Ordinances, Sacraments, Rituals, Practices, etc.

[Crazy Tom: C Toon]

We (as premellinial dispensationalist calvinist baptists) hold to a purely symbolic view of the partaking of the "Elements" as we call them. We do communion monthly, so as not to turn it into desensitized routine. The bread is simply tiny bread wafers, and the wine is grape juice. we still treat communion as a VERY solemn and serious time for reflection and reaffirmment.

He said "This is my body." He called his body bread and bread his body

How can you possibly tell that Christ means that the bread has changed essence. To me (and most others I might add), he is simply using a metaphor. I'll have to ask my dad how the Greek says it. "is" is most likely just a metaphor.

[Jayelle]

So Jesus was talking in a metaphor, but Genesis is literal?

[jotabe]

So Jesus was talking in a metaphor, but Genesis is literal?

It's called cherry-picking Christianism.

[Crazy Tom: C Toon]

Genesis had no reaon to be metaphorical, while Christ certainly would not want his followers to practice cannibalism. The distinction should be obvious even to you.

[Eddie Pinz]

So you (and it seems you alone) get to pick a choose where to read the bible literally and where there is symbolism going on? You are right and everyone that disagrees with you are wrong, even though they have brought up very valid points. If so, can you please send me your interpretation of the entire Bible? I just want to be sure that I don't mess anything up.

[Mich]

In far less scathing words, CTCT, Eddie is pretty much saying it as we all are saying. What reasoning do you have behind Genesis having "no reason to be metaphorical"? If Christ is telling people to eat his body without practicing cannibalism, where does he specify that? Maybe he was actually trying to introduce a new way of experiencing a closeness to him that seems like cannibalism. He never specifically says "but woah, I'm being metaphorical, unlike those other times." Do you see why any discussions about what's metaphorical and what isn't can't just be blatant statements declaring what someone meant and what someone else didn't? As has been pointed out countless times, all or most arguments on this forum are backed up with passages, logical reasoning, or others. What is your reasoning behind these latest conclusions?

[Crazy Tom: C Toon]

So you (and it seems you alone) get to pick a choose where to read the bible literally and where there is symbolism going on? You are right and everyone that disagrees with you are wrong, even though they have brought up very valid points. If so, can you please send me your interpretation of the entire Bible? I just want to be sure that I don't mess anything up.

You know, plenty of people agree with everything I have said. They're just all dead.

I interpret the Bible literally where it seems appropriate (and sane), where there is no reason to believe that it should be interpreted differently. When there IS reason (i.e. the promotion of cannibalism), I perceive the true meaning of words that are spoken. I notice that out of the THOUSANDS of times that the word "day" is used in the old testament, the only time you want to question its meaning is when you want the Bible to conform to man's theories, in Genesis. You don't hear people wondering if Joshua led his people around Jericho for 7 million years instead of seven days. Because that would be illogical. Using the same logic, I deny that Christ was speaking literally that the bread was literally made into his body because that would be illogical. Unethical.

[jotabe]

Your logic operates in a peculiar way
You find a reason for Jesus to speak in a non-literal way, because that would contradict your knowledge. But you can't get through Genesis being read in a non-literal way, despite Genesis contradicts our knowledge.

So...?

[Taalcon]

You know, plenty of people agree with everything I have said. They're just all dead.

Go back even earlier, and you'll find a lot more people who understood that symbols could be symbols without having to be stated as such, and that symbols usually had more than one meaning. It was a key reason for its presentation as a symbol.

I am curious as to how you interpret the Genesis 1 and prophetic teachings concerning the firmament. Do you believe there's a crystaline sphere surrounding the earth that separates the heavens (which hold the stars, sun, and moon), from the waters of Chaos which are between earth and the Third Heaven of Fire?

...Or is that part of the Creation account just symbolic?

[Crazy Tom: C Toon]

Reading the scripture, and ignoring the biased and unsupported sites you provided, the Earth is described exactly the way it is. Nothing in the Bible says "crystalline." The Bible simply says that the water was separated into the air and sea. It describes the creation of atmosphere.

Jotabe: instead of making complaints about my own arguments, how about you come up with some of your own, supported by hard evidence? (like the Bible)

[Taalcon]

Reading the scripture, and ignoring the biased and unsupported sites you provided, the Earth is described exactly the way it is. Nothing in the Bible says "crystalline." The Bible simply says that the water was separated into the air and sea. It describes the creation of atmosphere.

Unsupported? Biased? Have you seen the links you've posted here recently as evidence?

The first site I linked was wikipedia, which also included links for further reading. Did you look at those? The second site I linked is my own. I linked it for the image/video as a visual guide, as well as some of the context and quotes I cited as reference. I'd suggest watching the visuals on that video along with the text.

Do a search for 'ancient near eastern cosmology' , or 'ANE cosmology'. Do an image search as well using those same terms.

The only thing these 'sites' are biased towards is acceptance of epigraphic and archeological scholarship concerning ancient near eastern cultures. The Babylonian Enuma Elish epic of creation has several points of contact with the Genesis 1 creation element, including the initial Chaotic state in the deep (hebrew tehom, in the Enuma Elish, Tiamat: the personification of Chaos, referred to in the Old Testament as Leviathan). Following the conquering of Chaos in the Babylonian work, the firmament is literally made with the body of Tiamat, creating a stretched out, hammered out covering over the earth.

The hebrew word translated Firmament - raqiya - literally comes from the root 'beaten out/stamped/stretched out', the same word used for metal works stretched and beat out with a hammer. It was understood as being solid by the ancients.

