You still don't know if it's true. So, still, in these two cases, you can't make a definitive claim that it's true. A claim to truth doesn't equate to truth. — Sam26

Same slip again. What is true is independent of what is believed. One can assert the truth of a statement that is true. It doesn't matter if that person knows it is true. The way that we (the outside evaluators) know that it is true is based upon our own justifications, not the person that merely believes something is true by luck (or other insufficient warrant). We know it is true, they don't know it, we both assert that it is true. Why is that a problem?

What's being stated here, is that we have a truth, categorically, not a claim that maybe true, but a truth. But, how can we make such a claim, unless that truth is known to be true, and if it's known, then it's by definition, knowledge. — Sam26

This is the part that needs some firmer footing. Can A know X and B not know X? Does B not knowing X change X's truth? How does A's epistemic warrant about X relate to B's epistemic warrant about X?

Knowledge happens to individual agents, no? Or do systems have knowledge?

Notice the change from "is B justified in B's belief that X is true based on 1, 2, and 3?" (call it "B-Just") as compared to "Does B believe X is true?" (call it "B-Unjust"). Is the assertion of truth ("(i.e., I'm affirming the truth, not doubting the truth)") dependent on the answer to B-Just or B-Unjust?

Or on the triune analysis of JTB, can't you have TB without the J such that you can say, "X is true and I believe X is true, but I lack justification such that I don't know X is true?" Consider the old "Child believes his father has his wallet because he gave it to him moments before, but as it turns out, the Child is wrong about who his father is because he was kidnapped at birth by FakeFather, FakeFather doesn't have his wallet because someone just pickpocketed him, and the pickpocket is Realfather!"

P.S. Maybe we should use a simpler example of, "X believes in tossing bones and that information gleaned from tossing those bones is true. X tosses some bones and is told that Z is X's father. X thereafter believes that Z is X's father and tells everyone that is the case. X has never met Z and has no other information about Z other than the bone toss. As it turns out, Z is X's father." Does X know that Z is his father? (It is true, it is believed, but there is inadequate warrant for the belief.)

Needs are essential things in life, wether it be material needs or essential rights. — Vishagan

you give them the power to determine what the needs are — NOS4A2

The whole exercise steps off on the wrong foot. People lived long before governments existed and even longer before rights theory was invented. So people don't need rights. Indeed, many people lived having been wholly deprived of many "rights." No one, to my knowledge, has lived very long with their head cut off. Using the word "need" for s living person's right to travel and "need" for a living person's requirement for a head should demonstrate why conflating those ideas is in error.

Government, as such, has no needs for life because it is not alive. So whatever the government is after, it certainly isn't that necessary for its life. Government is, therefore, at best motivated by wants (as if a government could have wants independent of its constituency). There is, therefore, never a time where a government can deprive you of actual needs for life without being "unfair." Nevertheless, when a government tries to arrest a murderer, people don't typical advocate that the murderer is justified in using violence to repel the government.

I suggest you try some different buckets to contain your ideas. Legitimizing governmental coercion is not such a simple task even if people largely seem to accept that governmental coercion is good.

Might have once read something about government gaining legitimacy through the consent of the governed.

But do we ever say, "I don't know that it's true (i.e., I'm affirming the truth, not doubting the truth), that Paris is the capital of France." So, it's true, but I don't know it. What!? — Sam26

Do you mind elaborating a bit on this?

A: Has sufficient epistemic warrant to know X.

B: Was told by A that X is true, but lacks sufficient epistemic warrant to know X because "B said so" is inadequate. Has never had cause to doubt A's claims of truth and believes that if A says it is true, it is true. If "X" was "It is true that this bridge is safe for you to walk across" and B said it to A, B would unhaltingly walk across the bridge.

B says, "I don't know that X is true."

Religion-bashing has become passé since the new atheists lost their novelty factor, the new vogue is to defend it. — Isaac

The vogue is to get over being fart-sniffing atheists (new or otherwise) and just be malcontented nihilists playing at absurdists telling everyone that the know nothing by producing a mountain of evidence and talking points about why everyone is wrong all of the time. Or maybe just being contrarian. Hard to tell. In any event, you are at least 30 years late to the party of the cool kids shitting on atheists and defending the naive, romanticized "true" believers. Or maybe go read Tolstoy.

Anyway, perhaps we are finished here. — Banno

We could be, but how would that help your page count? I think at least two more rounds of "Grouping Christians is..." and "I'm not not grouping Christians, I'm just using Christians as proxy for..." is in order. I will insist that you say, "People who admire morally abhorrent agents are bad and that includes some Christians (such as X) that admire a morally abhorrent god" and you will reply "Stop being dense and engaging in special pleading; I am obviously talking about the Scotsman left after my No-true Scotsman criteria are applied (while of course conceding that it is of no moment whether any of them are Scotsman because I am really just talking about a pamphlet that sets out rules for government for China), and those Scotsman are abhorrent, so stop saying they are moral." Then I, trying yet again to understand you because of what I see as your clear equivocation will ask, "Who's on first?" and you will say "Yes."

The straight man always comes out looking better.

You failed to notice — Banno

I failed to notice or you wrote “given that” which isn’t quite the conditional you suggest it to be? Also you pluralized both Christians and Muslims, so your syntax indicated you were speaking of groups of people, not a hypothetical individual with specific beliefs that happens to belong to a general class. Also, despite having quoted you on this post in several prior comments, this is the first you’ve suggested that I misread you. If I did, I did. Mea culpa. But now that you are clarifying, go ahead and put a period at the end of a sentence. Do you have to ask an individual Christian what their views are before acting as if they admire a horrid god?

My interest here is as to the extent to which Christians (and Muslims) ought be allowed at the table when ethical issues are discussed. Given their avowed admiration for evil, ought we trust their ethical judgement? — Banno

This is all I have ever been discussing. Lewis, Christians, and whether his article has any bearing on your question.

