AW! Epistles
From Harold H
Abstract
Sunday, 22 February 2004
From Harold H
Mike, I have the following comments on: AskWhy! on Cathar Beliefs—Heresy and the Inquisition 1—Christianity Revealed. There seems to be a good deal of useful information in this article, but I was struck by the following quote from it. By the way, Zoroastrianism is misspelled in the quote:
“Lying was the worst sin in Zoroaatrianism. In Christianity, it is the highest virtue, so long as it is lying for Christianity.
In every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Jesus is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.S Paul, Philippians 1:18
If through my lies God’s truth abounds to His glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner?S Paul, Romans 3:7Ebionites disdained Paul as a fraud. ”
The author has completely misunderstood the apostle Paul. In Phil 1:18, Paul spoke of people who were preaching the Gospel as a pretext for causing him harm, adding affliction to his bonds of imprisonment. Their preaching was not false, but the motivation for their preaching was untrue.
Phil 1:17—The former preach Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains.
Phil 1:18—But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice. (NIV)
In Romans 3:7, Paul was quoting the thinking of his adversaries to show its foolishness, and he plainly rejected their thinking:
Rom 3:7—Someone might argue, If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?
Rom 3:8—Why not say, as we are being slanderously reported as saying and as some claim that we say, Let us do evil that good may result? Their condemnation is deserved. (NIV)
Paul did not advocate lying.
Many thanks for pointing out the spelling mistake. I am not the world’s greatest typist and pressing “a” instead of “s” is one of my common mistakes.
Now, regarding your main point, we shall have to agree to disagree. Paul famously braggs about his lack of principle when he boasts he is all things to all men, and in these passages, you have to try hard to put him in an innocent light. There seems no room for contradicting what is evident in Philippians. It does not matter how the gospel was preached or out of what motives, Paul rejoiced that it was preached! The passage in Romans is more obscure, and Christian commentators justify it as an argument with an imaginary Jew, whose arguments, however, have to be supplied because Paul does not. One has to laugh once again at the Holy Ghost and its incompetence at maintaining the purity if God’s word, but I have no need to try to make the Holy Word true by adding a lot of additional unholy words. The bible is all too often utterly confused, and so I simply cannot see why it is held in such absurd regard—like a God itself—when it is often so ambiguous. Not only that, but Christians consistently take advantage of its general confusion to confuse parts that are not confused at all, but that Christians do not like. No Christian, except perhaps for a few eccentrics and a few dedicated monks believe in the spiritual value of poverty even though it is a necessity to Christ. He does not really mean it. Convenient, eh?
So, I am sorry but I have written what I have written, and the references allow the curious reader to check them. If they do, they might feel the same as you, or agree with me. It is up to them. I hope you enjoy the pages.
Let me warn you that speaking falsehood about God’s word puts you in the position of being an enemy to God Himself. I honor and respect your freedom to say what you will. But you need to speak less flippantly about God’s word and study it more until you know what you’re talking about, which you don’t now.
Kneel before Him and pray for forgiveness, brother. Christ warned you to be humble. It is not humble to second guess God, judging me and warning me in your infinite ego. Judge that you be not judged, Pharisee. Your smug complacency is not in line with the teachings you think you understand so well, and your “warning” shows you do not honour or respect anything I say, proving you are lying and hypocritical. You presume too much. You have a beam in your eye. I shall look after my soul, you concern yourself with yours. You are too self-satisfied to realize Satan has got you. All of your arrogant kind are the same. Did you not read, The first will be last? How can you atone for your presumption? With humility, but you know not what it means, false prophet.
You seem to forget something about the Matthew passage that you cite:
Matt 7:3—Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
Matt 7:4—How can you say to your brother, Let me take the speck out of your eye, when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
You have claimed: “In Christianity, it [lying] is the highest virtue, so long as it is lying for Christianity.” That claim is not a speck of dust. It is a substantial accusation against Christianity.
I considered carefully what I wrote and am glad to stand before God for it. First I explained to you that there was a problem with your interpretation of the passages in the Bible. You ignored me and spoke lightly of God, insisting on your interpretation. You seem to think that the Bible is so mushy that no one knows what it means. Study the commentaries and you will find that the passages you cited have definite meanings. There is widespead agreement about what these passages mean. So I am being objective when I tell you that to leave your misrepresentation of the passages on the web site means that you placing yourself against God. Just study the passages. They don’t mean what you say. I don’t know how to say it more simply. You are wrong, and people who know the Bible well would know that.