The Windows of Heaven often mentioned in the OT were viewed as literal openings in this expanse, often the means by which heavenly messengers - and gifts from God - descended. In the flood narrative, the Chaotic Waters poured in from these windows, as well as seeped in from the Deep below the earth as well. The ancient imagery is the only way these passages make sense without truly twisting the text in a highly unsupported way.

It's a symbolic account, according to the understanding common at the time and place presented. God wasn't teaching astronomy, or science. He was teaching Doctrine, according to their own language and understanding.

[jotabe]

Again, i am slightly offended that you use the word "evidence" referred to the Bible. Evidence is something objectively verifiable, and it has scientific connotation.

If you say "i believe this" and then go to the bible and find a paragraph that sustains it and say "this is the evidence"... that's an argument devoid of all merit.

[Azarel]

So Jesus was talking in a metaphor, but Genesis is literal?

It's called cherry-picking Christianism.

...That doesn't happen TOO often now does it?


Faith is devoid of all merit, belief is the sole property of the individual, and Jesus never once called himself King, yet some of us call him that, for reasons only justifiable in our own hearts (that's right, an organ with no thought capacity) and this is the way it is.

[jotabe]

I don't get what you mean, Aza.
About the cherry-picking, i was being ironic, as it is a fault very easy to see in others, but very difficult to see in oneself. Essentially every single christian denomination you can think of uses cherry-picking because the literality of the text is incoherent or contradictory in several points. And we all need our beliefs to have a certain degree of coherence.

Of course, you can go all-out with literality, as long as you don't mind being incoherent with logics or with natural laws.

[Jayelle]

So Jesus was talking in a metaphor, but Genesis is literal?

It's called cherry-picking Christianism.

...That doesn't happen TOO often now does it?


Faith is devoid of all merit, belief is the sole property of the individual, and Jesus never once called himself King, yet some of us call him that, for reasons only justifiable in our own hearts (that's right, an organ with no thought capacity) and this is the way it is.

Luke 23:3 - So Pilate asked Jesus, "Are you the king of the Jews?"
"Yes, it is as you say," Jesus replied.

[Azarel]

In honest clarification I meant saying to people "i am the king" in order to get them to believe him. In that verse, he's answering a direct question yes, it is as you say but he also said that he was not of the world and that his kingdom was not a strictly worldly one. By which point pilate most likely didn't know what to believe.

[Caspian]

How will the heat migrate? Each tender sore sights an impulse. Throughout the crazy ally explodes a split chorus. Another aggressive sphere reacts under a visible citizen, and a cube clicks against a pulled disturbance.

[Crazy Tom: C Toon]

... anyway

Jotabe, if you don't accept the Scriptures as truth, then what DO you accept? if nothing, why are you on a religious thread?

[jotabe]

I accept as truth what is true (that's a tautology for you XD). What is objectively verifiable according to experience, and to our knowledge derived from experience.

I accept the Scriptures as the the accounts of people who had a powerful experience with god, or thought to had had it. God doesn't need that a human's experience of the divine is actual, to get use from it.
As human accounts, specially having in account how old they are, they will be flawed and inaccurate, specially the old testament, which hardly qualifies as scripture for me (because of this lack of historical reliability in the older texts). But on faith alone, i accept there is a kernel of truth in there, that there is a God trying to tell us something. A message that isn't really conveyed till he takes it upon himself to become human and tell us. And even then, we only get the account from humans again, though in this case witnessing is more reliable, because the oral tradition of Jesus' teachings became fixed into scripture a lot faster.

I accept this, but i can hardly qualify it as a truth, because it depends on faith alone, because it's unfalsifiable, because objective evidence will never be available.

[Crazy Tom: C Toon]

We'll just see about objective evidence in the End Times. Pray tell, what "objective evidence" proves the Big Bang theory, which you hold to, when there was nobody around to see it? or creation or evolution for that matter? For all your talk about only believeing in objective truth, you sure do believe a lot of perpetuated fallacies.

[Jayelle]

Faith is devoid of all merit, belief is the sole property of the individual, and Jesus never once called himself King, yet some of us call him that, for reasons only justifiable in our own hearts (that's right, an organ with no thought capacity) and this is the way it is.

Makes about the same amount of sense as:

How will the heat migrate? Each tender sore sights an impulse. Throughout the crazy ally explodes a split chorus. Another aggressive sphere reacts under a visible citizen, and a cube clicks against a pulled disturbance.

That is the point he was making.

[jotabe]

Pray tell, what "objective evidence" proves the Big Bang theory, which you hold to, when there was nobody around to see it? or creation or evolution for that matter? For all your talk about only believeing in objective truth, you sure do believe a lot of perpetuated fallacies.

No, i don't believe in objective truths... don't you see? i don't need to believe them. They are true. At the best of our knowledge and ability, they are as close to truth as we can get, and probably in the future we can get closer.

It's stuff not based on evidence that you need to believe, or believe not. *cough*there's no try*cough*

As for evidence, the Big Bang was the simple conclusion of an observational fact: the red shift of the light emmited by far galaxies. That means we are all getting far from each other, what means that we were closer in the past. Without any other force acting as massively as gravity at long distances, it's simply to deduce that there was a time where all the matter was arbitrarily close. From this deduction, which agrees with all our previous knowledge of physics, it was predicted that there had to be a microwave backgrown in the cosmic spectrum. And there it was, the second biggest piece of evidence of the Big Bang. The rest of our knowledge on the Big Bang stems only from applying physics to an exceptionally hot, dense state for the universe.

As for the evolution, that's way easier... but you know it already, we have been discussing that endlessly. As you like to say, read the thread. You still haven't said why evolution evidence isn't valid.