In contrast, I distinctly remember a scene from an old biblical film where a character, played by the young Anthony Hopkins, addresses precisely this issue. Namely, a number of religious people argue that everyone must obey the law as set out by God. While Hopkins' character argues that such is not the case, that outsiders are not subject to that law, and also that insiders cannot force the law upon outsiders.
I thought this was extremely strange, because this is precisely not how Christians go about this matter. — baker

For what it is worth, Christianity is not Judaism (whatever that is) as understood/modified by Jesus, but rather the followers of Paul. So reading the Jewish Bible as universalist is a tendency of those trying to follow in Paul's sted rather than as an extension of the group that actually wrote the thing. Even Jesus is inclined not to share his wisdom with the non-Jew because he wasn't sent to talk to them. Noticing a major disconnect between the themes of the Bible, the themes of the Bible as re-codified/written by early Christians, and the themes of Paul is appropriate. People raised as Christian (or even as "atheists" or "non-religious" in a secular-Christian culture) have a super hard time not importing a Christian reading into the text and insisting that ideas are in it that simply aren't in the text.

It really takes a lot to pull yourself out of your cultural biases when engaging with a text. If an alien that understood English with no familiarity with Christianity should read the Bible, what it understood about the book would likely be at complete odds with what Christians will tell you is a literal reading of the text.

21 And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” 23 But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 And he answered, “It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly. — Matthew 15:21

A person stops being an individual the moment they use a group term for themselves. — baker

So I shouldn't say that I am American? Or a person? Or a man? Or middle-aged? Or...? Hell, my body is but a bunch of cells, some of which I am proud of and some not, should I say I am a body? Or maybe a brain (damn you lymbic system!)? Feels an awful lot like group identity (you know, generalizations) allows mental efficiency but can be parsed when the need arises. Again, Lewis's article specifically disagrees that knowing someone is a Nazi means that they are non-admirable. Why are you going backwards (you know, being regressive)?

l

seems the best you can argue is that the bible reinforces a morality you already accept. — Banno

The Bible doesn't do anything, Banno, people do. I can use the Bible to support my ethical arguments or I can use my ethical arguments to support the Bible. I can also go in the opposite direction. I already write enough words, Banno. You don't have to add ones I haven't written.

Hence, the book does not provide moral guidance so much as rely on it. One has to know what is right in order to read the book in the right way. — Banno

Isaac, the fellow who thought the Bible was written in English? If that was his point - that language must be understood within a language community - I'm sorry I missed it; I agree with him. But again, what does that have to do with Lewis and your extension of his neglected argument to summarily writing off Christians without knowing anything about the individual?

By the by @Banno, I find it amusing that people who keep cherry picking quotes from the Bible to show it is shitty are accusing people who say "But you need to understand the context" of special pleading. As an aside, you may find traditional Jewish exegesis of interest - there are multiple ways to understand meaning starting from the blank space on the page, to the individual letter, to the word, to the sentence, to the section, etc., with each of those meanings altered by considering them through various interpretive lenses - everything happened at once, everything happened in linear time, people had knowledge of X or did not have knowledge of X within those lenses.

What? — Banno

That we lack a unitary meaning doesn't mean we don't have well developed conventions for how to understand things. Some interpretations are acceptable in one context that are unacceptable in another, even by the same people. My daughter can quote exact words that I say - if she insists that I meant that she can't go in the first case (where I was quoting her mother and explicitly disagree with her mother), English speakers in the ordinary context are unlikely to agree with her.

Special in what way? That everyone owes them obedience? — baker

No one owed them obedience. It is like you aren't even trying. Read the book. Find textual support for your glib. If you can't, give it up. If you can, produce it.

You both appear to be insisting that those who commit evil after the bible are reading it wrong, while also agreeing that there is no true reading. — Banno

What I've said is that people can read it however they want, but some readings have more or less support. My daughter saying, "You said 'You shouldn't go there!'" is accurate. What would you say I meant in the first case verses the second? Does the squishiness of meaning preclude our evaluation of what it means?

And again, I've never taken issue that it says abhorrent things. On my reading, it does, unequivocally. From the first story on, god is shitty.

Stop conflating the Bible (or the god described therein) being shitty with whether an individual Christian should be excluded from conversations about ethics. Those aren't the same things.

Ennui Elucidator and Hanover appear to wish for a reinvigoration of scholasticism; a narrow focus on defending the one true faith by any rhetorical means available. — Banno

There is no one true faith or one interpretation. I can't be any clearer. Tell me what words you want me to use that will make you understand that we agree that there are people that use the Bible to willfully say abhorrent things and that those people are abhorrent. If you ask someone, "Should an adulteress be stoned?" and they say, "Absolutely! That is what God commands and I think she deserves it for disobeying God!", that person is bad.

Saying I am advocating scholasticism when I say "read the text you keep referring to in sufficient context to understand the pronoun" is ridiculous. Even my six year old understands the difference between my saying "Your mother said 'you shouldn't go there', but I don't agree" and my saying, "You shouldn't go there." Decontextualizing words to make a point is lazy.

But those non-chosen people are also said to be doomed, are they not? They are automatically classed as the enemies of the Lord, as the enemies of the chosen people, no? — baker

No. The Bible was not a universal code and it anticipates the people Israel living in a world with many nations not subject to their local war god's rules for the chosen. That is one of the typical misreadings about the Biblical Israelites - that they wanted everyone to be like them. They didn't. They were special.

P.S. Go read about the stranger living in the land of Israel and the rules for the Israelites dealing with them.

That is odd. You are saying that I dismissed something by pointing you to the fact that other people will dismiss you?

You have yet to offer a third way, Isaac. Again, just point me to it (even a simple reference to the post number) and I'll try to find it to specifically engage with.

