The dangers of phantom Bible quotes?

In the midst of a rather fru-fru article on not-really-in-the-Bible Bible Quotes it makes a rather odd claims that they are dangerous! *GASP*

Getting biblical scriptures and stories wrong may not seem significant, but it can become dangerous, one scholar says.

Most people have heard this one: “God helps those that help themselves.” It’s another phantom scripture that appears nowhere in the Bible, but many people think it does. It's actually attributed to Benjamin Franklin, one of the nation's founding fathers.

"Danger Will Robinson! Danger!" - 4 Corinthians  5:6

Where's the danger? Somebody might think American values are Biblical? That self reliance and personal individuality are Biblical notions? Well compared to slavery, genocide, and treating women like chattel which actually *ARE* Biblical notions, how dangerous does this read?

Some of the guilty parties are anonymous, lost to history. They are artists and storytellers who over the years embellished biblical stories and passages with their own twists.

Yeah, and prior to the 4th century they'd get added in here and there. So silly Journalist, let he who is without sin cast the first stone!

And if you’re a preacher telling a story about Jonah, doesn’t it just sound better to say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, not a “great fish”?

For the life of me, I don't get it. You can't live inside either. It's not like whales have air in them, the oxygen is stored in their blood. You drown both ways. It's a stupid story either way, right up there with talking donkeys and talking snakes (oh! I mean serpent, goodness forbid we miss that distinction that makes no difference) because talking critters are totally real and not strongly indicative of fairy tales.

Still waiting for some dangers. Or are the dangers much more mild than reading what's actually in the Bible.

Objectivity to Christianity.

Something I wrote elsewhere about using the Outsider Test of Faith:

Mostly I'm pointing it out because it of the Outsider Test of Faith. I'm currently reading the Christian Delusion which is everything critics claimed the God delusion should be. A scholarly work that deals with the nuances of Christian faith by experts in their fields. It's the best thing I've read. (yes the sentence ended there). -- But, it is a really good set of points that certainty is an emotion and that humans are well primed toward biases. We emotionally react to threatened beliefs, when we should let them rise or fall on their merits. And as children we believe whatever we're told. So simply telling children there is a God suffices to make them believers who defend the faith. But, it holds equally true for any faith. Especially in light of this we must, necessarily, strive to examine religion objectively. Because if you are a God who is intent on burning people forever in hell for failing to believe, you really should make your chosen religion able to be believed objectively. Such that you don't already have to be that religion, to believe that religion. That you could be compelled away from your current faith to the correct faith reliably by something. But, if we honestly look at the evidence and we can't find one religion that consistently wins (except perhaps Secular Humanism or Scientific/Naturalist Pantheism). If we try to use any metric objectively, we consistently find that every religion is true (which means the metric doesn't work) or we find that none of them are. This ultimately is a very serious problem for religion.

If what you use to believe your religion can be used to believe any religion, then you are necessarily treating your religion differently than you treat other people's religions, and since we can all agree other religions are false religions. Then what you are using to believe your religion can be used to believe false religions. -- It's a pretty critical problem for religion, but it's also a fairly new set of arguments so I might as well give them a whirl. After all, the logic is pretty inescapable, your religion should be different if it's right, so we should determine a way to figure this out. We have reliable methods for determining truth, and they determine your religion is false. We can use unreliable methods for determining truth, but they determine that all religions are true. -- And it's not really gotcha logic. Maybe there is a method of consistently determining truth, and only Christianity passes. As such, we would then be right to convert to Christianity. But, at a minimum we must look at religions the same way those not of that religion view them, and doing so reveals the same obvious flaws that are so apparent to everybody else. Asking one to accept talking reptiles, and talking donkeys, magical trees and worldwide floods is bad enough when you have your personal feelings of certainty to rely on, but when you need to do so objectively? It's laughable. If somebody-else's religion had those, Christians would point and laugh on a daily basis. -- So asking for objectivity, is actually rather damning to the faith.

So I'm doing research for a simple facebook post and...

Having looked up zoonotic diseases of birds I'm subjected to the following topic point:

"MOST DISEASES STARTED WITH ANIMALS"

Um, wtf. Where else would they come from. You want human specialized diseases? Or do you count those against too. Is HIV started with animals because it jumped over from chimps in like 1900? And humans are animals. What the hell? Most diseases started with rocks? And what do you mean started? I mean a lot of them are bacteria and they started some couple billion years ago along with all the rest of the life around.

