My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

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_Gadianton Plumber

Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _Gadianton Plumber »

mikwut wrote:Gad,

Admittedly, not as much as I would like in the general consciousness. But with fundamentals such as the temple, further scripture that isn't the same as Genesis I don't know how it is completely missing.

my regards, mikwut

I agree that the temple is meant to be taken largely symbolically, I think this is almost the only area of scripture that it is allowed. I fervently wish folks could see religion as you do, I might even be a participant as an atheist, and be allowed to make their own way, do what they see as right, stop raping their minds, and allow their fellow men to exist on their own terms. But they don't you can't be gay, you can't have sex outside of marriage, pron is a no no, no coffee, no tea, no Carlsberg, on and on and on, or you lose your family and your soul.

I agree that ritual and symbol is intensely important to us human critters, but it needs to work for us, not us for it.

Thoughts?
_mikwut
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _mikwut »

Seth,

I am not immune from criticism any more than you are. A figurative reading of Genesis has theistically been published available and in popular understanding for centuries.

regards, mikwut
All communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.
-Michael Polanyi

"Why are you afraid, have you still no faith?" Mark 4:40
_JohnStuartMill
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _JohnStuartMill »

A visual timeline of literal versus figurative readings of Genesis (each "|" represents 150 years):

| 1000 BCE: Genesis is read literally by those who count it as Scripture.
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| Christianity gets its start. Genesis is read literally by its believers.
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| Middle Ages. Genesis still read literally.
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| Modern geological science upends the Earth-as-10,000-years-old theory. Christian believers start reading Genesis as figurative.
| 2009 CE: Mikwut disdains atheists who read Genesis as literal.
"You clearly haven't read [Dawkins'] book." -Kevin Graham, 11/04/09
_Sethbag
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _Sethbag »

mikwut wrote:Seth,

I am not immune from criticism any more than you are. A figurative reading of Genesis has theistically been published available and in popular understanding for centuries.

regards, mikwut

How does this change anything I said? The reason it turned into a figurative reading, which is still probably for a minority of believers even today, was just as I said - to escape being disproven. It was the believers - not the skeptics - who made the strawman, and they made it for their own apologetic purposes.

But I'm going to defend what I wrote in my previous post. Here's how it looks:

Seth: the Bible says such-and-such. Such-and-such is manifestly not true as we now know.

Mikwut: such-and-such is only to be taken figuratively, not literally. You are beating a strawman.

Now, in the above exchange, does it really matter what such-and-such is? No! You can, and would, use this formula for anything I happened to come along and criticize about the scriptures! Which is just what I said - with someone willing to assert that the scriptures are figurative, by definition anything the critic brings to the table will be turned into a strawman.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen
_JohnStuartMill
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _JohnStuartMill »

I don't think the Christian believers understand the problems to their theology that a literal reading of Genesis poses. If Adam and Eve didn't actually exist, then neither did original sin, and Jesus' atonement was entirely unnecessary.
"You clearly haven't read [Dawkins'] book." -Kevin Graham, 11/04/09
_AlmaBound
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _AlmaBound »

JohnStuartMill wrote:I don't think the Christian believers understand the problems to their theology that a literal reading of Genesis poses. If Adam and Eve didn't actually exist, then neither did original sin, and Jesus' atonement was entirely unnecessary.


There remains, of course, the problem of mankind's individual sin, regardless of "original sin."

In the sense that the Adam and Eve story serves as a parable, an explanation is provided regarding the nature of humans - anyone would have done the same thing as Adam and Eve did in the story.

The atonement isn't something that atones simply for someone else's sin - it atones for an individual's sin.

Speaking for myself, I know that I have broken even those things that I consider to be good and right, gone against what my mind tells me is "righteous," regardless of what any religious authority has told me. I know when I have wronged another, for instance, without having to be told.

The Adam and Eve story breaks this down into its simplest parts, as I see it. In the back of my mind, I have a notion of what is right and wrong, similar to Adam and Eve being commanded, yet breaking that command. Yet I do not always obey that notion that is in the back of my mind, just like they did not.

An atonement story, beginning with the Adam and Eve story of the skins that cover them, answers those internal thoughts about why I don't always do what it is I think is right.

So, does it have to be literal to have meaning? Not as I see it, though I am sure there are fundamentalists out there who would wholely disagree with me.
_AlmaBound
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _AlmaBound »

Sethbag wrote:Now, in the above exchange, does it really matter what such-and-such is? No! You can, and would, use this formula for anything I happened to come along and criticize about the scriptures! Which is just what I said - with someone willing to assert that the scriptures are figurative, by definition anything the critic brings to the table will be turned into a strawman.


None of this really matters to a fellow who is trying to treat people as he wants to be treated and discovers that he has failed.

So, figurative, literal, what difference does it make when all you are trying to do is what you in yourself consider to be righteous and good?

To me, that is where the biblical teachings provide the greatest insight.

But then, I'm a bit of a skeptic myself, so maybe the whole thing is just a sham and I'm fooling myself.

Scratch that, make it probably.
_AlmaBound
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _AlmaBound »

By the way, to steal a page from Dr. Peterson, today I wrote a detailed report about the level of security in the ports of Yemen.

Hopefully I got it right.
_EAllusion
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _EAllusion »

the fact that there is literally nothing I have written that could be construed as typically “creationist” in nature


Arguing natural selection is a tautology because survival of the fittest just means survival of those who make it, expressing skepticism at the existence of transitional forms/fossils and/or arguing evolution has failed to be vindicated by the lack of them, using the term "Darwinism" pejoratively to refer to common descent with modification as an explanation for biodiversity via natural processes like natural selection and mutation, arguing that intelligent direction has been a priori rejected by said "Darwinists" due to illicit bias, and arguing that the structure of DNA indicates intelligence are all typically creationist in nature.

If you were to argue that you believe in microevolution but not macroevolution according to your acceptance of evolution within "strict limits" that also would fit within classical creationism. If you were to accept change within some ill-defined immutable borders creationists used to call "kinds" (some still do), even more so.

But hey, that's all a side show you choose to focus on. After all, simply because I brought up what is the typical creationist tactic here, that doesn't mean you need to go that route even if you have over and over followed creationist tactics in your replies. You just choose to focus on that label rather than address the point of the post for rather obvious reasons.

So by all means, explain how you defend this statement, "And, of course, this has been the ongoing problem for the past century and a half since Origin of the Species was first published. Initially, Darwin and his acolytes predicted that the fossil record would bear out the evidence of the transitional process so predicted. But it hasn’t! And so now we have been subjected to the various “predictions” or so-called “logical extrapolations” from the genetic relationships of all life forms," given the abundance of intermediate forms.

After you're done with that you can explain just exactly how you believe in evolution in any kind of sense that corresponds with how the term is used in biology. For all we know, this could be a coy way of saying you believe in the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression and that is an evolutionary concept. Which would be another way of saying you don't believe in/accept evolution. At the very beginning of this conversation you said you do not think humans evolved from other animals, so it is already clear you don't believe in evolution unless you've had a recent change of heart, but feel free to clarify whatever it is you do think.
_William Schryver
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Re: My favorite cogdis of the Mormons.

Post by _William Schryver »

Eat Illusion:
... given the abundance of intermediate forms.

That's hilarious.

Really.

On the other hand, I probably should have mentioned earlier that the very definition (and corresponding expectation) of intermediary forms is another of the many things in Darwinist Dogma that has been greatly modified over the years in order to adapt itself to the actual record in the dirt.

Now that is what I call evolution.
... every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol ...
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