Is this advice to be taken taken literally by a true Christian? How is it to be interpreted? Will this not result in a one-way trip to hell, without a stay in the intermediate state of limbo purgatory, if he has taken it seriously and decided to realize the advice after he has seen his wife grabbing the balls of his opponent? What about the poor rescuing woman? Will she go to hell if she is punished already by axing of the sinful hand? — Raymond

Since you put this question so starkly I'm going to give everyone a quick Biblical lesson. God made people and gave some laws for all people (known as the Noahide laws in Judaism, but found as part of the story of Noah in god's covenant). Sometime later, god chose a specific group of people among the nations to make another covenant with (see Exodus) with laws that applied ONLY to that group. Anyone who was not part of the chosen people was not required to follow ANY of the laws given specifically to the chosen people.

Absent the Christian being a part of the chosen people to which the Bible refers, they are not required to do any of the bad stuff that people keep complaining about. A naive literal reading of the Bible gets you there. The thing is, you actually have to read it rather than just picking a sentence at random and then start asking why everyone in the world isn't doing whatever the sentence says at all times in all circumstances. It doesn't take any level of sophisticated textual analysis or weird interpretive communities to get you there. You just need to follow the pronouns and scope.

P.S.

These are the words Moses spoke to all Israel in the wilderness east of the Jordan—that is, in the Arabah—opposite Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth and Dizahab. 2 (It takes eleven days to go from Horeb to Kadesh Barnea by the Mount Seir road.)
— Deut. 1

If you carefully observe all these commands I am giving you to follow—to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him and to hold fast to him— 23 then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations larger and stronger than you. 24 Every place where you set your foot will be yours: Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the Euphrates River to the Mediterranean Sea. 25 No one will be able to stand against you. The Lord your God, as he promised you, will put the terror and fear of you on the whole land, wherever you go.

12 These are the decrees and laws you must be careful to follow in the land that the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has given you to possess—as long as you live in the land. 2 Destroy completely all the places on the high mountains, on the hills and under every spreading tree, where the nations you are dispossessing worship their gods. 3 Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and burn their Asherah poles in the fire; cut down the idols of their gods and wipe out their names from those places.
— Deut. 11ish

For flavor..

15 One witness is not enough to convict anyone accused of any crime or offense they may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.
— Deut. 19

I gave the quote... — Isaac

Point me to it. I try to respond directly and am willing to re-read (and read anew) a fair amount. If I am asking you for the courtesy of directing me to the issue, it is not rhetorical; it is vastly more efficient for the both of us and more likely to lead to a meaningful response.

You're dismissing my engagement. . . — Isaac

In what way have I dismissed it? Despite its obvious error (who is instructed to stone girls and whether such stoning is a good thing), I've taken it at face value that the Bible tells someone to stone someone. I haven't disagree that it says so (or that is says many other objectionable things) or even tried to explain the broader context or sentiment of various interpretive communities. What I did do is comment that reading something in isolation as if the justification for its inclusion in the book is that it stands self-evidentially wonderful all by itself is not the way that other interpretive communities understand such stories. If you wish to address yourself to those communities, you need to do so in a way that suggests you understand what they are saying. If you wish to address those outside the community and advocate for a position about what the book means to that community, again, it would behoove you to have a reasonable idea of whether your position is an accurate representation of that community's meaning.

I expect any intelligent participant in a conversation to meet these standards if they actually want to discuss a topic. Knowing something about what you are speaking and working together to understand it better makes, in my view, for a more worthwhile conversation. Where specific knowledge is required, speaking without it is a waste of time. Where generalized knowledge is required, speaking without it is a waste of time. Where people are discussing something that requires neither, you can make some progress in the absence of knowledge. Any of those conversations can be enjoyable (or at least a tolerable way to waste your time on the internet), but I prefer a reasonable level of knowledge as needed. This preference/expectation holds regardless of the topic. You'll notice (not that I've participated much in this forum) that I do not comment on topics that require specific knowledge when I have none and in general I do not try to authoritatively speak for anyone (or any group). For instance, regardless of my educational background in philosophy, you'll never catch me saying, "Spinoza meant this..." or "Kant intended that..." or "Novick's critique of Plato was..." I haven't studied philosophy in that way and I heavily rely upon secondary/tertiary sources to predigest specific philosophers/topics for me.

. . .but I'm fine with my current approach, thanks anyway. — Isaac

Your current approach is great for something, I suppose, but it makes for terrible ethical reasoning or literary analysis. As someone in the thread has already said, we don't judge individuals for membership in a group, we judge them on their own merit. As Lewis said in his article, we must ask the individual whether they are aware that they admire someone horrible. Contrast that with the group exclusion @Banno (who I tag only because he asked that I not use his name without tagging him) suggested (or asked about) based upon someone being a member of a group alone (e.g. Christians). From what I can gather, besides your dislike for the Bible as source material and your opinion that other people should use some other book for ethical guidance (or wisdom or ...), you also think that something can be said about the beliefs of an individual viz-a-viz admiring a bad god by virtue of their identification as a Christian. What is offered as advice to you (if you want X, do Y) is sincere, but is also a straightforward critique of your seeming approach - ignorant condemnation of an individual based upon poorly constructed standards of judgment is wrong. Trying to educate you (as to any individual or group) is a waste of both of our time, so I am focusing on the method - what can we say about an individual based upon identification in a religious group?

If you like, discuss the topic at hand. If you want to continue this back and forth about methods of having a discussion, I can do that, too.

What the Bible says is up to the individual (within various interpretive influences and communities);
Your interpretation of the Bible does not dictate how others interpret it;
Knowing your own interpretation tells you nothing about what others think;
Identifying as a member of a group does not necessitate that the member believes/agrees with all group positions/dogma (to the extent the group has identifiable positions/dogma);
Your opinion as to what a group's position/dogma with respect to any position does not make it so;
Knowing your own opinion about a group's position/dogma tells you nothing about the beliefs of an individual group member;
Knowing that a Christian makes use of the Bible provides you no information about what that individual Christian believes;
Judging an individual based upon either your opinion about a book or you opinion about a group is both an ethical and intellectual error; and
Lewis's article cannot be used to support individual judgment based group membership given Lewis's own analysis of what identification in a group relates about them.