That's just stupid. I'll get better rage on other topics later.

Ego-Surfing, finds...

So I went ego-surfing (basically google Tatarize) as it's only going to link to me and I found something cool I wrote back in 2006:

[A]m I rational in thinking that there is  a desk before me when I seem to see it?
Yes. That is rational. Firstly, desks are known to exist. People have jobs making desks. People buy desks.  People use desks. It is true that you could be completely insane and think there is a desk where there is not. However, then one needs to explain what keeps your stuff from falling and why everybody else similarly believes that such a desk exists. It becomes much less rational to disbelieve in the desk than to believe in the desk.

If so, what grounds are there to suppose that mystic experiences are not also legitimate ways of knowing?
The same grounds which existed for concluding that the desk existed. Do people have jobs making mystic experiences (outside of drug dealers)? Do people buy mystic experience? Do other people share an exact same mystic experience (do they also see the walls melting)? Can we test these things and find the results consistent with other things in existence? Does the absence of mystic experience leave a number of hard lingering questions? It does not become less rational to disbelieve. In such a situation, belief becomes clearly the irrational path.

Why assume that empirical investigation is the only way reality can be grasped?
Because 'empirical' deals with reality. Should we attempt to grasp reality by what exists in reality or things which do not exist in reality? Asking why we should use empirical investigation to discern reality is like asking why we should aim for the hoop when we want to make a basket.

Secondly, there are certain fruits of these labors. For example, the internet functions with the aid of a number physical properties and quantum phenomenon. We didn't learn about these by investigating how ghosts manage to push light through fine strands of glass? How long should we have spend testing for goblins within transistors?

Investigations into the supernatural, into gods and ghosts, horoscopes and rabbit feet have produced nothing. They have *never* given us a greater understanding of reality. We have never used ufology to make a better mousetrap or speed up a computer, only empirical investigations do that.

In short, we should look to reality when we intend to grasp reality. Because, it's the only thing that has ever worked and produced repeatable results; results which have given us all the technology we use everyday and all the understanding about the world we have today.

Damn I was good.

I previously failed to know how awesome Jonathan Coulton is...

I even once posted a video for the deaf that covered one of his songs.

But, others like "Re: Your Brains" and "Code Monkey", "The Future Soon". Which are very awesome




0 to fanboi in 3 hours is rare.-- To be fair I've heard some of the song before but never put them together and realize that they came from the same nexus of awesome.

Yay. I can post again.

Somehow blogger failed. I could log in with gmail and all, but not post. Very offputting. I really wanted to post this video about how much Jonathan Coulton rocked but I couldn't!

"Nobody knows the day or the hour..." - Matthew

The fun bit with Matthew is that that passage is added *BECAUSE* they failed. Early Christian preaching was apocalyptic to some degree from the start. You can see early on the authors pushing the dates back further and further from this generation, to a day is like a thousand years, to you can't predict when it will come. You can pretty much date texts by looking at when they claim the Judgement day will be and subtracting like a decade. If they say it'll be before the Second Temple falls, then they may well be before the second temple fell. If they say that the temple doesn't matter, they are likely writing afterwards.

The line in Matthew is specifically because this sort of stuff was the origin of Christianity. Really, as far as failed apocalyptic preachers go Harold Camping is pretty much on par with Jesus. So all the little "thief in the night" and "nobody can really know" stuff got added after they failed their asses off from the first to third centuries missing every benchmark they set.

The end of the world, "soon", for the last two thousand years. Heck the Jewish doomsayers were wrong so often they gave rise to Christianity. The end of the world is the failiest prediction ever.

So yeah, there's apologetics for why all the doomsayers failed, because starting with Jesus they were always dead wrong. Unless you think that somebody from Jesus' time is still alive, and that generation hasn't known death. And apologetics for the failures got added the the Christian corpus, but Camping is only as wrong as Jesus, with regard to the end of the world. So that's not too bad.

I am the palendrome fear my power, power my fear, palendrome the am I!

Awesome. Just awesome.

(The title is from an episode of The Middle Men).

