www.inspiringphilosophy.org/project/why-there-is-no-proof-of-god/

Or if you want a good book on the subject from an academic perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Hiddenness-Essays-Daniel-Howard-Snyder/dp/0521006104

Others have stated that you shouldn't start with the OT, opting to go for the gospels/NT books instead. While that's fine, just know that much of what is in those books draws on or is pulling symbolism/reference from OT books.


If you would like an easier experience with the OT, I would highly recommend reading them in the Jewish Study Bible. It has fantastic commentary made up of scholars, rabbinic essays, archeological data, etc. It really brings the text to life in a way that is not possible with just a casual reading of the text.

It's not just the age difference, so keep that in mind. You've heard the phrase "don't shit where you eat?" Churches are great networks for meeting new people, but it's also incredibly social fraught, especially if it's a relative of church leadership that you're interested in!

Grab this book and give it a read. It reminds you that, even though you are tired of being alone (and I feel that, brother, I feel it), you have to be careful about making poor choices.

Online dating isn't for pretty people, either! I say give it another try with some other platforms. Go start a hobby––take up dancing or crossfit or something social. That's a great way to meet people your age AND boost your confidence.

Except there are better ones out there.

When I say Aslan's scholarship isn't there, the issue is he uses flawed scholarship and presents it as fact. Some of this scholarship has actively been discredited, others are widely criticized for methodological issues (using circular logic to back up their conclusions), and is very contentious on some fundamental problems. Aslan makes a lot of claims as if they're truth but which cannot be proven because we lack the evidence to make such conclusions.

I'll be upfront on my bias here: Aslan relies on 19th century German scholarship and the Jesus Seminar and I simply think these sources of the historical Jesus are not sound. I contend that the streams of scholarship he relies upon tends to present speculation as fact (and a lot of the speculation has been treated as fact). The Jesus Seminar in particular is roundly criticized for using circular logic to make conclusions. I think these critiques are fair and do suggest that the conclusions of the wider Jesus Seminar should be handled as suspect. I believe archeological evidence disproves assumptions made by the Jesus Seminar when it comes to aging texts. This matters because the Jesus Seminar went through texts and voted on each one's authenticity based on their unproven assumptions -- deeming passages inauthentic (and thus later additions) based on criteria that were unproven and perhaps even disproven.

Aslan is a bad starting point because he uses questionable scholarship, doesn't question it, and then presents this "historical" portrait of Jesus based on his reading of this scholarship. Scholarship which archeological evidence actively contradicts at times.

I haven't read this book, but I've read some of his articles, and E.P. Sanders is commonly seen as a good starting point who makes good use of archeological evidence to draw conclusions.

N.T. Wright and Marcus Borg co-author a book which goes through various aspects of the search for the historical Jesus. Wright and Borg are friends (and I think went to school together? They both had the same mentor, anyhow) but have very different views. Wright is highly critical of the Jesus Seminar, Borg was part of the Jesus Seminar but is also a bit of an outlier due to his more mystical understanding.

The point is that there's much better starting points. I think any of the links I've provided are good ones. But Aslan simply because if Aslan is your jumping off point, you're mostly going to get scholarship that he agreed with to make his point.

Outside sources help confirm that - if you wish to explore this idea more I really recommend the book The Case for Christ

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310350034/ref=cm_sw_r_em_apa_i_lCZTDbDCV0B3B

We can agree to disagree on point one. As long as God is getting the glory I don't think it really matters if He did it in 7 days or 7 billion. (I'm curious what "simple research" you're refering to though. I've looked at interlinears and read a book on the subject, but I'm always open to learning more.)

2 and 3 come from Bible scholar Michael Heiser on his podcast The Naked Bible. According to him, those practices are observed in contemporary cultures. I'll see if I can find the episode.

I had, thank you. Same to you.

>Is humanity at peak prosperity? Yes, probably so. Why? Because it’s already the direction we were headed in.

I think is important to establish why we were headed in. Is because we discover ways to make our real, natural life better. Not because we discover ways to improve our spiritual life. Even though we tried with thousand of Gods and religions.

​

>It’s not like we’ve been walking in circles for the last ten thousand years.

We actually kind of were going in circles:

"Copernicus (1473-1543)1,2, Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo (1564-1642)3,4,5, Newton (1643-1727)6 and Laplace (1749-1827)7 all fought battles against the Church when they published scientific papers that enraged the Church by writing that the Earth might orbit the sun, rather than the idea that it sat at a central position in the Universe. These and other scientists suffered torture, imprisonment, forced recantations and death at the hands of Christians5,8. The source of the Church's confidence was the Bible.

.....

"2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia: on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea. Suddenly there were people who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from simpler forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun. And that the stars were very far away. [...]

In the 6th century B.C., in Ionia, a new concept developed, one of the great ideas of the human species. The universe is knowable, the ancient Ionians argued, because it exhibits an internal order: there are regularities in Nature that permit its secrets to be uncovered. [...] This ordered and admirable character of the universe was called Cosmos. [...]

Between 600 and 400 B.C., this great revolution in human thought began. [...] The leading figures in this revolution were men with Greek names, largely unfamiliar to us today, the truest pioneers in the development of our civilization and our humanity.”

"Cosmos" by Carl Sagan (1995)37

***

When did the Catholic Church officially accepted the fact of a moving Earth? Can you believe it was 1992

The idea is Christianity proposes and imposes a system in which reality works because of supernatural forces. Which has been proven wrong so so many times when it tried to defend it.

So I can say that Christianity is false because it's claims has been proven false in all its history. The sun doesn't burn because of supernatural forces, volcanos, thunders, earthquakes, floods, desises, disasters are not the wrath of Gods. From here I have big doubts about claims about soul, haven, angels, demons, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Significance-Religious-Experience-Howard-Wettstein-dp-0190226757/dp/0190226757/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

thoughts on the KJV?

This book has been around for decades and has a chapter on meditation, check it out.

Context is what you are missing out on. Life is vastly different today than it was in biblical times.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310431581?aaxitk=Sg0pijqQ8SEasKqkZsS.4g

Yeah, i think a lot of people had that experience. I think that's why Dan Kimball wrote a book called, "They Like Jesus but Not the Church" (https://www.amazon.com/They-Like-Jesus-but-Church-ebook/dp/B000SEI18G/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=i+love+Jesus+but+not+the+church&qid=1562185193&s=gateway&sr=8-1). There's also one by Francis Spufford called "Unapologetic" (https://www.amazon.com/Unapologetic-Everything-Christianity-Surprising-Emotional/dp/0062300466/ref=sr_1_1?crid=HY5DTU5TNYXK&keywords=francis+spufford+unapologetic&qid=1562185315&s=gateway&sprefix=francis+spufford%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-1). There are, unfortunately, too many people who still respect Jesus and the Bible but have had it with the Church. It's too bad the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.