re: Satanic Temple puts up display at Michigan Capital

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You can't reason someone out of a religious belief because they didn't use reason to form that belief. The vast majority of the religious beliefs held by individuals across religions were gotten by childhood conditioning from the ages of 0-6. Any kind of conditioning during those ages goes straight into the subconscious mind with no critical or conscious filter. Once again, if most people were not exposed to the teachings of their religion until age 18, they would not be religious at all because it would sound ludicrous to them. You have to get them young as admitted by the Catholic church so that you can pour that stuff into a skull full of mush. It is hard to jettison that kind of conditioning later in life. It takes effort. And it usually takes separating yourself from the family or social environment that shaped those beliefs in the first place. And it takes a truly open mind.

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Le bingo

I did too, Tom but we are in the minority. It happens more often today because people have access to information on the internet that we didn't have access to 20 years ago. And certainly those 50 and under are much less religious today. That trend will continue. You cannot put the horse back into the barn. The information is out there but you have to truly have an open mind to investigate it and then adjust your life philosophy accordingly.

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If they used allegory in the Old Testament couldn't Christ use it as well?

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Both Jesus and the disciples mention many of the Old Testament people by name as factual and very real. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Moses, Jonah, Daniel, Lot, Joseph, etc.
It then list things that these people did like in Noah's case with the ark and Joseph helping his family avoid the famine.
Not only that, the exact words of many of the Old Testament saints are quoted or referred to in the New. Now if none of these people and their stories are real, one might as well throw the entire bible in the trash can because it is utterly unreliable and mistake ridden.
Here is only one example of how if the Old Testament stories are myth than what Jesus says is pointless;


Matthew 12:40 For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.


Jesus is comparing his time in the grave to the time Jonah was in the whale. And he says, just as Jonah was in the whale, I'll be in the ground. So what if Jonah never existed? Then Jesus illustration is not only useless but also a lie.
I could go on, but you get the point.
Like I said before, it doesn't hold water.


And that is not even touching the subject how a God man who created everything by his own word wouldn't even know the real from myth!

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I believe this based on your posts on this board.

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Just as I love everyone equally.

The previous post is a paraphrasing of John Candy's mayoral candidate Johnny Larue from SCTV. However, I didn't list the various ethnic groups with the inappropriate terminology he used.

Last time I made an obvious joke someone didn't get it and reported me.

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not necessarily. There are many many times in the bible where things are exaggerated, made up, etc. and it's not clear.

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Understanding context is important for understanding the Bible, but you'll have to be more specific about the "exaggerated, made up, etc." part of your statement. That is something other than allegory, though, since allegory is never meant to be taken literally but is meant to reveal a deeper meaning. The Bible often times interprets itself, and if ancient theologians don't agree that something is definitely allegorical, it makes no sense to assume it just because it doesn't fit with our presuppositional thinking.

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I think it's obvious that the world wasn't created in 7 days, I don't think Abraham could have lived hundreds of years, and other things.

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Without getting into an argument on the natural feasibility of such things, I'll just say that I do think such things were meant to be taken literally.

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Now it is possible that God could create some type of miracle but I think it is also correct to think God wouldn't act in a way contrary to basic reason.

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How is a miracle "contrary to basic reason"? It really bothers me when people say that miracles (or the supernatural, in general) aren't "reasonable", "rational", or "logical", because reason and logic are ways of thinking about things. They aren't conclusions.

It would not be reasonable to say that God performs miracles when He doesn't interact with His creation (like the god of Deism). It isn't logical to say that people mentioned in the OT lived to be hundreds of years if we assume lifespans in the past were identical to what they have been in more recent history. It isn't rational to think Jonah lived inside of a whale or that three people were thrown into a blazing fire without being killed (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) if we don't also assume a supernatural protection.

You can't say that the miracles of the Bible are not reasonable or logical because that statement doesn't make sense by itself. You have to say such things aren't rational when you approach them with a completely natural or materialistic worldview. If you appended that last part, I would agree. But there is nothing in the BIble that is contrary to basic reason.

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Jonah is a real prophet but that doesn't mean his story is historical. That doesn't logically follow.

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Based on the context of the Bible, it does logically follow. There is nothing allegorical about the book of Jonah in and of itself. It is an interpretation of the book based on the assumption that the events described there in cannot be true and so the story must be allegorical. The other books and passages of the Bible that describe the interactions of the prophets with God and the people to whom they are sent are written in a historical fashion, so the story of Jonah would have to be the exception, and given that allegory in the Bible either uses nameless or generic people to prove a point (like most of Jesus' parables) or specifically makes a connection between real people and places and their meanings (like Galatians chapter 4), or there may be literal people and events that have a double purpose (foreshadowing of Christ's sacrifice through the Old Testament priesthood), but again, there is no reason to assume Jonah is allegorical from the text alone.

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I'm going to leave it at this. I don't think Jonah was swallowed by the fish but I think this is little outside of the context of our discussion.

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I believe there was talk of the Bible being mythical and not intended to be taken literally. I was arguing that while the Bible does use allegory and other poetical forms of writing, it also includes historical narrative that should be taken literally. The story of Jonah, for example.

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Odd. I see no reason that follows. People use fictional characters all the time as examples today. If I had the ability to jump over buildings, I might say that I would "leap buildings as does Superman". Everyone would know what I meant and no one would say, "Superman aint real.....that's a lie!!!!"

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This is a bad illustration. What if I tell my kid, " Just as Santa Claus is real and knows if you are bad and good, God is the same way?"
This is a good example because it happens all the time and when the child gets older and realizes there is no Santa and he was lied to, perhaps he thinks God is fictional too?
And if Jonah really didn't spend any time in the whale, well maybe Jesus didn't get buried?

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Sorry. Your logic is badly failing on this point.

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Have you ever heard the word " Theophony?" It's used to describe a visible manifestation of God to mankind. Jesus appeared in the Old Testament numerous times as an angel. One was when he met with Abraham and spoke about the destruction of Sodom.
Now if Jesus intermingled with the Old Testament characters himself, wouldn't he also know who was real? Again, the entire bible falls apart if these characters are purely myth because the New Testament clearly speaks to them as being real.

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Again, I'm sorry. Your "proof" here is badly lacking. Now, if you had a scripture where someone said, "But Jesus, Jonah was a fictional character" and Jesus responded with, "no, he was very real and really spent time in the belly", you'd have a point.

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There is an entire book about Jonah in the Old Testament, granted a short one. In it, it tells in great detail about Jonah and his interaction with God and his dealing with the people of
Nineveh. Now I'm to conclude that Jonah's story was fake and God never interacted with him and then later punish him for his disobedience? And God also didn't know Jonah and his story was fake? One had to jump through many theological hoops to pull this stuff off.

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It doesn't have to, only if you want it.

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Plus the Jews were meticulous record keepers and their scribes went through painstaking trouble to create accurate historical records. People like Jonah are part of the Jewish faith and they even had a modern day shrine to Jonah in present day Nineveh that was recently destroyed by vandals. I guess all of the Jewish writings apart from Christianity are also inaccurate?

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Since I believe God does exist, is supernatural, and has interacted with His creation in extraordinary ways in the past, I will have to continue to astound you.

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Stories have notoriously stretched the truth for as long as humans could communicate. There's a reason all god's law-of-physics-defying-miracles were done thousands of years ago, and never happen today.