I'm glad the rapture got press

Usually these things live and die in obscurity. They are wrong but nobody can say out loud and publicly that they were wrong, because nearly nobody heard of them. We also have the 2012 apocalypse coming and I hope some others get a good amount of press. The 2012 is so soon after the elections that it might get sort of drowned out. But, a few more and maybe we can get some press for the fact that all of these preachers predict crap from crap that always turns out to be wrong. It's as if the Bible is a terrible place to get your assumptions and certainty is an emotional state and not a level of reliance we can have on some points.

Errata: Myths of Galileo and Aristotle.

In an old set of posts I did about the BBC series "Did Darwin Kill God", I made a mistake by relaying a common misconception and set of myths about Galileo and Aristotle:

Aristotle was a proponent of science in one's own mind. The idea that one could rightly divine by thinking about an issue the correct answer. This idea may seem compelling, but it has always been wrong. It was wrong when Aristotle concluded that objects of different masses fall to Earth at different speeds, it was wrong when Galileo dropped different masses off the Tower of Pisa to see if they did, and it was wrong when the masses struck the ground at the same time.

Aristotle appears to have argued against that position. not in favor of it. Galileo appears to have actually just done that figuring in his mind and posing some thought experiments as to what happens when you tie a 1 pound weight to a 10 pound weight and likely didn't actually drop the weights from said tower and that story is likely apocryphal.

The Star Trek Rule and Argumentary Efficiency.

The Star Trek rule is generally a rule described by Russell Glasser on the Atheist Experience™ blog:as asking theists to keep in mind:

Before quoting the Bible to atheists, always ask yourself whether the same statement would be just as effective in your mind if you were quoting Captain Kirk.

The problem I have with the rule is argumentative efficiency. Due to the sheer mistake per word ratio of creationists and theists and other general wrong people it become critically important to have efficient arguments. That ultimately if you take a minute to refute each wrong claim and they can make four wrong claims a minute, you are going to lose to the sheer divergence of wrongness and leave some claims unrefuted or require four times as much time as they took to make said claims. The problem with the Star Trek rule is that it violates the general brevity required for refutations.

I recall a fairly good video on youtube that took seven minutes to say what I know how to say in a fourteen words, which is largely a refutation to the argument that atheism says something about God and therefore is a faith position and therefore makes atheism a religion. "If I not buying, what you're selling, it doesn't mean I'm selling something else." I believe there was a caller on the atheist experience which called in just to give that great one line rebuttal. And it's the best rebuttal I've seen for that particular argument.

The issue with the Star Trek Rule is that you have to explain yourself and it's not worthwhile. The better answer is to appropriate something Robgene (About Atheist Forum, Twsh Quotes) said: "Trying to prove God with the Bible is like trying to prove Superman with a Comic Book." Which I turned into a demotivator and got some quasi fame. I think this is better than the Star Trek Rule.

I think you can forgo the long explanation and initially undercut the comment by saying:

If you want to relate a nugget of wisdom, ask if I'd be compelled with that same nugget of wisdom taken from a comic book. If you want to try to prove God exists by using the the Bible, please note that it will be about as effective as trying to prove Superman exists with a comic book.

Dennis McKinsey on Proselytizers.

Dennis McKinsey said, that when evangelicals come to your door and when they leave and you're still an atheist, you shouldn't count that as a victory. You let two lost souls leave with their delusions intact. You were the one who lost.

That's some optimism. (This was from some webcasted radio program half a decade ago).

Somebody has an odd form of criticism. (of Carrier)

Apparently we are to conclude that Richard Carrier is a pathological liar because he cited #11 when he should have used citation #12. In an essay, from a decade ago, that he's corrected elsewhere and says has some mistakes and is superseded.

http://religiousyetsane.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-are-atheist-scholars-so-dishonest.html

Because apparently 1 error = Pathological Liar = Other side wins = God.

Oh, also he removed a lot of crap that wasn't about Jewish burial practices, in his essay about Jewish burial practices, between two passages that were about Jewish burial practices. Clearly because the original intent of the passage is to be long and have a bunch of stuff about how children are stoned to death in boring detail, because that changes so heavily how you bury them?

It's sort of weird, because he's good enough to check the original sources, but terrible enough to be confused as to what is and isn't a valid criticism of somebody's work.

