Re: 9 Bills That Would Put Creationism in the Classroom

On May 19, 10:11 pm, Bill <brogers31...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 20, 9:50 am, Suzanne <leila...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On May 16, 9:50 pm, Bill <brogers31...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 17, 8:31 am, Suzanne <leila...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 14, 5:14 am, Burkhard <b.scha...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 14, 9:03 am, Suzanne <leila...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 13, 2:19 am, Bill <brogers31...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 13 Mei, 13:47, Suzanne <leila...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

To a large degree the debate is about whether or not the Bible can be
trusted. Suzanne is therefore engaging in the logical fallacy called
begging the question .

Well, not exactly, but almost. You see, I gave my life to the Lord,
and
put my trust in him for salvation about the same time that I began to
learn to read. A child that makes that decison on his own still has to
grow up in this world, and he or she sees people struggling to
understand life and the Christian child goes through things himself
in order to learn.

.

One of the reasons you don't believe is probably
because of liberalism in some denominations of Christianity.

Change the "b" to a "t" and you might be right.

There are some things that need to be literal. Do you know what
"torah" means? It means "law," and therefore "instruction." For
instructions you
need literalism.

Law and legal interpretation is something every beginner in a law
degree is taught intensively (my students study it for one year, three
lectures a week) , and it is one of the disciplines that has developed
over centuries the most detailed theory of interpretation possible.
"Literal reading" is in the standard model just one amongst several
"canons" of interpretation, side by side the historical, the
teleological, the contextual, the audience oriented. etc 9up to 27,
depending on school and jurisdiction)
(Jonathon R. Macey & Geoffrey P.Miller, The Canons of Statutory
Construction and Judicial Preferences, 45
VAND.L.REV. 647, 647 (1992))

Mastering the skill of legal interpretation is one of the reasons you
have to the a professional lawyer and give him huge amounts of money -
if it were just a question of reading a text, everybody could do it.
Unsurprisingly, entire books have been written just on the method of
appropriate legal interpretation.n the US e.g. the two volume
treatise: Sutherland Statutes and Statutory Construction, currently
edited by Norman J Singer, J.D. Shambie Singer, See e.g. Sinclair,
Michael, "Llewellyn's Dueling Canons, One to Seven: A Critique". New
York Law School Law Review, Vol. 51, Fall 2006 for the different
methods used in legal interpretation, and how they can result in
conflicting interpretation s of the same text.

The standard example we give our students comes from H.L.A Hart, who
argued that every legal norm has a core meaning and then a penumbra of
doubt; His example: If the rule says: "no vehicles are permitted in
the park", are toy model vehicles banned? Wheelchairs? A disfunctional
tank for a veteran memorial? A remote controlled electric toy?

The text alone won't tell you, for this you need to interpret it in
its context, using additional information
(Hart, H. L. A. (1958). "Positivism and the Separation of Law and
Morals". Harvard Law Review 71 (4): 593 629)

You would not wa
nt someone to make you a meal
using vague recipe instructions.

I don't know what your recipe books say, but mien are full of vague
isntructions: "Take some flour" (how much?), cook for desired texture
(what?) etc etc.

Burkhard, thank you for explaining to me your perspective. You don't
have to go to that extent to understand the Bible. Children can
understand it. If you
don't understand something, you go to something that you can
understand.
The Holy Spirit helps someone to understand it. The things that I've
written
in the last few posts are crystal clear to most people. How is it that
you all
are so blindingly brilliant about some things, but can't grasp what
things I
have been saying? It's not that vague as "take some flour" as you
write
above.

OK...I see that you all will heckle me, and take a view against what I
say.
Or give me a hard time about my viewpoints. That is obvious. But, when
someone explains what someone says they don't get about the Bible in
here, why is it that the explanations are turned away? No one is
allowed
to be right, only the unbelievers. They say "we can't understand
this."
So people explain it and I've seen perfectly correct explanations get
turned away. The ones objecting to the explanations sound like they
just can't understand something but boy if an explanation is given
they
suddenly get so smart and know more, supposedly, than the person or
persons trying to explain the verses to them.

You are giving the impression with this post, that someone has to have
a law degree and then also take your classes for over a year, three
times
a week, in order to ever understand the words in the Bible. It just
isn't
so. So what are you saying all this for?

Suzanne

Burkhard is not heckling you. He is merely pointing out that what you
think of as "just reading what the Bible says, without interpretation"
is more complex than you seem to think. You yourself do not simply
read the text and understand it based on the simple dictionary meaning
of individual words. Your goal, as you yourself say, is to understand
the "original meaning." You do that by putting each individual verse
into context within the chapter and book in which it occurs, by
looking at other sections of the Bible, by applying what you know, or
think you know about the history of the period (e.g. the Eye of a
Needle market gate in Syria) or linguistics, to understand what is
written and to get back to "the original meaning."

