Re: Merely words (was Re: Agenda for Jigme's next return)

Evelyn wrote:

Hi Keynes,

Welcome back, and happy New Year! No matter how crazy it gets here on
the newsgroups it is seldom THAT crazy! I think it was rather
amazingly rude of your relatives to try and push their beliefs onto
you, but I am sure you handled it well.

Today my fundamentalist Christian brother is coming to visit, with his
equally fundamentalist lady friend. They too, are very nice people,
and honestly I like them very much. We scrupulously avoid getting
into any kind of philosophical conflicts with one another because I do
dearly love my brother. He knows where I am coming from, and only a
very little of what I believe. He has been to KTD with me, and he was
respectful, but was inwardly and silently disapproving, I knew. He
knows better than to try to lay any trips on me, because he knows that
I am of a different mindset. We respect one anothers differences and
leave it at that.

In case you are interested I have a huge list of biblical errors and
other quotes, which in years past I emailed all over the place for
people who asked. It is quite useful in these kinds of situations.
It is my observation that when these fundies want to discuss with you,
their ONLY reference material is the bible, which is a very flawed
collection of documents. Few of them have ever taken the time to
actually cast a critical eye upon it, or to dare to analyze it with a
clear mind. They imagine it might even be sinful to do so. After
all, their imaginary god might get mad at them for doing so. So it is
completely unnerving if someone who has actually done this, points out
the anomalies in the whole scenario, because after all it isn't a
"whole" scenario, it is a carefully hand picked collection of
documents, some of which still present differing views in spite of the
attempts of its first editors, to find books that "matched".


If you think pointing out Biblical contradictions will convince them to drop their beliefs, then you just haven't met the web-savvy apologist. Those trained in Biblical inerrancy will run circles around most non-believers using arguments found on many Christian apologetic sites. See, for example, http://www.carm.org/bible_difficulties.htm

But don't think these interpretive strategies are unique to fundamentalist Christians. It has been my experience that any belief system based on a set of scriptures develops a hermeneutic or interpretive strategy that accommodates the written word to the belief structure. I personally have my own interpretive strategy that dispenses with many of the literal interpretations of the early Buddhist canon.
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