That's an odd thing to run into.

So I was reading through the posts on Debunking Christianity, and came across this one that spoke to me.

It said, "Tatarize..."

Well it really did start off that way.

Tatarize: "I'm Only On the Fifth Chapter."

Which is a review of the book The Christian Delusion, that I posted on About's Atheism Forums.

**spooky**

On the testing of slippery supernatural suppositions.

I ran into an atheist on Facebook and criticized him for supposing that supernatural claims are not testable because supernaturalists are apt to change them.

John
14:13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
14:14 If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.

You're telling me that there's no tests for this? That somehow it's utterly impossible to make a coherent way of determining whether all prayers, in Jesus' name, are answered in the affirmative?

According to some billboards, Judgment day is in May of this year. I think May 21st. This is the return of Jesus and the whole flying around thing. This is a supernatural claim. Am I really suppose to accept that there's no conceivable way to check that? Not even on the 22nd?

I freely admit that one could change their claims indefinitely and never stake their belief on the latest nonsense they've pulled out of their hat. I cannot truly establish that disease isn't caused, as the Bible says, by sin or demons. But, I can establish that whatever these demons could do it's a moot point compared to germs. Just as I can show that invisible chariots would need to do no work because I can explain the motion of the stars with gravity (and I confess due to the nature of the analogy requiring an assist by dark matter). One could forever change their explanations, but that's not a requirement of supernaturalism. One could argue thusly that the moon is made of bananas with equally slippery supposition and layers of conspiracy. And nobody grants that that claim is supernatural. The fault lies not with the ability to test supernatural claims (after all, most every natural phenomenon from tides, to seasons, to healing, to weather, was supposed supernatural at one point), but with the ability to change ones claims as easily as clothing. Science can test reality, and if supernatural effects are part of reality then they can be established scientifically. It isn't a shortfall of science or the slippery nature of supernatural claimants but rather that reality shows nothing demonstratively supernatural about it. If fairies at the bottom of my garden were pushing up the daisies, we could well find evidence. We could also suppose magical reasons why the evidence didn't exist ad infinitum, but it doesn't really negate the original claim. It still becomes less likely to be true and more precarious to establish. And since we're talking about evidence and not absolute proof, it a serious problem. Testing supernatural claims, makes them less likely, even if they make up something new (and the fact that the way the do this is ad hoc confabulation rather than any sort of observation or perception of reality).

I'm not yoking the supernatural with scientific reason, I'm pointing out that if it matters with regard to reality, then science is the best and only real way of deciding the question. The only way the supernatural escapes science is by not being part of reality, that may well be the case, but it doesn't preclude science testing whether it is the case. You can argue a claim into such vagueness that it no longer matters, but it can't both matter and be scientifically untestable and undetectable. It must either be irrelevant or false, and if it's false it would necessarily be irrelevant.

I think you're giving supernaturalism far more credit that it deserves. It isn't something that's untestable and unfalsifiable, but rather something that we end up testing time after time and find it to be false. They make up something new, but it doesn't mean they weren't checked and found wanting previously. Supernatural claims have been tested and checked and phenomenon theorized, hypothesized, and understood for thousands of years (with a thousand year gap in there) and though religionists are always quick to open with "God did it" they have never ever been right in the entire history of the world. They always claim, initially, that it could only be the result of the supernatural and science has, thus far, always made them eat those words. Just because they backpedal, try to save face, regroup, and offer another steaming pile of shit at a later date, doesn't imply they weren't wrong each and every time they jumped to that same wrong conclusion by ignorance and faith. Given any reasonable scientific phenomenon, somebody somewhere claimed it was caused by supernatural forces; they were wrong. They've always been wrong. And claiming that it was because they weren't tested and found to be wrong is the utmost stupidity. You sacrifice the truth of scientific progress, naturalism, and empiricism in order to argue that they've never played some game properly because they play over and over and over and lose every time.

Bones is stupid sometimes. Yeti = Heliocentrism.