You are welcome to disagree with any (or all) of those statements. If you have a different thesis related to the thread you want to offer up, restate, or point to in prior posts, feel free. But please, stop the claims of victimization and that I (or anyone else) am somehow being intellectually unfair.

For what it is worth, this is sort of like the conversations about self-avowed Nazis. The justification for banning such a person from the forum upon site is not because of any judgment with respect to the individual, but that because the site administrators have deemed that declaring yourself a Nazi is sufficient warrant for banning. To their credit, the administrators have posted rules about it and offered up some justifications. The primary justification (if I can speak for admins/mods) is wholly unrelated to the individual being banned, but about the community that is being protected. It is simply unkind to forum participants (and counter-productive to the environment the admins are trying to create) to have to explore why someone thinks being a Nazi is a good thing or why Nazi philosophy should be given serious intellectual consideration. We don't have to judge the individual being banned - we just ban them. That is, where individual behavior poses intolerable risk to the community, individual evaluation is unnecessary and irrelevant.

This issue has been hinted at by several posters when they say things like, "Christians come from a long history with multiplicity of views and have done both great things and horrid things. Someone simply saying that they are Christian does not pose sufficient risk to the community to justify group treatment." There may be fruit in saying why Christians are more or less like Nazis, but Lewis's article does not go so far and actually says that even individual Nazis should be given the chance to explain themselves. I have not, therefore, explored the theme of group treatment based on communal threat in my responses.

If you can think of a third way to get to Banno's offered conclusion (that is exclusion from a conversation not based either upon 1) individual judgment or 2) group judgment based upon communal threat) using Lewis's article, go ahead an offer it up. As it stands, Banno's thesis is an unwarranted extension of Lewis's article.

Again, the same special pleading. — Isaac

Just because @Banno says something doesn't make it so. I think religious beliefs, claims, interpretations, etc. are to be evaluated in the same exact way as any other belief, claim, interpretation, etc. You would be hard pressed to find in my writing something that says, "Because it is 'religious' you must think of it differently.'" To the extent that any of my writing gives that impression, I suspect it would be in a context where being "religious" is relevant to the thing being discussed (e.g. deciding if something is halal or harem must be evaluated within a context where those terms are meaningful rather than a context in which those terms are meaningless). You are welcome to provide me with quotes that you find troubling and I will address them.

I'm not entitled to an opinion about what the meaning is to me, what it's value is to me. — Isaac

You are entitled to whatever opinion you want. No god or man shall rest it from your brain and some cosmic judge (that isn't god) deems your claim of entitlement correct. (Rights are non-sense on stilts, as the saying goes.) I can't help that you confuse advice about how to speak to a particular language community as somehow depriving you of your entitlement to an opinion, but I suggest that you re-read what I wrote and see where I said, "Your interpretation is wrong because it is mean." How many times have I called the god of the bible an "asshole", a "torturer", etc.? There are lots of unflattering things to be said about god and the sorts of injunctions/enjoinments that are contained in the Bible. Again, the text can support unlimited interpretations, no one of which is more right or wrong than other (though some of them have more support than others). As to what its value is to you, feel free to render it valuable or valueless, intrinsically or instrumentally.

I'm talking about the danger inherent in the ways in which it could be interpreted. — Isaac

I am talking about Banno's OP and the article he linked. To the extent what you are talking about relates to that article, perhaps we are talking about the same thing. Lewis, for his part, was not talking about how the Bible "could" be interpreted, but how to respond to specific people that worshiped/admired an evil god ("In bringing the problem of divine evil to their attention, I am presenting them with a choice they have previously avoided"). He wasn't dealing in hypotheticals (amusingly, when he does give the hypothetical of Fritz, he makes it clear that knowing that Fritz admires Hitler is not enough to indict Fritz, but that we have to know that Fritz admires Hitler because of the objectionable things Hitler does/did - "Fritz ... admires Hitler. . . Simply admiring Hitler isn't enough [to be evil]. . . . Fritz knows very clearly what Hitler would want done. Even though he admires Hitler, he does not do it. Fritz is evil .. because it is evil to admire someone [evil] . . . in full recognition of the characteristics and actions that express their evil." ).

Am I still not allowed an opinion on why people form their beliefs? — Isaac

Again, you are welcome to whatever opinion you want. But your belief on belief formation did not seem to be the topic of conversation. For my part, I wasn't asking why people formed their belief about X with relation to Y. I was commenting that when engaging with a language community, you need to speak their language. Where you demonstrate that you do not know the language (or minimally lack facility in it), members of that language community are less likely to take you seriously. Take the advice for what you think it is worth.

Describing a fact (members of a particular group tend to interpret text X through interpretive lens Y) does not mean that I agree with it or believe that there is justification for whatever judgment is being described. As far as "justification for belief", I tend to agree with you that justification is post hoc and that what you get in response to "Why do you believe X?" is not, in fact, why they believe X, but rather what they think accounts for reasons on your account. I do not expect people to understand why they believe things or to be able to account for their beliefs, I merely hope that they demonstrate pro-social behavior. (Someone asks you for justification, you give justification in the expected form, to the extent your justification is challenged and shown to be inadequate with respect to some socially established justification criteria, you acknowledge a lack of justification and alter your behavior accordingly.)

I get it. The Bible is a crap book and you can present lots of reasons for thinking so. I have zero problem with that conclusion. I also have zero problem with accepting that people who use the Bible for justification of behavior (as an appeal to authority) have problems inherent with a self-contradictory text.

Hopefully we can move on in the conversation and get to the substance of how the OP (or Banno's other claims relating to shunning Christians as a group because of their bad beliefs) relates to Lewis's article and/or the merits of Lewis's article in the first place. Evaluate any religious claim precisely the same way you would any other claim.