You seem to think that believers have no right to point out error, even if it speaks evil of their faith and could influence others for evil. Well, Scripture is full of prophets and godly people confronting others with their errors and sins. It is the most loving thing to do sometimes. A humble attitude on your part would have been to say, “Well, if you say that I am wrong, I will check some authoritative writings on the passage. Perhaps I have made a mistake. Perhaps I should not advertise on my web site that ’In Christianity, it [lying] is the highest virtue, so long as it is lying for Christianity.’ ”
By the way, if you should come up with a commentator somewhere who agrees with you, that would prove nothing to me. There is a long tradition of faithful, godly men who have understood those passages in the way that I have explained. In fact, before now, I have never even heard the interpretations you put on the texts. I myself have graduate training in biblical Greek and know what those passages mean. So I have no doubt about what I say.
We will get nowhere on this, but let me suggest for a final time that smugness is not a virtue recommended by Christ so far as I can tell, and moreover, those who presume to know what is right were those criticised by Christ as hypocrities and Pharisees and so too they were those criticised by the prophets. You need a dose of humility. So far as lying is concerned, I have placed online a large number of pages that show what I mean. Try reading them.
Christ did not, in particular, call Pharisees hypocrites for presuming to know what was right, but for not living according to what they professed and according to what God intended.
Am I to infer from this that what they professed they did not think was right?
The Pharisees and scribes acted as teachers of God’s word, but they did not do what they said:
Matt 23:2-4—The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
So by their actions you could conclude that they did not think what they professed was the right thing for them to do.
I agree that smugness is not good. But claiming to know the correct interpretation of a text is not necessarily smugness. I notice that you are an intelligent person and seem to know many things that I do not. That is why I was reading about the Cathars on your site in the first place.
Well, the humble view is that your interpretation might be wrong. It is, after all, an interpretation, because the text in this instance is not very clear.
Your career indicates that you have been involved in many different areas of service. I have been involved with the Bible. For the past several years I have been a translator. I have learned over the years that it is unwise for me to interpret the Bible off the top of my head, and that it is necessary to study the grammar, the context, the book’s message, and other interpreters who have written on the passage. The reason for this is that biblical culture is so distant from my own. Of course, I maintain the possibility, in general, that what I say might be wrong. But there really is no doubt in my mind about what I told you concerning Paul’s two statements. In the past, I have taken all these study steps regarding the two texts (Phil 1:18: Rom 3:7). The context and grammar are fairly clear, and I have found that there is widespread agreement about what Paul meant.
In other places it is utterly clear, but Christians ignore it because it does not suit them.
This remind me of what you wrote about Jesus dying as a rebel who attempted a military insurrection. But that is not true. Jesus did not come militarily and specifically denied having that purpose:
John 18:36—Jesus said, My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place.
Jesus came as a spiritual king at His first coming.
They are always certain they are all right, though, unlike many of the saints who died full of anguish that they might not have got it right, or had not done enough to be received in heaven.
I cannot quite identify with your first remark about people dying full of anguish that they might not have got it right. I can’t think of who you might mean. But the second comment is not really good biblical theology. We cannot get to heaven by earning our way there. Salvation is by grace through faith. What we do then goes on to attest the reality of that faith.
You are certain that my reading of the bible is wrong, and that is fine for both of us, but my reading is that to be certain of anything is insufficiently humble for anyone to be saved.
We cannot know things in an absolute way:
1 Cor 8:2—And if any man think that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.
1 Cor 13:9—For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
1 Cor 13:12—For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
But Paul’s statement in 1 Cor 8:2 does not mean that we cannot know what Paul is trying to say to us, for then we could not even understand 1 Cor 8:2.
Paul introduced the absurdity that mere belief was enough for salvation. Believe it if you wish.
Paul did not introduce it. It goes back to the Book of Genesis.
Gen 15:6—Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness.
And Paul was not the only NT writer who affirmed it:
John 5:24—I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.
1 Pet 2:6—For in Scripture it says: See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.
Peter is quoting Isaiah.
I see that you speak of Christian engaging in “pious lies”. That might sound a though you suppose Christians lied with good motivations. But then you have a statement like 0520PostCrucifixion.html:
First, does he seriously think that the first gentile bishops were so liberal in their views that they would circulate a book admitting openly that their god was a Jewish traitor to the Roman emperor? The idea is quite rightly risable. Yet no Christian scholar will allow that the first bishops might have indulged in sins of omission or commission in the furtherance of their breadpot.
Unless I misunderstand you, here you suggest that bishops prevaricated for personal advantage. But for whatever reason people distort the truth, falsehood is almost universally perceived as being bad. Certainly, from the perspective of what appears in the Bible lying is wrong. There are a couple of exceptional cases, when evil people might kill someone if the truth were told.
