Fundamentalist Christians... is there any other kind?
I recently saw this post on Ivan's blog.

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Quote:
Even though I am a Christian, and have been one since birth, I still very irrevocably remain a firm believer in evolution, and that the universe is several billion years old. To place all your belief solely in a book that may have once been the Word of God, but which has been written by the fallible hand of man (and hence is probably full of mistakes, misinterpretations or errors in translation from the original, though we will never truly know), is perhaps nothing short of being extremely short-sighted, and represents this face of Christianity that I wish to distance myself from as much as possible.

I don't claim to be any more righteous or upright or 'more Christian' than Creationists and other fundies (short for fundamentalists), but I can at least claim to be more open-minded, and more amenable to the progress of knowledge and wisdom. In my interpretation, studying and finding out all about the age of the Earth and the wonderful processes that shape the land around us, as well as how the multitude of lifeforms have proliferated and filled the planet since that one miracle which created life, isn't blasphemous or sacrilegious, it's our way of finding out the mysteries of His handiwork. Atheists and fundies alike may take issue with my views, so feel free to make use of my tagboard and guestbook if you please. But no flaming please.

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I do not take issue with your views per se, Ivan, but I do have some thoughts about this particular issue, and I think my views on this are too long to be posted on your board, so I'm gonna blog about them instead.

Firstly, I would like to state that I always appreciate open-minded Christians such as yourself, even though I almost invariably find myself playing the devil's advocate with you guys. This stems not from any desire to be contrary, but because I find your stand to be inconsistent. It seems to me that in this day and age, the only remotely logical reason for being a Christian in the first place is because the Bible exists. There are no credible miracle workers claiming that their powers derive from the Judeo-Christian God, for one thing, and there are surely no other religious writings that claim divine inspiration from the same source in existence today (except for the Mormons, but let's not go there). In other words, most Christians are Christians because they've read the Bible (or parts of it, anyway) and believe in it or because their parents are Christians.

I think that those who are Christians solely because of parental influence are not true Christians because from what I understand, to be a Christian requires a conscious choice and acceptance of the fact that Jesus Christ is the Son Of God. So we are left with those who are Christians because they've read the Bible and believe that what it says is true. My argument is based on the following premises:

1) Christians believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient and hence, infallible.
2) Christians believe that the Bible was divinely inspired.

Based on those two premises, I think that it is logically inconsistent to be a non-fundamentalist Christian. See, the only source of information about God is the Bible. Let's treat the Bible like a factual historical text, as Christians are wont to do. Supposing you read a historical text that states as a fact something that is blatantly untrue, would you take that as a reason to doubt the truthfulness of the entire text? In the case of an ordinary text, I would think that the answer is no. The author was only human, after all, and he could have made an honest mistake. In this case, however, the text in question claims to be divinely inspired by an infallible being, so how can the original text have contained errors? Either the original Bible was completely true or completely hogwash, wouldn't you say?

So now we come to the argument posed by many Christians who also believe in scientific facts that seem to be at odds with what is stated in the Bible. These Christians claim that the Bible has been translated so often that the original meaning has been lost. The first objection I would raise is that you have to bear in mind that you believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient and infallible. Since such is the case, what is written in the Bible cannot have been corrupted unless God allowed it. What possible reason could a non-sadistic God have for wanting his word to be corrupted and, as a result, becoming confusing to potential believers? I think there is no such reason. In other words, either every version of the Bible is entirely correct or God intended them to be corrupted and is hence, sadistic. The second objection I would raise is more of a question to these people. Since you believe that the English (or French, or Chinese, etc) translation of the Bible is not accurate, why don't you go read the version that contains the word of God in the original languages it was written in and see if it contains the same discrepancies? If you say that it's because you're not a Bible scholar/linguist, why do you doubt the accuracy of the versions that have been translated by Bible scholars/linguists? Not to mention that it makes no sense to believe in something because of what you read in a text you believe to be inaccurate?

Furthermore, if you believe that the Bible is only partially true, how do you arrive at conclusions regarding which parts are true and which parts are not, since you have no sure way to determine what actually occurred two thousand years and more ago? If you say that God guides you when you read the Bible, there are other people who claim that too and who believe differently than you, so what makes your inspiration any more valid than theirs? The strength of your convictions/faith? Suicide bombers have so much faith in the sanctity of their cause that they're willing to die for it. Presumably they thought that their god was guiding them too, so if their faith is so strong, wouldn't you say that they're more correct than you are? Besides, if you heard anyone say something like "I know it's true because God told me so", wouldn't you think he is insane?

To conclude, there is no reason to be a Christian unless you believe the Bible was 1) divinely inspired and hence 2) contains the infallible truth. To those friends of mine who do believe that the Bible does contain the infallible truth in spite of any apparent contradictions it may contain, please do not reply to this post, because you think I'm deluded and I think you're deluded and we can never agree on this so it makes no sense to argue about it. The only reason I'm responding to Ivan's post is because he claims to be open-minded and amenable to the voice of reason and I believe we can therefore have a reasonable discussion without the words "because God told me so" ever cropping up in any form whatsoever. Don't even talk to me about "context" if you haven't actually read the entire Bible, either.  ¶
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