By the by, figuring the Bible (because we are talking about the Christian one) has around 750 pages (KJV), the New Testament is about 200 of them (which is the much less than half). You first quote from the Bible (which was in Leviticus 21) is found in the third book around page 70, or about 10% of the way in. Aside from trying to save face, you do yourself no favors by flailing about to make your case that anything "in the first half could arguably be called the opening". A simple, "I was speaking too freely and misspoke, but you are being an ass for making hey of it since we both know that it says stupid things" would have sufficed. Unwillingness to concede the obvious makes for poor conversation.

Did you glance at the article? — Banno

The article misses a bunch, I think. I am happy to discuss it more, but it strikes me as far afield of this conversation. Suffice it to say that “social facts” appear to fit in the box of “factual belief” as he is using the term. There are many social facts that come from a religious context, so it is difficult me to see in a straight forward way how those social facts are any less “factual beliefs” because of how they originated. Perhaps you can elaborate your view on it in a response to a particular situation: a man walks into a room and sees a piece of food - he then declares it haram. A man already sitting at the table says, “No, it is halal.” What type of belief are we discussing and why? How does that differ from the man who knows facts about the streets of Cleveland mentioned in the article (“ An evidential authority, who can produce factual belief, knows about some objective information, such as plant life or streets in Cleveland.”)?

The book opens with a vengeful God putting babies to the sword, advocating the stoning to death of just about anyone who has sex without his say so, demanding sacrifices etc. — Isaac

It was a rhetorical device, I just mean it's quite early on in the book, Hosea I believe. — Isaac

I'm no bible scholar. If my quotes are inaccurate I'm happy to be corrected. — Isaac

Not really, no. These things are in the bible - or at east the version I'm looking at — Isaac

You want to dictate what Christians think based upon your reading of the Bible, but you don’t even know what you said within a few posts in this conversation. The Bible “opens” with Genesis. You have yet to quote a Genesis story. Your claim (rhetorical or otherwise) was wrong. You can’t even concede you made an obvious error.

Think of how this sounds to someone that thinks the Bible is a meaningful book. You say it has no meaning, but you don’t even know how to a) make an accurate claim about what is written or b) be corrected. I get that religion seems really important and like every opinion should matter (whether informed or ill-informed), but it doesn’t work that way. If you wan to critique Christian meaning, learn what it is. If you want to critique Christian behavior, learn what it is. Critiquing one is not the same as critiquing the other. Nothing here is special pleading.


P.S. For what it is worth, I refer you to hermeneutics and biblical hermeneutics. It will provide some more insight about multiple interpretations from the same text if you are otherwise unfamiliar. You might also notice that literalism is thought about as dumb as it gets.

Why? Or more accurately, why specifically? Do you think your responses are being charitable to those here who believe Christianity is a misogynist, homophobic crock of shit? I don't think so (nor do I particularly expect them to). It's more of the special pleading we saw earlier - Christianity ought to be properly understood before engaging with it. I'm a psychologist (academic, not clinical). I have theories about things like beliefs, perception and the role of social narratives (my general fields). Should I demand the same from anyone engaging in those areas on these threads? That they should all thoroughly read my papers and books before engaging (and when doing so read all my critics and supporters analysis to make sure they've understood it right)? That, further, they should all attend a few of my lectures, really engage in my belief system, perhaps work for a while in my research team, get a feel for what it's like to believe what I believe about the role of social narratives in belief formation. Then, and only then, can they comment on what I say I believe about it? — Isaac

This is a bit like going in a circle. The audience that already finds the book meaningless finds it meaningless (or even evil). You don’t have to talk about it or advance any new proof to convince them of their position. Unless you are just sitting around having a laugh fest with your friends about how stupid the book is, I’m not sure what you get from taking another pass at the book. It isn’t even like this is Mystery Science Theater 3000 where you take crap source material and add some funny context that makes the crap you are reading somehow worth it. If the book sucks and has no value to you, great. As the saying goes - don’t yuck my yum.

If, however, you wish to speak to people that find meaning in the book, you have to speak to them about the book in ways that they will relate to. Everyone gets that in the first hundred lines or so god has destroyed the world by flood because god did a shit job of creating it in the first place. It is what the words say and you aren’t going to get far in denying that it says what it says. The argument is not about what it says, but what it means; what the value is in including that story both on its own and within the greater context/s of the book. If you aren’t willing to engage with the material on that level (be it as “because this is the unerring word of god as related to *** and then written down, copied, and translated from then till now under the guidance of god” or “because that was a cultural creation story of the region of the people who told the story and the editors/codifiers of the book had to include to maintain legitimacy” or any other such attempt to understand the material), you aren’t having a conversation with the people that find meaning in it.

There is no special pleading about pointing out ingroup and outgroup dynamics and the general context in which messages are more likely to be received positively (or accepted as the case, if you prefer). You don’t have to understand Christianity to reject it. You could be wrong or right in your rejection, but that is your choice. You don’t have to understand Christianity to say things like, “The Catholic Church in the 20th century willfully hid evidence of priests sexually abusing children” or that the Catholic Church has exercised its political influence and wealth to limit women’s ability to exercise reproductive choice. There are lots of facts about Christianity (or at least specific groups/actors) that can be understood without engaging with meaning in the Bible. Decontextualizing text is not, however, something that fits into the bucket of “facts” quite the same way.

If you want to talk about why someone reads a story about god destroying the world because god does a shit job at creating the world, you can’t just keep reading the words as if they, in their isolation, will answer the question. Foisting your opinion of what the words mean (e.g. “It is a literal telling of mythic history and the dinosaurs prove that the story is untrue and the Bible is a lie!”) does not mean anything to someone who cares about the story because your meaning is so far from theirs. But again, discussing meaning in the book is a separate activity than evaluating the role of Christianity in society or the behavior of individual Christians. Sure, understanding their meaning as they do might help you explain their behavior better, but since you aren’t interested in understanding that meaning, you aren’t really that interested in using it for explanatory purposes.

For what it is worth, one can be charitable both to the Christian finding meaning in the Bible and the secular-Christian rejecting the Bible. One can find merit in both positions (and even agree with one or the other) without willfully misrepresenting one position or the other. Texts can (and do) support multiple understandings.