I think that Christians have been utterly immune to the idea that lying is sinful as long as it is for the glory of God and His coming kingdom.
True Christians place a high value on truth. One of the Ten Commandments is that we not bear false witness.
It means that many Christians do not even think of it as lying when they do.
If they lie, they are disobeying Scripture:
Eph 4:25 Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body.
But, it also means that many Christians, especially the ones designated as shepherds, have lied blatantly, relying on the ignorance and dependence of their sheep.
There has been a lot of corruption in Christianity, but the standard is what God says, not what some people do.
You began this correpondence with the two citations from Paul, but let me ask you to consider what this can mean (Mk 13:11; Mt 10:20):
…take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.
Here the speaker is your own God, and this seems to me to be telling his disciples that it is impossible for them to tell a lie, and if he is not, it is interpreted by Christians in that way. As a modern example, George Bush and Tony Blair behave as if they think they simply cannot tell lies.
You have to understand the context. It is not any sort of circumstance, but one where Christians are arrested because they testify about Jesus Christ.
Mark 13:9—You must be on your guard. You will be handed over to the local councils and flogged in the synagogues. On account of me you will stand before governors and kings as witnesses to them.
They will be persecuted for being Christians. When they are arrested and must testify on their own behalf, they can be sure that God will come to their aid. They need not be anxious about how to defend themselves, what they should say, and so forth. God promises that the Holy Spirit will give them the right thing to say. This does not mean that they can say anything they want. It means that they should say what God leads them to say, for that will be truth that cannot be rightly assailed.
Bush and Blair in their statements about the war in Iraq do not match the circumstance described by Mark 13:11. While it seems we could wish they had been better informed when they made their decisions to go to war, and that they had not made such cocksure statements about weapons of mass destruction, they were not victims of arrest for being Christians. They were not being persecuted for their faith.
I have not read your total outlook, but in reading a few pages I see that you have all sorts of theories contrary to what the Bible says. It would take a long piece of writing to respond to even one of the little chapters on your web site. I applaud your spirit of independent thinking, and we must think for ourselves, but I believe the Bible is inspired by God. The tradition of miracles permeates the Bible’s length and breadth. Either Scripture speaks of a supernaturally intervening God or it need not be followed.
In Paul’s letters he places a high value on truth and disparages lying.
This latter is what started the discussion. Again, it is a matter of interpretation. Christians, as I showed above, with a citation from Christ, think that whatever they say is true. The Holy Ghost ensures it is. To me this is idiocy. Truth is not arbitrary, and it is manifestly not what Christians say it is. You see, you will believe the bible is inspired by God. Is all of it inspired, and, if it is inspired is it automatically true, or can error creep in somehow, even when a text is inspired?
Yes, error can creep in. That is why we have textual criticism. Fortunately, because of the multiplicity of manuscripts, the Bible is the most textually certain document of all ancient literature, at least from what I’ve heard.
If you think it all is inspired and true then you are a fundamentalist and have made an idol out of a book. If you think some bits of it are not inspired and might be in error, then which bits are they? Will you tell me, and others what can be ignored in the bible?
If believing that the Bible is all inspired makes me a fundamentalist, then so be it. The Bible in various places and ways claims to be inspired. So again, it is a matter of evaluating the testimony of the Bible as to its believability. There are certain bits that textual criticism has isolated as suspect. I don’t think anything can be ignored. The wrong theology in the world that claims to originate in the Bible almost always results from ignoring something that is there in the text.
My guess is that you will not because you have put all your eggs of belief into one basket, and to begin to accept doubt will lead you into a crisis of faith. So, while you applaud my spirit of independent thinking, you are the one who needs it.
If thinking in submission to the Bible cannot be independent thinking, then you’re right.
To base your belief on the miracles in the bible is equally arbitrary. What is wrong with the miracles related by people of other faiths? Do they make doubt spring to your mind, or do they make you think, perhaps, that God is more subtle than you give Him credit for? It is a remarkable thing that the Almighty is never more intelligent than His believers allow Him to be—namely never more intelligent than they are!
First, I don’t deny the possibility that miracle reports from other religions could be true. God works in all parts of the world. I believe that the revelation God gave Israel is His official revelation of Himself to the world. His Son has died for the sins of the world only once. Christianity readily attests to God’s intelligence being far beyond the grasp of mortals:
Rom 11:33—Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!
