Sapere

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"Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture comes from one's own interpretation." - 2 Peter 1:20

"He [St. Paul] writes this way in all his letters, speaking in them about such matters. Some parts of his letters are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction." - 2 Peter 3:16

One of the two major tenets of Protestantism (Sola Scriptura) is in direct contradiction to what Peter tells us in his epistle.

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Is that your interpretation of these particular verses?

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I do. Most of it.
Religion is low hanging fruit.
Ours is truth. Yours is satanic.

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Are you saying the view "Ours is the truth. Yours is satanic" is a bad viewpoint and that your own is the true viewpoint?

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when hundreds of thousands of people are all killed in the name of X, then yes, at that point its safe to say X is a problem.

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Say you decide to share your infinite wisdom with the world. You teach love and compassion. A group decides to follow you and performs multiple heinous acts that go against your teaching. Who is responsible you or the group?

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It doesn't have to prove that there isn't an absolute truth.

It merely has to prove that whatever that absolute truth is, humans don't actually agree on it. Not even the ones who AGREE that God is the source of it.

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Yes but what is the point of this. If we are defining "objective moral law" as a law that is true independent of what humans think on the matter, then disagreement has nothing to do with the truth value of said moral law.

I could be misunderstanding you. Are you in fact arguing that disagreement among people regarding morality is proof that objective morality, as I defined it above, is a false idea?

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Nope, it's completely relevant. You asserted: "when the golden rule is properly defined." You then proceeded to define it in a manner that is neither objectively correct, nor the first or only example

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Are you saying that it is not objective in that not all people accept this specific formulation or in the sense that the formulation is not an objectively true formulation of the golden rule?

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if every single person who ever read the Bible came to the same conclusions regarding morality you might have a point. But they don't

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Why would every person need to come to the same conclusions to prove that an objective moral law exists or that said moral law is revealed in the Bible? This is certainly not the case for other objective truths. For example, it is absolutely true that there is at least one absolute truth. Now people can say that they disagree with that statement and some most certainly have, but their disagreement does not prove or disprove anything about the truth in question.

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Really, I'd Sam Harris is one of the greatest living philosophers. He's incredible at it. He's debatably the greatest living philosopher, which has made him many enemies.

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You might need to read a bit more if you think he is one of the greatest living philosophers.

The arguments Harris puts forth in his books are palatable to the dogmatic hoi polloi of the irreligious community, but they can be quite sloppy at times.

In his book Letter to a Christian Nation, for example, Harris starts off with this statement on page 8.

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Questions of morality are questions about happiness and suffering. This is why you and I do not have moral obligations toward rocks. To the degree that our actions can affect the experience of other creatures positively or negatively, questions of morality apply.

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This statement is problematic chiefly in that the book lacks the argumentation needed to defend it. Indeed, one would be lucky to find any structured argument defending this systematic moral definition in the book. He merely assumes it and builds a large multitude of his arguments off of it.

Another example is his rather vacuous rendition of the cosmological argument on page 72.

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The argument runs more or less like this: everything that exists has a cause; space and time exist; space and time must, therefore, have been caused by something that stands outside of space and time; and the only thing that transcends space and time; and yet retains the power to create, is God.

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One would think that the greatest philosopher alive would at least know that "everything that exists has a cause" is not a premise of the cosmological argument. The premise he is trying to come up with is "whatever begins to exist has a cause", which is quite different. Of course Harris builds off this caricature with his critique of the argument.

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As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

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Now this critique is a good one if anyone actually argues in favor of the cosmological argument that Harris put forth. Seeing, however, that Harris' caricature is the definition of a straw man, the critique can be easily disregarded in that it attacks an argument that is not utilized by theists.

Regarding his other statement pertaining to the complexity of God, Harris once again fails to provide any argumentation for the assertion. He merely assumes it to be the case. One would think that the greatest living philosopher would be more thorough in his argumentation.

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Those things you named that were designed were designed by something more complex than them. So, if god designed us, that would have to mean he was designed by something even more complex.

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Your second sentence does not follow the first. You have not established that if something is designed the designer must be more complex than the thing that is designed. All that can be gathered from your statement is that some things that are designed have designers that are more complex than themselves.

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Calvin believed in hardline predestination

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As does Piper.

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the immaculate conception and perpetual virginity of Mary

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Where in his writings does Calvin specifically endorse these views?

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rejected sola scriptura

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This might be too hasty of an assertion.

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Now daily oracles are not sent from heaven, for it pleased the Lord to hallow his truth to everlasting remembrance in the Scriptures alone.

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When taken to its logical conclusion this statement is a rejection of sacred tradition as being infallible. It is therefore a rejection of sacred tradition as being an infallible authority.

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But such wranglers are neatly refuted by just one word of the apostle. He testifies that the church is "built upon the foundation of the prophets and the apostles". If the teaching of the prophets and apostles is the foundation, this must have had authority before the church began to exist. Groundless, too, is their subtle objection that, although the church took its beginning here, the writings to be attributed to the prophets and the apostles nevertheless remain in doubt until decided by the church. For if the Christian church was from the beginning founded upon the writings of the prophets and the preaching of the apostles, wherever this doctrine is found, the acceptance of it-without which the church itself would never have existed-must certainly have preceded the church. It is utterly vain then, to pretend that the power of judging Scripture so lies with church that its certainty depends upon churchly assent.

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Here we have a quote that places Scripture as the authority over and above the church.

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Not at all. Luther's "do as I say and not as I do" attitude disprove nothing I've said.

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So you believe Luther desired to sin and create this system where he is free to do so, but that he also believed that one ought not sin as it is not something to be desired?