In Season 6 episode 18 of Bones, Bones and Booth have a discussion where Booth claims to have seen a Yeti and Bones scoffs at it. Then Booth says that she's just the same as those who were certain that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Heliocenticity was never an entirely terrible claim. It was lost between Aristarchus and Copernicus but largely lost because, most science was lost and Ptolemy was a towering genius whose geocentric model was the go to method of calculation until after Newton. While theoretically simple, it wasn't an accurate way of predicting the future. And the Inquisition voted 11 to 0 to dogmatize geocentrism (because geocentrism was Biblical) during the time of Galileo. In a real sense, you really could see it either way and it just changes the math a lot. Generally due to universal gravitation it's clear that the Earth travels around the sun far more than the reverse is true, but from a standpoint of calculation it might be easier to go from the Earth because being on Earth this is where observations are made.

However the comparison between such "close-mindedness" and the failure to accept Cryptozoological crap by hearsay is rather unfair. The proper position is always to go where the evidence leads you, and really there was a lot of evidence on both sides of the solar system debate (it wasn't until after Newton that people dropped Ptolemy all together, even when he lost the theory debate he was still better at calculating the planets position.) Whereas there's no good evidence for bigfoot, chupacabra, or yetis.

Aw, another good example gone away.

Sathya Sai Baba died. He was a great example of what trivia parlor tricks would end up looking like in somewhat backward cultures. Take that guy and move him to 1st century Judea, and you could well have a Jesus figure. Underwhelming magic tricks, and the guy got a million followers.

I should think more.

There's an old moral question about two different situations. One you can pull a lever and change the tracks of the train and therefore redirect a train away from killing five children and into killing one hobo. And comparing this to a situation where you can push a button, which will abduct a hobo harvest his organs and use his death to save five children. And the question is why does the first one feel okay but the second one feel completely unacceptable, when they are really the same situation? You are exchanging one life for five lives.

I just thought this was rather interesting and didn't bother to think about it. But, in reality the two situations are completely different. I just hadn't posed the questions correctly enough to consciously understand what I so clearly unconsciously understood so well. The difference is the type of society you live in. We're fine living in a world where people are hit by trains. Trains are pretty cool and they move stuff from one place to another. We're not fine living in a world where somebody can be abducted off the street and murdered for the greater good. The situations really are different, so different answers are required.

Truth as a wedge issue.

I was in Riverside earlier today listening to Richard Carrier speak, and one of the questions was concerning whether theists cared about the truth because some argued they did and others argued they don't really. And Dr. Carrier made the point that that is what makes it a fantastic wedge issue. It wasn't elaborated on, but certainly it's accurate, and has always been the rather core issue with religion.

If you care whether your beliefs are true, then there are a set set of things you should do. You should find a way to determine if something is true or false. You should find methods and a methodology by which you can determine what is true and what is false. And when you care about truth, your beliefs must always live and die by the evidence. Following closely from the desire to believe what is true is the requirement that we rely on evidence and reasonable argument. And that's a rather stunning trap. Because if one limits themselves to reasonable arguments and evidenced facts, you've cut off all paths that could get you to theism.

The want for truth isn't very hard to illicit from believers, so they really do care whether their beliefs are true or not. But, if you dig a bit with regard to their religious beliefs, this nice metric developed ad hoc suddenly becomes a heresy when you ask it to be applied to religion. On one hand theists want to accept what is true and not accept what is false, but on the other they don't care about the evidence at all or anything you say because they want to believe. And if they do that, they are accepting something less likely to be true over something more likely to be true, while they are allowed to do that, it's a rather serious problem. And if they are stuck there confronting their own cognitive dissonance it's not too much harder to ask them to admit that your position (not accepting any gods) is a perfectly valid one to hold because, after all it's more reasonable than theirs. They can try to weasel out at any point but they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they abandon the epistemological metric developed then they don't care whether what they beliefs are true or not. If they insist that there evidence matters, then the lack of evidence for theism in general or Christianity in particular is a serious problem, and the absence of evidence makes reasonable an absence of belief.

Treating "caring about truth" as a wedge issue forces theists to either abandon faith as an argument, or accepting that accepting faith as an argument means abandoning truth as a desire. They accept God as true on faith, and admit using faith as grounds means they don't care about believing true things. Or they can accept reasonable evidence alone which means they need should have a reason to believe resting on sound evidence and argument.

Finally, what does it say about the state of intellectual discourse in religion if "caring whether you believe true things" is a plausible wedge issue?

Music and chords... who needs something new?