[Waarnemer]

Originally Posted by Plethon

It does not broaden anything. Allegorical explanations of the Biblical passages were commonplace in the Christian theology since the inception of the Christianity. So nothing new, no broadening.

This only can produce contradiction. On what grounds do you accept Biblical events and dismiss you others? What sounds favourable on this day and age...? What sounds favourable to you personally? On what is assumable less ridicule then the next passage?

Bible was never meant to be a textbook on geology or biology anyway.

Never said that.

It does not undermine Christianity

Sure it does.

The original sin is something people knew of since times immemorial. There is something wrong with the world...and there being some primordial cause to it is a well known theme of many myths and legends.

In Christianity original sin holds his ground in the Genesis event, and original sin is the ultimate and only basis for Christ's crucifixion.

As for Jesus' crucifixion, it is something that fits in perfectly with what we know how the world functions in general. You need first ti humiliate yourself, in order to later elevate yourself. Nothing of worth is ever achieved, no worthwhile achievement, by presumption and arrogance. All the most brilliant scientists in history, who discovered great things, were humble and modest people. You need to sit a lot in order to learn something, you need to train, in order to achieve results in sports etc. Most things that are of value, are achieved by a kind of self-sacrifice. Jesus' (God's) self-sacrifice fits with this analogy perfectly.

There is a reason why Christianity isnt Buddhism.. I don't know the theologian that came with this Freudian interpretation, but with respect to the content the script already gives Jesus motivations, more precisely mankind's salvation from sin. Unclear modifications as these just reduce the doctrine. Needless to say there is morally much wrong with that sort of teachings of almost clear apathy.

They obviously can't, otherwise there would be no ethics. Of course, I don't say that only Christianity brings ethics. You can find ethical teachings, or seeds thereof, in Confucians', Buddhists' scriptures. But they did not come to those conclusions through empirical observations either. It came from their heart, so to say.

They can't provide them on their own, they can however dismiss the importance of dogmatic morals by clarifying events in the material world on which religion claims the ultimate truth.

Well, I think not. It seems to me that it is rather the strictly materialistic view that narrows down speculations on the purpose of life and eliminates even the question of the first cause. As if it had a commandment: "Thou shalt not ask after the first cause!" While the assessment of an intelligent creator arouses speculations about his nature and on how to approach him...

How do you come up with all of this?

If the world were only material, there would be no poetry, no aesthetics, no nothing, we would be robots and slaves to our instincts. No free will...

Perhaps you could elaborate your assertion a bit more.

I will only address free will, the rest of your text is an opinion, there is no reason to assume that without a supernatural creator there wouldn't be poetry or aesthetics.

So no free will..., I could start with addressing the totalitarian concept of free will in the Christian doctrine, since Im convinced you think to find real free choice in the dogma and revealed truth you subject to, but perhaps its better to ask you that question first in the light of your personal? dismissal of nonfavourable parts of the script. So do you believe to have free will under God?

Religious conceptions similar to Christianity existed since times immemorial. For me it is one yet proof in favour of God and immaterial reality.

'An explanation and justification for events in the world' Proof of that is omnipresent in all cultures and the concept in cultural anthropology came with the colonization and the reaction of the primitive on the knowledge and material from the west. What you do is wish thinking.

Some bigotted versions of Christianity claim that all people who did not hear the Christian message, go to hell automatically. The explanation is that man's nature got so corrupted with the fall (original sin), as to make him practically uncapable of any good deeds. We are so evil, evil and irredemiably evil that we all automatically deserve hell, only through blind faith and not through any good works can we attain salvation. Some protestant sects, but even some branches of Catholicism (Jansenism), make this claim. Well, it seems very illogical to me and, if that were the essence of Christianity, then I wouldn't be Christian (because such an approach is illogical and leads nowhere). Another extreme, saying that there is no original sin (Pelagianism) is also unacceptable (the everyday evidence defies it).

Protestantism and evangelical sects don't make that claim. You are too drastic in your argumentation.

The question of why Jesus was born only 2000 years pertains to the mysteries of the world. We cannot know the whole truth and understand everything, being in the state of fall and captured in the material world and dependent on it (yet having the ability of knowing something about the immaterial world, unlike animals). Our capability for knowledge is limited, but it does not mean that we should not pursue (sceintific) knowledge. On the contrary...

The answer of vague mystery and limits in our capability for understanding was to expected to come up in the argument, it always does in dogmatic line of defences.

And what about the first cause? you observe something, yet you can't observe the ultimate cause and/or purpose thereof.

And it seems to me that since the development of the quantum physics the old-fashioned materialism became out-dated. They say that matter is energy. And what it energy? Not something very observable...

We can't know the state before the Big Bang since only then time begun. We know what caused the explosion though. On energy, energy is not something, it's the result of something, the result of the association of atoms in molecules, its by the matter that you can mark energy.

The whole life is composed of speculations. You need speculation on immaterial concepts even in order to posit a scientific hypothesis (or theory), after you have collected observable data.

You have reasonable speculation and hypotheses on grounds of earlier observed concepts or matter (to reduce and make it clear) and you have speculation on the ground of wish thinking, speculating on God as a supernatural entity that you can't see nor know of existing falls in the second category as much of any other concept you can make up and can't prove, and you can take the stand of the agnostic on that. Speculating on an Abrahamic God falls also in the second category, since we know the script on which its based to be full of inner inconsistencies and inconsistencies with observed facts.µ

How can you be sure they don't exist? You can only be sure that you don't see them, nor hear, nor smell them, but that they don't exist, you can't be sure.

You let your imagination run wild on that, but if that's where you build your life around...

However, to posit that the world moves by itself, through accident, is not very logical. For example, mental concepts cannot be observed, but they still exist.

Mental concepts can be observed by neuroscience, they even can observe 'love'.

What about infinity? There is an infinity of particles of the material world, whenever you discover some small one, you can always discover a smaller etc. It is something impossible to solve seen only from the materialistic point of view.

Atoms can't be divided.

Another is more profound and it works through intuition and analogies. You need this kind of pre-conceived knowledge even to start any scientific inquiry. Some general principles that you simply "know" that they are such. It is through such intuitive-analogical cognition that you come to the knowledge of immaterial things and ultimately God.

That's not knowledge to be highly credited, its subjective and therefore by definition not universally true, since much of what you think to know or feel can be studied by exact science, and there is reason and logic behind the way and reason you think and feel.