Neither Burkhard nor I claim that there is anything at all wrong in
your doing that. Everybody does that whenever they read anything, even
a recipe or a law book. The only thing that strikes us as odd is your
intense resistance to calling what you are doing "interpretation," as
though interpretation were some tricky liberal way to "water down" the
Bible. Everybody has to interpret everything that they read. It is
absolutely unavoidable. And many people of good will may come to
different conclusions about what the "original meaning" of a text is,
whether that text is the Bible, a political essay, or the US
Constitution. What is slightly off putting, I must admit, is the
implication that you, Suzanne, read the text simply and get to its
original meaning easily, just like a child, with the help of the Holy
Spirit, while anyone who gets a different "original meaning" from the
text must be engaging in "interpretation."- Hide quoted text -

.



I can't get it without the Lord's help. Bill, you did say that when I
wrote what I did about the verbs showing degrees of comparison that
you saw some
others that had the same opinion. I didn't consult them, and they
didn't
consult me. So how could we come up with identical opinions?

I think that when you say "I can't get it without the Lord's help,"
that you are saying that a plain, literal reading of the text does not
get you to the original meaning. If such a plain reading could indeed
get you to the original meaning, you wouldn't need the Lord's help. It
sounds a lot like you are saying that the Lord guides you to a correct
interpretation. If the meaning were obvious, you'd hardly need to call
in an all-powerful spirit to explain it to you.

No, Bill, that is not what I meant. I meant that even though I can see
all that you say, I want it to be what the Lord is telling me that it
is.
I want his viewpoint.

What do you conclude when your interpretation of some verse in the
Bible differs from that of another Christian? How do you tell who is
getting the straight scoop from the Holy Spirit and who is wrongly
convinced that the Holy Spirit has given them a correct understanding
of the original meaning?

If we are talking about the purest form of meaning from the original
language, that would be translating, not interpreting. If I were to
explain what a verse meant by paraphrase that would be more like
an interpretation. I could translate something and then for a person
that does not understand then I could interpret if it was necessary.
But if we are talking only about the purest meaning of the original
words, that is what translating is, according to people that do this
professionally with biblical translating.

....And you asked what would I conclude if my interpretation is
different from another Christian's? I presume here you mean
translating? If I was sure that what I had said was the Lord's
meaning, if he had shown me his meaning, I would conclude
that I should stand up for what the Lord had shown me that he
means by that verse. However I would try to do that in as
respectful manner as was possible. If the other person insists
he is right, the Lord could work in the hearts of the hearers
that would listen to him.


Yes, many people have interpreted Jesus' "hate your parents" bit as
meaning "love me more than you love your parents," and, in support of
that view they have made the argument you advance about Rachel and
Leah. Perhaps a spirit sent the same opinion to all of you, but more
likely, this is simply a traditional interpretation of a "hard saying"
of Jesus, that is widespread in your religious tradition; it got
started by someone a few hundred years ago and has spread; that's why
you agree about it. I disagree with that interpretation of both
sayings, but yours is not obviously wrong.

On the other hand you still seem not to have gotten the point that the
simple grammatical claim that "Hebrew has no way to express
comparisons except by the use of opposites" is simply false. It may be
that sometimes, for rhetorical emphasis, someone wrote, in Hebrew,
"hate" to mean "love less." It is just amazing to me, though, that you
cannot separate the two issues, one a grammatical issue about the
Hebrew language, and the other an issue of the meaning of a particular
verse.

You are not representing what I was talking about. I was talking about
ancient Hebrew not using the same grammatical form that we use in
English to show degrees of comparison. Their sentence is not formed
the way that we form a sentence to show this. They use opposite verbs
to do this. I wrote out the Hebrew words in order as they are written
in
the original tongue, and people could see that what was written is
that
"Jacob loved Rachel Leah, and that Jacob it says "hated Leah." It was
very obvious that this Hebrew sentence was not written like a sentence
in English. We don't say "I love Danny Brenda and I hate Brenda."
Next,
I showed attention to the strongly opposite verbs which are
" 'ahab," (love) and "sane' " (hate). These are verbs. They are not
adjectives or adverbs. In Hebrew if it was with adjectives or adverbs,
that can be expressed in degrees. But these words "love" and "hate"
in this case are used as verbs. So the idea is to translate and not
to interpret, according to the professional translators.

Your idea that so many people got this wrong, because someone
way back when started teaching it wrong. You assumed that all
people that said something similar to what I said, got this from
others. Where are you getting this idea from that they got it from
others? Why wouldn't you conclude that each got the information
independently of each other? Also, why haven't you figured out
that the person you are speaking of from long ago also got his
information independently from the same source that they rest
of us got it from? What is your thinking? Are you skeptical because
you say they are saying the same thing that I am saying, so you
can't believe we would each come up with something the same
independently of one another without having read it from a
common source? Why would you conclude that? Is it because
you are skeptical? : D

Best Regars,
Suzanne

.

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