What you perhaps misunderstand about what I am writing is that I am not suggesting that meaning is contained within a text or that authors can convey specific meaning in words. What you intend when you write your articles is entirely independent of what I understand when I read them. We may have overlap in behavior (and therefore presume that there is overlap in meaning) in response to the written words, but each time someone reads (or remembers) text, they are constructing meaning for themselves. There is good reason to believe that if I want to know what YOU meant when you wrote your article, that I need to know lots of things about you (your influences, your other writings, what you have said about what you wrote, etc.) in order to more (or most) closely approximate your meaning. But then I may not care a lick about you and be contented with understanding your writings independent of any awareness of things about you. Both methods lead to an interpretation of your writings, but one cannot objectively say which is right and which is wrong, just that they are different.

I am simply pointing out to you that someone interpreting the Bible can understand it to mean something different than you do. You cannot dictate to people that the Bible MEANS something because you say so. If you want to engage with their meaning (be it to describe or critique), you need to identify their meaning in the first place rather than supplanting it with your own.

I quoted directly from the book. It's in English, right? — Isaac

No you didn’t and it’s not in English, but translation will suffice.

Read the first story and show me the babies put to the sword. Or the second or the third or the fourth or the…. You get my point. Find the first story that supports your sentence and demonstrate that is how the book “opens”. Sentiment is great and all, but when verifiable claims about the book, it would be nice if those claims were accurate.

religious belief is categorically distinct from factual belief. — Banno

This is one of those comments that sounds really good to someone that thinks of religion as that which is left over after everything else is carved away, but really strange to someone that thinks of all beliefs as occurring within a religious paradigm. Liberalism (and “secularism” in general) has done a great job at letting Christians understand religion to be something private and particular, but much of the rest of the world tends to understand that religion is all encompassing and pervading all aspects of thought.

Is religious belief that Jesus (or some substantially similar character by whatever name) walked the earth? Is that factual belief? In what way do the claims about Jesus render a belief vis-a-vis his existence religious and non-factual? Is the belief in existence of Jesus the sort of thing that responds to evidence?

Do you, perhaps, mean that personal revelation is non-responsive to truth or evidence? Is it that the existence of hell is not currently subject to the typical forms of scientific inquiry that make it non-evidential? I just don’t understand the move to make religious belief of a different category than other sorts of belief. We have our experiences and our minds and they interact in some way that ends up in talk of beliefs.

While I know that you won’t equate knowledge with belief, if someone says, “I believe X”, it doesn’t matter what the content of X is - to the extent we care about their belief, we will respond with the same sorts of questions about how they came to that belief and whether they have warrant to maintain it (even if they are doxasist involuntarists as suggested earlier) in light of A, B, and C. Saying, “I believe religious X” doesn’t change the conversation in the slightest around how/why that belief is maintained, it just gives you additional information about the belief being discussed.

Can I ask why? Why would you search for existential meaning? Why there? The book opens with a vengeful God putting babies to the sword, advocating the stoning to death of just about anyone who has sex without his say so, demanding sacrifices etc. — Isaac

This is one of those things that you can’t understand without having done it or being around those who encourage you to do so. It is sort of like your description of the book; within one sentence you get the contents of the book entirely wrong, but feel very assured that your description would ring true with someone who has actually spent time looking for meaning in the book. Maybe if the people summing up the book said things to you like, “It is a text with which our fathers and our fathers’ fathers and our fathers’ fathers’ fathers have engaged with for generations in order to make sense of their existence and their meaning/role in the world. Within its pages, countless people, learned, wise, and daft alike, have found wisdom. Sit awhile and read. Consider what others have written and said about it. See the ways in which our people are both great and detestable, the ways in which individuals and communities act to create a place in the world even as they are fallible. What matters in these stories is not whether they happened, but that those who came before you thought them worthy of attention and passing on to the next generation.” you would be more sympathetic to those who engage with it. Meaning making is something we do - if you come to the book not looking for meaning but for reason to object, you will find what you are looking for just the same as the person looking for meaning will find what they are looking for.

Other people read something and pass along their impression of it, but that doesn’t mean you will have the same impression if you read it. Sure, you can rely upon others to find the good stuff on your behalf and more efficiently communicate it without passing along the bad stuff, but you’ll never know what you would have found had you engaged with it yourself.

We can take any book and use it as our material for meaning making. Perhaps you prefer book Z over book X. Will they both have you think about the same things in the same ways? Probably not. Is there some categorical way to say that X is better than Z for purpose W? Probably not. What the Bible has going for it (even if it is the Christian one) is that it includes many stories with many people in many situations - some which play out as we would expect and some that are radically different. It is dissimilar from other books of the same length precisely because it is not a single narrative or a single authorial voice. Furthermore, the book explicitly engages with the sorts of questions that we generally consider have existential import - how to live the good life, how to make community, why we are born and why we die.

In the end, the flavor of religion (or religious text) that you pick to engage with can be thought of as that which best satisfies your aesthetic sensibilities. Someone who was raised Christian in a Christian community may feel partial to reading the Christian Bible. Someone who was raised in China may feel partial to Confucius and Lao Tzu. Will those two people end up thinking of the world the same way? Almost certainly not, but it is likely that by engaging with material that your community deems important, the conclusions you reach (and the conversations that you have) make you more functional within the community that you live.

The Bible is what it is. I do not make apologies for it or recommend it to you. But if you want to talk about it or the people that use it in their meaning making, I suggest that you try a bit more charity and little less cynicism.

I don't think it would normally be held to be unreasonable for someone to argue that "the Jews should be exterminated" is an awful thing to say and so worshipping Hitler is an awful thing to do. — Isaac

This is without argument and a case envisioned by Lewis. The trickier part is that when someone says to you "I worship Hitler" and you do not know the context in which they came to worship Hitler. What do you make of their statement? In an obvious effort to be charitable to people he otherwise admires, Lewis says that you should tell the person the bad stuff about the person(god) that they admire and see how they react. If they still admire the person, you know that something is wrong. If they stop, you can get on with admiring them.

