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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (13714)	2/16/2011 5:06:30 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

I have already addressed the fallacy of equating atheism with amorality. In re inerrancy: I see that as a failed philosophy. The Bible contains many items presented as fact that cannot have been true. Typically these are presented as miracles. I realize that it is a central tenet of every great religion except Buddhism (and there, not all schools) that miracles happen. Miracles, and a religion's ownership of the god responsible, are used as a "proof" of God's existence and sponsorship of that religion. My reason says that miracles don't belong in nature. My experience says that stories of miracles are old, second- and third-hand accounts. My instinct says that, like tales of UFOs, they are products of man's awesomely fertile mystical imagination. While reason can be used to, if not kill inerrancy, contort it beyond all comfort, infallibility is protean and much tougher to take apart. Revelation is beyond rational treatment altogether. I smile when fine-tuned intelligent design proponents play a statistical numbers game. That same numbers game can be used to show that "of all gods, this one, and of all doctrines, that book" is vanishingly improbable. Something else is needed - a sort of mystical contact. Saul had a rather spectacular one such on the road to Damascus, and every self-aware believer can reach back to an event in which the perception of the divine, not any exercise of reason, laid the necessary cornerstone for faith. That "touch of the spirit" is a necessary precursor or adjunct to deciding that the revelation is the stuff. That said, inerrancy makes claims that can be refuted, unless one assigns miracle to all the impossible events, like a flood that blanketed the planet in human history. (The moment one says the flood was regional, inerrancy has yielded to infallibility.) My belief is not a dogma because I don't teach it, nor do I consider it immutable ... two requirements of dogma. Is it unsubstantiated? In my heart and mind ... no. Can I prove that? No.