I am at a perpetual loss to understand why Christians want to believe an ancient book rather than modern discoveries. Your last post was typically Christian in being full of biblical citations which, for you, were proof of whatever you were seeking to show. For me an ancient book is likely to be wrong and this one can be shown to be wrong over many things. If something can be shown to be wrong in some respect, then there is no good grounds fro believing it in others. And that is the crux of the matter. You as a Christian just believe it. It is a matter of faith for you that it is true. You believe it to be true, and it is true because you believe it.
We who live in the modern world will not accept something to be true unless it is demonstrably so. That is the crucial difference between us that my pages are trying to bring out, but it is lost on Christians. I use reason backed up by evidence to analyse the content of your Holy Word, and the baneful history of Christianity.
You are a translator you say, and so are just as deceitful as the original writers. The translators of the bible quite deliberately seek to hide the proper translation of many passages and even single words in the bible. Yehouah is conventioanlly translated as the Lord which it does not mean, and Elohim is conventionally translated as God when it is a plural word. I know you have your excuses but save me from them. They are only excuses. You are familiar with textual criticism, but it does not seem to lead you to any conclusions. You still believe it. Textual criticism shows that the bible is compiled, and not by angels because it shows quite plainly. You doubtless believe that the composition and compilation were inspired by the Holy Ghost, but the Holy Ghost is obviously incompetent so ought to give you no confidence.
It does leave us in a difficulty because no proper argument can be had without a basis of common understanding, and my experience of Christians is that their belief precludes any criticism of it and its basis. That means we cannot get anywhere. A good example is what you say about thinking in submission to the bible. You think it can be independent thinking, and it could if the bible offered the truth, because truth cannot be gainsaid. But it does not. It offers ancient belief, and modern people like you just continue to believe it. You are not able to think independently because you have already tied yourself to error.
Anyway, you cite Matthew legitimately to show something the bible has to say about the Pharisees, an internal matter, and it says that the teaching of the Pharisees was correct. Surely that means what they professed was right, even if they did not do it. But it is an unimportant detail.
On interpretation, we are back to the point I made above. As you say, I have done several things but I was trained in science, which in a nutshell means testing your hypotheses. An interpretation is an hypothesis, but biblical interpretation is often and even usually arbitrary. The interpretation chosen is the one that best fits Christian belief. It is not scientific because there are no objective criteria. It becomes an item of theology, and theology is a purely arbitary framework built on these biblical interpretations. If every Christian in Christendom interprets a passage in the same way, it is no proof it is correct, because Christians want the interpretation to suit their belief. The more scholarly commentators on passages that are dubious are more honest about them, at least to the extent that they will say the passage is “difficult”. It means they do not understand it, and therefore the Holy Ghost is being its usual crass self. In speaking of context and grammar you sound quite cautious, but then suddenly develop immense confidence because you all think the same. Surely you can see that the necessity of belief will make you all tend to agree on these things, so it cannot be a proper criterion.
After this you get seriously subjective in your arguments which are therefore utterly worthless. You deny Jesus was a revolutionary on the basis of a citation of John obviously inserted for the very purpose you put it to! I suggest you read something about this, and begin to think that the bible was written by human beings with a purpose and not by God. Even Christians—those who try not to keep their heads in buckets—have to accept that Jesus was hanged as a traitor to the emperor. The charges admitted in Luke are all punishable by death, and all were committed by Jesus and his friends. Take your head out of the bucket and there is no way that anyone can defend Jesus under the laws that the Romans had at the time. The arguments are much more extended, and I have pages and pages about them, all fairly well argued, I think. We are back to your problem. You belief what you believe despite the evidence. Citing New Testament passages intended to give quite a different impression from the main plot is empty headed, but typically Christian.
You now assert that salvation is by grace, as you call it, but the criteria of salvation vary a good deal according to the NT book you read, and even according to different parts of the same book. You do what all Christians have done, picked the easiest. Faith will suffice! It is what Paul taught, this same Paul that I think was a charlatan, but you admire as much as your own God. A man who ought to have known better was James, described as the brother of Jesus. He thought faith was worthless without works. I prefer to believe him, but as I said last time, you will believe what you like.
On the question of humility you turn again to the rogue Paul who always knows better than God, even to the extent of telling you to be idiots rather than using the brain that God endowed you with. Jesus is adamant that humility is essential to salvation, so Paul is irrelevant, unless he is the son of God and not Jesus. These citations sound reasonably humble, but you note a contradiction yourself, and Paul seems to have few doubts himself, and even if he had, no modern Christian will acknowledge them.