What I think the confusion is here is that the typical Christian knows about and agrees with the objectionable stuff in advance. Putting aside whether the objectionable thing is necessary for Christianity, do all Christians know it and agree? At least as to eternal damnation, Lewis thinks not and calls the conversation around it the "neglected argument."

Again, my argument is simply that religious belief is no special category - supporting the 'special pleading' complaint made earlier. If I'm asking anything of Christians it's that they take part in the usual social game of post hoc rationalisation that everyone else plays. — Isaac

Absolutely. There is no privileged class of belief.

The Nazis didn't think so, obviously. — baker

This part is off for a number of reasons, but the most obvious in this context is that Lewis is addressing whether he (and those like him) ought admire a person that has horrid beliefs. There isn't even a question of whether the beliefs are horrid or whether the person that believes them thinks it good - indeed, a part of his criticism is that those who admire the evil god also believe that the god is good. Moral relativism has zero relevance to our judgment about the moral worth of others, it simply reminds us that people's moral judgments do not all occur in the same moral system.

Christians, or anyone else, have to justify themselves to whatever extent the situation requires. If you put up a sign and say, "I only admire people that don't admire an evil god," and a Christian walks over to your table and says, "I want you to admire me, but I worship an evil god," then the Christian is obliged to justify themselves as qualifying under your criteria. If, however, you are selling oranges and a Christian comes to buy one, they don't have to justify themselves for your admiration, they merely have to pay the price. People operate in a social sphere and are subject to all of the same conditions as anyone else. When discussing social interactions and the negotiation of power, justification is a basic means by which one person attempts to accomplish their purpose. You can't just exempt yourself from justification to another because you think some claim of yours is sacrosanct - the other person dictates the rules for what is required for them to cooperate.

Discussing your own personal conduct (which is what both Lewis and Banno do) is not the same as establishing what governments can or should do. A "human right" to religion is a claim made against states, not individuals. Anti-discrimination laws are things that states impose upon individuals. Conflating individual judgments with governmental judgments serves no purpose but to obfuscate the distinction between what justifies individual action and what justifies state action. You are capable of acting and making moral judgments independent of the state and in opposition to that state, be it secular or not. Indeed, groups of people acting as individuals (rather than state actors) can do a host of things and pass any number of moral judgments that would be considered inappropriate for the state.

It would be great if you could talk about your judgment rather than hypothesizing about the judgment of some nondescript moral agent cum state actor.

4. That many Christians don't hold to whole 'torturer' thing anyway. If one takes some parts of the Bible literally and other parts allegorically, then one is not following a creed. I think this is unarguable, because you could create any set of beliefs at all from the bible by doing so. We could say that that God's smiting of unbelievers is literal, but Jesus's kindness to the poor was only allegorical and didn't really mean the we ought to be kind to the poor. Once you personally (or some other group) are in charge of what's to be taken literally and what isn't, you no longer have a religion (from ligāre - to bind). You pick and choose which bits really mean what they say and which bits are just adding a bit of colour to a more generic message. — Isaac

This bit is a huge failing of people unstudied in religion and I'm not sure why it keeps being repeated here. If Christianity (love it or leave it) is our model for what a religion looks like, then features of Christianity are features of religion. It is unarguable both that Christianity has seen major changes from 50 C.E. to the present and that Christian understanding/dogma/creed was not limited to some naive literalist interpretation of the Bible. Imposing a literalist requirement on religions is simply a fiction of the modern day atheist and Christian fundamentalists (which, by the by, exclude Catholics). If religion is X as defined by Isaac (or any other person) and Christianity does not meet those criteria, then Christianity writ large isn't even a religion and so shouldn't be discussed in religious terms.

This attitude of fundamentalism (founding document to be understood literally as the only source of religious authority/authenticity) is precisely the problem with people like Lewis - actual people are being judged for having beliefs that they do not have based upon a facially incorrect understanding of what religion is/says/etc. Lewis, however, at least does the courtesy of saying that he has to ask a person before judging them. Writing off a class of people without specific knowledge of what that person believes is NOT what Lewis advocates, and in that way extending his argument to group judgment is an error. Taking issue with Lewis' definition of Christianity is secondary to his main point - what do we do with people that admirer a torturer? Can we hold them in esteem or must we cease our admiration of them?

Your third number misses the thrust of the argument, I think. The argument around worship is that what makes god worshipful is not inherently what makes god admirable (if at all). Lewis critiques those that admire. If someone worships a god that tortures people for fun, are they in the same boat of moral repugnance as someone that admires a god that tortures people for fun?

I’m probably missing this suggestion in the passage from Jonah you quote. Was it in there? Or do you have another source? — Srap Tasmaner

It is Abraham that reproaches god for going to kill a bunch of innocent people in Sodom. Abraham, as a Biblical character worthy of emulation, models expected behavior. Jonah is the jerk that runs from god and whines that he wasted his time going to Ninivah because god didn’t bother to kill them all. He actually antagonizes god a bit in the passage, “I disobeyed you and didn’t go to Ninivah because I knew you wouldn’t do it.”

… And he prayed to the Lord and said, "Please, O Lord, was this not my contention while I was still on my land? For this reason I had hastened to flee to Tarshish, for I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, with much kindness, and relenting of evil. And now, O Lord, take now my soul from me, for my death is better than my life."
And the Lord said: Are you deeply grieved? — “Jonah”

And for what it is worth…

. .It is profane in You to do such a thing, to kill a righteous one with a wicked one, rendering the righteous one like the wicked one. It is profane in You. Will the Judge of all the land not do justice? — “Genesis 18:25ish”

It is for people to demand justice even from god, not to sit idly by the blood of their neighbor. So from my perspective, it is abundantly obvious that one can worship/love/etc. god and still call god out for being an asshole. Cheering as god does bad things is demented and contra god. Indeed, even when god decides to do justice (horrible as it is), it is not for people to take issue with justice not being done.