You rather desperately attribute the idea of salvation by belief to Abraham in Genesis which speaks of believing in Yehouah, the high god of heaven who is speaking directly to him. That cannot be the sort of belief that Paul was urging, in which there is no evidence at all other than what Paul says. Again, Paul becomes God. As for John and 1 Peter, both of these were written long after Paul wrote his letters, so cannot be considered independent information. By the time they wrote, the Church was becoming Pauline. It was taking the easiest option, one that would guarantee rapid growth. An insistence on works would have had quite a different outcome, we can be sure.
Now you go back again to the Jewish scriptures to invoke the Ten Commandments. Christiuans do, of course, but again it is a trick. They treat the Jewish scriptures as true, and so the Ten Commandments are true and valid, yet the Law of Moses is no longer true. It was abrogated, it seems, so that Christians do not have to trouble with food taboos, circumcision and other such discomforts, yet this law was God’s law, not Moses’s law, and indeed the Ten Commandments are presentred as the start of it, brought down from a mountain inscribed on tablets of stone. I return to what I said before. What is to be believed in the bible and what can be ignored? Let me cite something to you:
And a son of eight days shall be circumcised among you, every male in your generation, he that is born in the house, or bought with silver from any son of a foreigner who is not of your seed. The child of your house and the purchase of your money circumcising must be circumcised. And My covenant shall be in your flesh for a perpetual covenant. And an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, his soul shall be cut off from his people; he has broken My covenant. Gen 17:12-14
Now unless I am mistaken, this clearly says that to be saved a man must be circumcised. If he is not, he has broken the perpetual covenant of God. It is a perpetual covenant, and God himself said so, not some upstart called Paul. Your own God said as plainly as possible that not a jot or tittle of the law would pass away until the End of Time, so what right had Paul to alter what your God had repeatedly said was inviolable. Perhaps you will get to understand why I say you Christians are habitual liars. You have convinced yourselves that absolute opposites can be simultaneously true, and with your heads firmly in your buckets you will not hear anything else.
Yet, in a line or two you tell me that the standard is what God says not anyone else! You are living proof, Harold, that Christians simply cannot understand that they are lying. That is what I have been saying, and you confirm it. The passage from Ephesians you cite is urging the Christians not to lie to each other, but in terms of faith that is impossible anyway, because faith is an agreement among Christians to believe the same untruths, while calling them God’s Truth.
Regarding the citation from Mark’s apocalypse, you say it was meant only for those Christians who were arrested and brought to court. God would ensure they said the right thing, you think. I did say, that Christians uniformly seem to interpret this passage as more broadly applicable than just law courts, but let me suggest that what you are saying is hardly mitigation. You are accepting that the bible tells people to lie in court. That, I believe, is the serious crime of perjury, and ought not to be recommended to honest people. It implies that Christians are not honest people.
Thankfully, I am getting to the end of your points. You seem to think that text that has been copied correctly is correct. If the text was originally false, then it does not matter how correctly it has been copied, it remains false. The errors creeping in, I spoke of, were precisely errors in the original supposed inspiration, not copying errors. For a book inspired by God, the bible is simply replete with errors, yet your faith obliges you to believe it even so. You yourself speak now of "evaluating the testimony of the Bible as to its believability". That is something that you just refuse to do. I do it on my pages, and few Christians indeed think I am doing something permissible let alone right, you among them, from your reaction. You are forced by your own psychological cowardice to believe impossibilities for fear of actually dying when you die. Whatever you believe, you will die, and after that you will have no knowledge of anything else.
We cannot ignore anything in the bible as incredible, you say. I say otherwise. It is a book of myth, and whatever is true in it has to be seen mythologically not as history or science. Some Christians are coming back to believing this, as some once did. They are being forced into it by the sheer foolishness of having to believe incredible things. I have just written a page about Don Cupitt’s ideas, ideas I cannot imagine you will agree with, so there might be some common ground between us here, but not for the same reasons.
Now you tell me that God will reveal himself through other religions but not officially. Not officially must be true since, Christians have to believe in Jesus to even get to the Father, so all of God’s revelations to these other people without Jesus being involved must be just mischief making—stirring up simple folk one against the other. That has been the main legacy in history of religion. You are doing what you deny—making God into an idiot. By projecting their feeble mental and emotional inadequacies on to their God, religious people get to feel quite God-like! It’s a miracle!
So, to the last citation, from Paul as ever. God is hyper-intelligent really. Now, if we are to believe this, and that He is almighty because He made us all and everything about us, tell me why He chose a primitive sacrifice to present His salvation to us. The very method supposedly picked by God is proof, in my view, that the whole thing was invented by primitive human beings as an extension of the age-old dying and rising god.
It is all on my pages, and I hope you will read them with some intention to try to understand how and why you have been duped.