And Jonah commenced to come into the city, one day's walk, and he proclaimed and said, "In another forty days Nineveh shall be overturned!"

. . .

And God saw their deeds, that they had repented of their evil way, and the Lord relented concerning the evil that He had spoken to do to them, and He did not do it.

Now it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was grieved.

. . .

8Now it came to pass when the sun shone, that God appointed a stilling east wind, and the sun beat on Jonah's head, and he fainted, and he begged to die, and he said, "My death is better than my life."
9And God said to Jonah; Are you very grieved about the kikayon? And he said, "I am very grieved even to death."
10And the Lord said: You took pity on the kikayon, for which you did not toil nor did you make it grow, which one night came into being and the next night perished.
11Now should I not take pity on Nineveh, the great city, in which there are many more than one hundred twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well?
— “Jonah 3 to 4”

Worship is not, and has never been, blind cheering for all that god does. One can reproach god, is expected to do so, and should be criticized for encouraging god to do bad things.

This topic has not, so far as I am aware, been discussed in this forum before. — Banno

I couldn’t say.

You and I agree, however, on the main point - people who believe something that is evil is good can be judged for both their belief in the bad thing and the inadequacy of the process they used to arrive at that belief. When someone reveals that they believe something horrid, you should act accordingly. To the extent that such a person is being called upon to pass judgment upon a matter and that judgment is of necessity complicated and not prone to efficient inquiry, excluding them from making that judgment based upon their expressed beliefs seems a reasonable heuristic/proxy. I only disagreed that self-identifying as a Christian of necessity demonstrates poor character - a point that Lewis does a poor job of establishing in his article.

As an aside, as an out group member I have had to learn far more about Christianity (secular or otherwise) than I would have liked to. Being in the out group, the essential nature of Christianity takes on a heightened importance because it often has to be appealed to to stop the Christians from murdering us (or otherwise persecuting us). Further, as an out group member you must be careful to find friends where they can be found, which requires that you not just write all in group members off as worthy of condemnation in all contexts/respects. Having a place at the table was not easy to come by for the out groups; taking your chance to sit at that table to demand that everyone in the in group leave (thereby ending the the collaborative process you were trying to join) is dangerous.

Judging people by their beliefs alone is dubious. Their actions tell you what they believe. — frank

A guy gives an example of obviously abhorrent dispositions and you don't want to judge. I can't fathom why. What value is advanced by refraining from acknowledging that the guy telling Hitler he is doing a great job exterminating the Jews is morally bad?

Sure. So we agree that like Nazis, Christians must be judged by their actions. :up: — frank

No, Nazis are judge by their beliefs. Granted, if there is no behavior manifesting their belief (speech or action), you wouldn't know what their belief is, but if they have told you, you take them seriously and scorn them as all Nazis should be. You don't simply smile and get back to letting your child marry them.

Actively expressing approval of and admiration for the bad acts of others is both a moral failing and an indication of suspect moral judgment. It isn't that Frtiz likes Hitler, it is that Fritz likes that Hitler is exterminating Jews and admires Hitler for doing so. Outside of agreeing with Hitler and Fritz, there is no way to see them as anything but morally repugnant and of bad judgment.

Giving Nazis a moral pass in an effort to save other morally repugnant people that you sympathize with seems a bad play. Beliefs (if others know them) are of necessity manifested - there is no innocent Nazi sympathizer. Even Fritz's admission to you that he admires Hitler is a bad act with nothing else. From that moment on, Fritz should be treated with caution and disdain.

P.S. The first paragraph is about beliefs, the third paragraph is about how speech is an act that has a moral status independent of the content of the speech.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. It isn't that in pantheism you can't talk to god, but that in pantheism god is inherently constituted by the universe and nothing more. The universe is always changing and that means that god is always changing. There is no eternal in something consisting of the universe. If you are looking for an eternally perfect god (and change suggests a lack of perfection), then you cannot get that from a pantheistic god.

Here is a brief excerpt from SEP:

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the development of panentheism as a specific position regarding God’s relationship to the world. The awareness of panentheism as an alternative to classical theism and pantheism developed out of a complex of approaches. Philosophical idealism and philosophical adaptation of the scientific concept of evolution provided the basic sources of the explicit position of panentheism. Philosophical approaches applying the concept of development to God reached their most complete expression in process philosophy’s understanding of God being affected by the events of the world.

...

The nature of a panentheistic mutual relationship between the infinite and the finite is crucial to the claim by panentheism to be a creative alternative to classical Christian theism and pantheism. Unlike classical Christian theism which prioritizes transcendence by deriving divine immanence from divine transcendence, panentheism balances divine transcendence and immanence (Clayton 2020). In the classical Christian understanding, divine transcendence is based on the ontological difference in substance between God and the world making interaction between the two distinct substances impossible (Schaab 2006, 547, 548). The panentheistic mutual relation also differs from pantheism which prioritizes divine immanence by identifying the infinite with the finite. The nature of this mutual relationship basically depends upon the understanding of the ontology of each member of the relationship. The issue is the nature of being for God and for the world as the basis for mutual influence between God and the world.
— SEP on Panentheism

Panentheism is a solution to a problem not addressed by pantheism. Specifically, panentheism helps answer the questions of immanence/transcendence, immutability/responsiveness, and eternal/transient in the context of omnipresence and some other stuff. Suffice it say that by having both god as constituted by the universe (everything is god and so god is everywhere) which is changing and effected by itself (god can respond to humanity) and a god that is outside of the universe's existence/causal chain, one can make sense of god having seemingly contradictory attributes.

Etymology isn't the be all and end all, but you might consider the types of relations between ideas that come from the words. "Opposite" is positional/in contrast - to have one is not to deny the other, merely to compare them or set against one another. "Negate" is about denial - there is something going on in the mind of an agent, e.g. a belief, a claim, a design/plan.